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
There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [1]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [2]
You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [3][4]
Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
Further work on header section redesign
Tweaks to the sitelink section
Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [6]
UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [7]
All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [8]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [9][10][11]
You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [12][13]
It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [14]
You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).
Future changes
Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [15]
In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [16]
مرحباً، قمت مضطراً برفع الفعل في المرشح 44 الخاص بإضافة ألفاظ نابية إلى درجة المنع، بسبب حالة التخريب الواسع الحاصلة. --زاهرنقاش17:24، 9 فبراير 2015 (ت ع م)[ردّ]
Wikidata weekly summary #145
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
Fixed editing of qualifiers
Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [20]
In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [21]
The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first. [22]
Meetings
The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [23]
You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [24]
You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [25]
هل يعلم أحدكم لماذا الفيديوهات الإرشادية: كيف تنشئ مقالة في ويكيبيديا؟ ملف:How to Create Article in Arabic Wikipedia.ogg و كيف تعدل مقالة في ويكيبيديا؟ ملف:How to Edit Article in Arabic Wikipedia.ogg غير موجودة؟ --C≡N- (نقاش) 23:41، 20 فبراير 2015 (ت ع م)[ردّ]
Wikidata weekly summary #146
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
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 new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [30]
It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [31]
Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [32]
Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [33]
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 February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [34]
