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Tech News: 2020-33

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

Recent changes

  • FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [1]

Problems

  • The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [2]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [3][4]

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

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: July 2020



Headlines
Read this edition in full • Single-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Wikidata weekly summary #429

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)
  • Development
    • Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
    • Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
    • Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
    • Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
    • Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
    • Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
    • Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-34

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

Recent changes

  • If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [5]
  • The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [6]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [7][8]

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

20:40, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #430

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
  1. Project & events [$2-10k]
  2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
  • Development
    • Deployed the first version of the Wikidata Bridge to Catalan Wikipedia
    • Creating Grafana Dashboards for the new Wikidata Bridge so we have some data to help us determine which datatypes to support next for example (phabricator:T260532)
    • Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
    • Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
    • Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
    • Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-35

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

Changes later this week

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

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #431

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Working on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
    • Polishing remaining pieces of the first version of Federated Properties to make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in other Wikibase instances
    • Continuing to work on improving the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item to make it more accurate

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Editing news 2020 #4

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

Reply tool

The number of comments posted with the Reply Tool from March through June 2020. People used the Reply Tool to post over 7,400 comments with the tool.

The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.

  • More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
  • Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
  • Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[9]

The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).

The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.

New requirements for user signatures

  • The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
  • Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.

Next: New discussion tool

Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-36

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

Problems

  • This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [10][11]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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

20:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2020).

Administrator changes

added Eddie891
removed Angela • Jcw69 • Just Chilling • Philg88 • Viajero

CheckUser changes

readded SQL

Guideline and policy news

  • Following a request for comment, the minimum length for site ban discussions was increased to 72 hours, up from 24.
  • A request for comment is ongoing to determine whether paid editors must or should use the articles for creation process.
  • A request for comment is open to resolve inconsistencies between the draftification and alternative to deletion processes.

Arbitration

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #432

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Rob Fernandez (Wikimedia District of Columbia) on Listeria, a tool that uses SPARQL queries to define a list, and provides a bot that will update a wiki page containing that list if the results of that SPARQL query change, all based on Wikidata, 08 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 8 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #19 Facebook, YouTube, September 10
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #29, September 13
  • Development
    • Added Wikidata support to Japanese Wikivoyage. phab:T261451
    • Investigating the nature of our training outliers to improve the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item.
    • Working on error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an item. phab:T260869
    • Completed various investigations to make an informed decision on the output format of WikibaseManifest files (automated configuration detection for toolbuilders) phab:T261285
    • Completed various bug fixes and wrap-up tasks to conclude the major engineering work on the Federated Properties project
    • More work on Item Quality Scoring and Federated Properties

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-37

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

Changes later this week

  • Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [12]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
  • Advanced item All MediaWiki API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before. [13]

Future changes

  • The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
  • OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [14]
  • The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [15][16]
  • Advanced item Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
  • Advanced item Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.

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

15:59, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 40

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 40, July – August 2020

  • New partnerships
    • Al Manhal
    • Ancestry
    • RILM
  • #1Lib1Ref May 2020 report
  • AfLIA hires a Wikipedian-in-Residence

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:14, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: August 2020



Headlines
  • Albania report: Wikivoyage edit-a-thon - Editing Albania and Kosovo’s travel destinations
  • Brazil report: Open innovation and dissemination activities: wrapping up great achievements on a major GLAM in Brazil
  • Czech Republic report: First Prague Wiki Editathon held in Prague
  • Estonia report: Virtual exhibition about Polish-Estonian relations. Rephotography and cultural heritage
  • Germany report: KulTour in Swabia and 8000 documents new online
  • India report: Utilising Occasion for Content donation: A story
  • Netherlands report: WMIN & WMNL collaboration & Japanese propaganda films
  • Serbia report: Enriching Wiki projects in different ways
  • Sweden report: Free music and new recordings of songs in the public domain; Autumn in the libraries; Yes, you can hack the heritage this year – online!
  • Uganda report: Participating in the African Librarians Week (24-30 May 2020)
  • UK report: Spanish metal and ...
  • USA report: Wiknic & Black Artists Matter & Respect Her Crank
  • WMF GLAM report: Wikipedia Library, new WikiCite grant programs, and GLAM office hours
  • Calendar: September's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Wikidata weekly summary #433

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Mbabel is a tool that simplifies article creation by providing pre-made sentences based on Wikidata statements.
  • Development
    • Fixing an error that sometimes causes Wikidata UI to report 2 error messages when saving a sitelink in an Item instead of just one. (phabricator:T260869)
    • Development of version one of Federated Properties has concluded! Expect an announcement with timing of the release of this feature soon. Wikibase users who want an early look at the feature are invited to reach out to participate in the pre-release testing round.
    • Development of the WikibaseManifest extension has continued into its second sprint; we focused on determining a product specification for the Manifest output.
    • Finishing a draft documentation for a REST API to get it ready for a feedback round before implementation.
    • Finished improvements to the automated scoring of the quality of Items with ORES. Still need to retrain ORES and deploy the changes before the scores are actually different though.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-38

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

Problems

  • The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [17][18]

Changes later this week

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

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

16:18, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #434

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata Introduction Workshop (German) (September 29)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 21 at 18:00 CEST
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: A starting point for newer institutions to think through what is involved in coordinating a Wikidata project, including shared infrastructure, training, and documentation, 22 September. Agenda
    • Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #21 WikiDojo: Facebook, YouTube, September 25
  • Tool of the week
    • copy-qid is a user script by Abbe98 that allows you to copy the Qid with one click.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • WQS now supports mwapi service request for Wikibooks (phab:T261125)
    • The language codes lij-mc, ja-Hira, ja-Kana, ja-Hrkt, ja-Hani, ojp, ojp-Hira and ojp-Hani" have been added for use in monolingual text property values (phab:T254968, phab:T195816)
    • The language codes de-1901, eo-hsistemo and eo-xsistemo, ja-hira, ja-kana and ja-hrkt have been added for Lexemes (phab:T262330,phab:T257422, phab:T250559)
    • P1438 has been converted from string to external ID datatype (phab:T262198)
    • Worked on fixing an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Investigating what work would be needed to get the new termbox that's available on mobile to also work on desktop
    • Fixing several issues with Special:Undelete (phab:T261747)
    • Fixing an error message being shown twice (phab:T260869)
    • Starting the coding work on the Query Builder
    • Continuing to write a draft for a REST API specification
    • Finishing the remaining work needed to get the improved quality scoring for Items deployed to ORES
    • Continuing work on WikibaseManifest: Determined the essential metadata that will be included in the WikibaseManifest file, added some new features (mostly MediaWiki metadata) to the Manifest that were requested by the OpenRefine team (phab:T262805 and phab:T262804) and set up a test system that will soon be ready for tool builders to use for testing the integration of their tools with WikibaseManifest


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-39

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

Recent changes

  • There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [19][20]

Changes later this week

  • The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [21]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).

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

21:26, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:47, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:53, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #435

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • The Wikidata development team is seeking to evaluate and improve the process of collecting and reacting to bug reports and feature requests. You can give feedback about your experience using this anonymous form until September 30th or add feedback publically to Wikidata talk:Contact the development team/Process review 2020.
    • Nominate your favorite tools for the Coolest Tool Award 2020 before October 14th.
    • Wikidata Walkabout is a new site that lets you browse and drill down through different "classes" of data on Wikidata: wikidatawalkabout.org
    • Como is a new Android app, that uses Wikidata lexemes and senses to create a word-guessing game. It let's players create new senses and tests them on other players to finally save them in Wikidata. The app is developed as part of a BA thesis, to determine if this concept is useful to create more lexicographical data, and testers would be very welcome.
  • Development
    • A long-standing bug has been fixed (T217144) where Items and Lexemes created via OAuth would not be added to the user’s watchlist even if the user had the Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist setting enabled. (The Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist setting was probably likewise ineffective, but this was not tested specifically.) Affected tools include QuickStatements, Mix'n'Match, and Wikidata Lexeme Forms; users of these and other tools may see more pages being added to their watchlists now. (This only applies to new edits and page creations; previously created or edited pages will not be automatically added to the watchlist retroactively.)
    • Working on the basic building blocks of the Query Builder towards making it possible to create the first very simple query with it
    • Talking to people about comparing Wikidata's data against other databases and flagging mismatches
    • Fixing an issue with Item creations via the API by blocked users leading to skipped entity IDs (phab:T232620)
    • Fixed an input issue with invisible characters (phab:T261071)
    • Finishing the draft of the REST API spec to get it ready for feedback
    • WikibaseManifest: created a separate key for local entities and decided what we do about non-local entity sources based on tool-builder feedback (phab:T263527) and specifying the API in OpenApi format (phab:T262919)


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-40

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

Recent changes

  • Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [22]
  • Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [23]

Problems

  • Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [24]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).

Future changes

  • You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
  • The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
  • In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [25]
  • You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
  • You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.

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

21:23, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – September 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2020).

Administrator changes

added Ajpolino • LuK3
readded Jackmcbarn
removed Ad Orientem • Harej • Lid • Lomn • Mentoz86 • Oliver Pereira • XJaM
renamed There'sNoTime → TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:43, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #436

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Events
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Toby Hudson on Entity Explosion, a browser extension which allows you to get information about entities on the web page you’re visiting, 06 October. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: plenty of events for the Wikidata birthday, check the calendar and feel free to organise one!
  • Tool of the week
    • IllWill.js is a userscript that searches Wikidata for foreign-language sitelinks, to populate Template:ill and replace plain red links on other Wikimedia projects.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • omeka-s-wikidata is a new module for the open source GLAM collection management software Omeka, that allows cataloguers to use Wikidata as a vocabulary for persons, places, subjects, etc.
  • Development
    • First pieces of the Query Builder are coming together and we are working towards making it generate the first dumb query
    • Talking to people about their thoughts on checking Wikidata's data against other databases. If you're interested reach out to Mohammed.
    • Got some first internal feedback for the REST API specification draft. We'll publish it for feedback in the next days.
    • Fixing an issue with certain language codes no longer being available (phab:T264294)
    • Working on making sure blocked bots don't waste Item IDs when trying to create new Items (phab:T232620)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-41

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

Recent changes

  • There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
  • You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [26]

Problems

  • There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [27]
  • Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [28]
  • Advanced item Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
  • Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [29]

Future changes

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

16:24, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-42

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

Problems

  • Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [31][32][33]

Changes later this week

  • Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [34][35]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).

Future changes

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

15:23, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #437

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: MsynABot
    • Closed request for adminship: Fuzheado (successful)
  • Tool of the week
    • OD2WD automatically converts CSV files from Open Data portals into QuickStatements for Wikidata republishing. Demo video
  • Development
    • The RFC to semi-protect all property pages has been implemented, all properties now require the “autoconfirmed” right to edit (T254280)
    • Working on enabling JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T220883)
    • Finishing preventing blocked users from making us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • Continuing work on the Wikibase Manifest extension that allows toolbuilders to easily access configurations of a specific Wikibase instance so it is easier for them to make their tools work with not just Wikidata but also other Wikibase instances
    • Started analyzing what we consider a mismatch for our work around checking Wikidata's data against other databases
    • Continued work on the Query Builder to get it to create the first very simple query. It can do that now but not yet visualize the result.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

This Month in GLAM: September 2020



Headlines
  • Brazil report: Wikidata birthday celebrations, Wiki Loves Monuments, new partnerships and more!
  • Colombia report: GLAM and virtual education
  • France report: AAF training course; Workshops in Strasbourg; European Heritage Days: Rennes; Wiki Loves Monuments
  • Germany report: Ahoy! Wikipedians set sail to document the reality of modern seafaring
  • Indonesia report: New GLAM partnerships on data donation; Commons structured data edit-a-thon
  • Norway report: Students taking on GLAM Wiki women in red
  • Sweden report: Musikverket: more folk music and photos; Hack for Heritage 2020; Wiki Loves Monuments; Wikipedia in the libraries; Digital Book Fair on Wikipedia
  • UK report: National Lottery; Khalili Collections
  • USA report: Virtual events MetFashion, 19SuffrageStories, WikiCari Festival and more
  • Open Access report: New publication about access to digitised cultural heritage
  • WMF GLAM report: Launching Wikisource Pagelist Widget
  • Calendar: ctober's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Wikidata weekly summary #438

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Prepbio tool uses Wikidata to create the beginnings of a Wikipedia stub biography article. (2020-10-19)
  • Development
    • Blocked users trying to create new Items no longer make us skip QIDs (phab:T232620)
    • So far we don't have JSON dumps for Lexemes. We're working on regularly generating them as well now (phab:T264883)
    • Continuing work on getting the Query Builder to generate the first query. Almost there.
    • Started the feedback round for the REST API. Please provide your input if you are currently using the action API or plan to develop against Wikidata's API in the future.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-43

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

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [37]
  • Advanced item In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [38]
  • Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.

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

16:29, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Women in Red World Contest

Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale!

19:27, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #439

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata, SEMIC Conference 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: Introduction to Wikidata by Frimelle, Software Freedom Kosova 2020 - (replay)
    • Past: What's new in Wikidata? by Lea Lacroix, Lydia Pintscher and Mattia Capozzi, ItWikiCon 2020 - (replay)
    • Ongoing: plenty of Wikidata birthday events, online and onsite! Here's an overview of the upcoming events, you can find the links and details in the main calendar.
      • WikiCite virtual conference on October 26-28, live-streamed on Youtube and Twitter, with sessions across many timezones and languages – English, French, German, Indonesian, and Portuguese.
      • Wikidata Education Week, online, on October 26-30
      • 24-hours online meetup, on October 28-29: an open discussion with plenty of community members facilitating exchange around the topic "what makes you enthusiastic about Wikidata"
      • Gene Wiki: how to synchronize and curate primary sources with and in Wikidata, online, on October 29th
      • Birthday celebration in Rennes, France, on October 29th
      • Birthday Celebration in Accra, Ghana, and online, on October 29th
    • Upcoming: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27th at 17:00 CET (16:00 GMT)
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, October 27 at 18:00 CET
  • Tool of the week
    • WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
  • Development
    • Got the Query Builder to create the first simple queries. You can follow along the development from now on on the test system.
    • Preparing regular JSON dumps for Lexemes (phab:T264883)
    • Analyzed a number of queries to the query service together with the WMF search team to better understand what the queries are doing and what further optimizations we can make to the query service and which queries need different systems to answer them.
    • Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
    • Created Extension:WikibaseManifest documentation on MediaWiki.
    • Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
    • Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores
    • Finished investigating how to handle a restricted list of external Wikibase services. (phab:T265118)
    • Removed noratelimit on bots for wikidata.org (phab:T258354)
    • Published Easier Access for Programmers to Wikidata research report

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-44

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

Problems

  • You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [39]
  • Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [40]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [41]
  • There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [42]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [43]

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

17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2020

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2020).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-45

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

Recent changes

  • You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [44]
  • Advanced item There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g. {{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [45]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
  • Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [46]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [47]

Future changes

  • A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [48]
  • In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.

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

16:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #440

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Hasley (RfP scheduled to end after 2 November 2020 17:23 UTC)
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #37, November 8
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, November 3 at 18:00 CET
This is 32 hours of video covering 85 individual presentations in 7 languages.
1266 "unique viewers" have watched some portion on YouTubeSince the conference began last Monday.
  • Tool of the week
    • reCH is a Wikidata anti-vandalism tool that is used to review edits and patrol new changes.
  • Development
    • Fixing the issue of `content was: ""` (empty string) when deleting Lexemes (phab:T263435)
    • Final steps for deployment of JSON dumps for Lexeme (phab:T264883)
    • Working on fixing an issue with adding statements with datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266673)
    • The Query Builder can now generate its first very simple query and show the result. You can follow along as we develop it at the demo system.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

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