User talk:Chlod/Newsletters/Archive 4
This page is an archive of past newsletter issues. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
The Signpost: 10 January 2024
- From the editor: NINETEEN MORE YEARS! NINETEEN MORE YEARS!
- Special report: Public Domain Day 2024
- Technology report: Wikipedia: A Multigenerational Pursuit
- News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!
- WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine
- Obituary: Anthony Bradbury
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023
- Comix: Conflict resolution
Tech News: 2024-03
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [1]
- Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the
requiresES6
option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [2] - Bot passwords and owner-only OAuth consumers can now be restricted to allow editing only specific pages. [3]
- You can now thank edits made by bots. [4]
- An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [5][6]
- Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [7]
- The
jquery.cookie
module was deprecated and replaced with themediawiki.cookie
module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [8]
Future changes
- Wikimedia Deutschland is working to make reusing references easier. They are looking for people who are interested in participating in individual video calls for user research in January and February.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
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. [9]
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). [10][11]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:01, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
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. [12]
- 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). [13][14]
- 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. [15]
- 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 theskins
option instead. [16]
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)
The Signpost: 31 January 2024
- News and notes: Wikipedian Osama Khalid celebrated his 30th birthday in jail
- Opinion: Until it happens to you
- Disinformation report: How paid editors squeeze you dry
- Recent research: Croatian takeover was enabled by "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining [admins]"
- Traffic report: DJ, gonna burn this goddamn house right down
Administrators' newsletter – February 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2024).
- An RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
- Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)
- Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
- Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.
- Voting in the 2024 Steward elections will begin on 06 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC) and end on 27 February 2024, 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process of current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.
- A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
- Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
- The Unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in February 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!
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". [17][18]
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). [19][20]
- Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [21]
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. [22][23]
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)
The Signpost: 13 February 2024
- News and notes: Wikimedia Russia director declared "foreign agent" by Russian gov; EU prepares to pile on the papers
- Disinformation report: How low can the scammers go?
- Serendipity: Is this guy the same as the one who was a Nazi?
- Traffic report: Griselda, Nikki, Carl, Jannik and two types of football
- Crossword: Our crossword to bear
- Comix: Strongly
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. [24][25][26] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [27][28]
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). [29][30]
- As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[31] 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. [32]
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MediaWiki message delivery 05:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
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. [33]
- 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. [34]
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). [35][36]
- 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 HTMLstyle
attributes in wikitext. [37]
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MediaWiki message delivery 15:34, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
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. [38]
- 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")))
. [39]
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). [40][41]
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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:21, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 24
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
- Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
After earthly attempts at improving the original have failed...
- Aaron Liu has created What redirects here from Guarapiranga/WhatRedirectsHere; his fork includes support for every MediaWiki wiki, corrected link positions, an access key, and some rudimentary translation.
- Ahecht has created a fork of SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
- AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
- Mesidast/Tidy citations is a fork of Meteor sandwich yum/Tidy citations is a fork of Waldyrious/formatcitations. It configurably harmonizes whitespace and cleans up parameters in citation templates, descriptive edit summary included.
Unfortunately, this section has remained nearly identical. Help us out here!
- Many of our favorite scripts such as Fred Gandt/userResourceManager, Guarapiranga/search-shortcuts and Bradv/Superlinks haven't been updated for Vector 2022. You could be the one to change that!
- Elominius/media timer works, but its UI looks alien. Someone could improve it...
- To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
- We want...
- ...a mark-as-read button and watchlist notices support for Aaron Liu/Watchlyst Greybar Unsin
- ...a tool to automatically fix CAT:BROKENREFs, preferably a fork/addition to TheJJJunk/ARA
- ...a fix/fork of DannyS712/SectionRemover to make it work
- A simple script to second or archive proposed deletions
- A script to auto-expand V22 ToC sections like this demo
- A WP:3O response tool that can automatically remove the relevant request from the 3O dashboard
- A byte filter to be split from Nux/LongTableFilters
- ...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests
- DannyS712/AbuseFilterMessageLinks add links to the "warn" and "disallow" messages in edit filters.
- Diegodlh/Web2Cit/script adds an option to use m:Web2Cit (which WP:ProveIt also uses) instead of mw:Citoid to generate citations in the Visual Editor.
- Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
- Doǵu/Adiutor (pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
- Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in TypeScript.
- /afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
- /ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
- /redirect-helper (pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by /redirect-helper.json.
- /rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
- Guycn2/UserInfoPopup (pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
- Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
- Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
- Moonythedwarf/extra-unreliable highlights phrases commonly used in spammed and POV'd paragraphs.
- NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/FormattedEditRequest (pictured) generates a wikitext-formatted diff view of any changes you've made that you can copy and paste anywhere.
- PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
- Qwerfjkl/massCFD creates mass WP:CfD nominations.
- Rublov/refspace highlights footnote spacing errors in red.
- Sophivorus's MiniEdit adds some nice, li'l buttons next to paragraphs to edit their wikitext with a minimal interface.
Edit-listings
- Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
- Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
- Ingenuity/AbuseFilterContribs adds the edit filters that an edit tripped (if any) to a user's contributions page.
- Nardog/ExamineMore makes it so the paging at Special:AbuseFilter/examine actually works, pending a fix to T292764.
- NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Appearance-ricing
- Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
- Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
- GhostInTheMachine/GraphicReplyLink replaces the [ reply ] link with 💬, which is some sort of rainy cloud I guess?[Joke]
- Jonesey/common (pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
- Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
- Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
- Phlsph7/ClassicalTOC (Vector 2022) reinserts the inline table of contents to pages under Vector 2022.
- For the paranoid: Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that editing is an honor.
- Sideswipe9th/Vector 2022 Floating Tools Menu moves the Page Tools menu to the left and makes it float along with the table of contents.
- Sm8ps/SectionEditing makes pressing Tab ↹ toggle the visibility of the tiny [ edit ] links next to section headings.. Not a great name, eh?
- The wub/tocExpandAll adds a button on top of the floating ToC to expand or collapse subheadings.
Permissions required!
- Ahecht/potd-helper: A script to post the picture of the day. A powerful upgrade for your mop.
- Dragoniez
- /AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
- /Selective Rollback (pictured) provides a dialog box to customize rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
- Theleekycauldron/DYK promoter automates (nearly) all the work needed to post a DYK hook.
QOL shortcuts
- BrandonXLF/SVGEditor lets you edit any file that is an SVG, straight from the file page.
- DanCherek/UAABotRemover adds a portlet link to enable a removal shortcut of faulty reports from Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention.
- DreamRimmer/BlankUserPage helps you destroy webhost-ers' hopes and dreams with a user-friendly dialog box.
- ESanders (WMF)/commentlinks.js adds a "link" button right after the "reply" button while the WMF struggles to reach feature parity with Convenient Discussions.
- Isaacl/copy-comment-link-to-clipboard does exactly what you'd think it does, but in Wikitext.
- FenrisAureus/SimpleStatus adds a shortcut at the top to edit your /Status subpage while providing a pre-made template.
- Fred Gandt/addCloneClearButtonAboveScributoConsole: What a mouthful! Yet all it does (no offense) is add another Clear button on top of the Lua module debug console.
- Guarapiranga/GlobalWatchlistLink adds a link to metawiki:Special:GlobalWatchlist next to the normal watchlist.
- Nardog
- PasteToCommons adds a paste handler to upload the pasted image to Wikimedia Commons.
- Unpipe tries to detect violations of WP:NOPIPE and fix them as much as possible.
- Ohconfucius/tometricunits automatically adds unit conversions of imperial units in brackets after their uses per MOS:UNITS.
- Suntooooth
- /flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
- /randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
- Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:36, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – March 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2024).
|
|
- Phase I of the 2024 RfA review is now open for participation. Editors are invited to review, comment on, and propose improvements to the requests for adminship process.
- Following an RfC, the inactivity requirement for the removal of the interface administrator right increased from 6 months to 12 months.
- The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. (T353388)
- The 2024 appointees for the Ombuds commission are だ*ぜ, AGK, Ameisenigel, Bennylin, Daniuu, Doǵu, Emufarmers, Faendalimas, MdsShakil, Minorax, Nehaoua, Renvoy and RoySmith as members, with Vermont serving as steward-observer.
- Following the 2024 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Ajraddatz, Albertoleoncio, EPIC, JJMC89, Johannnes89, Melos and Yahya.
The Signpost: 2 March 2024
- News and notes: Wikimedia enters US Supreme court hearings as "the dolphin inadvertently caught in the net"
- Recent research: Images on Wikipedia "amplify gender bias"
- In the media: The Scottish Parliament gets involved, a wikirace on live TV, and the Foundation's CTO goes on record
- Obituary: Vami_IV
- Traffic report: Supervalentinefilmbowlday
- WikiCup report: High-scoring WikiCup first round comes to a close
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. [42] - 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
andGadget_definition
namespaces andgadgets-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. [43] - A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [44]
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). [45][46]
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. [47]
- 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)
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). [48][49]
- 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. [50]
- The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [51]
- 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. [52]
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. [53][54]
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)
Wikimedia Apps newsletter – First quarter of 2024
Hello, and welcome to the app’s first newsletter in 2024!
It has been a long year; we published four editions of our newsletter, which you can go through all of them. In this edition, we will cover our work for the last quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024!
Android
- Edit Patrol (also known as Patroller tasks on Android) has been released to Beta testers with rollback rights on Test Wiki and Indonesian Wikipedia. We had a productive meeting with Indonesian users to introduce and discuss the new patrolling tasks feature on the Android app, as we provided a detailed presentation on the feature, and collected valuable feedback from the Indonesian community to enhance the user experience.
For those interested, a meeting recording is available.
We conducted outreach to Spanish, and French Wikipedia communities during February 2024. - We hosted two synchronous community consultations & recorded a third where we shared the Edit Patrol suggested edit workflow, and showed designs for Saved messages and templates:
- Places feature is back to the Wikipedia Android app!
Places is a feature that allows you to discover articles by location.
The iOS app was able to maintain the feature via use of Apple Maps, but it was necessary for Android audiences that we continue using an open source map.
iOS
- Suggested Edits on iOS prototype is in the experimental build. Instructions to test the feature can be found on this FAQ page.
Alt text is text associated with an image that serves the same purpose and conveys the same essential information as the image.
The app's product manager presented our team's work and prototype (iOS suggested edits) to the GLAM conference audience. All details can be found in the presentation's deck. - It is now possible to donate using Apple Pay directly from the app.
- IOS Native Editor Improvement Development is out!
You will be able to edit, find and replace, and insert links and images directly from Commons without any performance issues!
Additionally, it is now possible to edit a full article page and a talk page.
In the current quarter, we aim to engage with editors from LATAM, Spanish-speaking regions, North America, and the Caribbean to test Suggested edits and the new native editor features.
Community meetings
- We participated in the GLAM conference in November 2023. All the details are mentioned in the iOS section of this edition from the newsletter.
- On December 1st of 2023, The Wikipedia Android team met with Indonesian users to introduce and discuss the new patrolling tasks feature on the Android app. The team provided a detailed presentation on the feature and collected valuable feedback. A meeting recording is available.
- We joined the Wiki Editoras Lx editathon on December 16th to gather feedback about an alt-text Suggested Edit task on iOS.
Attendees were generally positive about the prospect of the feature. Experienced editors thought it could be a good task for on-boarding new editors, but also a more casual way of contributing for new editors.
And you can subscribe to this newsletter.
~~ARamadan-WMF04:42, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
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. [55]
- 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. [56]
- The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. [57][58][59]
- Communities can now customize the default reasons for undeleting a page by creating MediaWiki:Undelete-comment-dropdown. [60]
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. [61]
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). [62][63]
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [64][65]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 17:37, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
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). [66][67]
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)
The Signpost: 29 March 2024
- Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year
- Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors
- Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune
- Humour: Letters from the editors
- Comix: Layout issue
Administrators' newsletter – April 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).
- An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.
- The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)
- An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
- Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
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. [68]
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). [69][70]
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 03:33, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
New Pages Patrol newsletter April 2024
Hello Chlod/Newsletters,
Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.
Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.
Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.
It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!
2023 Awards
Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!
WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers deployed the rewritten NewPagesFeed in October, and then gave the NewPagesFeed a slight visual facelift in November. This concludes most major work to Special:NewPagesFeed, and most major work by the WMF Moderator Tools team, who wrapped up their major work on PageTriage in October. The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers will continue small work on PageTriage as time permits.
Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.
Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.
Reminders:
- You can access live chat with patrollers on the New Pages Patrol Discord.
- Consider adding the project discussion page to your watchlist.
- To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:27, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
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. [71][72]
- Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [73]
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). [74][75]
- 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. [76]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:34, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
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. [77][78]
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). [79][80]
- 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). [81]
- 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. [82]
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
andabuse_filter_history
tables. Some queries might need to be updated. [83]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:26, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
New page patrol May 2024 Backlog drive
New Page Patrol | May 2024 Articles Backlog Drive | |
| |
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here. |
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:14, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
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. [84]
- 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). [85][86]
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. [87]
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)
Growth News, April 2024
The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.
If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
Community Configuration
Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig
. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.
An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.
In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.
Experiment Results
Add a Image experiment analysis results
The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
- The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
- The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
- The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
- A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).
Personalized praise experiment results
This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)
English donors encouraged to try editing
As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)
Future work
Annual Plan
The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 25 April 2024
- In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics, and another wikirace on live TV
- News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law
- WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)
- Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users
- Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem
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
- 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. [88]
- Seven new wikis have been created:
- You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [96]
- 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. [97]
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). [98][99]
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)
Administrators' newsletter – May 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).
- Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.
- Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531
- The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.
- This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
- A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
- Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!
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
- 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. [100][101]
- 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. [102] - 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. [103]
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). [104][105]
- 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". [106]
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. [107]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 16:41, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
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. [108] - 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. [109]
- Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the
alt=
attribute. This is identical in usage to thealt=
attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive. [110] - 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. [111]
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). [112][113]
- 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. [114]
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. [115]
- Two columns of the
pagelinks
database table (pl_namespace
andpl_title
) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the newlinktarget
table instead (lt_namespace
andlt_title
). In your existing SQL queries:- Replace
JOIN pagelinks
withJOIN linktarget
andpl_
withlt_
in theON
statement - Below that add
JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
- See phab:T222224 for technical reasoning. [116][117]
- Replace
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)
The Signpost: 16 May 2024
- News and notes: Democracy in action: multiple elections
- Special report: Will the new RfA reform come to the rescue of administrators?
- Arbitration report: Ruined temples for posterity to ponder over – arbitration from '22 to '24
- Comix: Generations
- Traffic report: Crawl out through the fallout, baby
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. [118]
- 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. [119][120]
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). [121][122]
- 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 23:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
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). [123][124]
- 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. [125]
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)
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. [126]
- 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
". [127] - One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Kadazandusun (
w:dtp:
) [128]
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). [129][130]
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 22:32, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – June 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).
- Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.
- The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351
- The arbitration case Venezuelan politics has been closed.
- The Committee is seeking volunteers for various roles, including access to the conflict of interest VRT queue.
- WikiProject Reliability's unsourced statements drive is happening in June 2024 to replace {{citation needed}} tags with references! Sign up here to participate!
The Signpost: 8 June 2024
- Technology report: New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade
- Deletion report: The lore of Kalloor
- In the media: National cable networks get in on the action arguing about what the first sentence of a Wikipedia article ought to say
- News from the WMF: Progress on the plan — how the Wikimedia Foundation advanced on its Annual Plan goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023-2024
- Recent research: ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth
- Featured content: We didn't start the wiki
- Essay: No queerphobia
- Special report: RetractionBot is back to life!
- Traffic report: Chimps, Eurovision, and the return of the Baby Reindeer
- Comix: The Wikipediholic Family
- Concept: Palimpsestuous
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. [131]
- 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 thereference-text
class for better compatibility with the legacy parser. More details are available. [132]
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. [133]
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). [134][135]
- 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. [136] - 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. [137]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:17, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
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. [138]
- 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. [139][140]
- 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. [141]
Problems
- Cloud Services tools were not available for 25 minutes last week. This was caused by a faulty hardware cable in the data center. [142]
- 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. [143]
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). [144][145]
- 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. [146]
- 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. [147]
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)
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. [148]
- 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. [149]
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. [150]
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). [151][152]
- 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. [153]
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)
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. [154]
- 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. [155]
- 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. [156][157]
- 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. [158]
- 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:
) [159]
Problems
- Editors can once again click on links within the visual editor's citation-preview, thanks to a bug fix by the Editing Team. [160]
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 23:56, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 July 2024
- News and notes: WMF board elections and fundraising updates
- Special report: Wikimedia Movement Charter ratification vote underway, new Council may surpass power of Board
- In focus: How the Russian Wikipedia keeps it clean despite having just a couple dozen administrators
- Discussion report: Wikipedians are hung up on the meaning of Madonna
- In the media: War and information in war and politics
- Sister projects: On editing Wikisource
- Opinion: Etika: a Pop Culture Champion
- Gallery: Spokane Willy's photos
- Humour: A joke
- Recent research: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? Perhaps
- Traffic report: Talking about you and me, and the games people play
Administrators' newsletter – July 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).
- Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)
- The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more
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)
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. [161]
- 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 01:28, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Apps newsletter – Second quarter of 2024
Hello, and welcome to the app's second newsletter in 2024!
In this edition, we will review our achievements and progress from the first half of 2024!
- Android
- Edit Patrol is now available on production for all Wikis!
- Donation through G-Pay is now available within the app.
- iOS
- "Add an image" suggested edit is available for all Wikis! It is available to all users with more than 50 edits.
- We now support full-page editing on Talk pages.
And you can subscribe to this newsletter.
~~ARamadan-WMF11:53, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 July 2024
- Discussion report: Internet users flock to Wikipedia to debate its image policy over Trump raised-fist photo
- News and notes: Wikimedia community votes to ratify Movement Charter; Wikimedia Foundation opposes ratification
- Obituary: JamesR
- Crossword: Vaguely bird-shaped crossword
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. [162]
- 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. [163]
- 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. [164]
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 00:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)
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:
) [165]
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)
Growth News, July 2024
Community Configuration
The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration
.
This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig
. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.
You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.
If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!
Current work
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.
Future work
Increase constructive activation on mobile
As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.
Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.
Stay informed
Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 25
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:00, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
- inline-diff-inline-patrol by Ponor is this edition's featured script. By loading diffs inline on every page that shows a list of changes, it implements the 2023 community wish m:Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Admins and patrollers/Inline diffs and inline patrol. Hopefully we won't need this script anymore soon, with the WMF's focus on the backlog...
- Many of our favorite scripts such as Fred Gandt/userResourceManager, Guarapiranga/search-shortcuts and Bradv/Superlinks haven't been updated for Vector 2022. You could be the one to change that!
- Elominius/media timer works, but its UI looks alien. Someone could improve it...
- To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
- We want...
- ...watchlist notices support for Aaron Liu/Watchlyst Greybar Unsin
- ...a tool to automatically fix CAT:BROKENREFs, preferably a fork/addition to TheJJJunk/ARA
- ...a fix/fork of DannyS712/SectionRemover to make it work
- Automatically delink all duplicate links within the same section per MOS:LINKONCE.
- Collapsible parentheses in body text, which had a ridiculously long original request title and was accidentally moved to WP:US/L by me. Oops!
- An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
- Preview an edit under the mobile viewport on desktop, with perhaps MediaWiki:Gadget-mobile-sidebar.js used for inspiration.
- ...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests. Jeeputer and Nardog have been the most active on the page in the past five months.
- After the RIIJ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
- Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
- Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
- BilledMammal/Move+ expands the powers of User:TheTVExpert/rmCloser to include common procedures done with the art of moving pages.
- On a holiday? Somewhere? Gotta learn ye ABCs? CanonNi/StatusSetter puts the fun into Enterprisey/StatusChanger with a quadruple more statuses. That starts with a C!
- In our continuing trend(s?), DaxServer/DiscussionCloser forks DannyS712/DiscussionCloser to make it work. Sadly, this is the end of our lexicographic combo.
- Andrybak:
- user-tabs-on-contribs is a fork of User:Enterprisey/user-tabs-on-contribs for Vector 2022.
- Archiver is a fork of User:Enterprisey/archiver with automatic calculation of the destination archive subpage and with support for non-Vector skins.
- Quite coincidentally, Elli/OneClickArchiver has been forked from User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver to work with the mw:Heading HTML changes.
- FlightTime/OneClickArchiver forks the same thing but also no longer nonsensically prepends {{clear}} to page archives.
- Aaron Liu: MoveTop adds a different padlock topicon for each level of move-protection.
- Andrybak/Not around can help you mark talk pages of inactive users with {{not around}}.
- BrandonXLF/AddCopied automatically tags talk pages of pages you've copied between with {{copied}}.
- Bugghost/UserRoleIndicator adds text labels (which default to emoji) to user links that label the user's usergroups. Wow, that's a mouthful
- CanonNi/AlertAssistant adds a Twinkle-style dialog for alerting users about contentious topics.
- CFA/AttributeTranslation automatically tags articles translated from other places with appropriate attribution.
- In the defense of the 'pedia, the humble Jeeputer/defconIndicator adds the WP:WIKIDEFCON status to the toolbar.
- Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
- Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
- fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
- TheTechie/Help Me Tool is a quick and easy way of responding to {{help me}} requests.
- Per MOS:CONFORM, ZKang123/TitleCaseConverter converts all citation titles to... title case, unfortunately.
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 forTemplate:Dir
andTemplate: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. [166][167] - 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 20:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – August 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).
- Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
- Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
- The Arbitration Committee appointed the following administrators to the conflict of interest volunteer response team: Bilby, Extraordinary Writ
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. [168]
- 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:
) [169]
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)
The Signpost: 14 August 2024
- In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse
- In focus: Twitter marks the spot
- News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded.
- Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?
- Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing
- Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird
- Humour: I'm proud to be a template
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. [170]
- 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 ofmw.title objects
. This enables wikis to configure workflows such as category-specific edit notices. Thanks to SD001 for these improvements. [171][172]
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 withWikipedia 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:50, 20 August 2024 (UTC)
New pages patrol September 2024 Backlog drive
New pages patrol | September 2024 Backlog Drive | |
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:09, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
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. [173]
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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – September 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).
- Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which
applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past
. - A request for comment is open to discuss whether Notability (species) should be adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.
- Following a motion, remedies 5.1 and 5.2 of World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (the topic and interaction bans on My very best wishes, respectively) were repealed.
- Remedy 3C of the German war effort case ("Cinderella157 German history topic ban") was suspended for a period of six months.
- The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.
- Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
- A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in September 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles and redirects in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,900 articles and 26,200 redirects awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
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. [174] - 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. [175]
- 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. [176]
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MediaWiki message delivery 01:03, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 September 2024
- News and notes: WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked
- In the media: AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?
- News from the WMF: Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election
- Wikimania: A month after Wikimania 2024
- Serendipity: What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year
- Traffic report: After the gold rush
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. [177][178]
- 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()
andmw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid)
will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [179]
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. [180]
- Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new
MOS
namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning withMOS:
(usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language codemos
). [181]
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MediaWiki message delivery 18:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)
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. [182]
- 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. [183]
- 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. [184]
- 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 newercdx-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. [185]
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. [186]
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 23:58, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
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. [187] - Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [188][189]
- 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:32, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 September 2024
- In the media: Courts order Wikipedia to give up names of editors, legal strain anticipated from "online safety laws"
- Community view: Indian courts order Wikipedia to take down name of crime victim, editors strive towards consensus
- Serendipity: A Wikipedian at the 2024 Paralympics
- Opinion: asilvering's RfA debriefing
- News and notes: Are you ready for admin elections?
- Recent research: Article-writing AI is less "prone to reasoning errors (or hallucinations)" than human Wikipedia editors
- Traffic report: Jump in the line, rock your body in time
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. [190] - 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. [191]
- 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. [192]
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)
Administrators' newsletter – October 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).
- Administrator elections are a proposed new process for selecting administrators, offering an alternative to requests for adminship (RfA). The first trial election will take place in October 2024, with candidate sign-up from October 8 to 14, a discussion phase from October 22 to 24, and SecurePoll voting from October 25 to 31. For questions or to help out, please visit the talk page at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.
- Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
- A request for comment is open to discuss whether there is a consensus to have an administrator recall process.
- The arbitration case Historical elections has been closed.
- An arbitration case regarding Backlash to diversity and inclusion has been opened.
- Editors are invited to nominate themselves to serve on the 2024 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59 October 8, 2024 (UTC).
- If you are interested in stopping spammers, please put MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist and MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist on your watchlist, and help out when you can.
Wikimedia Apps newsletter – Third quarter of 2024
Hello, and welcome to the app's third newsletter of 2024! In this edition, we will highlight the accomplishments and progress made during July, August, and September 2024!
iOS Updates
Over 20,000 images have been added via the "Add an Image" feature across both iOS and Android! (T372954), good opportunity to try it yourself ;) This tool allows users to enhance Wikipedia articles by adding relevant images. It’s a great way to contribute and improve the visual experience for readers.
The iOS team kicked off the Alt Text experiment to improve image descriptions for accessibility. This feature helps ensure that visually impaired users can better understand the content of images through descriptive text.
The iOS App has been transitioning from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports both reading and editing. After adding a number of editing features, the navigation system of the app needs to grow and change to support them and future additions. Improving our navigation will allow for more app users to discover editing features, and allow experienced users quicker access to their most-used tools. This refresh incorporates findings from usability testing with multiple variants of the App's navigation. The team is currently planning phased rollouts over the coming year to improve user experience. (Phase 1: T373714)
Android Updates
Improvements were made to the Places feature in response to user feedback, including larger cluster icons and a Wikipedia logo for articles without images (T371067, T370094). Also, the team is exploring designs to allow users to explore articles from multiple language wikis simultaneously and will adjust the zoom logic to show nearby locations upon launch (T352757, T368792).
- WikiTrivia Game
The team prepared for the WikiTrivia Game during a hackathon, selecting a data source and creating initial designs (T371508, T371510).
Work began on adding Recommended Content to search, iterating on design concepts and testing performance (T371613).
The team is now engaging with several wikis to implement Machine-Assisted Article Descriptions based on prior experimental results.
- Sharing reading lists
Android users can now share reading lists with others, expanding community collaboration (T370703).
And some performance enhancements: Revision tags for app edits were successfully implemented (T366731, T366732).
The app now supports URL sharing on Pixel devices, thanks to volunteer developer contributions (T370020).
Stay tuned for future updates as we continue to enhance your Wikipedia experience! And you can subscribe to this newsletter.
--17:17, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
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. [193]
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. [194]
- 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 thecopy=1
attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [195] - Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [196]
- 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:
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 7 October 2024 (UTC)
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. [202][203]
- 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. [204]
- 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. [205]
- Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [206]
- 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. [207]
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 21:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 19 October 2024
- News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning
- Recent research: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper
- In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins!
- Contest: A WikiCup for the Global South
- Traffic report: A scream breaks the still of the night
- Book review: The Editors
- Humour: The Newspaper Editors
- Crossword: Spilled Coffee Mug
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. [208][209][210][211][212]
- 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 "22 November 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. [213][214] - Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using
{{USERLANGUAGE}}
instead of using{{int:lang}}
. [215] - 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. [216]
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.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
Growth News, October 2024
Current work
Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module
We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.
Constructive activation experimentation
After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.
This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:
- The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration for Automoderator. (T365046)
- Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)
Future work
As part of the Growth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via the Metrics Platform.
Community events
- Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
- Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.
Stay informed
Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
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