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The fourth fiscal quarter began the first of this month, and Collaboration Team has begun work on our new quarterly goals. In the coming months, we'll be working to release the New Filters for Edit Review beta on all wikis and then to improve the beta as much as possible based on user feedback. On that score, we're planning a round of user interviews on the new tools in May to get detailed information about usability and usefulness. If you've tried the new features and have thoughts, please share them with us in any language.
Our other focus right now is to look at what changes will be needed to spread the new filtering interface to other review pages, especially Watchlist. We're also exploring how to incorporate the tools we didn't include in the new interface in this round, like the Tag Filters, time-frame selector and Namespace filter.
New Filters for Edit review are now available on Polish, Portuguese, Persian, Russian and Turkish Wikipedias as a Beta feature. French Wikipedia and Mediawikiwiki have the filters as a Beta feature too, but without the quality and intent filters. [1]
Special:RecentChangesLinked now displays a message when no results are found for a given combination of filters. [2]
Problems
Polish Wikipedia is experiencing an issue with predictions (quality and intent filters using ORES). The different predictions are in conflict. An edit can be considered as "good" and "bad" at the same time, and the filter levels are somewhat redundant. We have formulated a plan to address this and are working on a fix, which is deployed progressively on Polish Wikipedia. [3]
The issue on Polish Wikipedia is shared by a few other wikis: Dutch, Czech and Hebrew, and Wikidata. The deployment for those wikis has been postponed to Tuesday, May 9. Wikis without this predictions problem have been deployed or will be deployed with no change on the schedule. [4]
Interestingly, the "problem" with those wikis is that they perform better than we anticipated. Once the fix is in place, the tools will work with particular simplicity on these wikis.
Future changes
English Wikipedia and all wikis without ORES prediction services will get the New Filters for Edit review on Monday, April 24. [5]
All remaining wikis will get the New Filters for Edit review on Tuesday, May 9. [6]
Wikidata edits will be added as a type of change on New Filters for Edit review. [7]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups.[12]
Problems
Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [13]
Changes this week
The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [14]
Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [15]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (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 25 April 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.
Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. This is the same thing as Tech News wrote about in issue 2017/16. You need to addmw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ) block for your scripts also, or add mediawiki.util dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. [17][18]
Problems
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre 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 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [19]
The Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [20]
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 users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [21]
There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [22]
Changes this week
When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [23]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (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 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [24][25]
Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: {{1x| sad :-{ face }}. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [26][27]
Did you know that you can review your changes visually?
When you are finished editing the page, type your edit summary and then choose "Review your changes".
In visual mode, you will see additions, removals, new links, and formatting highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.
Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.
The wikitext diff is the same diff tool that is used in the wikitext editors and in the page history.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
A new wikitext editing mode is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. The 2017 wikitext editor has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures to enable the ⧼Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-label⧽.
A new visual diff tool is available in VisualEditor's visual mode. You can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. More features will be added to this later. In the future, this tool may be integrated into other MediaWiki components. [28]
You can now use your web browser's function to switch typing direction in the new wikitext mode. This is particularly helpful for RTL language users like Urdu or Hebrew who have to write JavaScript or CSS. You can use Command+Shift+X or Control+Shift+X to trigger this. [30]
The way to switch between the visual editing mode and the wikitext editing mode is now consistent. There is a drop-down menu that shows the two options. This is now the same in desktop and mobile web editing, and inside things that embed editing, such as Flow. [31]
The Categories item has been moved to the top of the Page options menu (from clicking on the icon) for quicker access. [32] There is also now a "Templates used on this page" feature there. [33]
You can now create <chem> tags (sometimes used as <ce>) for chemical formulas inside the visual editor. [34]
Tables can be set as collapsed or un-collapsed. [35]
The Special character menu now includes characters for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and angle quotation marks (‹› and ⟨⟩) . The team thanks the volunteer developer, Tpt. [36]
A bug caused some section edit conflicts to blank the rest of the page. This has been fixed. The team are sorry for the disruption. [37]
There is a new keyboard shortcut for citations: Control+Shift+K on a PC, or Command+Shift+K on a Mac. It is based on the keyboard shortcut for making links, which is Control+K on a PC or Command+K on a Mac. [38]
Future changes
The VisualEditor team is working with the Community Tech team on a syntax highlighting tool. It will highlight matching pairs of <ref> tags and other types of wikitext syntax. You will be able to turn it on and off. It will first become available in VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode, maybe late in 2017. [39]
The kind of button used to Show preview, Show changes, and finish an edit will change in all WMF-supported wikitext editors. The new buttons will use OOjs UI. The buttons will be larger, brighter, and easier to read. The labels will remain the same. You can test the new button by editing a page and adding &ooui=1 to the end of the URL, like this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit&ooui=1 The old appearance will no longer be possible, even with local CSS changes. [40]
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 use ISBNs to automatically generate citations in the visual editor. This works on wikis that have enabled Citoid. [42]
The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using('mediawiki.util').done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [44]
Changes this week
The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [45]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages. [46][47]
Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. Tech News wrote about this last week. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. You can now see the full list of wikis with this problem and help fix them to avoid that things break later this month. You might find false positives. You can read more about what to fix. [48][49]
Older unreported changes
Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word __NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. [50][51]
“New Filters for Edit Review” beta released: As of May 9, the New Filters for Edit Review beta has been released to all wikis. The beta lets users review edits on Recent Changes using an easier and more powerful interface and many new tools, including user-defined highlighting and, on some wikis, predictive filters powered by ORES, a machine-learning program. You must opt in to the beta to try it out.
Tell us your ideas—but don’t wait: The team is focused right now in making changes to the New Filters beta. But in a few months, we’ll be moving on to other projects. So now is the time to give the new tools a try and then tell us what you think. What works well? What could make things better for you?
In the medium-term: By the end of summer, we plan to complete a suite of improvements that will, among other things: incorporate all the remaining Recent Changes tools into the new filtering interface; create new ways for reviewers to move back and forth through the filter queue; implement a “Reverted” filter; and, finally, bring the New Filters UI and tools to Watchlist.
Have time for a talk? We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchenwikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.
Wish you had ORES on your wiki? Some of the more interesting New Filters for Edit Review features are dependent on the machine-learning service ORES, which is available only on a small but growing list of wikis. For ORES to work on a wiki, volunteers from that wiki must train it by scoring some thousands of sample edits. Here’s a link that explains how the process works and how you can get it started on your wiki.
On wikis where Flagged Revisions are used, an edit highlighted as bad by ORES will not be highlighted anymore when the edit is reviewed by someone. [52]
You can highlight pages that are in your Watchlist in Recent Changes. 3 different filters are available: in watchlist, not in watchlist, new changes in watchlist. [53]
Wikidata, Dutch, Czech, Hebrew, Estonian and Finnish Wikipedia now have the new filters available as a Beta feature, and ORES is enabled by default on those wikis. [54]
All wikis now have the Recent changes Filters as a Beta feature. [55]
Users are invited to opt in to the Recent changes Filters beta when they visit the Recent Changes page. [56]
On wikis that have ORES predictions enabled by default, it is now possible to choose how to display the predictions in watchlist and recent changes pages. [57]
Future changes
It will be possible soon to save and retreive your favorite filters combinations. [58]
We are working on adding filter groups for last revisions, edits from Wikidata and reverted edits. [59][60][61]
When an article you have created is linked to a Wikidata item, you can receive a notification. Wikidata and all the Wikivoyages have it since May 9th, other wikis will follow. [62]
Special:Notifications tabs is now set to "Unread" if there are any unread messages. [63]
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 will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [67]
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
Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [68]
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 30 May 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.
Recent changes
You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [70]
When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [71]
You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [72]
New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [73]
Problems
The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [74]
Changes this week
Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [75]
You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [76]
When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [77]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [78]
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 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [79][80]
Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [81]
The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.
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 wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [82]
When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [83]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [84]
Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [85]
Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [86][87]
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
ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [88]
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [89]
Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [90]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The team is moving full speed ahead on a follow-up project to the New Filters for Edit Review beta dubbed "Integrated Filters." The name refers to the fact that we are integrating the Recent Changes tools that currently remain in the old user interface (like Namespace and Tag filters), along with some tools and capabilities from Watchlist and elsewhere, into the new Recent Changes interface.
You can get an overview of the Integrated Filters projects, and the general release strategy, on the description page of the project Phabricator board. Among the more interesting new capabilities:
Category filters: We'll be adding the ability to filter by category. This is a little tricky, since wiki categories often work in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, with the broadest categories returning the fewest results—because categories like "Science" or "Art" tend to contain not articles but other categories. So we're exploring solutions where a category search will crawl at least a layer or two down the category treat to, hopefully, bring back more useful results. [91]
User filters: We're adding the ability to filter by any username, similar to what's available already on the the User Contributions page. [92]
Live update: Users will have the ability to look at a more or less continuous flow of changes. This is a much requested feature that we expect will open up new possibilities for Recent Changes, especially for patrollers who want to see vandalism or other changes as they happen. While the updates won't truly be "live," the page updates will be frequent, similar to the way real-time tools (like RTRC or LiveRC) works. [93]
We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchenwikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.
Recent changes
It is now possible to save your favorite filters sets by using bookmarks. [94]
There were some issues with loading highlighted results when the URL was copied and pasted. This is now fixed. [97]
A "Watchlisted pages" filter group now lets reviewers use Recent Changes, and all its tools, to patrol changes to pages they've Watchlisted. If you have any feedback about how useful this is nor isn't—especially given that we plan to add the new filtering interface to the Watchlist page — let us know.
There were issues with the tools still in the older filtering UI — like the Namespace filter and the number of results selectors. These have been fixed. [98]
Now that users can save filter settings, and declare any settings they want as the Recent Changes page default, we'll be reviewing the RC page Preferences with an eye to getting rid of as many as we can. For instance, if you want to hide minor edits or Category changes by default, you can now do that right on the RC page, instead of having to go to a separate page to manage defaults.
On many Recent Changes Pages, the community has defined a large number of links that are displayed directly under the page name (example on Polish Wikipedia). Many of these links are unrelated or only peripherally related to Recent Changes, add informational complexity of the RC page. Research shows that they are used only rarely or never. We want to clarify RecentChanges page functionality, so we plan to put the links into a collapsible panel.
Should the panel default to open or closed? That is, should the default state (which users can change with one click) show the links as hidden or displayed? Let us know what you think.
The most used links are shortcuts to certain type of edits, (Mobile, Newcomers...). Users can already save their favorite filter settings to the Saved Settings menu, which should make some of the existing links redundant. We plan to provide default bookmarks for the most used filters combinations. [99]
Wikimedia Deutschland have scheduled the notifications of Wikibase notifications to Wikimedia projects: all the Wikivoyages on May 3; all the Wikipedias except en, fr, de on May 30; all other projects on June 13 and Wikipedias en, fr, de on September 5. [100]
It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications. [101]
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 <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [104]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [105]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [106]
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 a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [107]
Changes this week
Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [108]
