User talk:R520/TechNews/Archives/2022/May

Tech News: 2022-18

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

Recent changes

• On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [1][2]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

• The developers are working on talk pages in the Wikipedia app for iOS. You can give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
• Most wikis will receive an improved template dialog in VisualEditor and New Wikitext mode. [3] [4]
• If you use syntax highlighting while editing wikitext, you can soon activate a colorblind-friendly color scheme. [5]
• Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.

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19:32, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-19

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

Recent changes

• You can now see categories in the Wikipedia app for Android. [6]

Problems

• Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed. [7]
• Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change. [8]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [9]
• Incompatibility issues with Kartographer and the FlaggedRevs extension will be fixed: Deployment is planned for May 10 on all wikis. Kartographer will then be enabled on the five wikis which have not yet enabled the extension on May 24.
• The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.

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15:21, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-20

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

Changes later this week

• Some wikis can soon use the add a link feature. This will start on Wednesday. The wikis are Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [10]
• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).

Future changes

• You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons. [11]

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18:57, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-21

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

Recent changes

• Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. [12]
• The www.wiktionary.org portal page now uses an automated update system. Other project portals will be updated over the next few months. [13]

Problems

• The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all. [14]
• Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation. [15]

Changes later 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).

Future changes

• Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers. [16]

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00:19, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-22

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

Recent changes

• In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [17]
• The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.

Changes later this week

• 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).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [18][19]
• The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit. [20]
• A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates. [21]

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20:27, 30 May 2022 (UTC)