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Tech News: 2015-13

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
  • The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [1]
  • VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [2] [3] [4]
  • When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [5]

Meetings

  • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [6]

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

15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:History of Scotland

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:History of Scotland. Legobot (talk) 00:10, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Invitation

A gummi bear holding a sign that says "Thank you"
Thank you for using VisualEditor and sharing your ideas with the developers.

Hello, Diego Moya,

The Editing team is asking for your help with VisualEditor. I am contacting you because you posted to a feedback page for VisualEditor. Please tell them what they need to change to make VisualEditor work well for you. The team has a list of top-priority problems, but they also want to hear about small problems. These problems may make editing less fun, take too much of your time, or be as annoying as a paper cut. The Editing team wants to hear about and try to fix these small things, too. 

You can share your thoughts by clicking this link. You may respond to this quick, simple, anonymous survey in your own language. If you take the survey, then you agree your responses may be used in accordance with these terms. This survey is powered by Qualtrics and their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy.

More information (including a translateable list of the questions) is posted on wiki at mw:VisualEditor/Survey 2015. If you have questions, or prefer to respond on-wiki, then please leave a message on the survey's talk page.

Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost – Volume 11, Issue 12 – 25 March 2015

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:24, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14

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

  • You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [7]
  • You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [8] [9] [10]
  • All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [11]
  • You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [12]
  • VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [13]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
  • VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [14]
  • You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [15]
  • You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [16]
  • You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [17]
  • VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [18] [19] [20] [21]

Meetings

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

15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost, 1 April 2015

Metro (design language)

Hey. I am not really sure what original research you are talking about but I double-checked the sources just in case. If you don't find something there, I'll gladly show you.

If I had to guess I'd say you are talking about the Windows Runtime availability to traditional desktop apps. It is in the Ars Technica source. Actually, Windows 8 article talks about web browsers accessing Windows Runtime too, so if you need more sources and convincing, it is there. Fleet Command (talk) 16:29, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm afraid you're reading things that are not there, at least not in the references given for that paragraph. When Ars says "these apps—which are all ultimately based on Windows Runtime" it's referring only to those called "Windows apps", not "Windows desktop applications" - those are explicitly called "legacy Win32 apps". I don't doubt that desktop applications can mix the Win32 and Windows Runtime APIs, but if that is relevant, we should include a source in the article that supports it. Diego (talk) 09:46, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
It is in the diagram at the top of the article. It says:
Windows apps: Can access WinRT, COM, and subset of Win32 APIs
Windows desktop applications: Can access WinRT, COM, and Win32 APIs
If you don't doubt, then stop reverting what you don't doubt!
Fleet Command (talk) 16:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q1 2015

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 8, No. 1 — 1st Quarter, 2015
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q1 2015, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to sign up on the distribution list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:46, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 April 2015

VisualEditor News #2—2015

Did you know?

With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:


Screenshot of Citoid's first dialog


Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:


Screenshot of Citoid's initial results


After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.


The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements

VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead (T90734).

Looking ahead

The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon.

Let's work together

  • Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
  • Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language. Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
  • The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
  • File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite 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!

-Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 17:50, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

You are engaged in edit warring

Hello, Diego

Your editing record shows that you are engaged in edit warring with another editor. Specifically, you show signs that you are unwilling to work towards a consensus and prefer to hit the "revert" button with every excuse, whereas the other user has shown every sign of willingness to talk.

Please give all disputing parties ample amount of time to reply and do not reinstate disputed changes unless there is a clear sign that a consensus is reached. If it did not happen, there is always WP:DR to rescue.

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 14:11, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

I have removed unsupported content, which I have all the right to do, and I have not used the revert button (you did, with which you have introduced the problematic content again, as well as removed the tags documenting the problem), but instead have improved the text each time, including the feedback provided by FleetCommand each time. Why do you feel entitled to give me advice that you are not following yourself? Diego (talk) 14:23, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
I clearly see that a certain disputed part goes with your reverts and comes back with Fleet Command's and that not even a single round of forth-and-back conversation is held in the talk page between each revert. The article changes every time (ever so slightly) but the dispute over a certain portion is very clear.
Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 14:45, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
P.S. I did not take your message in the article talk page to construe a request for a third opinion. I thought it would be awkward if I gave one, unless you request specifically. So, you still have the option to request one from WP:3O if you wish, although you should probably wait for FC to answer first. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 15:02, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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

Problems

  • The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [28]
  • Labs was broken several times this week. [29] [30] [31] [32]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
  • You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [33]
  • Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [34] [35]
  • You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [36]

Meetings

  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [37]

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

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiBullying

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiBullying. Legobot (talk) 00:08, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 April 2015

Tech News: 2015-16

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

Problems

  • Some wikis had issues on Wednesday. [41] [42]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
  • Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [43] [44]
  • All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [45]

Meetings

  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 15 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:41, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Calling all WikiProject X members!

Hello fellow member! WikiProject X needs your help!

We studied the various needs that WikiProjects have, and have come up with some ideas for our first round of WikiProject tool development. These include:

  • An automatically updated WikiProject directory that surfaces WikiProject-related metrics and automatically generates a list of active participants and potential members;
  • A lightweight, optional alternative to WikiProject banners, featuring an option to quickly send a message to the named WikiProjects;
  • A tool that bootstraps WikiProjects; and
  • A worklist generation script for WikiProjects

We are now looking for volunteer coders to work on these projects. If you are interested in developing these tools, or if you would to volunteer for other tasks, check out our new volunteers portal. Thank you for your help!


Cheers, Harej (talk) 20:38, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 April 2015

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 3

Greetings! For this month's issue...

We have demos!

After a lengthy research and design process, we decided for WikiProject X to focus on two things:

  • A WikiProject workflow that focuses on action items: discussions you can participate in and tasks you can perform to improve the encyclopedia; and
  • An automatically updating WikiProject directory that gives you lists of users participating in the WikiProject and editing in that subject area.

We have a live demonstration of the new WikiProject workflow at WikiProject Women in Technology, a brand new WikiProject that was set up as an adjunct to a related edit-a-thon in Washington, DC. The goal is to surface action items for editors, and we intend on doing that through automatically updated working lists. We are looking into using SuggestBot to generate lists of outstanding tasks, and we are looking into additional options for automatic worklist generation. This takes the burden off of WikiProject editors to generate these worklists, though there is also a "requests" section for Wikipedians to make individual requests. (As of writing, these automated lists are not yet live, so you will see a blank space under "edit articles" on the demo WikiProject. Sorry about that!) I invite you to check out the WikiProject and leave feedback on WikiProject X's talk page.

Once the demo is sufficiently developed, we will be working on a limited deployment on our pilot WikiProjects. We have selected five for the first round of testing based on the highest potential for impact and will scale up from there.

While a re-designed WikiProject experience is much needed, that alone isn't enough. A WikiProject isn't any good if people have no way of discovering it. This is why we are also developing an automatically updated WikiProject directory. This directory will surface project-related metrics, including a count of active WikiProject participants and of active editors in that project's subject area. The purpose of these metrics is to highlight how active the WikiProject is at the given point of time, but also to highlight that project's potential for success. The directory is not yet live but there is a demonstration featuring a sampling of WikiProjects.

Each directory entry will link to a WikiProject description page which automatically list the active WikiProject participants and subject-area article editors. This allows Wikipedians to find each other based on the areas they are interested in, and this information can be used to revive a WikiProject, start a new one, or even for some other purpose. These description pages are not online yet, but they will use this template, if you want to get a feel of what they will look like.

We need volunteers!

WikiProject X is a huge undertaking, and we need volunteers to support our efforts, including testers and coders. Check out our volunteer portal and see what you can do to help us!

As an aside...

Wouldn't it be cool if lists of requested articles could not only be integrated directly with WikiProjects, but also shared between WikiProjects? Well, we got the crazy idea of having experimental software feature Flow deployed (on a totally experimental basis) on the new Article Request Workshop, which seeks to be a place where editors can "workshop" article ideas before they get created. It uses Flow because Flow allows, essentially, section-level categorization, and in the future will allow "sections" (known as "topics" within Flow) to be included across different pages. What this means is that you have a recommendation for a new article tagged by multiple WikiProjects, allowing for the recommendation to appear on lists for each WikiProject. This will facilitate inter-WikiProject collaboration and will help to reduce duplicated work. The Article Request Workshop is not entirely ready yet due to some bugs with Flow, but we hope to integrate it into our pilot WikiProjects at some point.

Harej (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

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

  • There was sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [46]
  • VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [47]
  • You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [48]
  • If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [49]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [50]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
  • Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [51] [52] [53]
  • If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [54]
  • You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [55]

Meetings

  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 22 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • You will soon be able to add and remove tags on edits. [56] [57]

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

15:31, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 April 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources. Legobot (talk) 00:06, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

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

  • All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [58] [59]
  • You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [60]
  • There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [61]
  • You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [62]

Problems

  • Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [63]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
  • It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [64]
  • You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [65]
  • You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [66]
  • You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [67]

Meetings

  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 29 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:11, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.

The Signpost: 29 April 2015

Tech News: 2015-19

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 chat with other users in Phabricator. [68]
  • There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [69] [70]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
  • It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [71]

Meetings

  • You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [72]
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [73]

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

15:18, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 May 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment. Legobot (talk) 00:04, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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

  • You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [74] [75] [76]
  • You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [77]
  • The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [78] [79]

Problems

  • There was a problem that caused slow editing. [80]
  • Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [81]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
  • You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [82] [83]
  • You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [84]
  • When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [85]
  • When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [86]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:57, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 May 2015

Tech News: 2015-21

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
  • References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [87]
  • You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [88]
  • The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [89]
  • You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [90] [91]
  • UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [92]
  • A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [93]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

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

15:32, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 May 2015

Tech News: 2015-22

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

  • VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [94]
  • Some Labs tools had issues last week. [95] [96]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

16:27, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

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

  • VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [98]
  • Some Labs tools had issues last week. [99] [100]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

16:27, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan. Legobot (talk) 00:07, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 May 2015

Tech News: 2015-23

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

Problems

  • Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [102]
  • Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [103]
  • Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [104] [105]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
  • You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [106]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:43, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

No personal attacks, please

Please strike your personal attack [107] as the decision which you clearly aware of [108] specifically talks about the talk page environment and does not name any specific editors . -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 16:14, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 21:10, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Warning regarding your editing at Talk:Gamergate controversy

Diego, I understand you don't like the restrictions at the article Talk page. However, after I implemented them as an AE measure, several editors brought up discussion of the restrictions in various places, and I purposefully stepped back from defending the restrictions in public venues to see what the community reaction to them was. They were discussed at the article Talk page, at AE, at a Village Pump board, and they were even challenged directly by an uninvolved administrator at WP:AN. What I observed is that, as of now, there is consensus to keep the restrictions in place. So, at this point, I'm going to start treating repeated re-hashing of the restrictions at the article Talk page as disruptive off-topic editing. This is fair warning to you. Thank you... Zad68 18:28, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

@Zad68: To avoid re-hashing settled points should the editor raise the topic elsewhere could you link to the consensus discussion(s)? 168.1.99.196 (talk) 18:58, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #3—2015

Did you know?

When you click on a link to an article, you now see more information:

Screenshot showing the link tool's context menu


The link tool has been re-designed:

Screenshot of the link inspector


There are separate tabs for linking to internal and external pages.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools, as well as fixing many bugs and changing some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-auto⧽, ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-manual⧽, or ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-reuse⧽). The cite button is now labeled with the word "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "⧼Citoid-citeFromIDDialog-lookup-button⧽", for the submit button.

The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and/or appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages. Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector (T98085).  

The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter (T70425).

Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "⧼visualeditor-dialog-transclusion-add-param⧽" each time they want to add another parameter (T95696). The team added a new property for TemplateData, "Example", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter (T53049).

The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.

The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.

Let's work together

  • Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
  • The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug.
  • If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
  • If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite 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! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

re: pinging

Koncorde did not get the new ping attempt. FYI, as I learned the hard way also, the ping template and the signature shortcut have to be in the same edit for it to work. Which is to say that editing the ping will not resend the ping, though one would think that should be the case. You're welcome to test ping on me, if you want. Adding this @Diego Moya:.

(Putting this here instead of that talk page.) ForbiddenRocky (talk) 15:42, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

@Diego Moya: This ping should work. ForbiddenRocky (talk) 15:44, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

The fox and the grapes

I have reverted your edit of the lead in the article for the following reasons. 1) The section on cognitive dissonance originally stood there without mention in the body of the article and I therefore moved it down and provided a succinct summary that also took in other comments on the fox's mental attitude in other sections. 2) There is discussion of the fable's plot before a summary is given 3) Jacobs is an unreliable source and the moral he gives is spurious and not in the Greek and Latin versions. 4) Overlinking is discouraged in WP guidelines.

I see you are new to editing. If you want to discuss the point further, please do it here or on the article's Talk page. Mzilikazi1939 (talk) 11:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Why do you think I'm new to editing? :-) My account is five years older than yours. Diego (talk) 11:24, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Discussion of the article should happen at its talk page, I've copied your points there. Diego (talk) 11:34, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [109] [110]
  • If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [111]
  • When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [112]
  • The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [113]

Meetings

Future changes

  • If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [115]

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

18:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:No original research

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:No original research. Legobot (talk) 00:05, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 June 2015

Tech News: 2015-25

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

Recent changes

  • Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [116]
  • Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [117]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [119]
  • If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [120] [121] [122]

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

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4

Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?

  • A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
  • A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
  • New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
  • SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
  • Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.


Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 June 2015

Tech News: 2015-26

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

Recent changes

  • Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [123] [124]
  • You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [125]

Problems

  • On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [126] [127] [128]
  • On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [129] [130] [131]
  • Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [132] [133] [134]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

15:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 June 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Deletion process

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Deletion process. Legobot (talk) 00:04, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

Recent changes

  • Long lines in code blocks now look better. [135]
  • You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [136]
  • When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [137]
  • The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [138] [139] [140]
  • You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [141]

Problems

  • JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [142]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
  • You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [143]
  • When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [144]
  • If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [145]
  • Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [146]

Meetings

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

Future

  • When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [147]

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

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q2 2015

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 8, No. 2 — 2nd Quarter, 2015
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q2 2015, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to sign up on the distribution list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 July 2015

Tech News: 2015-28

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

Recent changes

  • On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [148]

Problems

  • The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [149]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
  • The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [150] [151]
  • You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [152]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library needs you!

We hope The Wikipedia Library has been a useful resource for your work. TWL is expanding rapidly and we need your help!

With only a couple hours per week, you can make a big difference for sharing knowledge. Please sign up and help us in one of these ways:

  • Account coordinators: help distribute free research access
  • Partner coordinators: seek new donations from partners
  • Communications coordinators: share updates in blogs, social media, newsletters and notices
  • Technical coordinators: advise on building tools to support the library's work
  • Outreach coordinators: connect to university libraries, archives, and other GLAMs
  • Research coordinators: run reference services



Send on behalf of The Wikipedia Library using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 July 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability. Legobot (talk) 00:05, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [154]
  • There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [155]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [156]

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

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 July 2015

Tech News: 2015-30

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
  • You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [157]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [158]

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

03:06, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 July 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Verifiability. Legobot (talk) 00:07, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

Recent changes

Problems

  • There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
  • There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [164]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
  • JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [165]

Meetings

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

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

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thank you for answering that RfC on translation. I had gone to the page and knew what the argument was, but I couldn't find the policy. I figured someone who did know the policy and could quote it easily might OTOH not have realized what the RfC was asking from just their question, which seemed like it was stated kind of obtusely. valereee (talk) 14:02, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 July 2015

Tech News: 2015-32

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

Recent changes

  • The ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
    • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [166]
    • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [167] [168] [169] [170]
  • The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [171]
  • MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [172]
  • Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [173]

Problems

  • There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [174]
  • We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [175]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 August 2015

VisualEditor News #4—2015

Read this in another language • Local subscription list • Subscribe to the multilingual edition

Did you know?

You can add quotations marks before and after a title or phrase with a single click.

Select the relevant text. Find the correct quotations marks in the special character inserter tool (marked as Ω in the toolbar).

Screenshot showing the special character tool, selected text, and the special character that will be inserted


Click the button. VisualEditor will add the quotation marks on either side of the text you selected.

Screenshot showing the special character tool and the same text after the special character has been inserted


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

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.

Wikimania

The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about VisualEditor and the future of editing.

Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince, जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.

For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).

For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%).  There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).

We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. Thank you to the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.

Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. 

In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.  

Future changes

The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.

On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.

Let's work together

  • Share your ideas and ask questions at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.
  • Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help.
  • If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
  • Please file requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
  • The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
  • The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre directly, so that she can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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

  • MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [176]
  • The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [177]
  • You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [178]
  • You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [179]
  • It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [180]
  • JavaScript authors:
  • The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [185]

Problems

  • More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [186]
  • Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [187]
  • Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [188]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [189]
  • You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [190]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [191]

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

14:58, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Article titles

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Article titles. Legobot (talk) 00:06, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 August 2015

Tech News: 2015-34

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

  • Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [192] [193] [194]
  • Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [195]

Problems

  • Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [196] [197]
  • On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [198]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
  • You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [199]

Meetings

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

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

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

L.A. Noire (2011 video game)

Hi Diego Moya. I noticed you created the L.A. Noire (2011 video game) page with nothing but a link to L.A. Noire. I turned the page into a redirect into that page, and looking at the target article, I think that's what you probably meant to do, but I wanted to make sure. Thanks, Mz7 (talk) 20:51, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 August 2015

Tech News: 2015-35

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

Recent changes

  • Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [200]

Problems

  • There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [201]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Templates for discussion

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Templates for discussion. Legobot (talk) 00:07, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Console software logs

Please stop quietly reverting against established policy and consensus. I have posted on the Talk page of each article multiple times to justify my edits (most recently [202]), citing project pages widely accepted as consensus, citing the AFD discussion where the only arguments for keeping the logs in all their copy-pasted glory were WP:IJUSTLIKEIT or WP:ITSUSEFUL, and inviting others to participate. On most of these Talk pages, no one has responded. If you feel so strongly about it, please join in the discussion where I’m currently the only participant, and let’s build some consensus and fix some seriously problematic sections. Otherwise, please self-revert so I can get on with trying to rewrite the whole thing. Thank you. —67.14.236.50 (talk) 07:00, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject TAFI

Hello, Diego Moya. You're invited to join WikiProject Today's articles for improvement, a project dedicated to significantly improving articles with collaborative editing in a week's time.

Feel free to nominate an article for improvement at the project's Article nomination board. If interested in joining, please add your name to the list of members. Thanks for your consideration. North America1000 08:59, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 August 2015

Tech News: 2015-36

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

Recent changes

  • VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [203][204]
  • The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [205]
  • VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [206]
  • Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [207]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

21:37, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 September 2015

Tech News: 2015-37

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

Recent changes

  • You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [209]
  • A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [210]
  • You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [211]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [212]
  • The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [213][214]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
  • The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [215]
  • The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [216][217]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [218]
  • Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [219][220]

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

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Disney Alice Picture

Hi Diego! I noticed that you were the uploader for the lovely Disney Alice picture. I was wondering if the article could get a full-length image of the character from the trailer, because her whole outfit is iconic, not just her blonde hair and blue dress. What do you think about this? Rapunzel-bellflower (talk) 19:59, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Hello, @Rapunzel-bellflower: I did not originally upload the image, merely rescued it when it was deleted from Commons (though it has since been restored). I don't have access to the trailer, you may want to ask User:Aylaross who is listed as the original uploader there. Diego (talk) 11:42, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Or better yet, you can capture the image yourself! I've just found the original Alice's trailer online at Youtube. Diego (talk) 11:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
Oh, thank you! I'll see what I can do. Rapunzel-bellflower (talk) 19:04, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 September 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Administrators

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Administrators. Legobot (talk) 00:04, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

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

Recent changes

  • You can now use the Wikidata query service. [221]
  • Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [222]
  • Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [223][224]

Problems

  • There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [225]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [226]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [227]
  • The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [228]

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

16:18, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 September 2015

Tech News: 2015-39

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 now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [229][230]
  • Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [231][232][233][234]
  • More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [235]
  • The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [236]

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [237]
  • Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [238][239]
  • UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [240]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
  • The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [241]
  • You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [242]
  • Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [243]

Meetings

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

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 September 2015

Please comment on Talk:Papineau (electoral district)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Papineau (electoral district). Legobot (talk) 00:05, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

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

  • In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [244]
  • UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [245]
  • You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [246]
  • When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [247]
  • You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [248]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [249]
  • MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [250]

Problems

  • Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [251][252]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
  • There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [253]
  • The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [254]

Meetings

Future changes

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

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

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2015

Tech News: 2015-41

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

  • The link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [256]
  • The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [257]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [258]
  • UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [259]
  • A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [260]

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

18:33, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor update

This note is only delivered to English Wikipedia subscribers of the visual editor's newsletter.

The location of the visual editor's preference has been changed from the "Beta" tab to the "Editing" section of your preferences on this wiki. The setting now says Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta. This aligns en.wiki with almost all the other WMF wikis; it doesn’t mean the visual editor is complete, or that it is no longer “in beta phase” though.

This action has not changed anything else for editors: it still honours editors’ previous choices about having it on or off; logged-out users continue to only have access to wikitext; the “Edit” tab is still after the “Edit source” one. You can learn more at the visual editor’s talk page.

We don’t expect this to cause any glitches, but in case your account no longer has the settings that you want, please accept our apologies and correct it in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences. Thank you for your attention, Elitre (WMF) -16:32, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 October 2015

Tech News: 2015-42

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

Recent changes

  • The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [261]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [262]
  • Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [263]

Meetings

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

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

16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Redirect

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Redirect. Legobot (talk) 00:04, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q3 2015

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 8, No. 3 — 3nd Quarter, 2015
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q3 2015, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to sign up on the distribution list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:55, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 October 2015

Tech News: 2015-43

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

Recent changes

  • Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The Recurrent item icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The For technical readers icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
  • Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [264]

Problems

  • A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [265]
  • Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [266]
  • The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [267]

Changes this week

  • Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [268]
  • Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [269][270][271][272]

Meetings

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

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

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

You are in conflict with Wikipedia rules

You recently reverted a change that originally removed biased and harmful text from User:Chire that is known to have masive a WP:COI in adding harmful text to the Cdrtools article.

Please revert your edit in special as the text you removed is a neutral explanation for the biased claims from User:Chire. Schily (talk) 12:07, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

You can ask for a WP:THIRDOPINION, on whether the added text is neutral, or not. The text I added is well sourced, based on statements by Linux Torvalds. I second Diego's opinion that you should not be allowed to edit the article. I do not like your biased censoring of other opinions: Linus said, what he said. It's a sourced fact, even if you don't like it. He did say LUNs do not make sense, and he did say that you shouldn't use this to identify devices on Linux. Check the sources. And Linus is a reliable source for Linux, isn't he? --Chire (talk) 14:03, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 October 2015

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • October 2015

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

We did it!

In July, we launched five pilot WikiProjects: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. We also use the new design, named "WPX UI," on WikiProject Women in Technology, Women in Red, WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health. We are currently looking for projects for the next round of testing. If you are interested, please sign up on the Pilots page.

Shortly after our launch we presented at Wikimania 2015. Our slides are on Wikimedia Commons.

Then after all that work, we went through the process of figuring out whether we accomplished our goal. We reached out to participants on the redesigned WikiProjects, and we asked them to complete a survey. (If you filled out your survey—thank you!) While there are still some issues with the WikiProject tools and the new design, there appears to be general satisfaction (at least among those who responded). The results of the survey and more are documented in our grant report filed with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work continues!

There is more work that needs to be done, so we have applied for a renewal of our grant. Comments on the proposal are welcome. We would like to improve what we have already started on the English Wikipedia and to also expand to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Why those? Because they are multilingual projects and because there needs to be better coordination across Wikimedia projects. More details are available in the renewal proposal.

How can the Wikimedia Foundation support WikiProjects?

The Wikimedia Developer Summit will be held in San Francisco in January 2016. The recently established Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in investigating what technical support they can provide for WikiProjects, i.e., support beyond just templates and bots. I have plenty of opinions myself, but I want to hear what you think. The session is being planned on Phabricator, the Wikimedia bug tracker. If you are not familiar with Phabricator, you can log in with your Wikipedia username and password through the "Login or Register: MediaWiki" button on the login page. Your feedback can help make editing Wikipedia a better experience.


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 09:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

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

Changes this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [273]
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [274][275]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [276][277]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [278]

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

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Conflict of interest warning

Hello, Diego. We welcome your contributions to the encyclopedia, but when you have an external relationship with some of the people, places or things you have written about in the article cdrtools, you may have a conflict of interest. People with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. For information on how to contribute to Wikipedia when you have a conflict of interest, see the conflict of interest guideline and frequently asked questions for organizations. In particular, please:

  • avoid editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, its competitors, or projects and products you or they are involved with;
  • instead, propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (see the {{request edit}} template);
  • avoid linking to the Wikipedia article or website of your organization in other articles (see WP:SPAM);
  • exercise great caution so that you do not violate Wikipedia's content policies.

Please familiarize yourself with relevant policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, sourcing, and autobiographies. You have a tendency to misunderstand the spirit and letters of our policies, and you have been warned in the past about your conflict of interest with cdrtools. Please refrain from editing the article directly and limit yourself to adding comments at the talk page, or you could be topic banned sooner rather than later. Schily (talk) 11:01, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

@Schily: I do not have any external relationship with cdrtools. You really, really need to understand what our policies are actually saying before accusing people of not following them. Copy-pasteing random templates without assessing their meaning or whether they apply – it makes you look careless, as if you don't really know what you're saying. Diego (talk) 12:24, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, you have a relationship with Debian and as Debian is the attacking party in case of cdrtools, you should know that you of course have a conflict of interest. As long as you make biased edits that harm cdrtools, you are not allowed to work on the cdrtools page. Schily (talk) 12:28, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
Then you're telling a lie, because I don't have any relationship with Debian. Diego (talk) 12:35, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
Well, I know that User Chire is part of Debian and searching for "Diego Moya and Debian" gives many hits. You also made posts that make it very obvious that you are a non-neutral party with respect to cdrtools. The speudonym "Chire" is definitely in a hard conflict of interest with cdrtools. If you like to continue to edit this article, you should act neutral. Schily (talk) 12:48, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
That is your evidence to claim that I have a relationship with Debian? That putting both names in a search box return non-zero hits???
I hate to break this news for you, but search engines are not infallible oracles that grant perfect knowledge; they have false positives. One of the highest rated links is this one where "Diego Chaparro" and "Rodrigo Moya" are having a conversation in a debian's list; I'm neither of them. This other result from the first page of search results has my name because I happened to submit a translation of a few sentences for txt2regex, which happens to be included in Debian but AFAIK is not part of it. If that's the quality of your evidence, I firmly request that you immediately stop casting aspersions against me.
As for my neutrality, you're entitled to your opinion. Mine is that I'm acting neutrally by sticking to what sources that I consider reliable have written about the topic and is relevant to it. If you disagree, you have options to gather external opinions to settle the argument; use them, instead of engaging in useless name-calling. Diego (talk) 13:04, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
If you are not related to Debian, why don't you just try to act neutral? Schily (talk) 13:13, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
I do. The way I act is what I consider to be neutral. Diego (talk) 13:22, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
As mentioned on the cdrtools talk page already, you could verify neutrality by reverting your removal of the neutral information related to the SCSI CAM standard that explains that the vast majority of platforms do not support /dev/ based access at all. Schily (talk) 13:38, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
That source does not mention /dev or its benefits/drawbacks at all, does it? --Chire (talk) 14:12, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Category talk:Establishments

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VisualEditor News #5—2015

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Did you know?
You can use the visual editor on smartphones and tablets.

Screenshot showing the menu for switching from the wikitext editor to VisualEditor

Click the pencil icon to open the editor for a page. Inside that, use the gear menu in the upper right corner to "Switch to visual editing".

The editing button will remember which editing environment you used last time, and give you the same one next time. The desktop site will be switching to a system similar to this one in the coming months.

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 fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

Educational features: The first time you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.

Links:  It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558)  These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.

Uploads:  Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.

Mobile:  Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use the visual editor on any size of device. (T85630)  Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.

Rich editing tools:  You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925)  There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227 and T113354)  When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.

On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.

Future changes

You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.

Let's work together

If you can't read this in your favorite 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!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 04:16, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Halloween cheer!

Happy Halloween!

Hello Diego Moya:
Thanks for all of your contributions to improve Wikipedia, and have a happy and enjoyable Halloween!
    – North America1000 23:39, 31 October 2015 (UTC)


Send Halloween cheer by adding {{subst:Happy Halloween}} to user talk pages with a friendly message.
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The Signpost: 28 October 2015

Tech News: 2015-45

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 now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [279]
  • If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [280]
  • Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [281]

Problems

  • On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [282]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [283]
  • Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [284]

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

16:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:IPad1stGen.jpg

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:IPad1stGen.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at the discussion if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 15:16, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 November 2015

Tech News: 2015-46

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

  • Superprotect has been removed. [285]
  • You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [286]
  • JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [287]

Problems

  • Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [288]

Changes this week

  • Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [289]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

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17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Jedediah Smith

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Jedediah Smith. Legobot (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 November 2015

Tech News: 2015-47

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

Changes this week

  • You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [292]
  • Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [293]
  • The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
  • Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [294]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [295][296]

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

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 November 2015

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability 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, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability 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, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

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

Recent changes

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [297]

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

semi-protection for cdrtools

Hi Diego! I think cdrtools and its talk page, as well as cdrkit and its talk page would all greatly benefit from infinite semi-protection. You might have noticed that from time to time (but since several years now) some editors we both know switch to IP-editing to hide their identities and attack cdrtools. If you also think that infinite semi-protection would reduce the noise these anonymous editors keep adding, would you agree in supporting such a request? Important: Since several years now, all IP-based edits in cdrtools (and most of the edits in the talk page) are from the same editors who were/are involved in edit wars. On the other side, neither me nor Schily did ever use IP-editing. In case you would only agree with infinite semi-protection for the cdrtools article, I'll limit my request to that article. If you don't agree with infinite semi-protection, then that's OK. I won't enter any process anything. Thank you. Kind regards, Ekkt0r (talk) 16:51, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi Diego, I believe this is how you could show us that you are really non-biased as you claim. So please help to help to defend against the attacks from currently mainly two people that edit without being logged in when they add text that they know to be highly non-neutral. Schily (talk) 11:41, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi, I pulled the text back as we have new attempts for edit warring by well known people who act using IP addresses. We need to deal with this problem from repeated adding of unsourced claims and for removing maintenance tags even though such a tag was added because a given citation does not confirm the claim it was added to. Schily (talk) 22:41, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
You must stop your COI edits. The source says the ioctrl was added because cdrecord needed them. It is in the source, but you do not want to see, so you added false "failed verification" to make it look false. Do you not want it to say Linus added them because of cdrecord, because you do not like him? Do you have a better source that it was added because of other programs? Why would another program need a ioctrl that always returns 0? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.52.32.29 (talk) 23:46, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

please look at cdrkit and libburnia

Hi I have added that both cdrkit and libburnia can burn as a normal user when they have write permission to /dev/cdrom. Scily removing these edits, even though I have tested both of these programs as normal user and ben able to burn dvds. Could you please look into this as you had dealings with 10:38, 25 November 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Knutjb (talk • contribs)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:User pages

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The Signpost: 25 November 2015

Tech News: 2015-49

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

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

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [298]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [299]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [300][301]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [302]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [303]

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16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

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The Signpost: 02 December 2015

Tech News: 2015-50

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

  • Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [304]

Problems

  • Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [305]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [306]
  • IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [307]
  • You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [308]
  • It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [309]
  • You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [310]
  • UploadWizard will look a bit different. [311]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
  • New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [312]

Meetings

Future changes

  • A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [313]

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17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 December 2015

Tech News: 2015-51

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

Changes this week

  • Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [314]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Administrators/RFC on inactivity 2015

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Administrators/RFC on inactivity 2015. Legobot (talk) 00:04, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 December 2015

Season's Greetings!

Hello Diego Moya: Enjoy the holiday season and upcoming winter solstice, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, North America1000 19:00, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

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

Recent changes

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015

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Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

Screenshot showing a pop-up dialog for switching from the wikitext editor to VisualEditor
If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:
Screenshot showing a drop-down menu in Special:Preferences

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

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 fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

  • Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
    • Remember my last editor,
    • Always give me the visual editor if possible, 
    • Always give me the source editor, and 
    • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the current state for people using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
  • Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite 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!

Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 December 2015

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee

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The Signpost: 06 January 2016

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q4 2015

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 8, No. 4 — 4th Quarter, 2015
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q4 2015, the project has:

Content

Project Navigation
To receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to sign up on the distribution list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:35, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:Art of videogames-Advances in mechanics.jpg

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Art of videogames-Advances in mechanics.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at the discussion if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 23:51, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-02

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

  • Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [319]

Changes this week

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [324]
  • The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [325][326]
  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [327][328]
  • The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 January 2016

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot (talk) 00:10, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03

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

  • You will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [329]
  • Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [330]

Changes this week

  • The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [331]
  • MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [332]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).

Meetings

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

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

17:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 6

Newsletter • January 2016

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

What comes next

Some good news: the Wikimedia Foundation has renewed WikiProject X. This means we can continue focusing on making WikiProjects better.

During our first round of work, we created a prototype WikiProject based on two ideas: (1) WikiProjects should clearly present things for people to do, and (2) The content of WikiProjects should be automated as much as possible. We launched pilots, and for the most part it works. But this approach will not work for the long term. While it makes certain aspects of running a WikiProject easier, it makes the maintenance aspects harder.

We are working on a major overhaul that will address these issues. New features will include:

  • Creating WikiProjects by simply filling out a form, choosing which reports you want to generate for your project. This will work with existing bots in addition to the Reports Bot reports. (Of course, you can also have sections curated by humans.)
  • One-click button to join a WikiProject, with optional notifications.
  • Be able to define your WikiProject's scope within the WikiProject itself by listing relevant pages and categories, eliminating the need to tag every talk page with a banner. (You will still be allowed to do that, of course. It just won't be required.)

The end goal is a collaboration tool that can be used by WikiProjects but also by any edit-a-thon or group of people that want to coordinate on improving articles. Though implemented as an extension, the underlying content will be wikitext, meaning that you can continue to use categories, templates, and other features as you normally would.

This will take a lot of work, and we are just getting started. What would you like to see? I invite you to discuss on our talk page.


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 January 2016

Tech News: 2016-04

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 now follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [333][334]
  • Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [335]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [336]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [337]
  • The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [338]
  • Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [339]

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

16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 January 2016

Data Wrangling VS Data Preparation

Hi Diego Moya. I am affiliated with Paxata, whose page I brought up to Good Article status with a COI. I noticed that you merged the "data munging" and "data wrangling" pages a few years back and was hoping to tap your expertise to ask about "data preparation".

From what I can tell, "data preparation" is virtually synonymous with "data wrangling", but appears to be the more common name.

This Stanford paper defines "data wrangling" as a "process of iterative data exploration and transformation that enables analysis." This Glossary defines "data preparation" as a "pre-processing step in which data from one or more sources is cleaned and transformed to improve its quality prior to its use in business analytics." That sounds like basically the same thing? Then i started doing Google, Scholar and News searches and found that in each case "Data Preparation" was the more commonly used name by five-fold or more.

I was going to submit a renaming discussing for something like "Data preparation, also known as data wrangling or data munging," but I wanted to swing it by you first to see if I was missing something or making some mistake. David King, Ethical Wiki (CorporateM) (Talk) 21:36, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi David King, I'm no expert in data wrangling although I've worked professionally in bulding some data workflows in the past; I'm certainly not expert in the terminology, not being an English native. I did the merge because the sources I found described the same activity for both terms.
Are you sure that one is the article you want, and not Data pre-processing? I've seen references using "data preparation" as one step in the context of data mining, just like "pre-processing", while "munging" and "wrangling" seem to refer to the activity in a more general context, i.e. cleaning data for any use (including visualization) and not just mining.
We have a mess with multiple related articles covering very similar terms with different names (cleansing, scraping, curation, fusion, integration, semantic maping...) I think we would need a broad concept article that described the general idea, and which included references explaining what particular names are used in what contexts, if you're up to the task. The best I could do at the time was linking all them from the See also section of Data wrangling. Diego (talk) 19:38, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05

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

Problems

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [340]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [341][342]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [343]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [344]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [345][346]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [347]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [348][349][350]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [351][352]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [353]


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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-06

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

Recent changes

  • Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [354]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [355]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [356]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [357][358]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [359][360]
  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [361][362][363]

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

18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

Space barnstar

The Space Barnstar
For your quick involvement in the development of the article Gravitational-wave observation which is noted on Wikipedia's main page In the news section! --Pine✉ 20:32, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-07

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

  • You can now edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [364]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [365]

Problems

  • A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [366][367]

Changes this week

  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [368][369]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [370]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [371]

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

16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. Legobot (talk) 04:29, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2016

Tech News: 2016-08

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

Problems

  • There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [374][375]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [376]

Meetings

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

18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 7

Newsletter • February 2016

This month:

One database for Wikipedia requests

Development of the extension for setting up WikiProjects, as described in the last issue of this newsletter, is currently underway. No terribly exciting news on this front.

In the meantime, we are working on a prototype for a new service we hope to announce soon. The problem: there are requests scattered all across Wikipedia, including requests for new articles and requests for improvements to existing articles. We Wikipedians are very good at coming up with lists of things to do. But once we write these lists, where do they end up? How can we make them useful for all editors—even those who do not browse the missing articles lists, or the particular WikiProjects that have lists?

Introducing Wikipedia Requests, a new tool to centralize the various lists of requests around Wikipedia. Requests will be tagged by category and WikiProject, making it easier to find requests based on what your interests are. Accompanying this service will be a bot that will let you generate reports from this database on any wiki page, including WikiProjects. This means that once a request is filed centrally, it can syndicated all throughout Wikipedia, and once it is fulfilled, it will be marked as "complete" throughout Wikipedia. The idea for this service came about when I saw that it was easy to put together to-do lists based on database queries, but it was harder to do this for human-generated requests when those requests are scattered throughout the wiki, siloed throughout several pages. This should especially be useful for WikiProjects that have overlapping interests.

The newsletter this month is fairly brief; not a lot of news, just checking in to say that we are hard at work and hope to have more for you soon.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 February 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:04, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi

Wikipedia:A note regarding BRD had already been nominated for deletion once. When you added {{mfd}} it was linking to the old discussion. Please comment here: Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:A_note_regarding_BRD_(2nd_nomination) and please look at the instructions Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 11:43, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #1—2016

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?
Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features.
Screenshot showing a pop-up menu for column operations in a table
If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.

Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.

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 fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.

Recent changes

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.

Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.

The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:

  • Remember my last editor,
  • Always give me the visual editor if possible,
  • Always give me the source editor, and
  • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)

The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers would like to know how well the visual editor works in your language. They particularly want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic and others.

Let's work together

If you aren't reading this in your favorite 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. Thanks!

– Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-09

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

Recent changes

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [377][378]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [379][380]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [381]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [382]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [383]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [384]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Notability. Legobot (talk) 04:28, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-10

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

  • Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [385]
  • Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [386]
  • The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [387]
  • It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [388]
  • Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [389]

Problems

  • Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [390]
  • The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [391]
  • The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [392]
  • You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [393]
  • Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [394]

Changes this week

  • Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [395]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
  • Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [396]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [397]
  • The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [398]

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

20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:01, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 March 2016

Tech News: 2016-11

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [401]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [402]

Meetings

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

18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Videos

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Videos. Legobot (talk) 04:27, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-12

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

Problems

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [403]

Changes this week

  • It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [404]
  • You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [405]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [406]

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

16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-13

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

Problems

  • Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [409]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
  • You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [410]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [411]
  • Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

  • Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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

19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot (talk) 04:28, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-14

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

  • You can filter Special:Log in more detail. [412]
  • Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [413]

Changes this week

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

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

22:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q1 2016

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 9, No. 1 — 1st Quarter, 2016
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Project At a Glance
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:15, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

How to switch between editing environments
Part of the toolbar in the visual editor
Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.
Part of the toolbar in the wikitext editor
Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-15

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

  • The visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [414][415]
  • Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [416][417]
  • ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [418]
  • The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [419]

Problems

  • There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [420]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
  • The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [421]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [422]

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

20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Infobox film

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Template talk:Infobox film. Legobot (talk) 04:28, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-16

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 filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [423][424]
  • You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [425]
  • MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [426]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [427]
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

Meetings

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20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8

Newsletter • March / April 2016

This month:

Transclude article requests anywhere on Wikipedia

In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.

Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)

With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: {{Wikipedia Requests}}. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying article=, category=, or wikiproject=, and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do {{Wikipedia Requests|category=Living people}}. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!

Help us build our list!

The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.

If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Requests#Transition project and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.

An open database means new tools

WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.

And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.

Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name s52475__wpx_p. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called projectindex. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!

On the horizon
  • The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
  • The WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.


Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-17

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

Problems

  • Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [428]
  • When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
  • Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [429]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [430]
  • It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [431]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [432]

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

21:02, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-18

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

Recent changes

  • The visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [433]

Problems

Changes this week

Meetings

Future changes

  • Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [436]

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

20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Words to watch

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Words to watch. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-19

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

  • Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3. [437]
  • You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [438]
  • Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC. [439][440]
  • You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor). [441]
  • Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [442]
  • The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [443]
  • Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [444]
  • Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [445]

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [446]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems. [447]

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

23:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-20

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

  • Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth. [448]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [449]

Changes this week

  • Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later. [450]
  • Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [451]
  • A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [452]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5. [453]

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16:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. Legobot (talk) 04:28, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Hovercards prefs

Hello, you may want to participate and help publicize the voting for Hovercards preferences here. Thanks!--Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21

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

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [455]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [456]

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

18:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-22

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

  • There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module. [457]

Problems

  • A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review. [458][459]
  • CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [460]

Changes this week

  • When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place. [461]
  • The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [462]
  • A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki. [463][464]
  • Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason. [465]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).

Meetings

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

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

16:19, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Legobot (talk) 04:25, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:13, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-23

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

Changes this week

  • The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in Vector as in other skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week. [468]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).

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

20:51, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-24

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

Recent changes

Changes this week

  • You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [474]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [475]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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

18:41, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 June 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:58, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

subpage move

Hi Diego Moya, I noticed you moved User:Diego Moya/subpage to "User:Draft:User:Diego Moya/subpage", which is outside of your userspace. The account "Draft:User:Diego Moya" is not an account, and for the sake of housekeeping, I've userfied it by moving it to User:Diego Moya/subpage2. Just a friendly FYI. Thanks — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 02:31, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure. Legobot (talk) 04:27, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-25

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

Recent changes

  • Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [476]

Changes this week

  • The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [477][478]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [479]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [480]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

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19:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 9

Newsletter • May / June 2016

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, featuring the first screenshot of our new CollaborationKit software!

Harej (talk) 00:23, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-26

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

Recent changes

  • The ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [481]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [482]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [483]

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [486]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [487]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [488]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [489][490][491]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [492]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [493]

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

15:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #2—2016

Editing News #2—2016 Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

It's quick and easy to insert a references list.

Screenshot showing a dropdown menu with many items

Place the cursor where you want to display the references list (usually at the bottom of the page). Open the "Insert" menu and click the "References list" icon (three books).

If you are using several groups of references, which is relatively rare, you will have the opportunity to specify the group. If you do that, then only the references that belong to the specified group will be displayed in this list of references.

Finally, click "Insert" in the dialog to insert the References list. This list will change as you add more footnotes to the page.

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 fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.

Recent changes

The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.

The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.

Future changes

The "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.

The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

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!

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 21:09, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

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