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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
There are no technical changes this week.
Feedback about Tech News in 2014
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 2014? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us at m:Talk:Tech/News. You can write in your language. Thank you!
The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too.
Happy new year! :) It'll be a great one for Wikidata!
Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator)
The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space.
More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages :)
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 software changes
Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [1]
You can now use the {{!}}magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [2]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [3]
The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [4]
The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [5][6][7]
The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [8]
Future changes
You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [9]
Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and testwiki:Test Wiki. An example is at testwiki:Kitten on arbitrary page.
Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically
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 download the new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. The new version shows lead images, better galleries and content from Wikidata. It also has many other new features.[10][11]
Programs and bots still can't read information about images on many wikis. You can see the list of wikis with the most files to fix. Wikipedia in Italian, Indonesian and Japanese language have the most files to fix. On the biggest wikis you should use bots. Bots can add information templates to groups of files. You can ask other tech users to help you.
Problems
All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [12]
Software changes this week
There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [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 software changes
You can now translate articles with the new ContentTranslation tool on several wikis. [14]
This week
There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [15]
12:00pm - 5:00 pm at NYPL Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue), by W 135th St
The Wikipedia training and editathon will take place in the Aaron Douglas Reading Room of the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, with a reception following in the Langston Hughes lobby on the first floor of the building at 5:00pm.
February 6–8: The third annual ArtBytes Hackathon at the Walters Art Museum! This year Wikimedia DC is partnering with the Walters for a hack-a-thon at the intersection of art and technology, and I would like to see Wikimedia well represented.
February 11: The monthly WikiSalon, same place as usual. RSVP on Meetup or just show up!
February 15: Wiki Loves Small Museums in Ocean City. Mary Mark Ockerbloom, with support from Wikimedia DC, will be leading a workshop at the Small Museum Association Conference on how they can contribute to Wikipedia. Tons of representatives from GLAM institutions will be present, and we are looking for volunteers. If you would like to help out, check out "Information for Volunteers".
I am also pleased to announce events for Wikimedia DC Black History Month with Howard University and NPR. Details on those events soon.
If you have any questions or have any requests, please email me at james.harewikimediadc.org.
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. [18]
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. [19]
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. [20][21]
Drive: Thanks to everyone who participated in January's Backlog Elimination Drive. Of the 38 people who signed up for this drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Progress report: We were able to remove August 2013 from the general copyediting backlog and November 2014 from the request-page backlog. Many thanks, everyone!
Blitz: The February Blitz will run from February 15–21 and again focuses on the requests page. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one request article. Sign up here!
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Miniapolis, Jonesey95, Biblioworm and Philg88.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
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)
Wikimedia DC celebrates Black History Month, and more!
Hello again!
Not even a week ago I sent out a message talking about upcoming events in DC. Guess what? There are more events coming up in February.
First, as a reminder, there is a WikiSalon on February 11 (RSVP here or just show up) and Wiki Loves Small Museums at the Small Museum Association Conference on February 15 (more information here).
Now, I am very pleased to announce:
Tuesday, February 17 from 10 AM to 3 PM there will be #WikiTurgy at the University of Maryland. Join fellow theatre enthusiasts for a “mass act of public dramaturgy!”
Thursday, February 19 from 10 AM to 4 PM we are hosting the Howard University Black History Edit-a-Thon. We are working in partnership with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of African-American and African diasporic history.
Tuesday, February 24 from 6 PM to 8 PM we have the Black History Month “First Edit” at NPR. Help improve Wikipedia and help others make their first edit to Wikipedia!
Finally, our monthly dinner meetup is on Saturday, February 28.
There is going to be a lot going on, and I hope you can come to some of the events!
If you have any questions or need any special accommodations, please let me know.
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. [23]
UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [24]
All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [25]
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. [26][27][28]
You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [29][30]
It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [31]
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. [32]
In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [33]
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. [37]
In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [38]
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. [39]
Meetings
The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [40]
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. [41]
You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [42]
In celebration of WikiWomen's History Month, the SF Bay Area Wikipedia community has two events in early March -- please consider attending!
First, we have an ArtAndFeminism edit-a-thon, which will take place at the Kadist Art Foundation from 12 noon to 6pm on Saturday, March 7. We'll be one of many sites worldwide participating in this edit-a-thon on March 7th. So join us as we help improve Wikipedia's coverage of women artists and their works!
Blitz: Thanks to everyone who participated in the February Blitz. Of the 21 people who signed up, eight copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Progress report: The blitz removed 16 articles from the requests list, and we're almost done with December 2014. Many thanks, everyone!
Drive: The month-long March drive begins in about a week. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Sign up here!
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Miniapolis, Jonesey95, Biblioworm and Philg88.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing 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.
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. [47]
It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [48]
Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [49]
Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [50]
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. [51]
Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
Updated the json documentation
Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
Final touches on new header design
Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
Friday, March 13: NIH Women's History Month Edit-a-Thon – 9 AM to 4 PM
In honor of Women’s History Month, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is organizing and hosting an edit-a-thon to improve coverage of women in science in Wikipedia. Free coffee and lunch served!
Saturday, March 21: Women in STEM Edit-a-Thon at DCPL – 12 PM
Celebrate Women's History Month by building, editing, and expanding articles about women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields during DC Public Library's first full-day edit-a-thon.
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 software changes
A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [52]
You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [53][54]
Software changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [55][56][57][58]
The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [59]
The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [60]
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 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [61]
Future changes
You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [62]
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 create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [63][64]
VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [65][66][67]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
In VisualEditor the "Edit beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [68][69]
The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [70][71]
You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [72][73]
You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [74][75]
If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.
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 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [76]
You are invited to join us at Barnard College for Wikipedia Day NYC 2015, a Wikipedia celebration and mini-conference for the project's 14th birthday. In addition to the party, the event will be a participatory unconference, with plenary panels, lightning talks, and of course open space sessions.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
10:00pm - 9:00 pm at Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, by W 118th St
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 21:58, 9 March 2015 (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 servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [79]
It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [81][82]
Problems
Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
A puzzle piece icon () now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [83][84]
You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [85][86]
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 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [87][88]
You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [89]
Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
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. [91]
VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [92][93][94]
When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [95]
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. [96]
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. [97]
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. [98][99][100]
All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [101]
You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [102]
VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [103]
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. [104]
You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [105]
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. [106]
You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [107]
VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [108][109][110][111]
You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
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 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
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 join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [113]
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. [123]
Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [124][125]
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. [126]
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. [127]
We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
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 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. [133][134]
All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [135]
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.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our inaugural evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities.
After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street
Featuring a keynote talk this month on Lady Librarians & Feminist Epistemologies! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 18:28, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our inaugural evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities.
After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street
Featuring a keynote talk this month on Lady Librarians & Feminist Epistemologies! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 19:28, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
March drive: Thanks to everyone who participated in last month's backlog-reduction drive. Of the 38 people who signed up, 18 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 19–25. 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 December 2013, January and February 2014 and all request articles, begins soon. 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 Miniapolis, Jonesey95, Biblioworm and Philg88.
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Wikimedia's monthly GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) newsletter now includes a Wikidata report. The draft for the first edition, covering April, may be edited and your contributions will be welcome.
Made label, description and aliases special pages easier to use
Bene* created a new Special:ListProperties special page to list properties by data type
Expanded our set of automated browser tests
Made language fallbacks work in more situations and more consistently. In particular, the entity selector now uses language fallback. This should benefit especially people who want to use Wikidata in a variant such as en-gb.
Continued work on the planned DataModel 3.0 release
Continued discussing and documenting future calendar model support
Continued work on our RDF generator
Continued work on usage tracking for labels on multilingual sites
Addshore worked on various issues regarding redirects
Addshore worked on a special page to turn an item into a redirect
Work on showing entity labels in edit summaries on history pages
Implemented change dispatching based on the new usage tracking mechanism
Fixed issue with page deletions on some Wikipedias not being reported to Wikidata
More work on straightening out date formatting and parsing
Fixed handling of scientific notation for quantity values
Term box: fixed bug causing stale info to be show, and another bug causing babel languages to be ignored sometimes.
Implemented access to other arbitrary items via the #property parser function
Bene* implemented check to make sure two properties can not have the same alias only differing in capitalization
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. [136]
VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [137]
You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [138]
If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [139]
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. [141][142][143]
If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [144]
You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [145]
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. [146][147]
There are a number of user boxes you can add to your user page to indicate interests and which wiki projects you belong to.
Development
On Tuesday, we are deploying usage tracking (no arbitrary access yet) to Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource, and subscription tracking on Wikidata. There should be no noticeable changes for users. These are necessary steps towards enabling arbitrary access in clients.
Worked on making language fallback work in the suggester (when adding a new statement or searching for an item)
More work on RDF output and the query service
Added Special:RedirectEntity for redirecting items
Investigated and working to fix JS bug on items with “invalid” values (phabricator:92975)
Did work towards having entity ids in revision histories and in diffs linked with their label (like on watchlists or in the recentchanges)
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. [148][149]
You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [150]
There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [151]
You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [152]
Problems
Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [153]
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. [154]
You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [155]
You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [156]
You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [157]
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.
We rolled out usage tracking on the first two wikis (French Wikisource and Dutch Wikipedia). Users should not notice anything. More wikis will follow in the next weeks. This is the remaining step for enabling arbitrary access on wikis other than Commons.
The students team is working hard to get a first release of the improved constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases out.
Ricordisamoa fixed the issue with long descriptions being cut off.
We fixed the focus flow in the property selector.
We improved the messages on Special:EntityData to make it more understandable.
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 a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [159][160]
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. [161]
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. [163]
A study has been published about how Wikidata can help significantly improve the quality of medical content on Wikipedia. This is why we do Wikidata! \o/
The Wikidata Menu Challenge has started and goes on to May 27. Add labels, images and pronunciation audio to a list of around 290 items to help show off the power of Wikidata at a food festival.
Hovercards also show the target's label and ID now. (Try them by turning them on in the beta features section of your preferences.)
Continued working on RDF export
More work on making it possible to add a reference right away when adding a statement (and allowing the full statement incl references to be edited at the same time)
Did more work to make usage tracking possible on multilingual wikis (namely Commons)
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. [164][165][166]
You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [167]
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. [168][169]
Problems
There was a problem that caused slow editing. [170]
Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [171]
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. [172][173]
You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [174]
When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [175]
When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [176]
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.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our next evening "WikiWednesday" salon and knowledge-sharing workshop by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
This month will also feature on our agenda: recent and upcoming editathons, the organization's Annual Meeting, and Chapter board elections.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming editathons, and other outreach activities.
After the main meeting, pizza and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street
Featuring a keynote talk this month to be determined! We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 17:43, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Past: Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) spoke about authority control in Wikidata (and sister projects) at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group Symposium, organised in conjunction with the Qatar National Library, in Doha on 13 May. His slides, with an Arabic translation, will be online soon.
Past: Wikidata editing workshop at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin
Past: Wikidata workshop for archivists of Catalan City of Justice
Upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Lyon
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Elections for the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are ongoing. Wikidata should be well represented among the voters. Go and vote!
Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource now have the arbitrary access feature. Persian Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikipedia are following today. Italian Wikipedia and all remaining Wikisource projects are following on June 1st.
English Wikipedia is running a bot to add authority control templates to many articles that are filled completely from Wikidata. Italian Wikipedia is doing so as well.
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 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. [177]
You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [178]
The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [179]
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.
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. [184]
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.
