This is an archive of past discussions with User:Amorymeltzer. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Work on first prototype for Commons support - specifically by making it possible to have more entity types than just Item and Property (phabricator:T125822)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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. [3][4]
Changes this week
After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [5]
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 23 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
In order to deploy the ORES extension on Wikidata we need a few more people to help with a labeling campaign. ORES will help us a lot with anti-vandalism fighting.
The in other projects sidebar has graduated from beta features and is now turned on on all projects except Dutch Wikipedia. (They have their own hack.) This closes a wish that has been around since 2004 \o/ (phabricator:T2708)
Added a new identifiers section in items. Everything with datatype external identifier goes there now. Once we have all identifiers converted items should be easier to scan and understand because of the clearer structure.
We have a patch upcoming that should reduce loading time of items with a lot of sitelinks by 25%
Fixed a bug where you could not add statements with external identifier or mathematical expression datatype (phabricator:T127095)
More groundwork for Commons (making it possible to have more entities than just items and properties)
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 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. [6][7]
The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [8][9]
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. [10]
Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [11]
Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [12]
Meetings
Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [13]
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.
Wikiversity is now supported by Wikidata as well. Language links can be maintained on Wikidata now. Access to the data will follow. Welcome, sister!
Wikidata now has cross-wiki notifications as a beta feature. You can enable it in your preferences. Once enabled you will see notifications you received on the other Wikimedia wikis.
Property:P1367 ("BBC Your Paintings artist-ID") has become "Art UK artist identifier". Identifier values were replaced.
The number of claims on each item is to be included in the "page property" database table. For some items where it had been missing, it was recently added. This leads to improved coverage by database reports: without claims by site.
Mix'n'match has new catalogs: Artists of the Nationalmuseum in Sweden and Encyclopædia Britannica
Wikidata Query Service now allows to view images linked from Commons and display image galley if the query result has images. Example: Paintings by Gustav Klimt
Fixed a bug in Special:NewItem which prevented submission of the form (phabricator:T128075)
More performance work
In diffs for mathematical expressions we're now also showing the TeX source to make it possible to see changes that do not affect the rendering of the formula (phabricator:T125712)
More work on cleaning up languages for multilingual text values and labels/descriptions/aliases
You are invited to join us for the MoMA Art+Feminism edit-a-thon on Saturday, to support the expansion of Wikipedia's coverage of women in the arts.
We encourage both people new to Wikipedia, and people who have experience editing online, or have joined us for past edit-a-thon events.
This is by far our biggest event of the year (over 200 participants in the last edition), and every extra hand counts, so please join and volunteer to help us engage new communities!
10:00am - 5:00pm (drop-in anytime!) at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Building at the Museum of Modern Art, 4 West 54 Street - between 5th/6th, New York, NY 10019
Please note that this entrance is one block north of the main 53rd Street entrance, closer to 5th Avenue.
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. [14]
Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [15]
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. [16]
It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [17]
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. [18]
Problems
Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [19]
The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [20]
The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [21]
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. [22]
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. [23]
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. [24]
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. [25]
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. [26]
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. [27]
Lucie and Charlie handed in their Bachelor theses on the Article Placeholder and Editing Wikidata from Wikipedia. Work on both topics will continue. We'll publish both theses soon. A big congrats to both of them!
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent (Art+Feminism!) and upcoming edit-a-thons, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 137 West 14th Street
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! (One likely talk this month will be on the Wikidata project.) Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 18:05, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections. [28]
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. [30]
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. [31]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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. [32]
Changes this week
It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [33]
You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [34]
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. [35]
Hello, Amorymeltzer, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.
Hi Ian! Just FYI I signed up for the class, but was only doing so as an experienced Wikipedian to help give an intro and some tips/best practices to the other people in the group. I know this was automated so I won't hold it against you! ~ Amory(u • t • c)03:01, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
Yes, when I saw that I had welcomed you I assumed it must have been a mistake. I'm really glad we have an experienced Wikipedian involved. And in keeping with WP:SOCK, I just wanted to declare myself to also be also User:Guettarda.( Because you never know whether I've edited your talk page in the past.) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:33, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [38]
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. [39]
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. [40]
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.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [42]
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).
This article from Russian Wikipedia is generated only with Lua Module and Listeria, based on its Wikidata item.
If you're into Wikidata, GLAM and Facebook there is now a Facebook group for you.
There are 4 new games to help with the migration of the Persondata template on English Wikipedia.
There was a huge increase in the number of qualifiers over the last 2 weeks. It went from 2.6 to 3.7 Million due to additions of qualifiers for evidence codes on human and mouse proteins.
Interested in seeing Wikidata training sessions at Wikimania? Add yourself to interested attendees for the sessions.
March drive: Thanks to everyone who participated in last month's backlog-reduction drive. Of the 28 people who signed up, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
April blitz: The one-week April blitz, again targeting our long requests list, will run from April 17–23. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the requests page. Sign up here!
May drive: The month-long May backlog-reduction drive, with extra credit for articles tagged in March, April, and May 2015, and all request articles, begins May 1. Sign up now!
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Miniapolis, and Baffle gab1978.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
Special this month, a Mini-Video opportunity for individuals to share their Wikipedia experiences (during pre-meeting, 6-7pm, and in side-office during regular meetup). A videographer will be present to record 1-3 minute Mini-Videos of folks informally speaking, sharing anything about their Wikipedia-related projects, whether an edit-a-thon they joined, an article they edited, or a class project they were a part of, etc.
We will also follow up on plans for recent (Art+Feminism!) and upcoming edit-a-thons, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
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. [43][44]
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. [45][46]
ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [47]
The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [48]
Problems
There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [49]
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. [50]
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 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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. [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.
Recent changes
You can filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [52][53]
MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [55]
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. [56]
There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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. [57]
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. [58]
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. [59]
It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [60]
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. [61]
Substantially reduced server load for item and property displaying (phab:T132662)
There are currently some issues with the order of latitude/longitude inn coordinates in the query service map visualization. It will be fixed tonight.
Removed unsupported sort and dir parameters from the wikibase.api.RepoApi JavaScript module. This may break user JavaScript calling getEntitiesByPage (phab:T119856).
Worked on new flyers for institutions that want to cooperate with Wikidata and developers wanting to use our data (will be published on Commons once they're done)
Moved forward with internationalization of the query service interface (not on translatewiki.net yet but being worked on)
Worked on making it possible to extend SPARQL queries in simplified natural language version. It will also no longer add query prefixes when editing the query. Those are not live yet.
Fixed a bug where admins got a blank page when trying to view deleted revisions (phabricator:T132645)
Investigating issues with bad suggestions for properties when adding new statements (phabricator:T132839)
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. [62]
Problems
There was a security problem with the MobileFrontend extension. It showed information that had been oversighted. This has now been fixed. [63]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 4. It will be on all wikis from May 5 (calendar).
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. [65]
Invitation to the Bay Area WikiSalon series on May 25
Please join us in downtown San Francisco!
The last Wednesday evening of every month, wiki enthusiasts gather at Bay Area WikiSalon to collaborate, mingle, and learn about new projects and ideas.
We allow time for informal conversation and working on articles. Newcomers and experienced wiki users are encouraged to attend. We will have beverages and light snacks.
Please note: You mustregister here,and bring a photo ID that matches your registration name. The building policy is strict on this point.
Our Main Page now has a section for popular items to show you what is trending on Wikidata based on several people editing an item over the last few days
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. [66]
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. [68][69]
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). [70]
Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [71]
The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [72]
Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [73]
Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [74]
Problems
MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [75]
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
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 10 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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. [76]
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. [77]
Problems
Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [78]
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. [79]
Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [80]
A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [81]
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).
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. [82]
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon.
This month's WikiWednesday Salon, we'll meet and share with the MediaWiki software development community, through a community learning night at NYU on May 25.