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A company is a legal entity made up of an association of people, be they natural, legal, or a mixture of both, for carrying on a commercial or industrial enterprise.
Following an RfC, the blocking policy was changed to state that sysops must not undo or alter CheckUser or Oversight blocks, rather than should not.
A request for comment confirmed that sandboxes of established but inactive editors may not be blanked due solely to inactivity.
Technical news
Following a discussion, Twinkle's default CSD behavior will soon change, most likely this week. After the change, Twinkle will default to "tagging mode" if there is no CSD tag present, and default to "deletion mode" if there is a CSD tag present. You will be able to always default to "deletion mode" (the current behavior) using your Twinkle preferences.
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
Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [1]
Changes later this week
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [2]
When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [3]
On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).
There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPage was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [6]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new search word called articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [7][8][9]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).
The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year. [10]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use action=changecontentmodel to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [11]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).
Future changes
If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [12][13]
You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
Hello and welcome to the March newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since December 2019. All being well, we're planning to issue these quarterly in 2020, balancing the need to communicate widely with the avoidance of filling up talk pages. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
Election results: There was little changeover in the roster of Guild Coordinators, with Miniapolis stepping down with distinction as a coordinator emeritus while Jonesey95 returned as lead coordinator. The next election is scheduled for June 2020 and all Wikipedians in good standing may participate.
January Drive: Thanks to everyone for the splendid work, completing 215 copy edits including 56 articles from the Requests page and 116 backlog articles from the target months of June to August 2019. At the conclusion of the drive there was a record low of 323 articles in the copy editing backlog. Of the 27 editors who signed up for the drive, 21 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
February Blitz: Of the 15 editors who signed up for this one-week blitz, 13 completed at least one copy edit. A total of 32 articles were copy edited, evenly split between the twin goals of requests and the oldest articles from the copy-editing backlog. Full results are here.
March Drive: Currently underway, this event is targeting requests and backlog articles from September to November 2019. As of 18 March, the backlog stands at a record low of 253 articles and is expected to drop further as the drive progresses. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Help set a new record and sign up now!
Progress report: As of 18 March, GOCE copyeditors have completed 161 requests in 2020 and there was a net reduction of 385 articles from the copy-editing backlog – a 60% decrease from the beginning of the year. Well done and thank you everyone!
Election reminder: It may only be March but don't forget our mid-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 June. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.
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
Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [14][15]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 March. It will be on all wikis from 26 March (calendar).
Future changes
There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
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 will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 April. It will be on all wikis from 2 April (calendar).
Future changes
The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [17]
There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [18]
