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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.

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16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Emeco

The article has a dedicated section called "Restoration Hardware Lawsuit". There is a discussion on the Talk page about whether an individual lawsuit should have a dedicated section like this. Was hoping you could take a look if you have a minute? David King, Ethical Wiki (CorporateM) (Talk) 20:09, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

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)

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]

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16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Next up: Bi-directional switching

All yours. As usual, please direct any and all complaints about or desire for extra screenshots to me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:20, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Okay, back to you. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:57, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
I'm not getting a confirmation (from the browser) that I want to lose all my work when I switch from VE to WT. It happens WT to VE, but not the other way. Is it working for you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:28, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): What you're seeing is what I saw, yesterday. That's why the VE user guide only mentions a confirmation once (WT to VE) rather than twice. I guess for some reason I thought that was the way things were supposed to be (not sure why); apologies for not mentioning it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:53, 29 January 2016 (UTC)
So phab:T123960 is a one-way bug. I've added that information to the bug report.
I don't know what they're going to do about it; it'll probably get triaged next week. I suspect that this may be one of those "harder than it looks" problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:21, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
Whereas the docs match reality, I'm declaring this one "done". mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab is my next project, which means that my next User guide project is going to be delayed a bit. I was thinking that the next one should be dealing with the citation mess; does that sound best to you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
Sounds fine; I tend to go where you point me. (More constructively: you have a much better handle on what has changed and what needs more or better explanation.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:08, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

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. [24]
  • 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. [25][26]
  • 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. [27]

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. [28]
  • 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. [29][30]
  • 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. [31]
  • 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. [32][33][34]
  • 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. [35][36]
  • 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. [37]


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21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

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. [38]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [39]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [40]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [41][42]
  • 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. [43][44]
  • 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. [45][46][47]

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18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

A new addition. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

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. [48]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [49]

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. [50][51]

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. [52][53]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [54]
  • 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. [55]

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16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 15

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 15, December-January 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs), Nikkimaria (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs)

  • New donations - Ships, medical resources, plus Arabic and Farsi resources
  • #1lib1ref campaign summary and highlights
  • New branches and coordinators

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:20, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

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. [58][59]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [60]

Meetings

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18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

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)

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. [61][62]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [63][64]

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. [65]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [66]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [67]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [68]
  • 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)

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. [69]
  • Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [70]
  • 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. [71]
  • It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [72]
  • 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. [73]

Problems

  • Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [74]
  • The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [75]
  • The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [76]
  • 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. [77]
  • 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. [78]

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. [79]
  • 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. [80]

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. [81]
  • 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. [82]

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20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

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. [83]
  • The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated. [84]

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. [85]
  • 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. [86]

Meetings

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18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

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. [87]

Changes this week

  • It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [88]
  • You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [89]
  • 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. [90]

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16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

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. [93]

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. [94]

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. [95]
  • 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.

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19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Is my "fixed link" edit an improvement?

Could you glance at my recent edit and let me know if this is a valid change. I'd like to do other (similar) edits, but only if I know that I'm not barking up the wrong tree. (Sorry for this sloppy message; I don't know why the link in my message isn't working.) Thanks CWBoast (talk) 03:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@CWBoast: Well, the wikilink now works, and it links to the right place, so you've definitely improved the page. (Thanks.)
However, the edit isn't as clean as it could be. Here's what you created:
[[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing,_creating,_and_maintaining_articles/Setting_up_your_account_and_personal_workspace]]
(I've left off the part of the wikilink at the end that you didn't change)
Here's what the wikilink should look like, in the best of all worlds:
[[Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Setting up your account and personal workspace]]
The difference is that underlines have been changed to spaces. Underlines do work in wikilinks, but they aren't needed. This can be confusing because underlines are required in external links - external links are basically URLs with single brackets around them, and a URL with an internal space is a non-functioning URL.
So, for example, when pointing to an edit, you use a diff - which is an external link. Here's the diff (link) for your edit:
[https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual/Editing,_creating,_and_maintaining_articles/Setting_up_your_account_and_personal_workspace&diff=712583107&oldid=695459726]
Your edit
There isn't any way that I know of to create a wikilink (double brackets) that points to an edit, because (by definition) a wikilink points to a specific page, while an edit is the difference between two pages.
(I hope that helps.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:42, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
@John Broughton: Thank you. I improved my previous edit and made another edit using what you said. But now I notice another, more abbreviated, method to link (to a section within the same article) in the "Uses for your user page" section, namely: "(see the section about userboxes)". (One difference may be that the "tooltip" doesn't show anything in the "more abbreviated method" -- but maybe showing nothing is better than showing what the tooltip shows in the fully-spelled-out method.) Which method do you think is preferable? (By the way, is my use of the "reply to" template inappropriate, since we are "talking" on your talk page?) CWBoast (talk) 11:34, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
@CWBoast: You're correct in thinking that the "reply to" template isn't needed when you're posting to someone else's user talk page; the MediaWiki software automatically notifies the user when anything is posted to his/her talk page.
You're also correct that when linking within a page, only a # sign and the section heading is needed, as:
[[#Userboxes|the section about userboxes]]
There are pluses and minuses to using the full wikilink - it's more robust in the sense that if the text is copied to another page, the wikilink still works. On the other hand, when someone looks at the wikitext (in edit mode), having the full page name does make the wikilink a bit more difficult to understand. But, as you point out, the tooltip behaves differently [which I find odd - that's a bug in the software, I'd argue] - what is shown when there is a full wikilink is much better than what is shown with just the # (anchor) text. (I'm seeing something in both cases, but what shows in the abbreviated version pertains to the page as a whole, not to the section being linked to.) So until the software is changed, I'd recommend a full wikilink even if the link is to a section on the same page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:02, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

SUL username collisions detector

In the IP addresses change section of "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" there is a reference to a "SUL username collisions detector". Clicking on his doesn't work. It appears that the software to which this refers is no longer located where it used to be. Is there a way to fix this reference? Thanks CWBoast (talk) 22:21, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@CWBoast: It's no longer possible to have a user name collision - the Wikimedia Foundation eliminated all existing "collisions" a few years ago, as well as putting software in place that prevents future collisions. So the collision detector isn't relevant [which is presumably why it no longer exists - although everything on the toolserver is either at another site - WMF labs, I believe - or is defunct].
I've updated WP:TMM accordingly. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:36, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
"Tool Labs". See wikitech:Labs labs labs for Ops' preferred naming scheme. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Change

We are going to have to change mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Opening the visual editor.

The central page is mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. The enwiki-specific information is now at WP:VPM#Single edit tab. And I'm beginning to think that every time James F says something will get simplified, that the user guide will need another hundred words and three screenshots to explain the "simple" thing. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

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. [96]
  • Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [97]

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)

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)

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. [98][99]
  • 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. [100][101]
  • ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [102]
  • The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [103]

Problems

  • There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [104]

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. [105]

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. [106]

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

20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

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

Books & Bytes - Issue 16

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 16, February-March 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs)

  • New donations - science, humanities, and video resources
  • Using hashtags in edit summaries - a great way to track a project
  • A new cite archive template, a new coordinator, plus conference and Visiting Scholar updates
  • Metrics for the Wikipedia Library's last three months

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

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. [107][108]
  • You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [109]
  • MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [110]

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. [111]
  • 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)

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

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

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. [112]
  • 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. [113]

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. [114]
  • It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [115]
  • 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. [116]

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)

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. [117]

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. [120]

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)

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. [121]
  • You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [122]
  • 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. [123][124]
  • 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). [125]
  • Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [126]
  • The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [127]
  • Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [128]
  • Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [129]

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [130]

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. [131]

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. [132]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [133]

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. [134]
  • Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [135]
  • A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [136]
  • 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. [137]

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)

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. [139]

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. [140]

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)

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. [141]

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. [142][143]
  • CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [144]

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. [145]
  • The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [146]
  • 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. [147][148]
  • 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. [149]
  • 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)

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. [152]
  • 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)

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. [158]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [159]
  • 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)

Books & Bytes - Issue 17

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 17, April-May 2016
by The Interior, Ocaasi, UY Scuti, Sadads, and Nikkimaria

  • New donations this month - a German-language legal resource
  • Wikipedia referals to academic citations - news from CrossRef and WikiCite2016
  • New library stats, WikiCon news, a bot to reveal Open Access versions of citations, and more!

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:36, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

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. [160]

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. [161][162]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [163]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [164]
  • 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)

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. [165]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [166]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [167]

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. [170]

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. [171]
  • 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. [172]
  • 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. [173][174][175]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [176]
  • 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. [177]

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)

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)

Help:Collapsing. listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Help:Collapsing.. Since you had some involvement with the Help:Collapsing. redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 03:53, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:46, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

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. [178]

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. [179]
  • 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. [180][181][182]
  • 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. [183][184][185]
  • 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. [186][187][188]

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. [189]
  • 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.

15:14, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Help - In creating new article for Edelweiss Tokio Life

Hello,

Hope you are doing great.

As per your suggestion, I tried to find out paid users who can write article for us but no luck.

Now I am planning to go with other way, where I would create a draft from my side and submit to you for review, once you give approval then only I would go ahead and submit for review.

Please suggest if this approach seems fine to you.

Best Regards, https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User_talk:Risingguns_007


Hi John,

As suggested I have made the changes in draft, please review it and suggest the next step.

https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Risingguns_007/Edelweiss_Tokio_Life_Insurance — Preceding unsigned comment added by Risingguns 007 (talk • contribs) 10:28, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi John,

As suggested I have made the changes in draft, if you get time please review it and suggest the next step. https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Risingguns_007/Edelweiss_Tokio_Life_Insurance

Risingguns 007 (talk) 04:29, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

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. [193][194]

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. [195]
  • 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. [196]

Future changes

  • User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages. [197][198]
  • Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it. [199]

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)

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

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

Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance Wiki Page

Hi John,

As suggested I have made the changes and saved in draft, please review it and suggest the next step. https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Risingguns_007/Edelweiss_Tokio_Life_Insurance


Risingguns 007 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:43, 25 July 2016 (UTC)


Hello John,

Hope you are doing great.

As per your instruction, I have added more citation in my draft. Can you please review it and suggest what to do next.

Draft: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:Risingguns_007/Edelweiss_Tokio_Life_Insurance

Thanks, Risingguns 007 (talk) 10:21, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

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. [201]

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. [202]
  • 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. [203]

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. [204]

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. [205]
  • Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [206]

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)

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. [207]
  • 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. [208]

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)

New screenshots, new work

Hi John,

ScreenshotBot is fixed, and there's new updates to make. I've noted a few additions to the Insert menu and will work my way down the page as and when I can. Please feel free to follow after me and clean up the mess that I'm making.  ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Here's a few notes (numbered for your convenience):

  1. The bit that runs "To change or remove an existing link, click within the text for that link, then press the "Link" icon that appears near it" has changed significantly.
  2. They moved the Cite button into the Insert menu for a lot of non-Wikipedias. I don't know what the default for non-WMF wikis is. But this may affect the plans we still hadn't implemented for the ref stuff.
  3. The bit that I changed for the Insert menu says that it shows everything, but it doesn't. It shows what's available at the English Wikipedia. Maps is available at some wikis, and some wikis have the ref stuff in there.
  4. The "Basic reference" and "Re-use reference" labels have changed, and I can't find the right replacement. The pieces are:
    • Basic "basic"
    • Re-use "re-use"
    • $1 reference "reference"
    but the last item expects the first two to get passed as parameters or something, and I don't know how to do that in wikitext. (Maybe User:Guillom does.)

That's as far as I'm going to get today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I've done a bit of tweaking today, though not much. I did look at #1, above - lots of rewriting, as you say. Could you add an image showing what the edit dialog looks like (that is, what the user sees after he/she clicks on "Edit")? If you do, I'd like the existing image tied to just the first paragraph, and the new image tied to the other three paragraphs.
Also, regarding #3, could you tell me the places in the list where (on wikis other than the English Wikipedia) the items for Maps and for ref stuff? I'd like to add just a mention of these two, in the right places. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:50, 6 August 2016 (UTC)

For #3, the end of the Insert menu at Wikivoyage runs like this:

  • gallery
  • formula
  • map
  • graph
  • your signature
  • reference list
  • basic reference
  • re-use reference

-end of list-

I'd be happy to split #1, and will ping you when I get the screenshots made (guaranteed not to be for the next several hours, and feel free to ping me if it takes more than a few days). Thanks! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

John, did you look through the diffs? I just saw that this one has a huge minus sign for the number of bytes, and I seriously do not remember making some of these edits. I don't think that I touched the divs, for example, and the "just do it" language at one point doesn't sound like something I would write. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Nope, I didn't look through the diffs, so I didn't see the big deletion. I did comment, in my edit summary for this edit, that I was putting some deleted stuff back in, but hadn't researched why it was deleted. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:07, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

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. [209]

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. [210]

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. [211]
  • 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. [212]
  • 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. [213]
  • The button to read something in another language will move for mobile users. This will happen on 9 August. [214]
  • 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. [215]
  • 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. [216]

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)

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. [217]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [218]
  • 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. [219][220]

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. [221]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [222]
  • 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". [223][224]
  • 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. [225]
  • 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. [226]

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)

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. [227]
  • 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. [228]
  • 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. [229]

Problems

  • Some big image files could not be thumbnailed. This has now been fixed. [230]
  • When you moved a page over a redirect it would delete the redirect without saving it in the logs. This has now been fixed. [231]

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. [232][233]
  • How you add text after an edit conflict might work in a different way in the future. You can test the prototype. [234]

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)

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. [235]
  • 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. [236]

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. [237][238]
  • 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.

16:01, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 18

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 18, June–July 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi, Samwalton9, UY Scuti, and Sadads

  • New donations - Edinburgh University Press, American Psychological Association, Nomos (a German-language database), and more!
  • Spotlight: GLAM and Wikidata
  • TWL attends and presents at International Federation of Library Associations conference, meets with Association of Research Libraries
  • OCLC wins grant to train librarians on Wikimedia contribution

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:25, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

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. [239]
  • 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. [240]
  • 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. [241]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [242][243]
  • 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. [244][245]
  • 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)

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. [250]
  • A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [251][252]
  • 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)

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. [255]

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

22:08, 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. [256]
  • When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [257]
  • 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. [258]

Problems

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [261]

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. [262]

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)

Nomination of Harry Welty for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Harry Welty is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Harry Welty until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Bearcat (talk) 00:08, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

New newsletter for Notifications

Hello

You are subscribing to the Notifications newsletter on English Wikipedia.

That newsletter is now replaced by the monthly and multilingual Collaboration team newsletter, which will include information and updates concerning Notifications but also concerning Flow and Edit Review Improvements.

Please subscribe!

All the best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:51, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

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. [263]
  • <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. [264]

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)

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}}. [265]
  • 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. [266]
  • 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. [267]

Changes this week

  • Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [268]
  • 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. [269]

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

  • You can now set text as small or big.[270]
  • Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[271] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[272]
  • Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[273]
  • At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department are adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more on MediaWiki.org.[274]
  • The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[275] In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
  • Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[276]

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)

Tech News: 2016-10

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

The Collaboration team is delighted to publish its first newsletter! Your feedback is welcome.

This quarter the team will focus on improving Special:RecentChanges and create a ReviewStream, a new feed designed to improve the edit-review process. Both are part of the new Edit Review Improvements project.

Notifications [ More information · Help pages ]

Recent changes

  • Documentation concerning Notifications types has been updated. That page is ready for translations. [277]
  • For developers, how to create a new Notification type has been updated. [278]
  • Tools owners will be notified when OAuth app changes state. [279]
  • When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [280]
  • 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. [281]
  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. Now you can get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This is an opt-in option in your preferences. [282][283]
  • On Notifications, the badge is colored if you have some notifications. If you see these notifications, the badge will turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [284]

Problems

  • 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. It has been fixed. [285][286]
  • When a title was created with some wikitext inside of it, Notifications were not linking that title when they were mentioned. This is now fixed. [287]
  • Some Notifications messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed. [288]

Future changes

  • On Special:Notifications, pages and counts related to disabled notification types will not be shown anymore. [289]

Flow [ More information · Help pages ]

Recent changes

  • Flow is available as a Beta feature on Greek Wikipedia. [290]
  • A satisfaction survey was conducted concerning Flow in September 2016. Results will be published in December 2016. [291]
  • Wikitext interface for Flow is now using a monospaced font. [292]
  • It is now possible to moderate a Flow topic that have been resolved without re-opening it. [293]
  • It is now possible to watch and unwatch topics directly from the Notification panel. [294]

Problems

  • It is not possible to enable or disable Flow as a Beta feature on wikis where that option is available. This is under investigation. [295]
  • Some Flow messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed. [296]

Future changes

  • Communities that have Flow enabled manually on user talk pages will be asked to move on to a Beta feature activation to simplify the process. [297]
  • Notifications related to Flow will be grouped on your Notifications preferences. It will be easier to choose which Notifications you want to have from Flow. [298]

Edit Review Improvements [ More information ]

Recent changes

  • Informations about Edit Review Improvements project have been published. That page is ready for translations. [299]
  • ReviewStream feed product description is available. ReviewStream is a machine-readable feed that’s designed to be used by a variety of edit-review tools.

Future changes

Miscellaneous

  • On that newsletter, some particular items are highlighted by an icon, to ease reading. The For translators icon highlights items that may interest volunteer translators and the Advanced item icon highlights items that are relevant for readers with technical knowledge.

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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. [302]
  • Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [303]

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [304]

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.

16:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

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". [306]
  • About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [307]
  • 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)

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. [308]
  • Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. [309]
  • The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script. [310]

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. [311]
  • Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. [312]

Future changes

  • New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29. [313]

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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 19

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 19, September–October 2016
by Nikkimaria, Sadads and UY Scuti

  • New and expanded donations - Foreign Affairs, Open Edition, and many more
  • New Library Card Platform and Conference news
  • Spotlight: Fixing one million broken links

Read the full newsletter



19:07, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

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. [314]
  • First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [315]
  • .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [316]
  • Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [317]

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)

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. [322]

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. [323]

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.

19:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2016-11

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Our quarterly goal is to add filters to the Recent Changes page, that show ORES good-faith and damaging tests and filters around new users. The work on this is proceeding mostly as planned. We hope it shall be available as a Beta feature (only on wikis where ORES is available as a Beta feature) before the end of the quarter.

Edit Review Improvements [More information]

Recent changes

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Notifications concerning Flow are no longer all grouped together in your preferences. The "Edits to my talk page" category will now include Flow notifications about your user talk page (if your user talk page uses Flow), and the "Mentions" category will now include mentions on Flow pages. Previously, all notifications related to Flow were grouped together in the "Structured Discussion" category. [327]
  • The orange bar will now also be displayed when a message is posted on a your user talk page if your talk page uses Flow; previously, it was only displayed if you had a wikitext talk page. [328]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:32, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

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. [329]
  • 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. [330]
  • 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. [331]

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. [332][333][334]

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. [335]
  • 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. [336]

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)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, John Broughton. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

In-editor help

Hi John,

I just ran through the wishlist proposals, and I think that we don't really need people to vote on your proposal (and wait at least six months before the wishlist "winners" will be addressed anyway). How do you feel about a quicker, easier system? You decide where the in-help system (the little (i) buttons) should go, and what the box should say when you click on them, and the devs just add them? They'll of course do a sanity check to make sure that a button won't break the workflow, but I think they'd be happy to implement them. You'd only need to file a phab task with the location and text, tagged with "VisualEditor" so that they'll be sure to see it. Will that work for you? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:03, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I think that's a great way to make quick progress. So I apologize if I seem to be quibbling, but I'd only want to move forward on this if the boxes can contain wikilinks, and if clicking on such a link opened a new tab or window. Would that be a problem? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:31, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Maybe. MediaWiki: items can be translated (plus-good), but they can't contain wikitext (insert technical handwaving here) – or so I've been told. But it's got to be possible to include wikilinks, because MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning contains some. I'll ask around and see if I can get a definitive answer. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 09:14, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
So the answer seems to be "kind of". The help messages are strictly plain text, and there's apparently all kinds of internationalization and accessiblity reasons (especially on mobile) behind this. But if you wanted one link, then they could set up a "Read more" system, which would definitely open in a separate tab. So something like "You need to use reliable sources" isn't feasible, but "You need to use reliable sources. Read more" would be possible. Would that be sufficient? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I think that a "Read more" link would be fine, but I'd generally want to open a "bridging" page rather than directly link to an existing page. For example, for citations, I'd want to provide links for both reliable sources (a guideline) and the section of the user manual related to citations (technical help). So that bridging page might be at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Help system/Citations, and have a shortcut of WP:VE/HS/CITE. Such pages probably would be fairly short - just enough information so that the editor isn't surprised by what opens if he/she clicks a link on that such a page.
I'm guessing that it doesn't matter what the "Read more" link is to, so that bridging pages wouldn't be a problem. If they're not [perhaps I missed something?], then I think we're ready to try out this out. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:45, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
I don't think that they truly care what the link goes to, so long as it's sensible. Would you prefer centralizing those links (e.g., a help page on mw.org) or making them wiki-specific (each Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, etc. chooses its own, knowing that most won't have/create a relevant page)?
They'll have to build the "Read more" system for you, but it didn't sound like a particularly complicated thing. Do you want to write up one (perhaps simpler) task to start, and see how that works out? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 22 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)

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. [337]
  • 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. [338]
  • 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]. [339][340]

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.

21:16, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Please double-check the user guide

See this, which worries me because I think that this is a simple paste error (click inside a file name and paste, rather than select-and-click the file name to replace it), but it might instead mean that we've lost an entire row (or more) of the table.

Also, are you satisfied with this on the musical score?

If you're happy with these changes, then please {{ping}} me and tell me to mark the page for translation. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:26, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): To answer the second question first - yes, the musical score addition is fine, except that it would be good to crop/replace the screenshot of the Insert menu - there isn't any reason to show the bottom half of the menu, the part below what is being selected.
As for the first question, I'll get back to you on that by Wednesday. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:19, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

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. [341]
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [342]
  • 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. [343]

Changes this week

  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [344]
  • 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)

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. [345]
  • 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. [346]
  • 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. [347]

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. [348]

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.

19:29, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2016-12

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

A decision has been made about how the Recent Changes filtering scheme will affect current ORES beta feature users. When this new filtering system rolls out as part of the beta, it will replace the current ORES display on the Recent Changes page. That means the automatic color coding, the red “r” symbol and the “hide probably good edits” filter will go away, to be replaced by the new, more nuanced set of filters and user-defined color coding. All other pages that have ORES features, like Watchlist and Related Changes, will remain as they are now for ORES beta users. We think those pages could also benefit from the new filtering system. But we'll wait to see how users react to the beta test—and make any necessary changes—before we start spreading the new UI around. That's the plan as it currently stands. As always, please let us know if you have any thoughts, in any language.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Problems

  • Sometimes, after marking an important number of cross-wiki notifications as read, the counter remained at 1. This is now fixed. [350]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Due to a bug, it was not possible to activate Flow on user talk pages as a Beta feature. This is possible again for wikis that have that feature. [351]
  • Flow boards can be moved without constraints. However, this requires the move-Flow-board right. [352]

Miscellaneous

  • The MoodBar extension has been removed from all wikis. [353]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

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. [354]
  • 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. [355]

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. [356]

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) 03:03, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

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. [361]

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)

New page reviewer granted

Hello John Broughton. Your account has been added to the "New page reviewers" user group, allowing you to review new pages and mark them as patrolled, tag them for maintenance issues, or in some cases, tag them for deletion. The list of articles awaiting review is located at the New Pages Feed. New page reviewing is a vital function for policing the quality of the encylopedia, if you have not already done so, you must read the new tutorial at New Pages Review, the linked guides and essays, and fully understand the various deletion criteria. If you need more help or wish to discuss the process, please join or start a thread at page reviewer talk.

  • URGENT: Please consider helping get the huge backlog (around 15,000 pages) down to a manageable number of pages as soon as possible.
  • Be nice to new users - they are often not aware of doing anything wrong.
  • You will frequently be asked by users to explain why their page is being deleted - be formal and polite in your approach to them too, even if they are not.
  • Don't review a page if you are not sure what to do. Just leave it for another reviewer.
  • Remember that quality is quintessential to good patrolling. Take your time to patrol each article, there is no rush. Use the message feature and offer basic advice.

The reviewer right does not change your status or how you can edit articles. If you no longer want this user right, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time. In case of abuse or persistent inaccuracy of reviewing, the right can be revoked at any time by an administrator. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:18, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Share your experience and feedback as a Wikimedian in this global survey

Hello! The Wikimedia Foundation is asking for your feedback in a survey. We want to know how well we are supporting your work on and off wiki, and how we can change or improve things in the future.[survey 1] The opinions you share will directly affect the current and future work of the Wikimedia Foundation. You have been randomly selected to take this survey as we would like to hear from your Wikimedia community. To say thank you for your time, we are giving away 20 Wikimedia T-shirts to randomly selected people who take the survey.[survey 2] The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes.


Take the survey now!


You can find more information about this project. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this privacy statement. Please visit our frequently asked questions page to find more information about this survey. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email to surveys@wikimedia.org.

Thank you! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

  1. ^ This survey is primarily meant to get feedback on the Wikimedia Foundation's current work, not long-term strategy.
  2. ^ Legal stuff: No purchase necessary. Must be the age of majority to participate. Sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation located at 149 New Montgomery, San Francisco, CA, USA, 94105. Ends January 31, 2017. Void where prohibited. Click here for contest rules.

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. [363]

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. [364]
  • 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. [365]
  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [366]
  • You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [367]
  • 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. [368]
  • 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. [369]
  • When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [370]
  • 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)

Hello

Hello. I noticed you added a Page Curation script that I had made to your common.js page. It seems you have added more than the required part of the script. I would suggest undoing that edit. To install the page curation script, simply copy the following into your common.js page.

importScript('User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js'); // Linkback: User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js

Note: You will need to manually bypass your cache after installation. Visit Wikipedia:Bypass your cache to see how to do this.

Thanks. Lourdes 10:05, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 20

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 20, November-December 2016
by Nikkimaria (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs), Samwalton9 (talk · contribs)

  • Partner resource expansions
  • New search tool for finding TWL resources
  • #1lib1ref 2017
  • Wikidata Visiting Scholar

Read the full newsletter

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:00, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-01

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Our goal to add filters to the Recent Changes page is going well. We will contact soon some communities - the ones where ORES is available as a Beta feature - to plan a possible trial.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

  • Revert notifications were not received on Wikidata. This is now fixed. [371]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

  • We plan to change Flow's URLs to make them more human readable. Your feedback is welcome.
  • Communities which have allowed Flow trials with manual enabling (Hebrew Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia) will be asked if they want to switch to Beta feature activation. [372]
  • A small maintenance on Flow database will happen during week 4. No impact is expected. [373]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:16, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

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. [374]

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)

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. [375]

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. [376]
  • 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. [377][378]
  • 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)

New Page Review - newsletter No.2

Hello John Broughton,
A HUGE backlog

We now have 805 New Page Reviewers!
Most of us requested the user right at PERM, expressing a wish to be able to do something about the huge backlog, but the chart on the right does not demonstrate any changes to the pre-user-right levels of October.

Hitting 17,000 soon

The backlog is still steadily growing at a rate of 150 a day or 4,650 a month. Only 20 reviews a day by each reviewer over the next few days would bring the backlog down to a managable level and the daily input can then be processed by each reviewer doing only 2 or 3 reviews a day - that's about 5 minutes work!
It didn't work in time to relax for the Xmas/New Year holidays. Let's see if we can achieve our goal before Easter, otherwise by Thanksgiving it will be closer to 70,000.

Second set of eyes

Remember that we are the only guardians of quality of new articles, we alone have to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged by non-Reviewer patrollers and that new authors are not being bitten.

Abuse

This is even more important and extra vigilance is required considering Orangemoody, and

  1. this very recent case of paid advertising by a Reviewer resulting in a community ban.
  2. this case in January of paid advertising by a Reviewer, also resulting in a community ban.
  3. This Reviewer is indefinitely blocked for sockpuppetry.

Coordinator election

Kudpung is stepping down after 6 years as unofficial coordinator of New Page Patrolling/Reviewing. There is enough work for two people and two coords are now required. Details are at NPR Coordinators; nominate someone or nominate yourself. Date for the actual suffrage will be published later.

Discuss this newsletter here. If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:11, 5 February 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)

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. [379]

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. [380]
  • 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. [381]
  • 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. [382][383]

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

19:45, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

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. [384]

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. [385]
  • 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. [386]

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. [387]
  • 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. [388]
  • 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)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-02

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Flow satisfaction survey’s results are available. The survey provides useful data on what users like and don't like about Flow. This information will be helpful in discussions recently begun as part of the editing team's Annual Plan process. As the editing team investigates its priorities for next fiscal year (which begins in July), many ideas for improvements have been suggested, including projects to research the future of wiki discussions and to fix Flow's shortcomings.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

  • Flow notifications category in the Notification Preferences page will be changed from (in English) "Flow" to "Flow Discussion". Messages that have to be updated on TranslateWiki are echo-category-title-flow-discussion and echo-pref-tooltip-flow-discussion. [389]
  • Mentions were not recognized when more than one section is added during the same edit or when an new section was added and a change (new message or deletion) was done in another section. This is now solved. [390]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

  • Rich text mode is now the default in Flow replies. Some inconsistencies used to exist. Now the preference between visual mode and wikitext mode is updated when a content change is made in the selected editor, literally when it is typed in, not when it is saved or when the editor is switched. [391]
  • We plan to change Flow's URLs to make them more human readable. Your feedback is still welcome, the conversation will be closed on February 28th.

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:40, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

New Page Review-Patrolling: Coordinator elections

Your last chance to nominate yourself or any New Page Reviewer, See Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Coordination. Elections begin Monday 20 February 23:59 UTC. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:17, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

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. [393]
  • 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. [394]
  • OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [395]
  • 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)

New Page Review - newsletter No.3

Hello John Broughton,

Voting for coordinators has now begun HERE and will continue through/to 23:59 UTC Monday 06 March. Please be sure to vote. Any registered, confirmed editor can vote. Nominations are now closed.

Still a MASSIVE backlog

We now have 805 New Page Reviewers but despite numerous appeals for help, the backlog has NOT been significantly reduced.
If you asked for the New Page Reviewer right, please consider investing a bit of time - every little helps preventing spam and trash entering the mainspace and Google when the 'NO_INDEX' tags expire.

Discuss this newsletter here. If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the mailing list. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:35, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Your feedback matters: Final reminder to take the global Wikimedia survey

Hello! This is a final reminder that the Wikimedia Foundation survey will close on 28 February, 2017 (23:59 UTC). The survey is available in various languages and will take between 20 and 40 minutes. Take the survey now.

If you already took the survey - thank you! We won't bother you again.

About this survey: You can find more information about this project here or you can read the frequently asked questions. This survey is hosted by a third-party service and governed by this privacy statement. If you need additional help, or if you wish to opt-out of future communications about this survey, send an email through EmailUser function to User:EGalvez (WMF) or surveys@wikimedia.org. About the Wikimedia Foundation: The Wikimedia Foundation supports you by working on the software and technology to keep the sites fast, secure, and accessible, as well as supports Wikimedia programs and initiatives to expand access and support free knowledge globally. Thank you! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 08:25, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

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. [396]

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. [397]
  • 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. [398]
  • 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. [399][400]

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

19:55, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

UI changes

It looks like they're planning to change some icons at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116417

BTW, they'll probably do an automated update of screenshots in a month or so (most likely after the visual diff system has landed). I expect that most of the changes will be on the right half of the toolbar. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

P.S. Your talk page exceeds half a million bytes. Do you want to archive 2015? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

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. [401]
  • 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. [402]

Problems

  • Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [403]
  • 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. [404]

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. [405]
  • 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. [406]
  • 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. [407][408]
  • 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. [409]
  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [410][411]

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

15:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-03

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

We have focused all our efforts on the New filters for edit review. You will discover these filters on your wiki soon (see below).

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Future changes

  • We will release the ⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽ beta option on Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias March 28. This beta option adds powerful filtering and other tools as well as an improved filtering interface to the Recent Changes page (and Recent Changes Linked). To try out these new tools on these two wikis, go to the Beta tab of the Preferences page (after the 28th) and select ⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽.
  • In the weeks following the initial release to Polish and Portuguese Wikipedias, the New Filters for Edit Review beta will go out to the following list of Wikipedias in waves (schedule to be done):
    • Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech Wikipedias and Wikidata. [412]
    • English Wikipedia. [413]
    • All other wikis. [414]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • <math> <hiero> <score> <syntax> <source> <ref> shortcuts are now working on Flow visual editing mode. Type a shortcut in the visual editing mode will open the control panel for the chosen option. [415]
    • Concerning <ref>, footnotes will be automatically included at the end of the message, unless if they are displayed elsewhere in the message by the appropriate template.
  • Flow has been removed from Metawiki. [416]

Future changes

  • The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It will be a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view. [417]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:02, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

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. [418]
  • 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. [419]
  • 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. [420]
  • 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. [421]
  • 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. [422]

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. [423]

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. [424]
  • 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)

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. [425]

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. [426][427]

Changes this week

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

14:46, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

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. [428]
  • 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. [429]
  • 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. [430]

Problems

  • Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [431]

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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 21

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 21, January-March 2017
by Nikkimaria (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs), Samwalton9 (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs)

  • #1lib1ref 2017
  • Wikipedia Library User Group
  • Wikipedia + Libraries at Wikimedia Conference 2017
  • Spotlight: Library Card Platform

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:54, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

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. [434]
  • 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. [435]
  • The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [436]
  • 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://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [437]
  • You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [438]
  • 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. [439]

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)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-04

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

The fourth fiscal quarter began the first of this month, and Collaboration Team has begun work on our new quarterly goals. In the coming months, we'll be working to release the New Filters for Edit Review beta on all wikis and then to improve the beta as much as possible based on user feedback. On that score, we're planning a round of user interviews on the new tools in May to get detailed information about usability and usefulness. If you've tried the new features and have thoughts, please share them with us in any language.

Our other focus right now is to look at what changes will be needed to spread the new filtering interface to other review pages, especially Watchlist. We're also exploring how to incorporate the tools we didn't include in the new interface in this round, like the Tag Filters, time-frame selector and Namespace filter.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • New Filters for Edit review are now available on Polish, Portuguese, Persian, Russian and Turkish Wikipedias as a Beta feature. French Wikipedia and Mediawikiwiki have the filters as a Beta feature too, but without the quality and intent filters. [443]
  • Special:RecentChangesLinked now displays a message when no results are found for a given combination of filters. [444]

Problems

  • Polish Wikipedia is experiencing an issue with predictions (quality and intent filters using ORES). The different predictions are in conflict. An edit can be considered as "good" and "bad" at the same time, and the filter levels are somewhat redundant. We have formulated a plan to address this and are working on a fix, which is deployed progressively on Polish Wikipedia. [445]
  • The issue on Polish Wikipedia is shared by a few other wikis: Dutch, Czech and Hebrew, and Wikidata. The deployment for those wikis has been postponed to Tuesday, May 9. Wikis without this predictions problem have been deployed or will be deployed with no change on the schedule. [446]
  • Interestingly, the "problem" with those wikis is that they perform better than we anticipated. Once the fix is in place, the tools will work with particular simplicity on these wikis.

Future changes

  • English Wikipedia and all wikis without ORES prediction services will get the New Filters for Edit review on Monday, April 24. [447]
  • All remaining wikis will get the New Filters for Edit review on Tuesday, May 9. [448]
  • Wikidata edits will be added as a type of change on New Filters for Edit review. [449]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

  • Notifications badges were overlapping other tabs on Internet Explorer 11 and Firefox 3.6, using MonoBook skin. This is now fixed. [450]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

  • Flow is now available as a Beta feature on French Wikiversity. [451]
  • All Flow documentation is now available on one page gathering all information, to help users to search for an information.
  • Flow's AbuseFilter integration now allows blocking a particular user from participating on a talk page, or any topic within it. [452]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:04, 18 April 2017 (UTC)

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. [456]
  • 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. [457]
  • 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. [461]
  • 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. [462]

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)

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. [463]
  • 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. [464]

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. [465]
  • 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. [466][467]
  • 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. [468][469]

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. [470]

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. [471]

Other changes:

  • You can now use your web browser's function to switch typing direction in the new wikitext mode. This is particularly helpful for RTL language users like Urdu or Hebrew who have to write JavaScript or CSS. You can use Command+Shift+X or Control+Shift+X to trigger this. [472]
  • The way to switch between the visual editing mode and the wikitext editing mode is now consistent. There is a drop-down menu that shows the two options. This is now the same in desktop and mobile web editing, and inside things that embed editing, such as Flow. [473]
  • The Categories item has been moved to the top of the Page options menu (from clicking on the "hamburger" icon) for quicker access. [474] There is also now a "Templates used on this page" feature there. [475]
  • You can now create <chem> tags (sometimes used as <ce>) for chemical formulas inside the visual editor. [476]
  • Tables can be set as collapsed or un-collapsed. [477]
  • The Special character menu now includes characters for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and angle quotation marks (‹› and ⟨⟩) . The team thanks the volunteer developer, Tpt. [478]
  • A bug caused some section edit conflicts to blank the rest of the page. This has been fixed. The team are sorry for the disruption. [479]
  • There is a new keyboard shortcut for citations: Control+Shift+K on a PC, or Command+Shift+K on a Mac. It is based on the keyboard shortcut for making links, which is Control+K on a PC or Command+K on a Mac. [480]

Future changes

  • The VisualEditor team is working with the Community Tech team on a syntax highlighting tool. It will highlight matching pairs of <ref> tags and other types of wikitext syntax. You will be able to turn it on and off. It will first become available in VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode, maybe late in 2017. [481]
  • The kind of button used to Show preview, Show changes, and finish an edit will change in all WMF-supported wikitext editors. The new buttons will use OOjs UI. The buttons will be larger, brighter, and easier to read. The labels will remain the same. You can test the new button by editing a page and adding &ooui=1 to the end of the URL, like this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit&ooui=1 The old appearance will no longer be possible, even with local CSS changes. [482]
  • The outdated 2006 wikitext editor will be removed later this year. It is used by approximately 0.03% of active editors. See a list of editing tools on mediawiki.org if you are uncertain which one you use. [483]

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)

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. [486]

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. [487]
  • 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. [492][493]

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)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-05

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

  • “New Filters for Edit Review” beta released: As of May 9, the New Filters for Edit Review beta has been released to all wikis. The beta lets users review edits on Recent Changes using an easier and more powerful interface and many new tools, including user-defined highlighting and, on some wikis, predictive filters powered by ORES, a machine-learning program. You must opt in to the beta to try it out.
  • More features coming soon: The New Filters are still very much in development. In addition to fixing bugs and making adjustments (here’s our current to-do list), we’re actively adding new features, many at users’ request. A few notable additions you can look for this month: A cool tool for saving filter settings; a “Watchlisted pages” filter; a “Flagged Revisions” filter (for some wikis only); a “Last revision” filter.
  • Tell us your ideas—but don’t wait: The team is focused right now in making changes to the New Filters beta. But in a few months, we’ll be moving on to other projects. So now is the time to give the new tools a try and then tell us what you think. What works well? What could make things better for you?
  • In the medium-term: By the end of summer, we plan to complete a suite of improvements that will, among other things: incorporate all the remaining Recent Changes tools into the new filtering interface; create new ways for reviewers to move back and forth through the filter queue; implement a “Reverted” filter; and, finally, bring the New Filters UI and tools to Watchlist.
  • Have time for a talk? We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchen@wikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.
  • Wish you had ORES on your wiki? Some of the more interesting New Filters for Edit Review features are dependent on the machine-learning service ORES, which is available only on a small but growing list of wikis. For ORES to work on a wiki, volunteers from that wiki must train it by scoring some thousands of sample edits. Here’s a link that explains how the process works and how you can get it started on your wiki.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Many Recent Changes pages have on top a list of links. We plan to integrate those links in a collapsible menu. You are invited to comment the 3 proposals we have drafted on Phabricator.
  • On wikis where Flagged Revisions are used, an edit highlighted as bad by ORES will not be highlighted anymore when the edit is reviewed by someone. [494]
  • You can highlight pages that are in your Watchlist in Recent Changes. 3 different filters are available: in watchlist, not in watchlist, new changes in watchlist. [495]
  • Wikidata, Dutch, Czech, Hebrew, Estonian and Finnish Wikipedia now have the new filters available as a Beta feature, and ORES is enabled by default on those wikis. [496]
  • All wikis now have the Recent changes Filters as a Beta feature. [497]
  • Users are invited to opt in to the Recent changes Filters beta when they visit the Recent Changes page. [498]
  • On wikis that have ORES predictions enabled by default, it is now possible to choose how to display the predictions in watchlist and recent changes pages. [499]

Future changes

  • It will be possible soon to save and retreive your favorite filters combinations. [500]
  • We are working on adding filter groups for last revisions, edits from Wikidata and reverted edits. [501][502][503]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • When an article you have created is linked to a Wikidata item, you can receive a notification. Wikidata and all the Wikivoyages have it since May 9th, other wikis will follow. [504]
  • Special:Notifications tabs is now set to "Unread" if there are any unread messages. [505]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • You can enable Flow as a Beta feature on your talk page on Arabic Wikipedia and Catalan Wikiquote. [506][507]
  • When you send more than 50 mentions on one Flow post, you are now warned you have hit the limit. [508]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:19, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

New Page Review - Newsletter No.4

Hello John Broughton,

Since rolling out the right in November, just 6 months ago, we now have 805 reviewers, but the backlog is still mysteriously growing fast. If every reviewer did just 55 reviews, the 22,000 backlog would be gone, in a flash, schwoop, just like that!

But do remember: Rather than speed, quality and depth of patrolling and the use of correct CSD criteria are essential to good reviewing. Do not over-tag. Make use of the message feature to let the creator know about your maintenance tags. See the tutorial again HERE. Get help HERE.

Stay up to date with recent new page developments and have your say, read THIS PAGE.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:43, 21 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. [509]

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

22:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

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. [510]

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. [512]
  • When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [513]
  • 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. [514]
  • 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. [515]

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. [516]

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. [517]
  • You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [518]
  • 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. [519]
  • 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. [520]

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. [521][522]
  • 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. [523]
  • 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.

19:04, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

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. [524]
  • 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. [525]

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. [526]
  • 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. [527]
  • 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. [528][529]

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

15:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

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. [530]

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. [531]
  • Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [532]
  • 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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 22

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 22, April-May 2017

  • New and expanded research accounts
  • Global branches update
  • Spotlight: OCLC Partnership
  • Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:35, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 June 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:31, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-06

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Integrated Filters

  • The team is moving full speed ahead on a follow-up project to the New Filters for Edit Review beta dubbed "Integrated Filters." The name refers to the fact that we are integrating the Recent Changes tools that currently remain in the old user interface (like Namespace and Tag filters), along with some tools and capabilities from Watchlist and elsewhere, into the new Recent Changes interface.
  • You can get an overview of the Integrated Filters projects, and the general release strategy, on the description page of the project Phabricator board. Among the more interesting new capabilities:
    • Category filters: We'll be adding the ability to filter by category. This is a little tricky, since wiki categories often work in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, with the broadest categories returning the fewest results—because categories like "Science" or "Art" tend to contain not articles but other categories. So we're exploring solutions where a category search will crawl at least a layer or two down the category treat to, hopefully, bring back more useful results. [533]
    • User filters: We're adding the ability to filter by any username, similar to what's available already on the the User Contributions page. [534]
    • Live update: Users will have the ability to look at a more or less continuous flow of changes. This is a much requested feature that we expect will open up new possibilities for Recent Changes, especially for patrollers who want to see vandalism or other changes as they happen. While the updates won't truly be "live," the page updates will be frequent, similar to the way real-time tools (like RTRC or LiveRC) works. [535]

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Have time for a talk?

  • We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchen@wikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.

Recent changes

  • It is now possible to save your favorite filters sets by using bookmarks. [536]
  • It is possible to filter only the last edits done on a page on the Recent Changes page. [537]
  • ORES review tool has been deployed to French Wikipedia. This wiki can use predictions filters. To have the predictions filters on your wiki, you need to work on the labeling campaign for your wiki or request it. [538]
  • There were some issues with loading highlighted results when the URL was copied and pasted. This is now fixed. [539]
  • A "Watchlisted pages" filter group now lets reviewers use Recent Changes, and all its tools, to patrol changes to pages they've Watchlisted. If you have any feedback about how useful this is nor isn't—especially given that we plan to add the new filtering interface to the Watchlist page — let us know.
  • There were issues with the tools still in the older filtering UI — like the Namespace filter and the number of results selectors. These have been fixed. [540]

Future changes

  • Integration of new features on recent changes pages is planned. They will include menus to filter users, tagged edits, categories and namespaces. See the "What's new" section above for more information.
  • Now that users can save filter settings, and declare any settings they want as the Recent Changes page default, we'll be reviewing the RC page Preferences with an eye to getting rid of as many as we can. For instance, if you want to hide minor edits or Category changes by default, you can now do that right on the RC page, instead of having to go to a separate page to manage defaults.
  • On many Recent Changes Pages, the community has defined a large number of links that are displayed directly under the page name (example on Polish Wikipedia). Many of these links are unrelated or only peripherally related to Recent Changes, add informational complexity of the RC page. Research shows that they are used only rarely or never. We want to clarify RecentChanges page functionality, so we plan to put the links into a collapsible panel.
    • Should the panel default to open or closed? That is, should the default state (which users can change with one click) show the links as hidden or displayed? Let us know what you think.
    • The most used links are shortcuts to certain type of edits, (Mobile, Newcomers...). Users can already save their favorite filter settings to the Saved Settings menu, which should make some of the existing links redundant. We plan to provide default bookmarks for the most used filters combinations. [541]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Future changes

  • Wikimedia Deutschland have scheduled the notifications of Wikibase notifications to Wikimedia projects: all the Wikivoyages on May 3; all the Wikipedias except en, fr, de on May 30; all other projects on June 13 and Wikipedias en, fr, de on September 5. [542]
  • It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications. [543]

Flow [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Flow has been activated on all talk pages on Catalan Wikiquote. [544]

Future changes

  • On the Beta feature page, the activation message has been review to emphase the fact that the unstructured wikitext page will be archived. [545]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:41, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

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. [546]

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. [547]

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. [548]

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)

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. [549]

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. [550]

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

15:31, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

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. [551]

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. [552]
  • 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)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 18,511 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a a day.
  • Some editors are committing to work specifically on patrolling new pages on 15 July. If you have not reviewed new pages in a while, this might be a good time to be involved. Please remember that quality of patrolling is more important than quantity, that the speedy deletion criteria should be followed strictly, and that ovetagging for minor issues should be avoided.

Technology update:

  • Several requests have been put into Phabractor to increase usability of the New Pages Feed and the Page Curation toolbar. For more details or to suggest improvements go to Wikipedia:Page Curation/Suggested improvements
  • The tutorial has been updated to include links to the following useful userscripts. If you were not aware of them, they could be useful in your efforts reviewing new pages:

General project update:

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:48, 14 July 2017 (UTC)

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. [553]

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. [554]

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. [555] 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. [556]

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)

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. [557][558][559]
  • .mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [560]

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. [561]

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)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-07

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Notifications, Flow and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

The team is currently working on three main goals, which we expect to complete this summer or in September:

  1. Graduate New Filters for Edit Review core features out of beta:
    • The core New Filters features slated to become standard parts of Recent Changes are the ones that have been out in beta for a while and fully road-tested by the community.
    • These include the new filtering interface, the machine-learning filter groups “User Intent Predictions” and “Quality Predictions,” the highlighting tools, the ability to save your filter settings for later use, and the new filter groups: “Watchlisted pages,” “Last revision” and "User registration and experience."
    • There’s a list of “blocker” tasks we need to complete before these features are ready to graduate out of beta.
    • We expect to release those features by default in September. A more precise message will be sent to communities. If you have questions about it, you can write a message on Mediawiki.org, in any language.
  2. Extend the New Filters to Watchlist: The Watchlists of very active editors can include thousands of pages. To help these busy folks keep up with their work, we’re adding the New Filters UX and tools to Watchlist. The Watchlist and Recent Changes pages are similar, but there is some work involved in adapting the tools to their new setting. That work should be ready some time in late summer or early fall. Stay tuned for an announcement!
  3. Continuing work on “Integrated Filters”:
    • While the New Filters for Edit Review beta brought probably 70% of the old-style Recent Changes features into the new user interface, it left some behind—like the Tag and Namespace filters and the controls for the number of days searched and number of results presented. As the name is meant to suggest, “Integrated filters” integrates those old-style tools into the new UI.
    • It also adds some new tools users have asked for, such as:
      • “Live updates” which provides a near real-time automatic refresh of the Recent Changes page.
      • Category filters, which enable users to search by category.
      • User filters, which let you define searches that include or exclude edits by particular users.
    • We will put the community-defined related links that cluster at the top of most Recent Changes pages into a collapsible panel, in order to clarify the Recent Changes page.

We should note that it’s not certain these last two additions will make the cut for inclusion this year. If you want a make the case for either one, we want to hear from you.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Some styling adjustments are ongoing on the filters for recent changes. [562]
  • RecentChanges with the Beta feature were very slow to load on Wikidata. It is now fixed. [563]
  • In the Beta feature, you can try the Live Updates feature. Just add &liveupdate=1 at the end of the URL in Recent Changes page. [564]

Future changes

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • It is now possible to display the number of unread notifications in the browser title bar, using a gadget. [567]

Future changes

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:43, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

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. [569]
  • 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. [570]
  • 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. [571]

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)

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. [574]
  • The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [575]

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. [576]
  • 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. [577][578]
  • 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. [579][580]

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)

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. [581]

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. [582][583]

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)

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. [584][585]
  • Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [586]
  • 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. [587]
  • 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. [588]
  • 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. [589]
  • 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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 23

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 23, June-July 2017

  • Library card
  • User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Spotlight: Combating misinformation, fake news, and censorship
  • Bytes in brief

Chinese, Arabic and Yoruba versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:04, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 16,991 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a a day.

Technology update:

  • Rentier has created a NPP browser in WMF Labs that allows you to search new unreviewed pages using keywords and categories.

General project update:

  • The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working with the community to implement the autoconfirmed article creation trial. The trial is currently set to start on 7 September 2017, pending final approval of the technical features.
  • Please remember to focus on the quality of review: correct tagging of articles and not tagbombing are important. Searching for potential copyright violations is also important, and it can be aided by Earwig's Copyvio Detector, which can be added to your toolbar for ease of use with this user script.
  • To keep up with the latest conversation on New Pages Patrol or to ask questions, you can go to Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers and add it to your watchlist.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:33, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

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. [590][591]
  • 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. [592]

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. [593]

Changes later this week

  • You can block users from sending you notifications. [594]
  • 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. [595]
  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [596]
  • 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)

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. [597][598]

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. [599]

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. [600]
  • 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.

22:14, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

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. [602]
  • 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. [603]
  • 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. [604]

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. [606]

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

19:15, 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.

15:31, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 14304 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a day.
  • Currently there are 532 pages in the backlog that were created by non-autoconfirmed users before WP:ACTRIAL. The NPP project is undertaking a drive to clear these pages from the backlog before they hit the 90 day Google index point. Please consider reviewing a few today!

Technology update:

  • The Wikimedia Foundation is currently working on creating a new filter for page curation that will allow new page patrollers to filter by extended confirmed status. For more information see: T175225

General project update:

  • On 14 September 2017 the English Wikipedia began the autoconfirmed article creation trial. For a six month period, creation of articles in the mainspace of the English Wikipedia will be restricted to users with autoconfirmed status. New users who attempt article creation will now be redirected to a newly designed landing page.
  • Before clicking on a reference or external link while reviewing a page, please be careful that the site looks trustworthy. If you have a question about the safety of clicking on a link, it is better not to click on it.
  • To keep up with the latest conversation on New Pages Patrol or to ask questions, you can go to Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers and add it to your watchlist.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:16, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 September 2017

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

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. [613]
  • 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. [614]
  • 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.

15:59, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Global Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-09

Latest news from the Wikimedia Global Collaboration team, about Notifications, Structured Discussions, Edit Review Improvements and Content translation. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

  • This newsletter is the first for the Global Collaboration team!
    • Global Collaboration team formed in July by merging the Language and Collaboration teams of the Wikimedia Foundation. The team is part of the Contributors department.
    • The newsletter now includes updates about Content translation. The Global Collaboration team now have an extended report (in English), with more information and data about the different projects we take care of.
  • Due to vacations and Wikimania, no newsletter has been written in August.
  • Major changes, with possibly an important impact on the wikis, are now marked with the star icon in the newsletter. Let us know if you like it.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Filters for Recent Changes will be deployed by default on all wikis. [615]
    • Some features for Recent Changes remain on Beta. See the list.
    • The initial deployment was scheduled for September 26. It has been postponed after October 3 for performance issues. [616]
  • The filters for Watchlists, as a Beta feature, have been deployed as a Beta feature on Sept. 19. [617]
  • "User registration" and "experience level" groups have been unified. It is now possible to select only actions from logged-out users or from logged-in users. [618]

Content translation [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Delete action on the list of translations is now more reachable. Now it's possible to open it on click, and easier as well, because active area is bigger. [619]
  • Content Translation language selector is restyled to be more compact. [620]

Future changes

  • The translation editor of Content Translation will be replaced by the visual editor. Work is ongoing. [621]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Structured Discussions [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Global Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:10, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

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. [626]

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. [627]
  • Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [628]
  • 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. [629]
  • 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. [630]
  • 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. [633]

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. [634]
  • 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)

Wildfire

Your contributions have been very important to Wikipedia; and I hope you are safely weathering this exceptional fire season. Thewellman (talk) 21:31, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Thewellman: Thanks for your posting. Fortunately I live in part of Sonoma County that hasn't been (and isn't likely to be) affected, but my wife and I have close friends who lost their house, and it's stunning to see all the devastation not that far from us. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:49, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Help design a new feature to stop harassing emails

Hi there,

The Anti-Harassment Tools team plans to start develop of a new feature to allow users to restrict emails from new accounts. This feature will allow an individual user to stop harassing emails from coming through the Special:EmailUser system from abusive sockpuppeting accounts.

We’re inviting you to join the discussion because you voted or commented in the 2016 Community Wishlist discussion or IdeaLab discussion about letting users restrict who can send them email.

You can leave comments on this discussion page or send an email to the Anti-Harassment Tools team.

It is important to hear from a broad range of people who are interested in the design of the tool, so we hope you join the discussion.

For the Anti-Harassment Tools team SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 21:48, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Please let us know if you wish to opt-out of all massmessage mailings from the Anti-harassment tools team.

COI Help

Hi John.

I have been trying to find an editor to collaborate with here on an IT security company page for a couple weeks now, but haven't managed to find anyone with an interest. I thought I would see if you have a mind to chip in. CorporateM (Talk) 17:04, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@CorporateM: Sure, I'll be happy to help, but things are a bit busy now. Would you mind pinging me again, three or four days from now? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:32, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

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. [635][636]
  • 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. [637]
  • 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. [638]
  • Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [639]

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. [640]
  • 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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 24

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 24, August-September 2017

  • User Group update
  • Global branches update
    • Star Coordinator Award - last quarter's star coordinator: User:Csisc
  • Wikimania Birds of a Feather session roundup
  • Spotlight: Wiki Loves Archives
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic, Kiswahili and Yoruba versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:53, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 12,878 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a day.
  • We have successfully cleared the backlog of pages created by non-confirmed accounts before ACTRIAL. Thank you to everyone who participated in that drive.

Technology update:

  • Primefac has created a script that will assist in requesting revision deletion for copyright violations that are often found in new pages. For more information see User:Primefac/revdel.

General project update:

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:47, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

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. [641]

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. [642]
  • 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)

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. [644]

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)

Forcepoint

Hi John. I was wondering if you had the time/interest in participating here. I disclosed my COI and shared a draft about a month ago. Another editor I know said he would take a look when they get a chance, but I don't think they ever got around to it. CorporateM (Talk) 13:38, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

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. [645]

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)

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. [648]
  • A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [649]
  • 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. [650]
  • 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. [652]
  • 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. [653][654][655]

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. [656][657]

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)

Global Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-11

Latest news from the Wikimedia Global Collaboration team, about Notifications, Structured discussions, Edit Review Improvements and Content translation. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

  • The Global collaboration report for October is now available.
  • All wikis now have the Filters for edit review as the default system on Recent Changes page.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Most recent changes

  • Filters for Watchlists are still on Beta. Please try them and give feedback before we release it for all users!
  • Shortcuts to filter Namespaces and Tags are now more visible. [658]
  • Discovery of the search bar has been improved. [659]
  • If the Recent Changes page or the Watchlist fails to load or is time-outed, a message is now displayed. [660][661]
  • The bookmark icon for creating a "Saved filter" is now grayed when it is not possible to save. Before it was not visible. Bookmarking is unavailable when, for example, the current filter set is already saved. [662]

Future changes

  • Live updates on Recent changes will be moved out of beta and into the standard feature set by the end of the year. [663]
  • Extension:Translate filters for RecentChanges are going to be integrated to the new filters. [664]
  • Automatic edit summaries will be filtered as tags. [665]

Content translation [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • List items (suggested items and in-progress/published translations) layout restyled to prevent overflows on small screen sizes.
  • Search results for new translation dialog are now embedded, instead of being displayed in floating menu. Search results remain displayed when tabbed out and can be closed using ESC key.
  • Missing pages are no longer shown when there is no match for search query. Message informing that there are no results is displayed instead.
  • Embedded search results enabled to provide users with more translation opportunities. Articles user recently edited (in currently selected source language wiki) are surfaced when there is no input in search bar, with additional info if article is missing in user's currently selected target language.
  • Long suggestion descriptions are limited to three lines, and the rest is truncated, which is indicated by ellipsis.
  • Chart data representing user translation statistics in now showing all the months since user's first published translation. Months that went without translation are now displayed in chart as well.
  • A loading indicator is shown while suggestions are loading.
  • Button to discard dialog is now shown through the whole process of selecting article to translate.

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Edit-user-talk notifications are now expandable. [666]

Structured Discussions [More information • Help pages]

Future changes

  • Some work is ongoing to store Structured Discussions contents from HTML to wikitext. That change will allow some specific templates and magic words to work properly on Structured Discussions. [667]
  • Some tests are conducted in order to prepare the rewriting of Structured Discussions' interface. That rewriting will have no visible impact on users but it will ease future changes.

Other projects

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Global Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:35, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

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)

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, John Broughton. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

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. [675]
  • 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. [676][677]

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)

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)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 12713 pages. Please consider reviewing even just a few pages each day! If everyone helps out, it will really put a dent in the backlog.
  • Currently the backlog stretches back to March and some pages in the backlog have passed the 90 day Google index point. Please consider reviewing some of them!

Outreach and Invitations:

  • If you know other editors with a good understanding of Wikipedia policy, invite them to join NPP by dropping the invitation template on their talk page with: {{subst:NPR invite}}. Adding more qualified reviewers will help with keeping the backlog manageable.

New Year New Page Review Drive

  • A backlog drive is planned for the start of the year, beginning on January 1st and running until the end of the month. Unique prizes will be given in tiers for both the total number of reviews made, as well as the longest 'streak' maintained.
  • Note: quality reviewing is extremely important, please do not sacrifice quality for quantity.

General project update:

  • ACTRIAL has resulted in a significant increase in the quality of new submissions, with noticeably fewer CSD, PROD, and BLPPROD candidates in the new page feed. However, the majority of the backlog still dates back to before ACTRIAL started, so consider reviewing articles from the middle or back of the backlog.
  • The NPP Browser can help you quickly find articles with topics that you prefer to review from within the backlog.
  • To keep up with the latest conversation on New Pages Patrol or to ask questions, you can go to Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers and add it to your watchlist.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. — TonyBallioni (talk) 20:27, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 25

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 25, October – November 2017

  • OAWiki & #1Lib1Ref
  • User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Spotlight: Research libraries and Wikimedia
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic, Korean and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:57, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

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. [684]
  • 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)

Global Collaboration products newsletter: 2017-12

Latest news from the Wikimedia Global Collaboration team, about Notifications, Structured discussions, Edit Review Improvements and Content translation. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

  • The filters are now deployed as a default feature on all wikis on RecentChanges and RecentChangesLinked pages.
  • The filters are still available as a Beta feature on all wikis on Watchlists. Please try them!
  • LiveUpdates have been deployed as a default feature for all wikis.
  • On wikis using Extension:Translate, translated messages can now be filtered. System messages can be filtered as well, on all wikis. [685]
  • "View new changes since $1" link is now more prominent, to invite users to use that native feature to update the list of results. [686]
  • Pagination and time period selectors are now combined and located on the right on left-to-right wikis. [687]
  • When a user wanted to click outside of the filter menu to close it, it was possible to click on "revert" link by accident. It is not possible anymore. [688]
  • It is now possible to filter the following events using the Tags menu: Making a page a redirect, Changing redirect target, Changing an existing redirect into a non-redirect, Blanking of the page, Removing more than 90% of a page content, Rolling back an edit. [689]
  • Some design improvements have been done to Related Changes page to integrate the new filters. [690]
  • "Save current filter settings" menu and legend overlapped the results. This is now fixed. [691]
  • Some small design improvements have been done. [692]

Content translation [More information • Help pages]

  • Now Content Translation prevents source and target language to be set to same language. [693]
  • The dialog for selecting article to translate is standardized. It introduces a new component that is used for the selected page on both the "New translation" dialog and the "Suggested pages" list. [694]
  • More space is given to the language filter, to increase responsiveness and show more language names without truncation. [695]
  • While searching for a new page to translate, duplicates are not shown anymore for user search input. [696]
  • Various PHP warnings and JavaScript errors have been fixed. [697][698]

Structured discussions [More information • Help pages]

  • It is now possible to use Special:Nuke on hidden Structured discussion topics. [699]
  • The Reply button is not active anymore until something is typed. [700]

Miscellaneous

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Global Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:31, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Your signature

Please be aware that your signature uses deprecated <font> tags, which are causing Obsolete HTML tags lint errors.

You are encouraged to change

-- <font style="font-family:Brush Script MT; font-size:15px;">[[User:John Broughton|John Broughton]] </font> [[User talk:John Broughton |(♫♫)]] : -- John Broughton (♫♫)

to

-- <span style="font-family:Brush Script MT; font-size:15px;">[[User:John Broughton|John Broughton]] </span> [[User talk:John Broughton |(♫♫)]] : -- John Broughton (♫♫)

—Anomalocaris (talk) 01:07, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for updating your signature! —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:41, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

New Years new page backlog drive

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!

Announcing the NPP New Year Backlog Drive!

We have done amazing work so far in December to reduce the New Pages Feed backlog by over 3000 articles! Now is the time to capitalise on our momentum and help eliminate the backlog!

The backlog drive will begin on January 1st and run until January 29th. Prize tiers and other info can be found HERE.

Awards will be given in tiers in two categories:

  • The total number of reviews completed for the month.
  • The minimum weekly total maintained for all four weeks of the backlog drive.

NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. — TonyBallioni (talk) 20:24, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

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. [703][704]
  • 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. [705]
  • 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. [706]
  • 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. [707][708]

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. [709]
  • 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. [710]
  • 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). [711]
  • 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. [712]

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. [713]
  • 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. [714][715]
  • 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. [716]

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)

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. [717]
  • 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. [718]

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. [719][720]

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. [721][722]

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)

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. [725]

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. [726]

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)

Global Collaboration products newsletter: 2018-01

Latest news from the Wikimedia Global Collaboration team, about Notifications, Structured discussions, Edit Review Improvements and Content translation. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

  • The Global Collaboration report for December is now available (in English).
  • Filters are better integrated on Related Changes (see below).
  • Structured discussions now use the 2017 wikitext editor (see below).

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Bug fixes

  • When searching, a click on a filter capsule moved the list of filters. [727]
  • On Related Changes page, the page name entry box didn't show the entirety of long page names. [728]
  • Transcludeing Special:RelatedChanges on a page added unexpected parameters to the URL. [729]
  • Filter menu was opening upwards. [730]
  • ORES preferences on Recent Changes and Watchlist preferences pages have been rationalized. [731]
  • Users are now prevented from clicking on a link when they click outside of the dropdown menu to close it. [732]

Work in progress

  • Filters on Related Changes page are better integrated and get new features, for instance: [733]
    • The standard auto-completion mechanism is available when you search for a page to look at.
    • It is more clear if you are looking to pages linked from the target page or to the target page.
    • You no longer need to click the "Show" button; the page updates automatically when a page is positively identified via autocompletion.

Content translation [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • Further enhancement are made for list (Suggestions/In-progress/Published) items on mobile screens. Long titles no longer overflow or overlap with other interface elements. [734]
  • Various changes to the "New translation" dialog and the selected page for translation have been made: [735]
    • Longer titles of selected pages are displayed in smaller. Some space has been added around to increase readability.
    • Language codes are not truncated by ellipsis anymore. Only full, autonym language names are subject to truncation.
    • Minimal screen sizes and selected suggestion dialog have been revisited. They are more consistent in responding to screen size changes.
    • Discard button is no longer shown on small screen sizes.
  • Language filters no longer render wrong or non-existent language codes. [736]
  • The "New translation" dialog now shows a loading indicator and doesn't display an error when you change the source language after an unsuccessful research. [737]

Structured discussions [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Future changes

  • Structured discussions does not always follow wiki's configurations concerning talk pages indexation. This will be fixed. [740]
  • Hidden topics will not be indexed by search engines anymore. [741]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Bug fixes

  • User rights change notifications were displaying a broken link. This is now fixed. [742]
  • "Mark as read" buttons had a bad appearance for users who don't have JavaScript activated. [743]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Global Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:56, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

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)

Books and Bytes - Issue 26

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 26, December – January 2018

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Spotlight: What can we glean from OCLC’s experience with library staff learning Wikipedia?
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:36, 31 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)

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. [745]
  • The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language. [746]
  • 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. [747]

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. [748]

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. [749]
  • 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. [750]
  • 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. [751]
  • 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. [752]
  • 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)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!
The NPP backlog at the end of the drive with the number of unreviewed articles by creation date. Red is older than 90 days, orange is between 90 and 30 days old, and green is younger than 30 days.

Backlog update:

  • The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
  • We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!

New Year Backlog Drive results:

  • We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!

General project update:

  • ACTRIAL will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
  • Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the guideline on appropriate redirects for advice on reviewing redirects. Inappropriate redirects can be re-targeted or nominated for deletion at RfD.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

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. [755][756][757]
  • 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. [758]
  • 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. [759]
  • 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. [760]
  • 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)

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. [762][763]
  • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [764]

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. [765]
  • 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. [766][767]

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.

22:55, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

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. [769]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [770][771]
  • 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. [772]
  • Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [773][774][775]

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. [776]
  • 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. [777][778]
  • 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

  • The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
  • The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges. [779]
  • Wikitext syntax highlighting is available as a Beta Feature for both the 2017 wikitext editor and the 2010 wikitext editor. [780]
  • The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. This tool has been used at the English Wikipedia for a long time. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be tricky for admins to set up. Other wikis can have this service, too. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.

Let's work together

  • The team is planning a presentation about editing tools for an upcoming Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting.
  • Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
  • The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. This has already been enabled at the English Wikipedia. If you want columns for a long list of footnotes on this wiki, you can use either <references /> or the plain (no parameters) {{reflist}} template. If you edit a different wiki, you can request multi-column support for your wiki. [781]
  • 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. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!

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

Collaboration products newsletter: 2018-02

Latest news from the Wikimedia Global Collaboration team, about Map improvements 2018, Notifications, Structured discussions and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

  • Collaboration and Language are now going their way separately. Updates about Content Translation are not included in this newsletter anymore. Please refer to the Language report.
  • Collaboration has a new project: Map improvements 2018.
    • The team’s engagement with maps is based on 2017 Community Wishlist proposal Kartographer Improvements, though the work won’t be restricted to items named there.
    • The project is currently in its very early research and planning stages.
    • It has a limited term that’s scheduled to conclude at the end of June 2018.

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Problems

  • The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [786][787]
  • On Related changes it was not possible to use Saved filters for several articles. It has been fixed. [788]
  • Transclude special:relatedchanges on a subpage removed #contentSub. This is now fixed. [789]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • The wording when you send a thanks message has changed. Instead of Yes or No it says Thank and Cancel. It is also now easier to understand that all thanks are public. [790]
  • A notification is now sent to account owner on multiple unsuccessful login attempts. [791]

Problems

  • Between week 7 and 20 February, 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. [792]
  • Long page titles on Special:Notifications were not truncated. This is now fixed. [793]

Structured discussions [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

  • You can now press CTRL + ENTER to post a new message. [794]
  • It wasn't possible to create a description of a Structured discussions board. This has been fixed. [795]

Problems

  • On wikis using the Beta feature, it is not possible to enable or disable Structured discussion from the Beta page. However, admins can create and move the pages.

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

11:29, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

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. [796]

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. [797]
  • 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. [798][799]
  • 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. [800]
  • 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.

17:12, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

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. [801]
  • 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. [802]
  • 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. [803]
  • 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. [804]

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). [805]

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. [806]
  • 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. [807][808]
  • 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. [809][810][811]
  • 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)

Dominic Barton

Hi John. I was hoping you might have the time/interest to get involved in this page. @DGG: said he would take a look a month ago, but no dice. I offered a draft, which @Spintendo: reviewed as part of the Request Edit process. However, I don't feel it is actually possible to improve the page while complying with his feedback on WP:AGEMATTERS (for example) disallowing using recent sources to cover Barton's early life. Therefore, I'm not sure how to improve the article from here. CorporateM (Talk) 05:15, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

CorporateM, my apologies.The interpretation of WP:AGEMATTERS that was given was an absurd misreading. When dealing with the interpretation of history and similar subjects, new sources are in general more authoritative. (The still widespread WP use of the 1913 EB or even early Bible dictionaries is a disgrace--there is no topic whatsoever for which they are valid). What one uses are the best sources. When 21st century high quality sources do not exist, we use the best that there is, correcting for the expected bias. John, I'm too busy to do very much here, but please help on this and then I will take a look also. DGG ( talk ) 18:37, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
@CorporateM: In this case, I'm inclined to handle this by my moving new information, with the appropriate source, into the article in a piecemeal way, while removing material that lacks a source, or at least a good source, and isn't being proposed for retention. That's not the normal way I participate in these discussions - I usually just focus on the draft replacement - but because this [unusually] involves WP:BLP issues and because I do a lot of editing of biographical articles in Wikipedia, I'm more comfortable with a piecemeal approach. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:03, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
Sure thing. To clarify, are you asking me to propose content in a sentence-by-sentence fashion, or are you saying you'll review the draft sentence-by-sentence? I'll follow your lead either way. CorporateM (Talk) 23:01, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi John. I just wanted to check-in and see if this was still on your radar. FYI - Dominic Barton's third and final term as Managing Director of McKinsey has come to an end as the firm's rules only allow him to serve up to three terms. Let me know if there is any way I can be of assistance. CorporateM (Talk) 16:35, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

@CorporateM: Among other things, I volunteer to do taxes for people (for free). Tax season ends 4/17, and I envision having the time, shortly thereafter, to finish working on the article. I apologize for the delay; thanks for your patience. And yes, the article should reflect Barton's current status. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:50, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
Hi John. Hope tax season went well! I wanted to check-in and see if it was a good time to circle back on this. CorporateM (Talk) 23:02, 27 April 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. [812]

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. [813][814]
  • 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)

Collaboration products newsletter: 2018-03

Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Map improvements 2018, Notifications, Structured discussions and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

The Collaboration team has announced the start of a new project: In-Context Help and Onboarding. The idea is to improve retention of new wiki editors by giving them short tutorials and other training experiences related to, and triggered by, their current activities on the wikis (that’s the “in context” part). The project follows from the conclusions of the New Editor Experiences research. The work is in its very early stages, but we’d like to hear from people with ideas on the subject—particularly if you have experience supporting or training new contributors.

Map improvements 2018 [More information]

Edit Review Improvements [More information • Help pages]

  • Number of edit to show in recent changes information text was incorrect in Special:Preferences. It has been rephrased. [816]

Notifications [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Future changes

Structured discussions [More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

Problems

  • It was not possible to opt-in and opt-out Structured discussions on wikis using it as a Beta feature. It is now fixed. [821]

Future changes

  • The visual editor and 2017 wikitext editor interface is going to change for consistency. The toolbar, dialogs and menus will appear slightly bigger; some icons will look different. Content or functionality will not change. That change will apply to Structured Discussions as well. [822]

Collaboration team's newsletter prepared by the Global Collaboration team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

12:25, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

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. [823] [824]
  • 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. [825]
  • TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [826]
  • 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. [827]
  • 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)

New Page Review Newsletter No.10

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
Notability
General notability guideline
Subject-specific guidelines
See also

ACTRIAL:

  • ACTRIAL's six month experiment restricting new page creation to (auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.

Paid editing

  • Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary.

Subject-specific notability guidelines

Nominate competent users for Autopatrolled

  • While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.

News

  • The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.
To opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:06, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

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. [828][829][830]
  • The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [831]

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. [832]
  • 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. [833][834][835]
  • 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. [836] [837]
  • 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. [838]
  • 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. [839]
  • 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. [840]

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. [841][842]

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)

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. [843]
  • 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. [844]
  • 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. [845]
  • 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). [846]

Problems

  • The bookmark icon for saved filters on the recent changes page disappeared because of new icon changes. This has now been fixed. [847]
  • 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. [848]

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. [849]

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)

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. [850]
  • 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. [851][852]
  • 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)

Books & Bytes - Issue 27

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 27, February – March 2018

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • New collections
    • Alexander Street (expansion)
    • Cambridge University Press (expansion)
  • User Group
  • Global branches update
    • Wiki Indaba Wikipedia + Library Discussions
  • Spotlight: Using librarianship to create a more equitable internet: LGBTQ+ advocacy as a wiki-librarian
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic, Chinese and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:50, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Select Survey Invite

I'm working on a study of political motivations and how they affect editing. I'd like to ask you to take a survey. The survey should take no more than 1-2 minutes. Your survey responses will be kept private. Our project is documented at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_%2B_Politics.

Your survey Link: https://uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9S3JByWf57fXEkR?Q_DL=56np5HpEZWkMlr7_9S3JByWf57fXEkR_MLRP_1HctmWNUdk64ldH&Q_CHL=gl

I am asking you to participate in this study because you are a frequent editor of pages on Wikipedia that are of political interest. We would like to learn about your experiences in dealing with editors of different political orientations.

Sincere thanks for your help! Porteclefs (talk) 17:05, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Porteclefs: I don't remember the last clear conflict I had that involved a political article; it's certainly been more than a few years since anything memorable. My practice, now, is almost always to not look back after I've edited, relying on others to protect what I've added or changed. I'm scrupulous about including a source for every fact or sentence that I add to an article, which sharply reduces the likelihood of the text being (successfully) removed. More generally, I've focused most of my energy on things other than improving Wikipedia articles. So I'm not able to help with your survey - I started it, but couldn't get past the second page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:26, 19 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. [855]
  • 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. [856]

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. [857]
  • 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)

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. [858]

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. [859]

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. [860]
  • 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. [861]
  • 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. [862]
  • 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. [863][864][865]

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)

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. [866]

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. [867]

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. [868]
  • 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. [869][870]

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)

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. [871]

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 [872]

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

22:23, 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)

The Signpost: 24 May 2018

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:18, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.11 25 May 2018

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
Notability
General notability guideline
Subject-specific guidelines
See also

ACTRIAL:

  • WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Deletion tags

  • Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.

Backlog drive:

  • A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

Editathons

  • There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Paid editing - new policy

  • Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines

  • The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
  • Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies.

Not English

  • A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.

News

  • Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
  • The next issue of The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.
Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:35, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

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. [873][874]
  • It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked. [875]
  • 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. [876]
  • 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. [877]
  • 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. [878]

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. [879]

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. [880]
  • 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. [881]
  • 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. [882]

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. [883]
  • A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development. [884]
  • 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. [885][886]

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)

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. [887]
  • Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet. [888][889]
  • 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. [890]

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. [891]

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)

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. [894]
  • Advanced item There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [895]

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. [896]

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)

NPP Backlog Elimination Drive

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.

Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive!

  • As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
  • Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: Special Edition New Page Patroller's Barnstar. Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: 100 review coin, 250 review coin, 500 review coin, 1000 review certificate.
  • Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 06:57, 16 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. [900][901]
  • 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. [902][903]
  • 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. [904]

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)

Books & Bytes – Issue 28

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 28, April – May 2018

  • #1Bib1Ref
  • New partners
  • User Group update
  • Global branches update
    • Wikipedia Library global coordinators' meeting
  • Spotlight: What are the ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let's ask the data
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:33, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

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. [905][906]

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. [907]
  • 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)

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. [908]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem. [909]

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)

Tech News: 2018-28

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

  • WebM video files have smaller file size but still be of the same quality. Creating WebM files will take longer time. [910]
  • The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. This was supposed to already have happened but was delayed. For most wikis this will happen on 9 July. For the rest it will happen on 16 July. [911]
  • Advanced item All wikis now use the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy. This could cause errors. You can help fix the errors. [912]

Problems

  • When you rolled back an edit it could get both the Rollback and Undo tags. This has been fixed. [913]
  • Rollbacks from autopatrolled users were not marked as patrolled. This has been fixed. [914]

Changes later this week

  • When you edit a link in the visual editor there will be two separate buttons to change which page the link goes to (target) or its text (label). [915][916]
  • On the mobile version you can find a link to an editor's contributions from their user page. Now this will work even if they haven't created a user page. [917]
  • When you edit a discussion on the mobile version you sometimes get your signature automatically added. This will now not happen if you have already added a signature manually. This is to avoid double signatures. [918]
  • Structured discussions toolbars will have more style options. [919]
  • Advanced item When you look at Wikimedia code in Gerrit there will be a new interface. It is on by default for new users. This is also true for developers. This is to make it easier to understand what is happening. [920]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 July. It will be on all wikis from 12 July (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 10 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 11 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Today all administrators can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. There will be a new user group for editing CSS and JavaScript. Administrators will no longer automatically be able to do this. This is because it is a security risk when all administrator accounts can edit JavaScript even if they never plan to or do not know how it works. You can read more. [921]
  • Page previews will be on by default for new accounts. [922]

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

23:09, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-29

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

Changes later this week

  • Your watchlist will show changes from the last seven days instead of three. If you have already set a length preference it will not change. [926]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from July 18. It will be on all wikis from July 19 (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 July 17 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 July 18 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some articles have messages to readers about problems with the article. For example that it does not cite sources or might not be neutral. Readers do not see these messages on the mobile version. The developers now want to show them. You can read more and leave feedback.
  • You can use <inputbox> to create search boxes for specific pages. For example to search the archives of a community discussion page. Instead of prefix:Page name you will see a text that explains which pages are being searched. You can read more and leave feedback.

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

16:00, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-30

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

  • When you log in to your account you can choose to keep being logged in. This checkbox now works better than before on the mobile version for users without JavaScript. [927]
  • Wikis that use Citoid can automatically generate citations for Swedish news sites. This only works in the visual editor. This now works for Swedish public service radio. More will come. Others could use this to add news sites in other languages in the future. [928]
  • Editors can do max 90 edits per minute. This is new since last month. This does not affect bots or administrators. [929]

Changes later this week

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

09:44, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.12 30 July 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months. (Purge)

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

June backlog drive

Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers.
Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.

New technology, new rules
  • New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
  • Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
  • Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.
Editathons
  • Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.
The Signpost
  • The next issue of the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team here.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 00:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Speedy deletion declined: Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department

Hello John Broughton. I am just letting you know that I declined the speedy deletion of Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department, a page you tagged for speedy deletion, because of the following concern: being part of a notable entity indicates significance, not to mention all the sources that BlackCurrantTea apparently had no problem finding. Thank you. SoWhy 07:56, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-31

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

  • The design on Special:Log has changed. It will change again soon. Developers are working on fixing problems. [930]

Problems

  • Deployment of 1.32.0-wmf.13 has been partially delayed. All deployments have been resumed and successfully done after bug fixes. [931][932]
  • Deployment of 1.32.0-wmf.14 has been partially delayed. [933][934]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 August. It will be on all wikis from 2 August (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 31 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 1 August at 15:00 (UTC) as well as at 23:00 (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.

14:05, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-32

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

  • The MediaWiki version that was released two weeks ago was late to some Wikimedia wikis. This was because of bugs. It was on all wikis 30 July. [936][937]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 August. It will be on all wikis from 9 August.

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 7 August 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 8 August 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.

19:39, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-33

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

  • CSS in templates can now be stored in a separate page on all wikis. This is called TemplateStyles. This is to make it easier to edit how templates look. [938]

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 14 August 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 15 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The developers are planning more ways to block users. This could be blocking someone from just a page or a namespace. You can read more. You can leave feedback on the talk page. [939]

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

17:53, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-34

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 August. It will be on all wikis from 23 August (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 22 August 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.

16:46, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Latest message for Collaboration team newsletter; Growth team's newsletter invite

Hello

Sorry to use English if that's not your favorite language.

You are receiving this message because you were reading the Collaboration team newsletter.

The Collaboration team doesn't longer exists. That team was working on building features that encourage collaboration. This is the latest message for that newsletter.

The Growth Team, formed in July 2018, supports some former Collaboration projects. The Growth Team's main objective is to ease new editors' first steps on wikis, through software changes. You can discover all objectives and missions of the Growth team on its page.

If you wish to be informed about Growth team's updates about easing new users first steps, you can subscribe to the new list to get updates. The first message from Growth –with a call for feedback on a new project– will be posted in a few days!

If you have questions or you want to share experiences made on your wiki about new users' first steps, please post them on the team talk page, in any language.

On behalf of the Growth team, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:29, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #1

Welcome to the first newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects. We will be starting with Wikipedias, but we hope these changes will benefit every community.

8 ideas we consider: tell us what you think about them!

We are considering new features to build, that could retain new editors in mid-size Wikipedias. We will be testing new ideas in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, and then we'll talk to more communities (yours!) about adopting the ideas that work well.

We have posted the 8 ideas we are considering. We would really appreciate your thoughts and the thoughts from your community. Please share the ideas, and tell us what do you and your community think of those ideas before September 9.

Share your experiences with newcomers

We want to hear about what is working and what is not working for new contributors in your wiki. We also want to hear any reactions, questions, or opinions on our work. Please post on the team’s talk page, in any language!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the first project we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Books & Bytes – Issue 29

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 29, June – July 2018

Hindi, Italian and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-35

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

  • You can now see moved paragraphs in diffs in the mobile view. It also works on all languages in the desktop view. [941]
  • Bureaucrats on all Wikimedia wikis can now remove the interface admin user right. [942]

Problems

  • Some diffs show lines in the wrong order. The developers are working on fixing it. [943]

Changes later this week

  • The message you see when you thank a user will change. This is to make it easier to understand. [944]
  • AWB will stop adding using AWB in the edit summary. Instead it will add a tag that says AWB. [945]
  • Advanced item Some abuse filter variables have changed. They are now easier to understand for non-experts. The old variables will still work but filter editors are encouraged to replace them with the new ones. You can find the list of changed variables on mediawiki.org. They have a note which says Deprecated. Use ... instead. An example is article_text which is now page_title. [946]
  • Advanced item Abuse filters can now use how old a page is. The variable is page_age. [947]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 August. It will be on all wikis from 30 August (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 28 August 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 29 August at 15:00 (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 up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.

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

16:16, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-36

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

  • There is a new user right for users who can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. Before this all admins could edit CSS and JavaScript. This was a security risk. This group is called interface administrators. Administrators can delete user CSS and JavaScript pages. [948][949]
  • There will be an A/B test on the Wikipedia mobile website. It starts this week. It tests how we show templates that show information about an article. The test will last two weeks. [950][951]
  • You can now use different CSS rules for different skins when you edit templates. This is because of TemplateStyles. [952]
  • wp10 in ORES is now called articlequality. [953]
  • When you get a new message on your talk page you get a yellow message in the toolbar. The preference to show or not show this has been removed. [954]

Problems

  • UploadWizard had problems with campaigns. Users could not upload files. This has now been fixed. [955]
  • You can get a notification when a link is made to a page you created. This has not worked since June. It was fixed last week. [956]

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

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

16:47, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-37

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

  • When you added or edited a template with the visual editor the input boxes were very big. This has been fixed. The input boxes will now be smaller until you click on them. Then they will change size to fit the text. [958]

Problems

  • Some diffs showed lines in the wrong order. This was fixed last week. [959]
  • Marking a cross-wiki notification as read didn't work every time. The other wiki was not updated. This has now been fixed. [960]
  • <maplink> did not work for a few days. This was because of a bug. This has now been fixed. [961]
  • {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} is used by some templates. For a period edits saved with {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} would save the previous user's name and not your username. This is now fixed. Edits made before the bug was fixed will still be wrong and need to be corrected. [962]
  • When you move a page the title still shows the old page name. The developers are working on fixing this. [963]

Changes later this week

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
  • Because of the data centre test there will be no new version of MediaWiki this week. Changes for this week will come next week instead.

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 11 Septmber 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 12 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.

22:35, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-38

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

  • The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. Images uploaded using Nearby are now automatically added to the associated Wikidata item. You can browse other images on Commons. You can see your achievements and your upload statistics. It has also fixed some bugs. [964]
  • Advanced item MediaWiki web requests now have a time limit of 60 seconds for GET requests and 200 seconds for POST requests. [965]

Problems

  • You could not see the menu on the notifications page on the mobile version. This has now been fixed. [966]

Changes later this week

  • Special:AncientPages can hide disambiguation pages. [967]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 September. It will be on all wikis from 20 September (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

21:58, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.

Project news
As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.
Other
Moving to Draft and Page Mover
  • Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at WP:DRAFTIFY.
  • If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear conflict of interest.
  • Articles that have been created in contravention of our paid-editing-requirements or written from a blatant NPOV perspective, or by authors with a clear COI might also be draftified at discretion.
  • The best tool for draftification is User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js(info). Kindly adapt the text in the dialogue-pop-up as necessary (the default can also be changed like this). Note that if you do not have the Page Mover userright, the redirect from main will be automatically tagged as CSD R2, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
  • The Page Mover userright can be useful for New Page Reviewers; occasionally page swapping is needed during NPR activities, and it helps avoid excessive R2 nominations which must be processed by admins. Note that the Page Mover userright has higher requirements than the NPR userright, and is generally given to users active at Requested Moves. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.
List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing

  • Twinkle provides a lot of the same functionality as the page curation tools, and some reviewers prefer to use the Twinkle tools for some/all tasks. It can be activated simply in the gadgets section of 'preferences'. There are also a lot of options available at the Twinkle preferences panel after you install the gadget.
  • In terms of other gadgets for NPR, HotCat is worth turning on. It allows you to easily add, remove, and change categories on a page, with name suggestions.
  • MoreMenu also adds a bunch of very useful links for diagnosing and fixing page issues.
  • User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js(info): Installing scripts doesn't have to be complicated. Go to your common.js and copy importScript( 'User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js' ); into an empty line, now you can install all other scripts with the click of a button from the script page! (Note you need to be at the ".js" page for the script for the install button to appear, not the information page)
  • User:TheJosh/Scripts/NewPagePatrol.js(info): Creates a scrolling new pages list at the left side of the page. You can change the number of pages shown by adding the following to the next line on your common.js page (immediately after the line importing this script): npp_num_pages=20; (Recommended 20, but you can use any number from 1 to 50).
  • User:Primefac/revdel.js(info): Is requesting revdel complicated and time consuming? This script helps simplify the process. Just have the Copyvio source URL and go to the history page and collect your diff IDs and you can drop them into the script Popups and it will create a revdel request for you.
  • User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js(info): Creates a "Page Curation" link to Special:NewPagesFeed up near your sandbox link.
  • User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/deletionFinder.js: Creates links next to the title of each page which show up if it has been previously deleted or nominated for deletion.
  • User:Evad37/rater.js(info): A fantastic tool for adding WikiProject templates to article talk pages. If you add: rater_autostartNamespaces = 0; to the next line on your common.js, the prompt will pop up automatically if a page has no Wikiproject templates on the talk page (note: this can be a bit annoying if you review redirects or dab pages commonly).

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-39

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

Changes later this week

  • The preferences form will change to use the standard look. If you see any problems please report them on Phabricator. [968]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 September. It will be on all wikis from 27 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

15:22, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-40

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

  • Ordinary pages can no longer be loaded as javascript. You could do this using ?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript in the URL. Only fully protected pages in the MediaWiki: namespace or user javascript subpages can be loaded as javascript now. This is for better security. [969][970]

Problems

  • New and updated translations from translatewiki.net will not reach the wikis for a while. You can still translate messages on translatewiki.net. The Wikimedia wikis will be updated with the new translations later. This is because of work on the translation system. [971][972]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 October. It will be on all wikis from 4 October (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 3 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation Search Platform team. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 UTC. See how to join if you want to know how the search function works or have questions.

Future changes

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.

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

17:34, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #2

Welcome to the second newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

  • Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
  • Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.
  • Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

You can read about the details of this plan on our team page.

How did we get to this plan?

We have set up our plan based on the 8 ideas we were considering. You can read about our analysis in our team updates, and detailed discussion on each idea.

We are looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:31, 4 October 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Tech News: 2018-41

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

  • There was a problem when you copied and pasted from a table with the visual editor. It could add href where it shouldn't be. This has now been fixed. [974]

Changes later this week

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
  • Because of the data centre test there will be no new version of MediaWiki this week. Changes for this week will come next week instead.

Meetings

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

23:38, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-42

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

Problems

  • Some pages, edits and users disappeared for a short while after the server switch. Missing content and users was fixed within a day. Some preferences and other things might take a few more days to fix. [975]
  • Wikis are updated with new and updated translations from translatewiki.net again. This will happen once a week. The developers are working on fixing the problem so we can have translation updates more often again. [976]

Changes later this week

  • When you create an abuse filter that prevents edits you can now write a specific error message for it. Before this all abuse filters that prevented edits had the same error message. [977]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 October. It will be on all wikis from 18 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • There will be no more meetings with the Editing team. This is because not enough Wikimedians were interested. To tell developers which bugs you think are the most important you can use Phabricator as normal. [978]
  • 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 17 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.

22:40, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.14 21 October 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.

Hello John Broughton, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

Backlog

As of 21 October 2018, there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.

Community Wishlist Proposal
Project updates
  • ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
  • There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.
New scripts

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 20:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-43

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

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Community Wishlist Survey begins on 29 October. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 29 October to 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.

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

23:11, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 30

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 30, August – Septmeber 2018

  • Library Card translation
  • Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref spreads to the Southern Hemisphere and beyond
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:43, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-44

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 post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
  • Advanced item The wikis now have a content security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future. [979]

Problems

  • Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed. [980]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (calendar).
  • The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed from Special:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the 2010 wikitext editor. [981][982]

Meetings

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

20:08, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Editing News #2—2018

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

Did you know?

Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?

Screenshot showing the location of the pencil icon

Tap on the pencil icon to start editing. The page will probably open in the wikitext editor.

You will see another pencil icon in the toolbar. Tap on that pencil icon to the switch between visual editing and wikitext editing.

Toolbar with menu opened

Remember to publish your changes when you're done.

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 wrapped up most of their work on the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual diff tool. The team has begun investigating the needs of editors who use mobile devices. Their work board is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are fixing bugs and improving mobile editing.

Recent changes

Let's work together

  • The Editing team wants to improve visual editing on the mobile website. Please read their ideas and tell the team what you think would help editors who use the mobile site.
  • The Community Wishlist Survey begins next week.
  • 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. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-45

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

Changes later this week

  • You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. The interface for the two-column edit conflict will change. You can read more.
  • When you edit with the visual editor you can use the "Automatic" citation tab. This helps you generate citations. You will now be able to write plain text citations or the title of a journal article or a book in this tab. This will search the Crossref and WorldCat databases and add the top result. [985]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 November. It will be on all wikis from 8 November (calendar).

Meetings

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

17:28, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #3

Welcome to the third newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks

We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.

  • Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
  • Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.

Third Growth team project begins

  • Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

Best practices for helping newcomers

We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:29, 7 November 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Hi

Hi. I am Mossab a Wikipedia education program team leader at hashemite university in jordan. Recently i organized an MOU signing ceremony between the hashemite university in jordan and the Wikimedia foundation in that there will be a corner for Wikipedia inside campus in the university library so that I'd like to include your book Wikipedia – The Missing Manual in the Wikipedia corner. So could you please send me it as PDF so that i can print it and put it in the university library? Kind Regards--مصعب (talk) 17:20, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

@مصعب: Mossab - I'm glad to hear that you're helping to improve Wikipedia, in Jordan, and I'm happy to help. The book I wrote can be printed without cost (that is, a copyleft version has been issued), but I don't have the book in PDF format. However, the contents were published at Help: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and have even been improved by changes made by other editors. So what's available to you is actually better than what is in the original version.
I suggest that you or others simply print the published Help pages, in order, or, using Adobe Acrobat or similar, create and then combine all the separate PDFs into a single PDF for printing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:06, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-46

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

  • Some old mobile browsers can use the watchlist again. This has not worked for a while. These browsers are called grade C browsers. This helps for example Windows Phone 8.1 with Internet Explorer and Lumia 535 with Windows 10. [986]

Problems

  • You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. Users who use this view saw the edit conflict resolution page when they wanted to see a preview. This has been fixed. [987][988][989]

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • You can use the content translation tool to translate articles. The developers are working on a new version. One of the changes will be a maintenance category. Articles where users add a lot of text from machine translation without changing it will be in that category. This is so the community can review it. The users will also have been warned before they publish the article that it has a lot of unchanged text from machine translations. [990]

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

19:21, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.15 16 November 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.

Hello John Broughton,

Community Wishlist Survey – NPP needs you – Vote NOW
  • Community Wishlist Voting takes place 16 to 30 November for the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements, and other software requests. The NPP community is hoping for a good turnout in support of the requests to Santa for the tools we need. This is very important as we have been asking the Foundation for these upgrades for 4 years.
If this proposal does not make it into the top ten, it is likely that the tools will be given no support at all for the foreseeable future. So please put in a vote today.
We are counting on significant support not only from our own ranks, but from everyone who is concerned with maintaining a Wikipedia that is free of vandalism, promotion, flagrant financial exploitation and other pollution.
With all 650 reviewers voting for these urgently needed improvements, our requests would be unlikely to fail. See also The Signpost Special report: 'NPP: This could be heaven or this could be hell for new users – and for the reviewers', and if you are not sure what the wish list is all about, take a sneak peek at an article in this month's upcoming issue of The Signpost which unfortunately due to staff holidays and an impending US holiday will probably not be published until after voting has closed.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here)18:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-47

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

  • You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote until 30 November.
  • Advanced item There is an A/B test for sameAs data. This is to make it easier to find the right information with a search engine. This changes the metadata for a wiki page. It doesn't change how the page looks. [991]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia wikis use templates to show readers there are problems with the content on some pages. For example if there are no sources or the page needs to be rewritten. The mobile website will soon show more information when you use these templates. Some templates may need to be updated. [992]
  • The Education Program extension was removed from all Wikimedia projects. The database tables used by the extension will be archived. This will happen in a month. If you want the information on your wiki you should move it to a normal wiki page. [993]

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

23:28, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, John Broughton. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-48

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

  • On wikis with translatable pages you could create a mess when you moved a page that had translatable subpages. A subpage is when you use / to create a new page: /wiki/Page/Subpage. The subpages would be moved but not the translations. The subpages are no longer automatically be moved. This is to make it safer to move pages. [994]

Changes later this week

  • The advanced search interface will be available by default on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It's already active on German, Farsi, Arabic and Hungarian Wikipedia. [995]
  • Special:UnusedCategories show empty categories with no files or other categories. You can soon choose to not show soft redirect categories or some maintenance categories there. You can do this with the magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDCATEGORY__. [996]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 November. It will be on all wikis from 29 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Advanced item The mw.util.jsMessage() function was deprecated in 2012. It will be removed next week. Look for the warning Use of "mw.util.jsMessage" is deprecated in the JavaScript console to know if you use an affected script or gadget. If you are a gadget maintainer you should check if your JavaScript code contains mw.util.jsMessage. There is a migration guide. It explains how to use mw.notify instead. [997]

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

22:22, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-49

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

  • Admins will not be able to unblock themselves if they are blocked by someone other than themselves. This is because it can cause damage if someone else takes over an admin account and other admins can't block them. If this is a problem for your community you can report it on Phabricator. You can also ask questions on Meta. There is a discussion on Phabricator about how to solve this if two admins fight with each other on a small wiki. [998]
  • Small SVG images are now bigger when you see them in MediaViewer. [999]
  • You can go to a section from the edit summary by clicking on the section name. Before this you had to click on the arrow. [1,000]
  • When you jumped to a footnote that was referenced several times in an article it could be difficult to see where you were in the text. Now there are jump marks and highlights to help you find your way back. [1,001][1,002]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

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

16:12, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #4

Welcome to the fourth newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

We need your feedback!

We have two requests for community members:

  1. Now that data is coming in for the welcome survey, we are planning how to use that data to personalize the newcomer's first day. See our current thoughts here, and join the conversation here.
  2. Try out the help panel's interactive prototype, and read about how we're planning to roll it out, and post any thoughts or reactions here.

Two Growth team projects have been deployed (detailed updates here)

  • Personalized first day (welcome survey) was deployed on November 20 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
    • The survey is now being shown to half of new users (A/B test). Responses are being recorded in the database. We'll report on initial results during December.
    • We are planning to test a second version of the survey, called "Variation C", which we think will maximize the number of users who complete the survey and stay on the wiki.
    • The original objective of this project was to give newcomers the materials they need to achieve their goals, and so now we are currently planning how we will use the information collected in the welcome survey to personalize the newcomer's experience. We hope community members will read our current thinking and join the conversation here. Some of the plans we are considering include:
      • Making it easy for newcomers to see editing activity around the topic areas in which they indicated that they're interested.
      • Connecting interested newcomers to experienced editors.
      • Surfacing the help content most relevant to the reason for which the newcomers created their accounts.
  • Understanding first day (EditorJourney) was deployed on November 15 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias. It has been done after a longer security review and final testing than expected. Data is now being recorded for all new users on those wikis, and we've been auditing the data and preparing to make initial reports during December. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Help panel is under construction

  • Focus on help desk (help panel) is planned to be deployed during the week of January 7 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
  • This interactive prototype is the best way to see the design and wording in the feature.
  • We ran live user tests on the prototype, with results posted here.
  • In addition to giving the ability to ask a question, the help panel will also contain a set of links to existing help content. Our ambassadors on Czech and Korean Wikipedias are determining the right initial set of most helpful links in this task.
  • We encourage community members to try out the prototype and read about the rules for who will get the feature, and add any thoughts to this discussion.

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project updates page for detailed updates on the projects we work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 09:31, 7 December 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Weighing in on Growth team work

Hi John Broughton -- thank you for weighing in when the Growth team was discussing ideas on what we would build. We've made a lot of progress in the last few months, and we're hoping you could take a look at some of our current work and post any thoughts you have. We're working on a "help panel" (comments can go here), and on the next steps for the "Personalized first day" project (comments can go here). Thank you for any time you give! -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-50

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

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • New accounts will need passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Admins, interface admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, CentralNotice admins, global renamers, check users, stewards and some other user groups will need passwords that are at least 10 characters long. This is because an attacker could cause damage to the wikis if they took over these accounts. [1,003][1,004]
  • When you hover over a footnote it will show you the reference as a pop-up. This is so you don't have to jump down to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will happen in 2019. Some wikis already have gadgets that do this. You will be able to turn it off. [1,005]

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

17:33, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.16 15 December 2018

Hello John Broughton,

Reviewer of the Year

This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554 reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285 edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.

Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760 reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001 reviews), Semmendinger (8,440 reviews), PRehse (8,092 reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306 reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016 reviews), and Elmidae (3,615 reviews).
Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only seven months, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.

See also the list of top 100 reviewers.

Less good news, and an appeal for some help

The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640 holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.


Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019

At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3 December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.


Training video

Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minute video was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:14, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-51

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 7 January 2019.

Recent changes

  • Some templates that show notices about the content of the page will now be shown on the mobile website. In many cases they were hidden before. [1,006][1,007]
  • Admins can no longer unblock themselves, except for self-blocks. A blocked admin can block the user who blocked them but no one else. This is so no one can block all admins on a wiki without being stopped. [1,008]
  • Advanced item The ParserMigration extension has been removed. It compared the result of two versions of the MediaWiki wikitext parsing pipeline. It was used when we moved to the Remex parsing library instead of Tidy.

Problems

  • <ref> tags can use parameters such as "name" or "group". For example <ref name="adams" group="books">. If a <ref> tag has more than two parameters all parameters are ignored. You don't get a warning that they don't work. This will soon be fixed. [1,009]

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Foundation Android app team are working on making it easier to edit on mobile phones. You can read more about these plans. If you have an Android phone and speak at least two languages you can help testing in English. Tell Dchen (WMF) you want to be part of the testing by writing on her talk page or email her.
  • Advanced item tiles.wmflabs.org and wma.wmflabs.org will stop working. They have no maintainers and run an old operating system. Tools which use it could stop working. This includes the mapnik gadget, hill shading, and hike and bike layers. New maintainers could help out and keep it going. [1,010]

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

20:34, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

Greetings and Salutations

An imaginative 1882 greeting card in The National Archives collection.
To John Broughton:
Hello!
Congratulations!
You have been included in my first, and possibly only, Very Early Christmas List!
As an earnest fellow believer in Santa Claus, and possibly in Our Redeemer Liveth as well, you may wonder how you got on this list.
I have no idea!
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Unless I tracked down the connection in our user talk archives, in which case you know who you are!
Or not.
All the best for you and yours this Christmas 2018 and New Year 2019!
– Athaenara jingles all the way 02:30, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 31

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 31, October – Novemeber 2018

  • OAWiki
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

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