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Welcome

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.. and thanks for staying engaged with the VPT discussion. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:15, 13 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! /Johan (WMF) (talk) 01:31, 13 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Travelling

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In case anyone is trying to reach me here due to the recent HTTPS development: I'll be travelling for much of the weekend. I'll get back to you as soon as I can, or someone else might check in and see if they can help you. Feel free to get in touch, just be prepared that it might take some extra time before I can get back to you. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 03:35, 13 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-32

[edit]

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 ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
    • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [1]
    • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [2] [3] [4] [5]
  • The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [6]
  • MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [7]
  • Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [8]

Problems

  • There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [9]
  • We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [10]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:41, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

[edit]

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

  • MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [11]
  • The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [12]
  • You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [13]
  • You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [14]
  • It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [15]
  • JavaScript authors:
    • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix. [16] [17]
    • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix. [18] [19]
  • The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [20]

Problems

  • More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [21]
  • Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [22]
  • Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [23]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [24]
  • You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [25]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [26]

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

14:35, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

[edit]

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

  • Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [27] [28] [29]
  • Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [30]

Problems

  • Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [31] [32]
  • On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [33]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
  • You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [34]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:58, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

[edit]

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

  • Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [35] [36] [37]
  • Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [38]

Problems

  • Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [39] [40]
  • On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [41]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
  • You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [42]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:09, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

[edit]

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

  • Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [43]

Problems

  • There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [44]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 27 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

12:48, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

[edit]

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

  • VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [45][46]
  • The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [47]
  • VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [48]
  • Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [49]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [50]

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

21:33, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [51]
  • A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [52]
  • You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [53]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [54]
  • The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [55][56]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
  • The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [57]
  • The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [58][59]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [60]
  • Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [61][62]

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

17:21, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now use the Wikidata query service. [63]
  • Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [64]
  • Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [65][66]

Problems

  • There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [67]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [68]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 17 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 15 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [69]
  • The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [70]

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

16:12, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39

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

Recent changes

  • There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [71][72]
  • Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [73][74][75][76]
  • More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [77]
  • The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [78]

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [79]
  • Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [80][81]
  • UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [82]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
  • The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [83]
  • You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [84]
  • Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [85]

Meetings

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

18:19, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [86]
  • UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [87]
  • You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [88]
  • When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [89]
  • You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [90]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [91]
  • MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [92]

Problems

  • Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [93][94]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
  • There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [95]
  • The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [96]

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

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

15:02, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-41

[edit]

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 link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [98]
  • The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [99]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [100]
  • UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [101]
  • A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [102]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:26, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-42

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [103]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [104]
  • Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [105]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:23, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

You have been randomly selected to take a very short survey by the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team!

[edit]

https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9mNQICjn6DibxNr

This survey is intended to gauge community satisfaction with the technical support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia, especially focusing on the needs of the core community. To learn more about this survey, please visit Research:Tech support satisfaction poll.

You have been randomly selected to take a very short survey by the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team!

[edit]

https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9mNQICjn6DibxNr

This survey is intended to gauge community satisfaction with the technical support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia, especially focusing on the needs of the core community. To learn more about this survey, please visit Research:Tech support satisfaction poll.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:49, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You have been randomly selected to take a very short survey by the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team!

[edit]

https://wikimedia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9mNQICjn6DibxNr

This survey is intended to gauge community satisfaction with the technical support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia, especially focusing on the needs of the core community. To learn more about this survey, please visit Research:Tech support satisfaction poll.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:53, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent edits

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Information icon Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

  1. Add four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment; or
  2. With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button ( or ) located above the edit window.

This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.

Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 19:13, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Recent survey

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Johan,

I responded to the random survey that the one thing I think we need is an article stats tool maintained on a daily basis. The best illustration of why was posted at the Village Pump earlier today by TonyTheTiger. Link to that thread. We've had a hit and miss issue on many tools since transferring to Labs. But the statistics tool has been randomly going down almost as long as I've been an editor at Wikipedia. Just giving you some input. — Maile (talk) 19:58, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, yes, that's something the WMF is working on solving. :) And as an editor, I agree – article page views is something I've been wanting to see fixed for a long time. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 07:40, 16 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-43

[edit]

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

  • Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The Recurrent item icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The For technical readers icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
  • Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [106]

Problems

  • A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [107]
  • Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [108]
  • The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [109]

Changes this week

  • Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [110]
  • Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [111][112][113][114]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:56, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [115]
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [116][117]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [118][119]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [120]

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

15:37, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [121]
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [122][123]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [124][125]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [126]

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

18:00, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-45

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [127]
  • If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [128]
  • Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [129]

Problems

  • On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [130]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [131]
  • Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [132]

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

16:37, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

[edit]

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

  • Superprotect has been removed. [133]
  • You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [134]
  • JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [135]

Problems

  • Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [136]

Changes this week

  • Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [137]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:06, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

[edit]

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

  • Superprotect has been removed. [140]
  • You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [141]
  • JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [142]

Problems

  • Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [143]

Changes this week

  • Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [144]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:11, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

[edit]

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

  • Superprotect has been removed. [147]
  • You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [148]
  • JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [149]

Problems

  • Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [150]

Changes this week

  • Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [151]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:16, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

[edit]

Hi everyone! Apologies for writing in English. Translations are very welcome.

The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on building improved curation and moderation tools for experienced Wikimedia contributors. We're now starting a Community Wishlist Survey to find the most useful projects that we can work on.

For phase 1 of the survey, we're inviting all active contributors to submit brief proposals, explaining the project that you'd like us to work on, and why it's important. Phase 1 will last for 2 weeks. In phase 2, we'll ask you to vote on the proposals. Afterwards, we'll analyze the top 10 proposals and create a prioritized wishlist.

While most of this process will be conducted in English, we're inviting people from any Wikimedia wiki to submit proposals. We'll also invite volunteer translators to help translate proposals into English.

Your proposal should include: the problem that you want to solve, who would benefit, and a proposed solution, if you have one. You can submit your proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey page, using the entry field and the big blue button. We will be accepting proposals for 2 weeks, ending on November 23.

We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:54, 9 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Community Wishlist Survey

[edit]

Hi everyone! Apologies for posting this in English. Translations are very welcome.

The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on building improved curation and moderation tools for experienced Wikimedia contributors. We're now starting a Community Wishlist Survey to find the most useful projects that we can work on.

For phase 1 of the survey, we're inviting all active contributors to submit brief proposals, explaining the project that you'd like us to work on, and why it's important. Phase 1 will last for 2 weeks. In phase 2, we'll ask you to vote on the proposals. Afterwards, we'll analyze the top 10 proposals and create a prioritized wishlist.

While most of this process will be conducted in English, we're inviting people from any Wikimedia wiki to submit proposals. We'll also invite volunteer translators to help translate proposals into English.

Your proposal should include: the problem that you want to solve, who would benefit, and a proposed solution, if you have one. You can submit your proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey page, using the entry field and the big blue button. We will be accepting proposals for 2 weeks, ending on November 23.

We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Community Tech Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:38, 9 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-47

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [154]
  • Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [155]
  • The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
  • Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [156]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [157][158]

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

19:37, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [159]

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

20:24, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49

[edit]

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [160]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [161]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [162][163]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [164]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [165]

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

16:14, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

[edit]

Hi everyone! Apologies for posting this in English. Translations are very welcome.

We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.

Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.

The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!

Community Tech via

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:31, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-50

[edit]

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

  • Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [166]

Problems

  • Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [167]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [168]
  • IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [169]
  • You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [170]
  • It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [171]
  • You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [172]
  • UploadWizard will look a bit different. [173]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
  • New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [174]

Meetings

Future changes

  • A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [175]

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

17:47, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [176]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:38, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Test tech news

[edit]

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

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
  • The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
  • The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

  • There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

  • Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
  • No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

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

18:20, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-02

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [181]

Changes this week

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [186]
  • The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [187][188]
  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [189][190]
  • The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:54, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [191]
  • Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [192]

Changes this week

  • The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [193]
  • MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [194]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [195][196]
  • Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [197]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [198]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [199]
  • The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [200]
  • Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [201]

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

16:35, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [202]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [203][204]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [205]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [206]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [207][208]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [209]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [210][211][212]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [213][214]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [215]


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

20:33, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [216]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [217][218]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [219]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [220]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [221][222]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [223]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [224][225][226]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [227][228]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [229]


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

20:38, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [230]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [231][232]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [233]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [234]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [235][236]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [237]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [238][239][240]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [241][242]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [243]


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

20:40, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-06

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [244]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [245]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [246]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [247][248]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [249][250]
  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [251][252][253]

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

18:56, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-07

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [254]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [255]

Problems

  • A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [256][257]

Changes this week

  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [258][259]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [260]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [261]

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

16:12, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-08

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [264][265]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [266]

Meetings

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

18:20, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-09

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [267][268]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [269][270]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [271]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [272]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [273]

Meetings

  • Resigning Executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [274]
  • You can join a Tech Talk about "automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it" on Monday February 29th at 20:00 UTC, hosted by Sebastian Karcher (Zotero). [275][276]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:00, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-09

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [277][278]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [279][280]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [281]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [282]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [283]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [284]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:09, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-10

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [285]
  • Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [286]
  • The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [287]
  • It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [288]
  • Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [289]

Problems

  • Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [290]
  • The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [291]
  • The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [292]
  • You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [293]
  • Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [294]

Changes this week

  • Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [295]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
  • Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [296]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [297]
  • The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [298]

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

20:22, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-11

[edit]

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

Please note that the link to read more about the backup data centre and the work on it doesn't work yet. It will be written before the newsletter is distributed to the wikis on Monday.

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [301]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [302]

Meetings

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

18:27, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-11

[edit]

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

Please note that the link to read more about the backup data centre and the work on it doesn't work yet. It will be written before the newsletter is distributed to the wikis on Monday.

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [305]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [306]

Meetings

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

18:34, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-11

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [309]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [310]

Meetings

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

18:35, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-12

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [311]

Changes this week

  • It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [312]
  • You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [313]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [314]

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

16:00, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-14

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can filter Special:Log in more detail. [315]
  • Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [316]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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

22:11, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-16

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [317][318]
  • Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [319][320]
  • ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [321]
  • The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [322]

Problems

  • There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [323]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
  • The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [324]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [325]

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

20:39, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Server switch 2016

[edit]

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).

If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped.

Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.

  • There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April.

No non-essential code deployments will take place.

This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-16

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [326][327]
  • You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [328]
  • MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [329]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [330]
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

Meetings

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

20:36, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-17

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [331]
  • When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
  • Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [332]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [333]
  • It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [334]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [335]

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

21:00, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-18

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [336]

Problems

Changes this week

Meetings

Future changes

  • Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [339]

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

20:07, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-19

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3. [340]
  • You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [341]
  • Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC. [342][343]
  • You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor). [344]
  • Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [345]
  • The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [346]
  • Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [347]
  • Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [348]

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [349]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 12 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems. [350]

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

23:21, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-20

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth. [351]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [352]

Changes this week

  • Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later. [353]
  • Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [354]
  • A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [355]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5. [356]

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

15:56, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [358]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [359]

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

18:29, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [361]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [362]

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

18:33, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [364]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [365]

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

18:35, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [367]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [368]

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

18:38, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-22

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module. [369]

Problems

  • A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review. [370][371]
  • CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [372]

Changes this week

  • When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place. [373]
  • The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [374]
  • A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki. [375][376]
  • Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason. [377]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:16, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-24

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [383]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [384]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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

18:35, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-25

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [385]

Changes this week

  • The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [386][387]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [388]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [389]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

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

19:11, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-26

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [390]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [391]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [392]

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [395]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [396]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [397]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [398][399][400]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [401]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [402]

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

15:39, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Test

[edit]

Test. Sent by bot 19:17, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [403]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [404]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [405]

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [408]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [409]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [410]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [411][412][413]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [414]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [415]

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

19:39, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [416]

Changes this week

  • The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [417]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:43, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-30

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed. [419]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
  • It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon. [420]
  • Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages. [421]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [422]

Future changes

  • The current icon for Notifications "Notices" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency. [423]
  • Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [424]

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

19:50, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-31

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [425]
  • The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

Problems

  • Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [426]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).

Meetings

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

21:41, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-31

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [427]
  • The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

Problems

  • Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [428]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).

Meetings

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

21:46, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-32

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • In notifications, the icon for Notices has been changed from a speech-bubble icon () to a tray icon () for consistency. The Alerts icon has been redesigned too. The colors have been changed for accessibility. [429]

Problems

  • If you use the wikEd gadget, changes you made were not kept when you switched from the wikitext editor to the visual editor while you were editing. This has now been fixed. [430]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia search will now ignore question marks at the end of the sentences or words you use when you search. Until now the question mark was just a wildcard. [431]
  • On Commons, UploadWizard will now be available on mobile, rather than just the old upload form. This should reduce the workload for the community in reviewing images. [432]
  • When you edit with the visual editor a puzzle symbol tells you there is an invisible template in the article. It will now mention the name of the template. [433]
  • The button to read something in another language will move for mobile users. This will happen on 9 August. [434]
  • When someone mentions you and links to your user page you get a notification. You will now get a notification when you mention yourself this way. [435]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 August. It will be on all wikis from 11 August (calendar).
  • A message on Notifications panel will invite users to try Special:Notifications page. [436]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:38, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-33

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [437]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [438]
  • For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [439][440]

Changes this week

  • The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in (for up to one year)" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [441]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [442]
  • In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [443][444]
  • The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [445]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [446]

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

19:27, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-33

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [447]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [448]
  • For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [449][450]

Changes this week

  • The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in (for up to one year)" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [451]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [452]
  • In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [453][454]
  • The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [455]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [456]

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

19:31, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-33

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [457]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [458]
  • For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [459][460]

Changes this week

  • The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [461]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [462]
  • In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [463][464]
  • The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [465]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [466]

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

19:34, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-34

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The ORES review tool is now available on Special:Contributions as a beta feature. It can make it easier to find contributions that are probably damaging the wikis. The ORES review tool is available on Wikidata and Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Russian Wikipedia. [467]
  • The norm and ccnorm functions have been updated to make it easier to write abuse filters. This also affects the TitleBlacklist extension. You don't have to transform "I" and "L" to "1", "O" to "0" and "S" to "5" anymore. [468]
  • The old pageview data in the "pagecounts-raw" and "pagecounts-all-sites" files is no longer being updated. You can find the new pageview data here. This happened on August 5. [469]

Problems

  • Some big image files could not be thumbnailed. This has now been fixed. [470]
  • When you moved a page over a redirect it would delete the redirect without saving it in the logs. This has now been fixed. [471]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 23 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully sent out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. You can test this on the test wiki. [472][473]
  • How you add text after an edit conflict might work in a different way in the future. You can test the prototype. [474]

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

21:14, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-35

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Wikimedia mobile sites now don't load images if the user doesn't see them. This is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster. [475]
  • When you edit a table with the visual editor, pressing Tab in the last cell of a row will take you to the first cell in the next row. Pressing Shift and Tab in the first cell of a row will take you to the last cell in the previous row. [476]

Changes this week

  • The name of the "Save page" button will change. The button will say "Publish page" when you create a new page. It will say "Publish changes" when you change an existing page. [477][478]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

15:56, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-36

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [479]
  • Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [480]
  • When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show a validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [481]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [482][483]
  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [484][485]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:09, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

RevisionSlider

[edit]
From September 13th on, RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature in your wiki. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page, so that you can easily move between revisions. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well in your work! --Birgit Müller (WMDE)

14:22, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

RevisionSlider

[edit]
From September 13th on, RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature in your wiki. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page, so that you can easily move between revisions. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well in your work!

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:32, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RevisionSlider

[edit]
From September 13th on, RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature in your wiki. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page, so that you can easily move between revisions. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well in your work!

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:52, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RevisionSlider

[edit]
From September 13th on, RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature in your wiki. The RevisionSlider adds a slider view to the diff page, so that you can easily move between revisions. The feature fulfills a wish from the German Community’s Technical Wishlist. Everyone is invited to test the feature and we hope that it will serve you well in your work!

Birgit Müller (WMDE) 15:01, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-37

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [490]
  • A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [491][492]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:57, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-38

[edit]

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

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [495]

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

22:06, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-39

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can request it after a community decision. See how to request it. [496]
  • When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [497]
  • Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [498]

Problems

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [501]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [502]

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

17:57, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Talkback: you've got messages!

[edit]
Hello, Johan (WMF). You have new messages at VarunFEB2003's talk page.
Message added VarunFEB2003 13:24, 3 October 2016 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.[reply]

Tech News: 2016-40

[edit]

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. [503]
  • <slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible. [504]

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

21:27, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-41

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}. [505]
  • The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [506]
  • Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight. [507]

Changes this week

  • Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [508]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [509]

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

20:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Developer Summit wants you

[edit]

The Wikimedia Developer Summit is the annual meeting to push the evolution of MediaWiki and other technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement. The next edition will be held in San Francisco on January 9–11, 2017.

We welcome all Wikimedia technical contributors, third party developers, and users of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia APIs. We specifically want to increase the participation of volunteer developers and other contributors dealing with extensions, apps, tools, bots, gadgets, and templates.

Important deadlines:

  • Monday, October 24: last day to request travel sponsorship. Applying takes less than five minutes.
  • Monday, October 31: last day to propose an activity. Bring the topics you care about!

More information: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit

Subscribe to weekly updates: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Td5wfd70vptn8eu4

MKramer (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-42

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning. [510]
  • Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [511]

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [512]

Future changes

  • The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

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

16:38, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-43

[edit]

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

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
  • The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". [514]
  • About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [515]
  • Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.

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

17:36, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-45

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. [516]
  • First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [517]
  • .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [518]
  • Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [519]

Changes this week

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

22:57, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-46

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [524]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
  • In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [525]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

19:14, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-47

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [527]
  • You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [528]
  • The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems

  • A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [529]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
  • RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [530][531][532]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [533]
  • Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page. [534]

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

15:30, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-48

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [535]
  • When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [536]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
  • Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [537][538]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:14, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-49

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [539]
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [540]
  • ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [541]

Changes this week

  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [542]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:00, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-50

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [543]
  • You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [544]
  • Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. [545]

Problems

  • Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [546]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:26, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [551]

Changes this week

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

19:05, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [556]

Changes this week

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

19:09, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-03

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [558]

Changes this week

  • There is a new magic word called {{PAGELANGUAGE}}. It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators. [559]
  • When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu. [560]
  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [561]
  • You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [562]
  • The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to. [563]
  • Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in. [564]
  • When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [565]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

23:21, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-04

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [566]

Changes this week

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

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

20:08, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-04

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [567]

Changes this week

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

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

20:10, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [568]

Changes this week

  • ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [569]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [570][571]
  • The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

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

18:39, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [572]

Changes this week

  • ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [573]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [574][575]
  • The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

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

18:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-06

[edit]

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

Problems

  • The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [576]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after. [577]
  • There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change. [578]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems. [579][580]

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

19:43, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-07

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. [581]

Problems

  • The Firefox add-on Firefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg. [582]
  • Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this. [583]

Changes this week

  • The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later. [584]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring. [585]
  • The Developer Wishlist is a list where developers prioritize tools they need. The voting closes at 14 February 23:59 (UTC). This process is only for developers.

Review

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

18:03, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-08

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the Beta Feature called Hovercards. [587]
  • There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options: type and peers. The type option solves this problem. You can use peers to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers. [588]
  • OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [589]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:23, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

[edit]

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

Problems

  • On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [590]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor. [591]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later. [592]
  • The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia. [593][594]

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

19:43, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-10

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't. [595]
  • When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view. [596]

Problems

  • Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [597]
  • Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately. [598]

Changes this week

  • The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view. [599]
  • The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log. [600]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Clarification

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

23:19, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • …

Problems

  • …

Changes this week

  • You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. [601]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [602]
  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [603][604]

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

21:05, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. [605][606]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [607]
  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [608][609]

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

15:23, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-14

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [610]
  • The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [611]
  • English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [612]

Problems

  • Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [613]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:49, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [616]
  • New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [617]
  • The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [618]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
  • RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

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

18:25, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [620]
  • New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [621]
  • The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [622]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
  • RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

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

18:32, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

[edit]

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

17:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

[edit]

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to other languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:27, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-17

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

Changes this week

  • The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [626]
  • Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [627]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:28, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-17

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

Changes this week

  • The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [631]
  • Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [632]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:31, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-19

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [633]
  • There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [634]

Changes this week

  • When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [635]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [636][637]
  • Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: {{1x| sad :-{ face }}. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [638][639]

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

02:22, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-20

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ).done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [642]

Changes this week

  • The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [643]
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

Older unreported changes

  • Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word __NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. [648][649]

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

21:46, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

[edit]

Just to say thanks for the Milhist popular pages info - v. useful. Hchc2009 (talk) 18:48, 18 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! Though I'd like to note that if one wants to thank one specific person for this, it should probably be User:NKohli (WMF), who's been working on this for a while. (: /Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:51, 18 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2017-21

[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
  • There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [650]

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

22:00, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-22

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [651]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

23:13, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-22

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [653]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

23:27, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-22

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [655]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

12:14, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-23

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [657]
  • When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [658]
  • You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [659]
  • New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [660]

Problems

  • The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [661]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [662]
  • You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [663]
  • When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [664]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
  • String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [665]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [666][667]
  • Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [668]
  • The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.

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

19:01, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-24

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [669]
  • When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [670]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [671]
  • Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [672]
  • Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [673][674]

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

15:22, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-25

[edit]

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

Problems

  • ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [675]

Changes this week

  • irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [676]
  • Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [677]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:40, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-26

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [678]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
  • Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [679]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [680]

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

15:35, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-27

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [681]

Changes this week

  • Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
  • EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [682]

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

15:26, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-29

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [683]

Problems

  • On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [684]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is: Migrate to HTML5 section ids. [685] The meeting will be on 19 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [686]

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

22:46, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-29

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [687]

Problems

  • On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [688]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is: Migrate to HTML5 section ids. [689] The meeting will be on 19 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [690]

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

22:53, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-31

[edit]

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

Problems

  • Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [691]
  • Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.

Changes later this week

  • Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. [692]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [693]

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

21:42, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-32

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [696]
  • The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [697]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).

Future changes

  • Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [698]
  • Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [699][700]
  • Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [701][702]

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

21:42, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-33

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [703]

Problems

  • The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [704][705]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).

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

23:24, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-34

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now test the new Timeless skin on the test wiki and mediawiki.org. You can turn it on in your preferences. You can report bugs in Phabricator. It will come to more wikis soon. [706][707]
  • Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [708]
  • If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [709]
  • The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

  • Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [710]
  • The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [711]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:58, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-35

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [712][713]
  • You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [714]

Problems

  • Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [715]

Changes later this week

  • You can block users from sending you notifications. [716]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [717]
  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [718]
  • The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.

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

22:07, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-36

[edit]

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

Tech News

Recent changes

  • The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [719][720]

Problems

  • Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [721]

Changes later this week

  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [722]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

22:12, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-37

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [724]
  • The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [725]
  • The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [726]

Problems

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
  • OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.

Meetings

  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • New filters for edit review are available now on recent changes as a beta feature. Some of those filters and other features will be deployed as default features in the coming weeks. Users will be able to opt out in their preferences. [728]

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

19:12, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-38

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 September at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:25, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-39

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • You now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [735]
  • Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [736]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Foundation Readers department has proposed changing the mobile website. You can read more on mediawiki.org. This would be a big change.
  • You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

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

15:57, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-40

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now use preload features in the visual editor. This means you can create links to create new pages and some text will already be in the edit window when someone clicks on it. [737]

Changes later this week

  • If you have turned on "Automatically enable most beta features" you will now get the 2017 wikitext editor. Before this you had to turn it on manually even though it is a beta feature. [738]
  • Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [739]
  • The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [740]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [741]
  • The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

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23:23, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-41

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [744]

Changes later this week

  • The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [745]
  • If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

14:18, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-42

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • When you edit a template with the visual editor it follows the template's format configuration on how to save it. You can now change the format in more powerful ways if your wiki wants it. [746][747]
  • The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It has been a beta feature for the last five months. You can now try out the new interface on a page where you will actually get simulated edit conflicts. You can give feedback to the developers.

Problems

  • There is a problem with recent changes pages and your watchlist that show a large number of pages. Until it is fixed, Wikidata edits will not be shown on recent changes or in your watchlist on Commons or Russian Wikipedia. If necessary, Wikidata edits will be removed from all wikis. [748]
  • Notifications are not working for some actions. For example some users don't get a notification when they are mentioned. The developers are working on fixing this. [749]
  • Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [750]

Changes later this week

  • Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia from 17 October. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [751]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:26, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-43

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can use ccnorm_contains_any when you create an abuse filter. This can be used to look for multiple words or phrases within a string. It will find words where some characters have been replaced. You can read more in the documentation. [752]

Changes later this week

  • When you search in some languages the search function could use specific other languages if the first language didn't work. This is called a fallback language. This didn't work properly and created bad searches. The search index is being fixed to work better. [753]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:13, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-44

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now block users from emailing you through the Wikimedia wikis. [755]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 October at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

00:16, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-45

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [756]

Changes later this week

  • The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 6 November. You can post proposals from 19:00 UTC and until November 19.
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

18:39, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-45

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [759]

Changes later this week

  • The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 6 November. You can post proposals from 19:00 UTC and until November 19.
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

18:42, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-46

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • The diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [762]
  • A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [763]
  • Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [764]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

19:13, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-46

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • The diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [766]
  • A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [767]
  • Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [768]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

19:16, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [770]
  • The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [771][772][773]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [774][775]

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

19:12, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [776]
  • The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [777][778][779]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [780][781]

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

19:15, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-48

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:27, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-49

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).
  • Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems. [788]
  • Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [789][790]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:47, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-50

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:53, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-02

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • On Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [797][798]
  • Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [799]
  • Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [800]
  • Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of its old custom one. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [801][802]

Problems

  • Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [803]
  • With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [804]
  • The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [805]
  • Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [806]

Changes later this week

  • Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [807]
  • The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [808][809]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
  • WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [810]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:11, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-3

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [811]
  • There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [812]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [813][814]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [815][816]

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

18:41, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-04

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [819]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [820]

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

23:49, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:02, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:04, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-07

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [823][824][825]
  • Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.

Changes later this week

  • You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [826]
  • The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like {{reflist}}, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [827]
  • The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [828]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:55, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-08

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [830][831]
  • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [832]

Problems

  • Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [833]
  • Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like {{sfn}} are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [834][835]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

22:41, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-08

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [837][838]
  • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [839]

Problems

  • Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [840]
  • Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like {{sfn}} are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [841][842]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

22:52, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-09

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [844]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [845][846]
  • Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [847]
  • Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [848][849][850]

Changes later this week

  • Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [851]
  • Advanced item The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [852][853]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 28 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:49, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-10

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now make longer edit summaries. [854]

Changes later this week

  • You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. [855]
  • On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [856][857]
  • Advanced item Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [858]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:09, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-13

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [859] [860]
  • Advanced item The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [861]
  • TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [862]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [863]
  • Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.

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

19:59, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-15

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Some pages have templates that describe problems with that article. There is now more information for mobile readers and what is wrong with the article and how they could help fix it. [864]
  • You can now thank users for many more actions than edits to a page. This was one of the top ten requests in the Wishlist Survey last year. [865]
  • The sort order of categories will have errors for a short time starting Monday 9 April (UTC). We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a script to update the database. This will take between a few hours and a few days depending on wiki size. You can read more details. [866]
  • Tag filter titles will now work better on wikis where the tag filter title is in a language that is written in another direction than the language of that wiki. This could for example be an English title (written from left to right) on a Hebrew or an Arabic wiki (written from right to left). [867]

Problems

  • The bookmark icon for saved filters on the recent changes page disappeared because of new icon changes. This has now been fixed. [868]
  • For a week in March rollbacks got both the rollback and the undo tag on the recent changes page and other pages where you see tags. This has now been fixed. [869]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 April. It will be on all wikis from 12 April (calendar).
  • Patrolled edits now have three states instead of two. Recent changes filters are updated to show unpatrolled, autopatrolled and manually patrolled edits. [870]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:05, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-16

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [871]
  • Advanced item Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [872][873]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:09, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-16

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [876]
  • Advanced item Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [877][878]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

15:17, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-17

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • All Wikipedias now have Page Previews.
  • The iOS and Android apps now have synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
  • The icons in the 2010 wikitext editor have changed. [881]
  • The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step. [882]

Changes later this week

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

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • <mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of flagged revisions will not get this feature in May. [883]
  • The rollback function could change. This was a German community request. All editors with rollback rights can leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).

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18:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-18

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

Recent changes

  • The parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links. [884]

Problems

  • Advanced item We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process on Phabricator. [885]

Changes later this week

  • You will be able use CodeMirror in the 2017 wikitext editor on all wikis. CodeMirror helps with syntax highlighting. It has previously been a beta feature and only available on wikis with scripts that are written from left to right. [886]
  • When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date. [887]
  • Advanced item You can soon turn on the Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly. [888]
  • Advanced item There is a new abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on the talk page or email jhare@wikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
  • Advanced item All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [889][890][891]

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16:15, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-19

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

Recent changes

  • The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones. [892]

Problems

  • Advanced item The abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed. [893]

Changes later this week

  • The advanced search function beta feature will be on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. [894]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Advanced item All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [895][896]

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16:23, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-20

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

Recent changes

  • Dynamic maps are now available on most Wikipedias. Labels on maps can also be in different languages.
  • The new Advanced Search interface is now available as a Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated. [897]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can give feedback and suggestions.
  • The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it. Read more on mediawiki.org [898]

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

22:20, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-21

[edit]

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

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article. You can give feedback. The last day for feedback is 27 May.

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

17:30, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-22

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

Recent changes

  • You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week. [899][900]
  • It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked. [901]
  • Wikidata now supports lexicographical data. This helps describe words.
  • There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups. [902]
  • Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script. [903]
  • Advanced item There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this. [904]

Problems

  • Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations. [905]

Changes later this week

  • There will be a new special page named PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the password rules for each user group on that wiki. [906]
  • A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them. [907]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (calendar).
  • Advanced item Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [908]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles. [909]
  • A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development. [910]
  • Advanced item Some wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July. [911][912]

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

12:36, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-23

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

Recent changes

  • The MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different. [913]
  • Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet. [914][915]
  • Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [916]

Problems

  • You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
  • MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [917]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:39, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-24

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

Recent changes

  • In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [920]
  • Advanced item There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [921]

Problems

  • The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [922]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:52, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-25

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [926][927]
  • The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [928][929]
  • Advanced item All wikis that have not already done so will switch to use the Remex parsing library on 5 July. This is to replace Tidy. You can help fix remaining errors. [930]

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

21:45, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-26

[edit]

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [931][932]

Changes later this week

  • Content translation users who translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles. [933]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 June. It will be on all wikis from 28 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

23:05, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-27

[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The database for tags will be changed. This will happen on 2 July on French Wikipedia and 9 July on all other wikis. Please report if recent changes get slower or you can't save edits. This could especially affect editors who use the database on ToolForge. [934]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a database problem. [935]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 July at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

00:43, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

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