User talk:RudolfoMD

August 2023

Hello, I'm Sundayclose. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Brincidofovir, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at referencing for beginners. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Sundayclose (talk) 13:55, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Info I added was obviously verifiable and not reasonably disputable; Sources were obvious; added. --RudolfoMD (talk) 10:38, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Introduction to contentious topics

You have recently edited a page related to COVID-19, broadly construed, a topic designated as contentious. This standard message is designed as an introduction to contentious topics and does not imply that there are any issues with your editing.

A special set of rules applies to certain topic areas, which are referred to as contentious topics. These are specially-designated topics that tend to attract more persistent disruptive editing than the rest of the project and have been designated as contentious topics by the Arbitration Committee. When editing a contentious topic, Wikipedia’s norms and policies are more strictly enforced, and Wikipedia administrators have special powers in order to reduce disruption to the project.

Within contentious topics, editors should edit carefully and constructively, refrain from disrupting the encyclopedia, and:

adhere to the purposes of Wikipedia;
comply with all applicable policies and guidelines;
follow editorial and behavioural best practice;
comply with any page restrictions in force within the area of conflict; and
refrain from gaming the system.

Editors are advised to err on the side of caution if unsure whether making a particular edit is consistent with these expectations. If you have any questions about contentious topics procedures you may ask them at the arbitration clerks' noticeboard or you may learn more about this contentious topic here. You may also choose to note which contentious topics you know about by using the {{Ctopics/aware}} template. Johnuniq (talk) 05:21, 10 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently reality is a contentious topic. If you think I made an edit inconsistent with these expectations, please identify the content and expectation and explain. RudolfoMD (talk) 07:35, 12 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Your comments at Talk:Peter Navarro show a misunderstanding of how article talk pages should be used. For one thing, putting "Fauci used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory ..." in a heading is a WP:BLP violation no matter how artfully the following wording is phrased. Your opinion about what a pdf says is not useful at Wikipedia. If you have a reliable source saying that an assertion in the article is false or misleading, specify the source and the wording that should be corrected, and why. Otherwise, you should find another topic to work on because much more of the same will result in a topic ban. The point about contentious topics is that they are contentious and time-wasting, repetitive yet content-free arguments need to stop. Johnuniq (talk) 09:00, 12 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oops - I thought the idea that NIAID had funded research under which SARSr viruses gained the ability to infect human and monkey cells (Vero E6 and HeLa) with ACE2 receptors was widely accepted; I didn't think informed people still seriously disputed that. I regret the assumption. The ensuing discussion has showed is that there are still some who consider the idea to be not just disputed, but baseless conspiracy theory! My assumption apparently resulted in a lot of hostility and bad faith assumptions about me personally.

I don't understand something: the Navarro article is a BLP and has stated for some time, "During a Fox News appearance in March 2021, Navarro echoed a baseless conspiracy theory that Fauci [...] used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory where it was supposedly developed" so I presume that that is not a WP:BLP violation. So then how can putting the same phrase - "Fauci used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory ..." in a heading on a talk page be a WP:BLP violation? Are you saying the ... part is a BLP violation?
Are you saying the email in which Dr. Fauci wrote, “scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.” is not real or not a reliable source? Surely this FOIA'd government documents is not an unreliable source.

I am reviewing the paper entitled “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus”^[1] to see if indeed it is the case that, as the Rand PDF claims, it described in-depth the research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded through NIAID Award R01AI110964. Dr. Zheng-Li Shi details the research in which the spike genes from two uncharacterized bat SARS-related coronavirus strains, Rs4231 and Rs7327, were combined with the genomic backbone of another SARS-related coronavirus to create novel chimeric SARS-related viruses that showed cytopathic effects in primate epithelial cells and replication in human epithelial cells. These experiments combined genetic information from different SARS-related coronaviruses and combined them to create novel, artificial viruses able to infect human cells. This research, funded under NIAID Award R01AI110964, meets the definition of gain-of-function research. If it does I think I can do / am doing what you said I should - present reliable sources (the email and the journal article) backing my rejected edit indicating that an assertion in the article is false or misleading. But if I haven't and can't then I certainly shall stop. I thought the idea that NIAID had funded research under which SARSr viruses gained the ability to infect human and monkey cells (Vero E6 cells and HeLa cells) was widely accepted. The paper does indeed show that experiments were performed on SARSr viruses whereby two, identified in the paper as WIV1-Rs4231S and WIV1-Rs7327S were described as having gained the ability to infect human and monkey cells (Vero E6 cells and HeLa cells), and was supported by funding of authors Peter Daszak (PD) and Zheng-Li Shi (ZLS) via the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964 grant), and the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program. This is done in the "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity experiments" and "Funding" sections. Authors state, "Using the reverse genetics technique we previously developed for WIV1 [23], we constructed [...] chimeric SARSr-CoVs". I'm finding everything in the quote checks out except perhaps the last sentence. I may need a source connecting the dots in one respect. We know - we have proof Fauci knew: "scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection" but it's a small leap to say "This research, funded under NIAID Award R01AI110964, meets the definition of gain-of-function research." I can't yet eliminate the possibility the statements are about different research.

~~--RudolfoMD (talk) 07:13, 23 August 2023 (UTC)~~[reply]

I stand by the above but perhaps I can keep it short: In short The Intercept^[2] and the peer-reviewed paper and grant it refers to^[1] and USGov bat coronavirus grant R01AI110964 serve as a reliable source of expert opinion for these two edits, or something along along those lines: [1] and [2]. It shows that most experts believe that the "Fauci ... had used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory" part of what Wikipedia is calling a baseless conspiracy theory, isn't baseless, but rather true. You instructed me, "If you have a reliable source saying that an assertion in the article is false or misleading, specify the source and the wording that should be corrected, and why." Done. No? If you think different wording explaining the part that is now likely true would be better, can you suggest some, Johnuniq? Or do you believe that these sources refute no part of the article's text it's "a baseless conspiracy theory : Fauci was the “father” of the virus and had used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory where it was supposedly developed"? Johnuniq?

--RudolfoMD (talk) 07:13, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you are attempting to ping me, it hasn't worked—I have not received any notifications from you. Pings require a new comment (not an edit) with a new signature. See Help:Notifications. Rather than repeat attacks against a living person, you should be responding at the ANI report. That's not compulsory, but failing to respond suggests contempt for standard community procedures. Johnuniq (talk) 08:09, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand. I didn't just write the above, contrary to what you seem to have inferred. I wrote the above a week ago, long before the ANI report, which I don't know how to respond to because I see inaccuracies in so many of the claims and the overall gist that it seems unlikely to be coincidence. I can't leave it up to the admins to make their own judgement? How should I respond? Is there a policy? (It seems to me that assuming no response to be contempt would be assuming bad faith.) I had started writing a response and thought it wiser not to, and now I see you are pushing me to respond, but you also don't seem to want to even discuss The Intercept reporting covered.

Are you saying it's against policy/I'm not allowed to quote from the Intercept about Fauci because that's attacking a living person? I feel frustrated - I see misrepresention at ANI and see you refusing to respond to my week-old questions by clarifying, and instead are giving instructions that I find are also unclear. So I'm not feeling well. Please consider directly replying to what I wrote a week ago at some point. If you're trying to be helpful. If you don't, I'll take that as confirmation you want me to stop editing. RudolfoMD (talk) 08:42, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding "I didn't just write the above, contrary to what you seem to have inferred.", I was thinking of the two links to my user page above, including one added 21 minutes before my comment (07:38, 1 September 2023). People don't need every inaccuracy refuted. It would be desirable to pick out, say, two of the most significant problems with the report and briefly explain why they are inaccurate. It's normal at noticeboards (including ANI) for people to put their differing views and for others to comment.

My opinion on whether certain sources refute something is not relevant to what I wrote. My earlier comment above concerned WP:BLP and a claim you made in (diff) where you created a new section with heading "Fauci used taxpayer money to finance a Chinese laboratory where [SARS-CoV-2] was [perhaps] developed is NOT "a baseless conspiracy theory" per reliable sources these days". The use of qualifiers like "perhaps" is not acceptable because it is obvious that such wording looks like an attempt to assert that Fauci did something bad. I haven't read your sources and have no opinion on the matter other than that a quick skim of Anthony Fauci fails to show any support for the notion conveyed in your text. That's not conclusive of course, but if what you suggest is true, it obviously belongs in Fauci's article. Johnuniq (talk) 11:03, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

SandyGeorgia, do you think I need to reply to the ANI?

I was going to respond to you:

Thanks.

Yes, mustn't lose my temper even when someone endangers readers by removing notice of a black box warning from an article, citation or no.

Kudos on covering Wakefield's fraud - https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo/wiki.riteme.site/MMR_vaccine_and_autism. Interesting tool too. Wow.

I can't leave it up to the admins to make their own judgement? This smear so distasteful. I think most of my article edits (some tool can tell?) have nothing to do with covid or vaccines. I assume good faith, but so many misrepresentations - like one that has been made thrice- "peddling allegations from a controversial US senator as a sole source" - I did no such thing, as the record shows - I, rather, brought up a senator's letter's cited sources and its news coverage, like The Intercept article I am trying to discuss above, as sources. RudolfoMD (talk) 10:13, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Rudolfo; I'm sorry to be "meeting" under these circumstances. I do appreciate your attempts to contribute to medical content, and regret such a rocky start.

The reason Johnuniq had not responded to you is that the ping you sent was faulty; for a ping to be received by another editor, it has to be included with a new post that is signed. Johnuniq was trying to explain that above, but with a lot going on right now, I see it's difficult for you to understand everything and prioritize what should be your first response to whom and where.

In general, the "accused" should always respond at ANI, even if the accusations seem faulty or in bad faith. I understand your frustration that many diffs in the ANI are misrepresented and fail to AGF, but I have mostly already pointed that out, so with an ANI thread that is already being bludgeoned, I hope you can let those misrepresentations go and let the facts speak for themselves. That is, keep your response short and to the point, and even when you feel there have been bad faith accusations, don't respond in kind.

In general, I can tell you four things about Wikipedia that must become your bright line:

Always focus on content; don't personalize discussions.
Always take care with edit summaries; they are permanent, and you can't retract what you write in them, so they should always be absolutely neutral and informative and avoiding personalization of issues. Sundayclose was wrong to revert your factual addition, but many editors are prone to blindly reverting edits from new editors that don't have a WP:MEDRS source attached to them. But you were wrong to call them a "nutter", and that should result in a sincere apology from you. Without an apology at ANI for your inappropriate edit summaries, things might not go well.
Make one revert a general policy; never ever edit war, and never re-revert if you've been reverted once (except for WP:BLP or blatant vandalism), until a thorough discussion has occurred on talk. That policy will save you a lot of agida on Wikipedia.
Stay away from anything related to COVID. Period. It has always been a mess on Wikipedia, as a new editor you aren't going to fix that, and even restating what sources say will only result in problems. You have much to add in other medical topics, and COVID articles on Wikipedia are unlikely to ever be a good place to spend your time ... particularly as you learn which sources will always be rejected on Wikipedia even if they are reliable.

Yes, the smear is distasteful, and I regret seeing that happen to a new editor, but the failure to AGF in most of the diffs speaks for itself and most observers will see through them (that is, most editors do AGF).

I think you need to apologize for the edit summaries, acknowledge that you are new and didn't realize the sources you were using would be rejected in COVID content, simply state that your intent with the COVID posts was misunderstood and ask that others carefully read, recognize that you should never revert without discussion, and express regret for having engaged in an argument with WMrapids at the reliable sources noticeboard; you are by no means the first to be frustrated to the point of exasperation by them, but nonetheless, you are responsible for your own responses and behavior, and on Wikipedia, one has to always avoid taking the bait. My best advice with WMrapids is to let them have the last word, or you'll end up typing for the rest of your life :)

So, yes, you should respond at ANI, but you should do so when you are able to respond to it without anger or frustration, with a short simple apology for where you went wrong and agreement to seek advice from more experienced editors going forward; it's OK to take your time to compose a response, since you are so obviously new to Wikipedia.

Once again, I'm sorry this happened to you; I can only offer that I had similar happen when I was new 17 years ago, and the bad things that were done to me made me a better editor in the long run. We need knowledgeable medical editors, so I hope you'll not be too discouraged by this, and stick around! Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 10:44, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

PS, having now followed through on Johnuniq's post after mine, it is important also to understand how to use appropriate talk page headings; short and simple is best. Even if you had a rock-solid, high-quality source, and even if we weren't talking about a BLP, a more appropriate section heading would have been something simple like "Navarro claims on Fox news". It's Navarro's page, but both Navarro and Fauci are living persons, WP:BLP applies on all pages (even talk), and the point you were trying to make was lost because of the way you worded the section heading. You were seeking to change the words "baseless conspiracy theory" (not very encyclopedic) to "claims" (more encyclopedic), and that point was lost. This is part of why I advise you simply avoid COVID topics until you're more experienced; I'm as experienced as any medical editor, and won't touch them :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:34, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ ^a ^b Hu, Ben; Zeng, Lei-Ping; Yang, Xing-Lou; Ge, Xing-Yi; Zhang, Wei; Li, Bei; Xie, Jia-Zheng; Shen, Xu-Rui; Zhang, Yun-Zhi; Wang, Ning; Luo, Dong-Sheng; Zheng, Xiao-Shuang; Wang, Mei-Niang; Daszak, Peter; Wang, Lin-Fa; Cui, Jie; Shi, Zheng-Li (November 2017). "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus". PLoS pathogens. 13 (11): e1006698. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. ISSN 1553-7374.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
^ Hibbett, Sharon Lerner, Mara Hvistendahl, Maia (10 September 2021). "NIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan". The Intercept.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Indicating to wikipedia readers when they visit a page on a pharmaceutical if it has a black box warning - the most severe warning the FDA mandates for a drug

Anyone want to work on this with me?

Accomplished! --RudolfoMD (talk) 10:38, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tasha McCauley

I challenge with the claim that https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/17/these-are-the-people-that-fired-openai-ceo-sam-altman/?sh=26dd1a074ae9, which has 2 paragraphs entirely about her, does not constitute significant coverage. The article is entirely about her and the rest of the board. And it's by two Forbes staffers. Surely independent. Not to mention there's a ton more out there; OpenAI is worth ~$86 billion. Combined, that makes this decline highly inappropriate, no? RudolfoMD (talk) 19:19, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas

~ ~ ~ Merry Christmas! ~ ~ ~

Hello RudolfoMD: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, --Dustfreeworld (talk) 12:23, 25 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Harassment concern

It looks as if you are starting to follow me round disruptively reverting my edits. What for example are you doing here?[3] I explained why I made that edit in my WP:ES, yet you did a regressive revert without comment. Bon courage (talk) 09:18, 17 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[Copied from your talk page where I already responded to the accusation] Holy moly. Your writing that in response to the comment above it [edit:on Bon's talk page] with sources proving it wrong before I've even responded is... EPIC. Controlled animal studies can show something to be carcinogenic even if epidemiological dietary evidence can't. Editing accordingly is the opposite of CRYSTAL.
FOLLOW NPOV. By all means, the article should and (IIRC) does mention that CRUK as of 2021 says the idea it causes cancer is a myth with no evidence, but don't' put it in wikipedia's voice. Why?
The problem is what you wrote is a medical claim that does not represent the balance of perspectives of high-quality, reliable secondary sources, not that I didn't read it. The sources are overwhelmingly on my side; I noted three of them in my previous comment. "You need to" back the hell off and not order people around.
I'm not following you. As you should know. I came here to follow up on (link to) your removing content from Burzynski Clinic without adequately explaining why, and then refusing to engage when I said: "researchers other than Burzynski and his associates have not been successful in duplicating his results" is outdated. You rejected my update. What update is acceptable to you? Then while on the page, I saw THIS discussion about and your hostility to Kku and looked into the issue about acrylamide.
Consider yourself warned about making frivolous or meritless complaints about another editor following you around. And your argument is so weak. Look at the LD50 of the carcinogen. They're right there in the acrylamide infobox. ~100mg. That not a lot. 50 packets of chips can have that much. And I'm sure plenty of people have had several packets of chips in a day and that many in a month. And it does seem to do harm according to doctors and blood tests. Criticizing someone for OR on user talk pages is lame. OR even says "This policy does not apply to talk pages and other pages which evaluate article content and sources, such as deletion discussions or policy noticeboards." SMH. And the WP:ES of my previous edit moments earlier to the same page explained the edit you ask about so shrilly. As does BRD. --RudolfoMD (talk) 10:38, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Still no explanation about why you reverted my shortening of an over-long short description without comment.[4] Was this a follow & harass stunt? Because I'm sorry to say that's what it looks like. Bon courage (talk) 10:30, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's not true. As I said above, And the WP:ES of my previous edit moments earlier to the same page explained the edit you ask about so shrilly. As does BRD. And further above, I'm not following you. ... while on the page...acrylamide. Stop harassing me. I've now warned you 4 times - Consider yourself warned about making frivolous or meritless complaints about another editor following you around RudolfoMD (talk) 10:46, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In fact it is true. You reverted a maintenance edit (my shortening of a shortdesc) with no comment. Given your lack of explanation I have to conclude that you did indeed follow me an article and reverted my edits, simply because they were my edits. Bon courage (talk) 11:21, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

ANI notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is RudolfoMD. Thank you. Guy (help! - typo?) 10:37, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-04

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

Problems

A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [5]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [6][7]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:02, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

January 2024

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing because it appears that you are not here to build an encyclopedia.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please review Wikipedia's guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text to the bottom of your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}. Doug Weller talk 08:40, 25 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-05

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

Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [8]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [9][10]
On February 1, a link will be added to the "Tools" menu to download a QR code that links to the page you are viewing. There will also be a new Special:QrCode page to create QR codes for any Wikimedia URL. This addresses the #19 most-voted wish from the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [11]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [12]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:29, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-06

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

The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks". [13][14]

Changes later this week

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). [15][16]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [17]

Future changes

24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings. [18][19]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-07

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

The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [20][21][22] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [23][24]

Problems

There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.

Changes later this week

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). [25][26]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[27] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [28]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 05:47, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-08

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

If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [29]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB. [30]

Changes later this week

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). [31][32]

Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [33]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 15:35, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Concern regarding Draft:Penn Foster Group

Hello, RudolfoMD. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Penn Foster Group, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 10:05, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-09

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

The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [34]
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [35]

Changes later this week

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 29 February (calendar). [36][37]

Future changes

The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:21, 26 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-10

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

The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [38]
Wikitech now uses the next-generation Parsoid wikitext parser by default to generate all pages in the Talk namespace. Report any problems on the Known Issues discussion page. You can use the ParserMigration extension to control the use of Parsoid; see the ParserMigration help documentation for more details.
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [39]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [40]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [41][42]

Future changes

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [43]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).

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

MediaWiki message delivery 19:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-11

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 later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [44][45]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [46]
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [47]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [48]

Future changes

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [49][50]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:02, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-12

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 notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher. [51]
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers. [52]
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. [53][54][55]
Communities can now customize the default reasons for undeleting a page by creating MediaWiki:Undelete-comment-dropdown. [56]

Problems

RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now. [57]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar). [58][59]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [60][61]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 17:38, 18 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-13

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

An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar). [62][63]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:54, 25 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-14

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

Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed. [64]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar). [65][66]

Future changes

The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 03:34, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Concern regarding Draft:International project team for antivirals in covid-19

Hello, RudolfoMD. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:International project team for antivirals in covid-19, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 19:05, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Concern regarding Draft:Brincidofovir

Hello, RudolfoMD. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Brincidofovir, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 09:09, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-15

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

Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check. [67][68]
Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [69]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar). [70][71]
New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [72]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-16

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

Problems

Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [73][74]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar). [75][76]
Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [77]
A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [78]

Future changes

Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated. [79]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:27, 15 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-17

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

Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention. [80]
You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar). [81][82]

Future changes

This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [83]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:25, 22 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-18

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

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [84]
Seven new wikis have been created:
- a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:) [85]
- a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:) [86]
- a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:) [87]
- a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:) [88]
- a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:) [89]
- a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:) [90]
- a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:) [91]
You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [92]
Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.

Problems

Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed. [93]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar). [94][95]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 03:31, 30 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your draft article, Draft:International project team for antivirals in covid-19

Hello, RudolfoMD. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "International project team for antivirals in covid-19".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:19, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your draft article, Draft:Brincidofovir

Hello, RudolfoMD. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, "Brincidofovir".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:32, 4 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-19

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

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks. [96][97]
Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page. [98]
Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services. [99]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar). [100][101]
When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs". [102]

Future changes

A new service will be built to replace Extension:Graph. Details can be found in the latest update regarding this extension.
Starting May 21, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia will get the possibility to activate "Add a link". This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to all Wikipedias. These communities can activate and configure the feature locally. [103]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:42, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-20

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

On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list. [104]
If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" will now also work without reloading the page. [105]
Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive. [106]
The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people. [107]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar). [108][109]
The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure. [110]

Future changes

In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more. [111]
Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
1. Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
2. Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
- See phab:T222224 for technical reasoning. [112][113]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:56, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-21

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

The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. [114]
New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description. [115][116]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar). [117][118]
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:02, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Drugboxwarns

Template:Drugboxwarns has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 09:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-22

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

Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar). [119][120]
When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules. [121]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:13, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-23

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

It is now possible for local administrators to add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without JavaScript. Documentation is available. [122]
The message name for the definition of the tracking category of WikiHiero has changed from "MediaWiki:Wikhiero-usage-tracking-category" to "MediaWiki:Wikihiero-usage-tracking-category". [123]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Kadazandusun (w:dtp:) [124]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 June. It will be on all wikis from 6 June (calendar). [125][126]

Future changes

Next week, on wikis with the Vector 2022 skin as the default, logged-out desktop users will be able to choose between different font sizes. The default font size will also be increased for them. This is to make Wikimedia projects easier to read. Learn more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:33, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-24

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

The software used to render SVG files has been updated to a new version, fixing many longstanding bugs in SVG rendering. [127]
The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It was changed last week in some skins (Vector legacy and Minerva). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in Vector-2022. The developers are still considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.
The HTML markup used for citations by Parsoid changed last week. In places where Parsoid previously added the mw-reference-text class, Parsoid now also adds the reference-text class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available. [128]

Problems

There was a bug with the Content Translation interface that caused the tools menus to appear in the wrong location. This has now been fixed. [129]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 June. It will be on all wikis from 13 June (calendar). [130][131]
The new version of MediaWiki includes another change to the HTML markup used for citations: Parsoid will now generate a <span class="mw-cite-backlink"> wrapper for both named and unnamed references for better compatibility with the legacy parser. Interface administrators should verify that gadgets that interact with citations are compatible with the new markup. More details are available. [132]
On multilingual wikis that use the <translate> system, there is a feature that shows potentially-outdated translations with a pink background until they are updated or confirmed. From this week, confirming translations will be logged, and there is a new user-right that can be required for confirming translations if the community requests it. [133]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:18, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-25

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

People who attempt to add an external link in the visual editor will now receive immediate feedback if they attempt to link to a domain that a project has decided to block. Please see Edit check for more details. [134]
The new Community Configuration extension is available on Test Wikipedia. This extension allows communities to customize specific features to meet their local needs. Currently only Growth features are configurable, but the extension will support other Community Configuration use cases in the future. [135][136]
The dark mode beta feature is now available on category and help pages, as well as more special pages. There may be contrast issues. Please report bugs on the project talk page. [137]

Problems

Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center. [138]
Last week, styling updates were made to the Vector 2022 skin. This caused unforeseen issues with templates, hatnotes, and images. Changes to templates and hatnotes were reverted. Most issues with images were fixed. If you still see any, report them here. [139]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar). [140][141]
Starting June 18, the Reference Edit Check will be deployed to a new set of Wikipedias. This feature is intended to help newcomers and to assist edit-patrollers by inviting people who are adding new content to a Wikipedia article to add a citation when they do not do so themselves. During a test at 11 wikis, the number of citations added more than doubled when Reference Check was shown to people. Reference Check is community configurable. [142]
Mailing lists will be unavailable for roughly two hours on Tuesday 10:00–12:00 UTC. This is to enable migration to a new server and upgrade its software. [143]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:46, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-26

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

Editors will notice that there have been some changes to the background color of text in the diff view, and the color of the byte-change numbers, last week. These changes are intended to make text more readable in both light mode and dark mode, and are part of a larger effort to increase accessibility. You can share your comments or questions on the project talkpage. [144]
The text colors that are used for visited-links, hovered-links, and active-links, were also slightly changed last week to improve their accessibility in both light mode and dark mode. [145]

Problems

You can copy permanent links to talk page comments by clicking on a comment's timestamp. This feature did not always work when the topic title was very long and the link was used as a wikitext link. This has been fixed. Thanks to Lofhi for submitting the bug. [146]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar). [147][148]
Starting 26 June, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link at English Wikipedia, making this feature available for you to use at all wikis. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they were linked to, even if this comment has since been moved elsewhere. You can read more about this feature on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [149]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:30, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:CodeDiff

Template:CodeDiff has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:35, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-27

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

Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [150]
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [151]
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [152][153]
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [154]
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Mandailing (w:btm:) [155]

Problems

Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team. [156]

Future changes

Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 2 weeks. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:57, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-28

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

At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.

Problems

A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.

Future changes

The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.

Tech News survey

Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 1 more week. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:29, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-29

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

Tech News survey

Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 3 more days. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

Recent changes

Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Editors who have access to The Wikipedia Library can once again use non-open access content in SpringerLinks, after the Foundation contacted them to restore access. You can read more about this and 21 other community-submitted tasks that were completed last week.

Changes later this week

This week, dark mode will be available on a number of Wikipedias, both desktop and mobile, for logged-in and logged-out users. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them. There are some recommendations for dark mode compatibility to help.

Future changes

Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [157]
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-30

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

Feature News

Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [158]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [159]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [160]

Project Updates

Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.

Learn more

Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-31

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

Feature news

Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.

Bugs status

Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [161]

Learn more

There is a new Wikimedia Foundation data center in São Paulo, Brazil which helps to reduce load times.
There is new user research on problems with the process of uploading images.
Commons Impact Metrics are now available via data dumps and API.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:08, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [162][163]
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-33

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

Feature news

AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. [164]
Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change by the Trust and Safety Product Team, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.

Project updates

Nominations are open on Wikitech for new members to refresh the Toolforge standards committee. The committee oversees the Toolforge Right to fork policy and Abandoned tool policy among other duties. Nominations will remain open until at least 2024-08-26.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in West Coast Bajau (w:bdr:) [165]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:19, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-34

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

Feature news

Editors who want to re-use references but with different details such as page numbers, will be able to do so by the end of 2024, using a new sub-referencing feature. You can read more about the project and how to test the prototype.
Editors using tracking categories to identify which pages use specific extensions may notice that six of the categories have been renamed to make them more easily understood and consistent. These categories are automatically added to pages that use specialized MediaWiki extensions. The affected names are for: DynamicPageList, Kartographer, Phonos, RSS, Score, WikiHiero. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match. Thanks to Pppery for these improvements. [166]
Technical volunteers who edit modules and want to get a list of the categories used on a page, can now do so using the categories property of mw.title objects. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [167][168]

Bugs status

Your help is needed to check if any pages need to be moved or deleted. A maintenance script was run to clean up unreachable pages (due to Unicode issues or introduction of new namespaces/namespace aliases). The script tried to find appropriate names for the pages (e.g. by following the Unicode changes or by moving pages whose titles on Wikipedia start with Talk:WP: so that their titles start with Wikipedia talk:), but it may have failed for some pages, and moved them to Special:PrefixIndex/T195546/ instead. Your community should check if any pages are listed there, and move them to the correct titles, or delete them if they are no longer needed. A full log (including pages for which appropriate names could be found) is available in phab:P67388.
Editors who volunteer as mentors to newcomers on their wiki are once again able to access lists of potential mentees who they can connect with to offer help and guidance. This functionality was restored thanks to a bug fix. Thank you to Mbch331 for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 18 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

The application deadline for the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) has been extended to September 16. Members will help by providing advice to Foundation Product and Technology leadership on short and long term plans, on complex strategic problems, and help to get feedback from more contributors and technical communities. Selected members should expect to spend roughly 5 hours per month for the Council, during the one year pilot. Please consider applying, and spread the word to volunteers you think would make a positive contribution to the committee.

Learn more

The 2024 Coolest Tool Awards were awarded at Wikimania, in seven categories. For example, one award went to the ISA Tool, used for adding structured data to files on Commons, which was recently improved during the Wiki Mentor Africa Hackathon. You can see video demonstrations of each tool at the awards page. Congratulations to this year's recipients, and thank you to all tool creators and maintainers.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available, and includes some highlights from Wikimania, an upcoming Language community meeting, and other news from the movement.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-35

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

Feature news

Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [169]

Bugs status

Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Project updates

Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
Do you have a project and are willing to provide a three (3) month mentorship for an intern? Outreachy is a twice a year program for people to participate in a paid internship that will start in December 2024 and end in early March 2025, and they need mentors and projects to work on. Projects can be focused on coding or non-coding (design, documentation, translation, research). See the Outreachy page for more details, and a list of past projects since 2013.

Learn more

If you're curious about the product and technology improvements made by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, read this recent highlights summary on Diff.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
- Community Configuration - Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together (55 mins) - about the Community Configuration project.
- Future of MediaWiki. A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views (30 mins) - an overview for both technical and non technical audiences, covering some of the challenges and open questions, related to the platform evolution, stewardship and developer experiences research.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:30, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [170]
Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [171]
Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
- Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
- State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [172]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [173][174]
Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [175]

Project updates

Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [176]
Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [177]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [178]
References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [179]
It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [180]
Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [181]

Technical project updates

Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [182]

Tech in depth

The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
- Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
- Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [183]
Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [184][185]
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

From Wikimedia Enterprise:
- The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
- The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [186]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [187]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [188]

Meetings and events

October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [189]

Updates for editors

Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [190]
View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [191]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [192]
Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
Five new wikis have been created:
- a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:) [193]
- a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:) [194]
- a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:) [195]
- a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:) [196]
- a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:) [197]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [198][199]
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [200]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [201]
Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [202]
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [203]

In depth

The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

Updates for editors

Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [204][205][206][207][208]
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "24 December 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [209][210]
Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [211]
The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [212]

In depth

The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [213]

Updates for technical contributors

Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [214]
Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [215]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [216]
Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [217]
View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [218]

In depth

Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-46

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

Updates for editors

On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [219]
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [220]

Updates for technical contributors

In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [221]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [222]

Meetings and events

21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:04, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-47

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

Updates for editors

Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [223]
View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [224]

Updates for technical contributors

On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [225][226]

In depth

There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:58, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-48

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

Updates for editors

A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [227]
Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [228]
The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [229]

Meetings and events

A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:39, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-49

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

Updates for editors

Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [230]
Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [231]
This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [232]

Updates for technical contributors

In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-50

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

Weekly highlight

Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.

Updates for editors

Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [233]
The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [234]
The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [235]
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Indonesian (voy:id:) [236]
Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [237]
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [238][239]

Updates for technical contributors

Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [240]
Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [241]

Meetings and events

The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation discussions with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on December 12 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is new media and new contributors. Contributors from all wikis are welcome to attend.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-51

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

Weekly highlight

Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.

Updates for editors

Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.

Updates for technical contributors

There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [242]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings of the season

~ ~ ~ Greetings of the season ~ ~ ~

Hello RudolfoMD: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Spread the love; use {{subst:User:Dustfreeworld/Xmas3}} to send this message.
--Dustfreeworld (talk) 16:00, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[GoF-paper-1] Hu, Ben; Zeng, Lei-Ping; Yang, Xing-Lou; Ge, Xing-Yi; Zhang, Wei; Li, Bei; Xie, Jia-Zheng; Shen, Xu-Rui; Zhang, Yun-Zhi; Wang, Ning; Luo, Dong-Sheng; Zheng, Xiao-Shuang; Wang, Mei-Niang; Daszak, Peter; Wang, Lin-Fa; Cui, Jie; Shi, Zheng-Li (November 2017). "Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus". PLoS pathogens. 13 (11): e1006698. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. ISSN 1553-7374.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)

[2] Hibbett, Sharon Lerner, Mara Hvistendahl, Maia (10 September 2021). "NIH Documents Provide New Evidence U.S. Funded Gain-of-Function Research in Wuhan". The Intercept.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

[1]

[2]