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An RfC on the administrator resysop criteria was closed. 18 proposals have been summarised with a variety of supported and opposed statements. The inactivity grace period within which a new request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally, Bureaucrats are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
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
Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [1]
The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [2]
Hello and welcome to the December 2019 GOCE newsletter, an update of Guild happenings since the September edition. Our Annual Report should be ready in late January.
Election time: Nominations for the election of a new tranche of Guild coordinators to serve for the first half of 2020 will be open from 1 to 15 December. Voting will then take place and the election will close on 31 December at 23:59 UTC. Positions for Guild coordinators, who perform the important behind-the-scenes tasks that keep our project running smoothly, are open to all Wikipedians in good standing. We welcome self-nominations so please consider nominating yourself if you've ever thought about helping out; it's your Guild and it doesn't run itself!
September Drive: Of the thirty-two editors who signed up, twenty-three editors copy edited at least one article; they completed 39 requests and removed 138 articles from the backlog, bringing the backlog to a low of 519 articles.
October Blitz: This event ran from 13 to 19 October, with themes of science, technology and transport articles tagged for copy edit, and Requests. Sixteen editors helped remove 29 articles from the backlog and completed 23 requests.
November Drive: Of the twenty-eight editors who signed up for this event, twenty editors completed at least one copy edit; they completed 29 requests and removed 133 articles from the backlog.
Our December Blitz will run from 15 to 21 December. Sign up now!
Progress report: From September to November 2019, GOCE copy editors processed 154 requests. Over the same period, the backlog of articles tagged for copy editing was reduced by 41% to an all-time low of 479 articles.
Request archiving: The archiving of completed requests has now been automated. Thanks to Zhuyifei1999 and Bobbychan193, YiFeiBot is now archiving the Requests page. Archiving occurs around 24 hours after a user's signature and one of the templates {{Done}}, {{Withdrawn}} or {{Declined}} are placed below the request. The bot uses the Guild's standard "purpose codes" to determine the way it should archive each request so it's important to use the correct codes and templates.
Thanks for uploading File:Tiktok logo.svg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
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
Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [3]
There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [4]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [5]
Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [6]
Changes later this week
You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [7]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [8]
Spread the cheer by adding {{Subst:Xmas4}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Merry Christmas!!
TheSandDoctorTalk is wishing you a MerryChristmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!
Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
Merry Christmas, K6ka/Archives/2019! Or Season's Greetings or Happy Winter Solstice! As the year winds to a close, I would like to take a moment to recognize your hard work and offer heartfelt gratitude for all you do for Wikipedia. And for all the help you've thrown my way over the years. May this Holiday Season bring you nothing but joy, health and prosperity.CAPTAIN RAJU(T)17:49, 20 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hello K6ka, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2020. Happy editing, Onel5969TT me15:17, 21 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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 6 January 2020.
Recent changes
All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [9]
Hello K6ka. I noticed that you were the one who recently rev-deleted some entries at Belle Delphine. I wondered if this was related to material added by Honestyfirst10 (Special:Contributions/Honestyfirst10) that seems to have used unreliable sources (also reverted since). I'm leaving this at your discretion if you think it also deserves revdel. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 02:16, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]