News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2022).
Guideline and policy news
- A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
- An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.
Technical news
Arbitration
- An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
- The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
- The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
- Voting for candidates for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees is open until 6 September.
Tech News: 2022-36
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 later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).
- Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 6 September at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
- On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar's row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of
#p-namespaces
should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink
function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages
, the new id for this row. Examples are available. [1][2]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
23:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Tech News: 2022-37
01:48, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Two database fields in the
templatelinks
table are now being dropped: tl_namespace
and tl_title
. Any queries that rely on these fields need to be changed to use the new normalization field called tl_target_id
. See T299417 for more information. This is part of normalization of links tables. [5][6]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar).
- In Kartographer maps, you can use icons on markers for common points of interest. On Tuesday, the previous icon set will be updated to version maki 7.2. That means, around 100 new icons will be available. Additionally, all existing icons were updated for clarity and to make them work better in international contexts. [7][8]
Future changes
- In a group discussion at Wikimania, more than 30 people talked about how to make content partnership software in the Wikimedia movement more sustainable. What kind of support is acceptable for volunteer developers? Read the summary and leave your feedback.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 22:14, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Parsoid clients should be updated to allow for space-separated multi-values in the
rel
attribute of links. Further details are in T315209.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 September. It will be on all wikis from 29 September (calendar).
- Visual diffs will become available to all users, except at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias. [9]
- Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. [10] [11]
- In the Module namespace, pages ending with
.json
will be treated as JSON, just like they already are in the User and MediaWiki namespaces. [12]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 00:28, 27 September 2022 (UTC)