This is an archive of past discussions with User:Path slopu. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Voting for proposals in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey, which determines what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year, will take place from 8 December through 21 December. In particular, there are sections regarding administrators and anti-harassment.
The ISS has been continuously occupied for the last 20 years! Expedition 1 arrived on 2 November 2000 with the first long-term residents. That’s longer then Wikipedia has existed.
Arianespace had a launch failure after liftoff of its Vega rocket on the 17th November. Two satellites were lost due to an integration error of the fourth stage.
This is an image of the ISS from December 9, 2000. Almost 20 years ago, this image is one of a series of 70mm frames taken onboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. With the ISS being continuously occupied for the last 20 years, this shows how the space station has developed over the years.
Since October, 43 new pages have been added to Spaceflight. There has been 2 more images which have reached FM class, both GA and B classes have 1 more article. 5 more lists have been added to the project. While 25 articles have been improved to C class as well as 24 articles reaching start class and 5 new articles added to stub class.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributors: OkayKenji and Terasail
Enterprisey's parsoid-round-trip uses Parsoid to convert wikitext to HTML and back, and then shows the result and the difference between the original wikitext and the post-conversion wikitext.
Frietjes's infoboxgap assists in renumbering infobox labels/data/classes, so that a new line can be inserted in the middle of the infobox.
Twinkle has made a number of improvements, including using a change tag to identify actions made with it and automatically filing edit requests for protected XfD nominations.
GeneralNotability's spihelper updated to 2.2.10, fixing a number of small bugs, automatically tagging globally locked socks as such in the sockpuppet template, and restoring open cases following an SPI history merge.
Enterprisey's script-installer gadget has been updated with more internationalization of messages, as well as addition of a user preference, window.scriptInstallerInstallTarget to allow controlling where new scripts are to be installed.
My apologies for the delayed issue. As always, if anyone else would like to contribute, help is appreciated. Stay safe, --DannyS712 (talk) 18:20, 1 December 2020 (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
You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [1][2]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [3][4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).
Election time: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opened for nominations on 1 December and will close on 15 December at 23:59 (UTC). Voting opens at 00:01 the following day and will continue until 31 December at 23:59, just before Auld Lang Syne. 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.
December Blitz: This will run from 13 to 19 December, and will target all Requests. Sign up now.
Drive and Blitz reports
September Drive: 67 fewer articles had copy-edit templates by this month's close. Of the 27 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and 124 articles were claimed for the drive.
October Blitz: this ran from 18 to 24 October, and focused on articles tagged for copy-edit in July and August 2020, and all Requests. Of the 13 who signed up, 11 editors copy-edited at least one article. 21 articles were claimed for the blitz.
November Drive: Of the 18 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and together claimed 134 articles. At the close of the drive, 67 fewer articles were in the backlog and we had dealt with 39 requests.
Other news
Progress report: As of 09:05, 3 December 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 663 requests (18 from 2019) since 1 January and there were 52 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 494 (see monthly progress graph above).
Annual Report for 2020: this roundup of the year's activity at the Guild is planned for publication in late January or early February.
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself 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.
Recent changes
There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).
Enterprisey's copy-section-link adds popups to section headers which has an appropriate wikilink and external link to the section.
DannyS712's FindBlacklistEntry can be used to figure out which line(s) in either the local or global spamblacklist prevent a particular url from being added.
The Watchlist Expiry feature worked on by the Community Tech team has been enabled on Wikipedia. For scripts that include watching or unwatching pages, developers may want to update their code to take advantage of the new functionality. See the documentation on mediawiki.org.
As noted in the prior issue, Enterprisey's links-in-logs script has now been implemented as part of MediaWiki core. By my count, this is his third script that was replaced by implementing the code in MediaWiki core or an extension, along with link-section-edits and abusefilter-hide-search. Additionally, his reply-link script is being converted in part to mw:Extension:DiscussionTools. Are there any other scripts that might be worth integrating directly in MediaWiki? Thoughts would be welcome at Wikipedia talk:Scripts++.
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 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [6]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [7]
Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [8]
Hello, Path slopu! Here is the December 2020 issue of TheWikiWizard.
Pilot Project, trying a smaller and different style newsletter
Here are the events of December 2020
Wikipedia News
On the French Wikipedia, the new vector skin design has already been rolled out! Check it out here!
Wikipedia will soon celebrate it's 20th Birthday very soon! Go back to 2001 by visiting nostalgia.wikipedia.org !
EN Wikipedia has more than 6,200,000 Articles!
Humor
Santa is watching you.... Don't vandalise Wikipedia, or he will reward you a block and no presents this year if you do so. (Seriously don't vandalise Wikipedia, even if santa isn't watching)
More turkey on Christmas
Notes
We are trying out this pilot style newspaper, making it easier for you, and our editors to use. Please let me know what you think about this new 'style' of newspaper!
The Wikipedia Ads section will be omitted, to make the flow of this newsletter easier. Discuss this issue here
Hello Path slopu, 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 2021. Happy editing, Mazewaxie (talk • contribs) 17:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Wishing you a joyful Christmas and a happy New year. We would like to use this occasion for giving thanks for editors like you for your works on editing, maintaining and expanding this encyclopedia. May the glorious message of peace and love fill you with joy during this wonderful season.
One Voice at Christmas-a 2016 Christmas album by the Welsh singer Aled Jones and produced by Classic FM.
"Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas!"
Hi Path slopu, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous New Year, Thanks for all your contributions to Wikipedia this past year, like this tree, you are a light shining in the darkness. Onel5969TT me12:07, 22 December 2019 (UTC)
I see that you reviewed the page yesterday. I'm wondering why user Lettler has added the speedy delete template for the second time in 2 days despite having had the article un-deleted after a review at AFD reviews. Can I just remove it ? or do I have to go through the process all over again.Grmike (talk) 01:06, 27 December 2020 (UTC)grmike
Happy New Year and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders, improvers and reviewers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. Any questions on the rules or on anything else should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. We thank Vanamonde93 and Godot13, who have retired as judges, and we thank them for their past dedication. The judges for the WikiCup this year are Sturmvogel 66 (talk·contribs·email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk·contribs·email). Good luck! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:11, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
The Chang’e 5 lander landed on the moon on December 1st, and started to gather lunar samples.
The Chang’e 5 ascent module launched from the moons surface on December 3rd and later docked with the service module in lunar orbit.
Hayabusa-2 has successfuly returned samples it collected from the asteroid 162173 Ryugu. It landed in South Australia on 5th December after a 6 year mission.
SpaceX Starship SN8 completed a 12.5km flight and successfully made it back to the launch pad however was unable to slow down and hit the ground creating an impressive fireball.
China becomes the third country to terurn samples from the moon. After the Chang'e-5 return capsule lands in Inner Mongolia at 01:59 local time on December 13th.
Mary Jackson (néeWinston, April 9, 1921 – February 11, 2005) was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at NACA, which was succeeded by NASA. She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregatedWest Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
Image of the month.
With China becoming the third country to return moon samples back to earth, this is an image of the Apollo 11Lunar Lander being worked on by Buzz Aldrin. This mission was the first time moon samples were brought back to earth. This image was taken over 51 years ago on July 21, 1969.
Since November, 99 new pages have been added to Spaceflight. 1 new file, with 2 more files reaching FM class. There 3 more articles have reached FA class, with an increase of 2 GA class articles. 4 more lists have been added to the project. While 13 articles have been improved to C class as well as 2 articles reaching start class and 66 new articles added to stub class.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributor: Terasail
By motion, standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily authorizedfor all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
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 choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [9]
You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [10]
Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [11]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [12]
When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [14]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
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 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).
MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.
Did you realize that the word "Humour" has been spelt wrong? I didn't until now! ;)
I hope you didn't edit Wikipedia straight on and Missed Christmas...
Notes
We are trying out this pilot style newspaper, making it easier for you, and our editors to use. Please let me know what you think about this new 'style' of newspaper!
The Wikipedia Ads section will be omitted, to make the flow of this newsletter easier. Discuss this issue here
Did you realize that the word "Humour" has been spelt wrong? I didn't until now! ;)
I hope you didn't edit Wikipedia straight on and Missed Christmas...
Notes
We are trying out this pilot style newspaper, making it easier for you, and our editors to use. Please let me know what you think about this new 'style' of newspaper!
The Wikipedia Ads section will be omitted, to make the flow of this newsletter easier. Discuss this issue 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.
Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [20]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).
The NASASpace Launch System test-fire of the core stage on 16 January triggered a shutdown due to an hydraulic system issue. The test which was intended to last eight minutes, lasted just over one minute.
Space X sets a new world record for the number of satellites launched. 143 small satellites were launched on a Falcon 9 on 24 January.
Since December, 23 new pages have been added to Spaceflight. Including 1 new file. Unfortunately there are 8 less GA class articles however there was an increase of 13 articles at C class.
Discuss & propose changes to The Downlink at The Downlink talk page. To unsubscribe from the newsletter remove your name from the Mailing list.
Newsletter contributor: Terasail
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
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [21]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [22]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [23][24]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [25]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [26][27]
Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.
User:Ahecht/Scripts/pageswap - version 1.4 fixes reading destination from form field if destination is not in article namespace, and fixes self redirects.
Wikipedia:XFDcloser - version 4 brings a new user interface for dialogs, some preferences for customising XFDcloser, major behind-the-scenes coding changes, and resolves various issues raised on the talkpage. Also, since version 3.16.6 non-admin soft delete closure have been allowed at TfD.
Open tasks
As a reminder, the legacy javascript globals (like accessing wgPageName without first assigning it a value or using mw.config.get('wgPageName') instead) are deprecated. If your user scripts make use of the globals, please update them to use mw.config instead. Some global interface editors or local interface administrators may edit your user script to make these changes if you don't. See phab:T72470 for more.
Miscellaneous
For people interested in creating user scripts or gadgets using TypeScript, a types-mediawiki package (GitHub, NPM) is now available that provides type definitions for the MediaWiki JS interface and the API.
A GitHub organization has been created for hosting codebases of gadgets. Users who maintain gadgets using GitHub may choose to move their repos to this organization, to ensure continued maintenance by others even if the original maintainer becomes inactive.
As always, if anyone else would like to contribute, including nominating a featured script, help is appreciated. Stay safe, and happy new year! --DannyS712 (talk) 01:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
User:Ahecht/Scripts/pageswap - version 1.4 fixes reading destination from form field if destination is not in article namespace, and fixes self redirects.
Wikipedia:XFDcloser - version 4 brings a new user interface for dialogs, some preferences for customising XFDcloser, major behind-the-scenes coding changes, and resolves various issues raised on the talkpage. Also, since version 3.16.6 non-admin soft delete closure have been allowed at TfD.
Open tasks
As a reminder, the legacy javascript globals (like accessing wgPageName without first assigning it a value or using mw.config.get('wgPageName') instead) are deprecated. If your user scripts make use of the globals, please update them to use mw.config instead. Some global interface editors or local interface administrators may edit your user script to make these changes if you don't. See phab:T72470 for more.
Miscellaneous
For people interested in creating user scripts or gadgets using TypeScript, a types-mediawiki package (GitHub, NPM) is now available that provides type definitions for the MediaWiki JS interface and the API.
A GitHub organization has been created for hosting codebases of gadgets. Users who maintain gadgets using GitHub may choose to move their repos to this organization, to ensure continued maintenance by others even if the original maintainer becomes inactive.
As always, if anyone else would like to contribute, including nominating a featured script, help is appreciated. Stay safe, and happy new year! --DannyS712 (talk) 01:17, 3 February 2021 (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
The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [28]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [29]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [30][31]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [32]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [33]
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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [34][35]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [36]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
THESE STATEMENTS ARE NOT TRUE/NOT GOOD ADVICE. ALWAYS FOLLOW THE POLICIES THAT WIKIPEDIA HAS. EVERYTHING LISTED HERE IN THIS SECTION IS SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF HUMOUR
If you have a COI, and you don't want to declare it, don't! (For all we know, a dog could be writing [or rather typing] this statement ;) )
Notes
We have a new editor on our team! Berrely will be joining the TWW team as a proofreader starting from the next issue onwards! (No more typos now...)
The Wikipedia Ads section will be omitted, to make the flow of this newsletter easier. Discuss this issue 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.
Recent changes
The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [37]
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [39]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Quotations related to Calvin Coolidge at Wikiquote
_(5247428631).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
