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West African Ebola virus epidemic

if you have a moment I wanted to ask a question....--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:23, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@Ozzie10aaaa: Sure -- please ask away. -- The Anome (talk) 15:23, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I'm nominating West African Ebola virus epidemic for GA, will you review it?--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:51, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Sure. But it may take me a day or two to do so: I will need to familiarize myself with the reviewing criteria first. -- The Anome (talk) 22:29, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 23:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
The Anome you indicated one or two days(per above) I have therefore posted the nomination today[1]...I should add the article was recently GOCE[2], additionally I am willing to make any adjustments you may suggest, thank you again--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:28, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Ozzie10aaaa: Hi. Please accept my apologies for not being able to do the checking in a timely way: I got ditracted, and then off-wiki issues took priority. Now I'm back. I see the article has already been accepted as a GA, but just in case, I took a look at it just now, and couldn't fault it. -- The Anome (talk) 11:54, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins

Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:34, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-46

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

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. [3]

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. [4]

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.

19:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Intended purpose of DNS Certification Authority Authorization

Hi The Anome,

I'm uncertain about something you wrote in DNS Certification Authority Authorization last year about what entities are supposed to check CAA records (after looking at the RFC, I believe it's only certificate authorities, not user-agents/TLS endpoints). Could you please take a look in Talk:DNS Certification Authority Authorization and let me know what you think?

Thanks! Schoen (talk) 20:15, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

A new user right for New Page Patrollers

Hi The Anome.

A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.

It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.

If you have any questions about this user right, don't hesitate to join us at WT:NPR. (Sent to all admins).MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:48, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-47

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

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. [6]
  • 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. [7]
  • 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. [8]

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. [9][10][11]

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. [12]
  • 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. [13]

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

15:33, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, The Anome. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. Mdann52 (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

SS0 listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect SS0. Since you had some involvement with the SS0 redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. — JFG talk 17:14, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-48

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

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. [14]
  • 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. [15]
  • 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]. [16][17]

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.

21:17, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-49

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

Recent changes

  • You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [18]
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [19]
  • 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. [20]

Changes this week

  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [21]
  • 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.

18:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Editing Eco-Sensitive Zone

This is with reference to your edit at the page 'Eco-Sensitive Zone'. You added a category saying coordinates missing. Since there are various eco-sensitive zones in India, there is clearly no logic in specifying geo-coordinates of the place. -Jn045 (talk) 16:22, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. Although it has a large number of heuristics designed to catch errors like these, the bot got this one wrong. Thanks for correcting the error. -- The Anome (talk) 11:06, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-50

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

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. [22]
  • 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. [23]
  • 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. [24]

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. [25]

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.

19:30, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of 4over6

The article 4over6 has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

The coverage (references, external links, etc.) does not seem sufficient to justify this article passing Wikipedia:General notability guideline and the more detailed Wikipedia:Notability (software) requirement. If you disagree and deprod this, please explain how it meets them on the talk page here in the form of "This article meets criteria A and B because..." and ping me back through WP:ECHO or by leaving a note at User talk:Piotrus. Thank you.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:44, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Regne d'Espanha listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Regne d'Espanha. Since you had some involvement with the Regne d'Espanha redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. - CHAMPION (talk) (contributions) (logs) 01:46, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-51

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

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.
  • 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 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [26]
  • Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [27]

Problems

  • Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [28]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

  • The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. 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.

20:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Demolition belt

The article Demolition belt has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

fails Verifiability, this term is not found in the source and not found through searches

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Gab4gab (talk) 15:18, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Nomination of List of celebrities who were shot and lived for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of celebrities who were shot and lived is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of celebrities who were shot and lived until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. The Traditionalist (talk) 14:16, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Channelsea Island.

I have put a note on the talk page: where is the Channelsea Island? There seem to be two distinct areas of land. I will research this further. LoopZilla (talk) 12:51, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

@LoopZilla: The island is just the island itself, situated in the middle of the Channelsea River. The land neighboring is unrelated (except possibly by ownership, but we don't have a WP:RS for that). -- The Anome (talk) 18:14, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I was there today, and took a photograph! LoopZilla (talk) 21:36, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

9½ Weeks

I could not find any consensus to move 9½ Weeks to create a disambiguation page. Since this is required to disambiguate an existing page with incoming links, can you point me to the discussion? I have reverted the move in the meantime. Cheers! bd2412 T 13:17, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Block of User:XCpwner1337

Are you sure about this? While "pwn" is often in the names of abusive accounts it is not in and of itself a violation of the username policy, at least I sure don't think it is. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:09, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

@Beeblebrox: I regard "pwner" as pretty much equivalent to "troll", with both being effectively a declaration of intent to disrupt. One "trolls", the other "pwns", pretty much the same activity. -- The Anome (talk) 13:03, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02

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. [33]

Changes this week

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

19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

A username block

There's an unblock request at User talk:Smellyfeet182, concerning a username hard block that you placed. I can't see anything about the name which is either offensive or in any way contrary to the user name policy, so I think we should unblock. However, even if you disagree, and think the username is unacceptable, I don't see anything other than the user name which is unacceptable, and neither in what you said in the block log nor in the block notice on the talk page have you indicated anything other than the user name that you think is unacceptable. If the username is the only thing which is unacceptable, then I can't see any possible reason for not letting the editor move to a new user name, so I can only see the fact that this is a hard block as a mistake. I have therefore reduced the block to a soft block, but please tell me if there is some reason for the hard block which I have missed, and if so I will consider reverting my change. Also, do you have any opinion on my suggestion of unblocking completely? The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 20:22, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

My long experience is that names containing words like "smelly" and "stinky" suggest that the user is not here to contribute positively. However, I think you're right here, and that a soft block would be more appropriate in this case. I'll also take that on board for future blocks.

I don't think a complete unblock would be appropriate: I'm firmly convinced that deliberately unpleasant usernames are corrosive to Wikipedia's atmosphere of civility: see Reddit for the usernames you get when you relax this. -- The Anome (talk) 20:27, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I actually tried to post a change to my above message, but you edit-conflicted it. The essential substance of my change was that since the only reason you gave for the block was the user name, and the editor had agreed to change that, there was no longer any reason for the block, so I was going to lift the block. With hindsight I think it would have been a better thing to have said in the first place. Any way, an unblock conditional on a change of user name has the same effect as a soft block, except that the editor has the option of keeping the editing history of the two user names together, so it doesn't make a lot of difference.
On your comment about user names which suggest that the user is not here to contribute positively, I agree about that, but I differ from you on one or two points. While I would certainly block if the user name were something like "Fuck face", for such a mild example as in this case I think it is wrong to assume that the editor will edit disruptively on the basis of a user name: we should assume good faith. At the most I would warn the editor about the name and suggest that he or she switch to another user name, and then keep an eye on his or her editing for a while, with a view to blocking if and when the suspicion of disruptive editing is confirmed. However, it is, of course, a matter for judgement how offensive a particular user name is, and you evidently put this one in a higher category than I do. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 20:46, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
@JamesBWatson: I mostly agree with you regarding borderline-offensive usernames and WP:AGF, but you are right that I take a stronger view on this than you do. In particular, I regard usernames including infantile offensive terms such as "smelly" or "stinky" as being deliberate attempts to offend the reader, in the same way as usernames containing words like "crap" and "poop", and therefore both (a) intrinsically disruptive, and (b) usually a clear indication that the user is unlikely to be here to contribute positively to the encyclopedia. -- The Anome (talk) 10:55, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I fully understand what you say. It seems to me that the only difference between us is that you see "smelly" and "stinky" as on the same level as "crap" and "poop", and I don't. The latter pair are clearly, as you say, deliberate attempts to offend the reader, but to me the former pair read like just someone making up slightly joky names. It seems to me that while such a user name may be intended to be offensive, it equally may be no more intended to offend than joky names such as Department of Redundancy Department or Boing! said Zebedee. Oh well, you and I will no doubt continue to view such names differently. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 11:22, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-03

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [35]

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. [36]
  • 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. [37]
  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [38]
  • You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [39]
  • 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. [40]
  • 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. [41]
  • When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [42]
  • 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.

23:24, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Coordinate question

Hello, and please pass on my thanks to Anomebot2 for its useful work in identifying articles lacking geographical coordinates. What's the best way to handle articles like Bombay Sapphire that was tagged recently? Do you think we should add coordinates for the main production facility or the owning group's head office? If neither and it's a false positive, do I simply remove {{coord missing}} (i.e. does the bot know not to tag the same article twice) or can I replace the tag with something that means "I don't want coordinates; don't ask me again"?

I suspect the cause may be using Category:Distilleries in England, when Bombay Sapphire comes from a distillery rather than is a distillery. Thanks again, Certes (talk) 15:29, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I'd remove the {{coord missing}} tag. "Bombay Sapphire" is a brand, and as such doesn't really have a valid concept of physical location. On the other hand, an article about Laverstoke Mill, where it's currently distilled, would be eligible for coordinates. And yes, the bot remembers the titles of articles it's edited, and won't re-add a tag that's been removed. -- The Anome (talk) 16:18, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll untag it. Certes (talk) 17:42, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Filter question

Please give a thumbs up/thumbs down on disabling filter 767. No hits since inception. ~ Rob13Talk 21:39, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

I've disabled it. There's not much activity on this front, and seem to be catching new accounts related to this at account creation time, so they don't get round to making any edits. -- The Anome (talk) 14:12, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-04

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

Recent changes

  • You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [43]

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.

20:15, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Ponce in the Park for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Ponce in the Park is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ponce in the Park until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Jellyman (talk) 19:38, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05

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

Recent changes

  • The OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [44]

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. [45]
  • 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. [46][47]
  • 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.

18:45, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter - February 2017

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2017). This first issue is being sent out to all administrators, if you wish to keep receiving it please subscribe. Your feedback is welcomed.

Administrator changes

NinjaRobotPirate • Schwede66 • K6ka • Ealdgyth • Ferret • Cyberpower678 • Mz7 • Primefac • Dodger67
Briangotts • JeremyA • BU Rob13

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • When performing some administrative actions the reason field briefly gave suggestions as text was typed. This change has since been reverted so that issues with the implementation can be addressed. (T34950)
  • Following the latest RfC concluding that Pending Changes 2 should not be used on the English Wikipedia, an RfC closed with consensus to remove the options for using it from the page protection interface, a change which has now been made. (T156448)
  • The Foundation has announced a new community health initiative to combat harassment. This should bring numerous improvements to tools for admins and CheckUsers in 2017.

Arbitration

Obituaries

  • JohnCD (John Cameron Deas) passed away on 30 December 2016. John began editing Wikipedia seriously during 2007 and became an administrator in November 2009.
Discuss this newsletter • Subscribe • Archive

13:38, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Pico Jano

Hi, I noticed that you added the template Occor missing to Pico Jano article. Is it necessary? Coordinates are directly taken from wikidata by the infobox mountain, as far as I know.--Pampuco (talk) 17:38, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

It's working as designed. Although the template pulls data from Wikidata, it does not add visible coordinates. The bot has correctly labeled the article as currently missing visible coordinates. A later bot pass will eventually pull the coordinates from Wikidata, add them to the article, and remove the label. If the template were to add visible coordinates to the infobox, this wouldn't happen. Either way, the bot is doing the right thing. Similarly, if someone added the coordinates here, they would eventually get transferred to Wikidata.
But thanks for making me aware of this. I will look at some more of the possible edge cases that might occur, and see if I can tighten Wikidata integration behavior further. -- The Anome (talk) 17:47, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
Thenks for your explanation, --Pampuco (talk) 14:42, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-06

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

Problems

  • The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [48]

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. [49]
  • 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. [50]
  • 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. [51][52]

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

19:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Waterloo railway station listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Waterloo railway station. Since you had some involvement with the Waterloo railway station redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Useddenim (talk) 00:20, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

AGF for TraitorMania

I honestly don't see anything offensive about the username TraitorMania. The one contribution he made prior to the block seemed constructive enough. Mind if I unblock? ~Anachronist (talk) 07:22, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

@Anachronist: What I found dubious was the word "traitor", which is a very loaded term currently being thrown around liberally in arguments about politics. But, yes, please feel free to unblock if you wish. -- The Anome (talk) 11:55, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Unblocked (with a recommendation that they change their username anyway). Thanks, Anome. Yunshui 雲水 13:15, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-07

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

Recent changes

  • 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. [53]

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. [54]
  • 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. [55]

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. [56]
  • 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. [57]
  • 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

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18:06, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-08

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

Recent changes

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. [59]
  • 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. [60]
  • OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [61]
  • 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.

19:25, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Alternative accounts

Thank you for blocking one of the 'Mike Hunt' accounts. 76.168.37.169 (talk · contribs) appears to be another. Cheers, 2601:188:1:AEA0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 00:36, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Max Spiers for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Max Spiers is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Max Spiers until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. →ὦiki-Coffee(talk to me!) (contributions) 12:13, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-09

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

Problems

  • On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [62]

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. [63]
  • 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. [64]
  • 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. [65][66]

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

19:56, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-10

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

Recent changes

  • 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. [67]
  • 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. [68]

Problems

  • Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [69]
  • 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. [70]

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. [71]
  • 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. [72]
  • 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

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23:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11

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

Changes 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. [73][74]
  • 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. [75]
  • CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [76][77]

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

15:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-12

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

Recent changes

  • The Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. 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. [78]
  • DMOZ no longer works. Templates that use DMOZ can be redirected to archive.org or another mirror. DMOZ has been removed from the RelatedSites extension on Wikivoyage. [79]
  • You can see monthly page views when you click on Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API. [80]
  • The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later. [81]
  • The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers. [82]

Problems

  • On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it. [83]

Changes this week

  • When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs. [84]
  • 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 21 March 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.

22:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Coordinates from Wikidata

Hello. Your bot made this edit to add coordinates from Wikidata to an article. There are two big things wrong with this edit. First, the coordinates should be added to the infobox where possible, rather than in the body of the article. Second, since the data is from Wikidata, you don't need to copy the data over to Wikipedia, you can just transclude it directly. Something like this edit would have been much better. Would you be willing to update your bot's code accordingly, please? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 23:43, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Wikidata/infobox integration for coordinates has been a long time coming, but I think it's sufficiently advanced now that it's time I addressed the issue. -- The Anome (talk) 17:08, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
That's great, thanks. :-) Wikidata integration is something I've been working on, particularly in infoboxes, e.g. South Pole Telescope. I'm happy to help / give iterative feedback here if it would be useful. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:20, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. -- The Anome (talk) 17:55, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
What is the plan with the bot in the meantime? eg. (a) Disable the rule, or (b) fix the rule, or (c) carry on making more work for others to clean up? —Sladen (talk) 18:38, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
(a), then (b). I will stop copying coordinates from Wikidata for the time being, until I've worked out a strategy which will play nicely with other users, including bots, and with Wikidata-aware template., This can also include cleaning up other existing conflicts/interdependencies from past data. I will run this past the geocoding project when I have it in place: it may need help from other bot owners or template maintainers to make it all work. This is a big job, and it's been a long time coming: it's not at all trivial to implement. Note that the bot already will not add coordinates to any article which currently autogenerates coordinates from Wikidata. -- The Anome (talk) 18:48, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for the clarification—both about not clashing, and about disabling the rule until the extensive improvements that can be made. It is also excellent to hear about the intention to check with the Geo side. This is the type of response that it is rare to read so quickly from a bot-operator. Thank you! —Sladen (talk) 18:58, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-13

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

Recent changes

  • When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes. [85]

Problems

  • Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed. [86][87]

Changes this week

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

14:46, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

GAR

SpaceX reusable launch system development program, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Kees08 (talk) 18:04, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-14

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

Recent changes

  • 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. [88]
  • 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. [89]
  • 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. [90]

Problems

  • Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [91]

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

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17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Nomination of Recuperation (politics) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Recuperation (politics) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Recuperation (politics) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. TheDracologist (talk) 02:42, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Re User:Selfempowerment

Hi,

I saw that you had posted a block notice on User:Selfempowerment's talk page, but the user didn't get blocked. I've blocked them now. Stephen! Coming... 11:30, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Proposed article rename

I've proposed to rename Mind control to Brainwashing. I'm letting you know since you contributed to the article. Redddogg (talk) 23:20, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

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

Recent changes

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. [94]
  • 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. [95]
  • The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [96]
  • 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.

18:35, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Edit to ODL

Did you make a typo in this edit? The link is red with no supporting blue link. ~ GB fan a "frantic, furious ball of anger" 21:30, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-16

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

Recent changes

  • You can add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [97]
  • You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [98]
  • The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [99]

Problems

  • 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. 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. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

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 18 April 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.

19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Queen(')s Road Peckham

I have started a discussion about redirects to Queens Road Peckham railway station and the road it is named for at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject London Transport#Queen(')s Road Peckham. As you have had involvement with one or more of the existing redirects, your comments are invited there. Thryduulf (talk) 21:46, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

How do I add coordinates?

Fulton–Mock–Blackmer House — Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:01, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

I followed someone's advice. I found a photo and used the URL to come up with degrees longitude and latitude. I found a conversion method. I put everything in the infobox. Still nothing.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:01, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
Okay, the obvious solution is to look for an NRHP structure and see how it was done. It worked.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 15:42, 22 April 2017 (UTC)
Fantastic. Apologies for not having got round to responding to you earlier. -- The Anome (talk) 09:11, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-17

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

Recent changes

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. [106]
  • 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. [107]
  • 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.

16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-18

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

Problems

  • Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 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.

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

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 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. 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. [111]
  • The Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [112]

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

19:50, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!

please help translate this message into your local language via meta
The 2016 Cure Award
In 2016 you were one of the top ~200 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med Foundation for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a user group whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.

Thanks again :-) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 18:08, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-19

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

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. [113]
  • 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. [114]

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. [115]
  • 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. [116][117]
  • 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. [118][119]

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

02:25, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Overly precise coordinates

I'm still finding and fixing overly precise coordinates by hand. About five years ago I requested a bot to make me a list. But I don't want to ask at bot requests again because it is my hope that a working group, a list, a script or a bot already exists that is handling this issue. Do you know what is going on these days regarding coordinates? Abductive (reasoning) 19:39, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do. -- The Anome (talk) 17:51, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2017

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VisualEditor
Did you know?

Did you know that you can review your changes visually?

Screenshot showing some changes to an article. Most changes are highlighted with text formatting.
When you are finished editing the page, type your edit summary and then choose "Review your changes".

In visual mode, you will see additions, removals, new links, and formatting highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.

Toggle button showing visual and wikitext options; visual option is selected.

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

Screenshot showing the same changes, in the two-column wikitext diff display.

The wikitext diff is the same diff tool that is used in the wikitext editors and in the page history.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and adding the new visual diff tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

A new wikitext editing mode is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. The 2017 wikitext editor has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures to enable the ⧼Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-label⧽.

A new visual diff tool is available in VisualEditor's visual mode. You can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. More features will be added to this later. In the future, this tool may be integrated into other MediaWiki components. [120]

The team have added multi-column support for lists of footnotes. The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. You can request multi-column support for your wiki. [121]

Other changes:

  • You can now use your web browser's function to switch typing direction in the new wikitext mode. This is particularly helpful for RTL language users like Urdu or Hebrew who have to write JavaScript or CSS. You can use Command+Shift+X or Control+Shift+X to trigger this. [122]
  • The way to switch between the visual editing mode and the wikitext editing mode is now consistent. There is a drop-down menu that shows the two options. This is now the same in desktop and mobile web editing, and inside things that embed editing, such as Flow. [123]
  • The Categories item has been moved to the top of the Page options menu (from clicking on the "hamburger" icon) for quicker access. [124] There is also now a "Templates used on this page" feature there. [125]
  • You can now create <chem> tags (sometimes used as <ce>) for chemical formulas inside the visual editor. [126]
  • Tables can be set as collapsed or un-collapsed. [127]
  • The Special character menu now includes characters for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and angle quotation marks (‹› and ⟨⟩) . The team thanks the volunteer developer, Tpt. [128]
  • A bug caused some section edit conflicts to blank the rest of the page. This has been fixed. The team are sorry for the disruption. [129]
  • There is a new keyboard shortcut for citations: Control+Shift+K on a PC, or Command+Shift+K on a Mac. It is based on the keyboard shortcut for making links, which is Control+K on a PC or Command+K on a Mac. [130]

Future changes

  • The VisualEditor team is working with the Community Tech team on a syntax highlighting tool. It will highlight matching pairs of <ref> tags and other types of wikitext syntax. You will be able to turn it on and off. It will first become available in VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode, maybe late in 2017. [131]
  • The kind of button used to Show preview, Show changes, and finish an edit will change in all WMF-supported wikitext editors. The new buttons will use OOjs UI. The buttons will be larger, brighter, and easier to read. The labels will remain the same. You can test the new button by editing a page and adding &ooui=1 to the end of the URL, like this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit&ooui=1 The old appearance will no longer be possible, even with local CSS changes. [132]
  • The outdated 2006 wikitext editor will be removed later this year. It is used by approximately 0.03% of active editors. See a list of editing tools on mediawiki.org if you are uncertain which one you use. [133]

If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-20

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

Recent changes

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. [136]

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. [137]
  • 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. [142][143]

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

21:48, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-21

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

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. [144]

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

22:15, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-22

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

Problems

  • Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [145]

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.

12:18, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-23

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

Recent changes

  • You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [147]
  • When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [148]
  • 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. [149]
  • 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. [150]

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. [151]

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. [152]
  • You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [153]
  • 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. [154]
  • 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. [155]

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. [156][157]
  • 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. [158]
  • 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.

19:04, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

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