This is an archive of past discussions with User:Rcsprinter123. 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.
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
When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [1]
When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [2]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [3][4]
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 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
November 28, 2016 was supposed to mark the end of the first round. However, we needed 16 competitors to move on, and currently only 10 have completed articles.
Thus, the judges have come together to let the participants decide what we shall do. Please complete this quick survey to let us know whether you would like a holiday break.
There will be two options for what we will do next in terms of Round 2 depending on the results of this poll.
If the survey indicates that the competitors want a break, we will have a 2nd round after the break ends with just the 10 competitors who have reviewed articles, starting in January (with a specific date TBA).
If the survey does not indicate that participants want a break, we will extend Round 1 until the end of December.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [6]
ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [7]
Changes this week
You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (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 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
BBC 12-hour Editathon - large influx of new pages & drafts expected
AfC Reviewers are asked to be especially on the look out 08:00-20:00 UTC (that's local London time - check your USA and AUS times) on Thursday 8 December for new pages. The BBC together with Wikimedia UK is holding a large 12-hour editathon. Many new articles and drafts are expected. See BBC 100 Women 2016: How to join our edit-a-thon. Follow also on #100womenwiki, and please, don't bite the newbies :) (user:Kudpung for NPR. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:02, 8 December 2016 (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
Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [9]
You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [10]
Because of work on cross-wiki watchlistsglobal renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [12]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (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 December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
On 1 January 2017, WikiCup 2017 (the 10th Annual WikiCup) will begin. This year we are trying something a little different – monetary prizes.
For the WC2017 the prizes will be as follows (amounts are based in US$ and will be awarded in the form of an online Amazon gift certificate):
First place – $200
Second & Third place – $50 each
Category prizes – $25 per category (which will be limited to FA, FL, FP, GA, and DYK for 2017). Winning a category prize does not require making it to the final round.
Note: Monetary prizes are a one-year experiment for 2017 and may or may not be continued in the future. In order to be eligible to receive any of the prizes above, the competing Wikipedia account must have a valid/active email address.
After two years as a WikiCup judge, Figureskatingfan is stepping down. We thank her for her contributions as a WikiCup judge. We are pleased to announce that our newest judge is two-time WikiCup champion Cwmhiraeth.
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 9 January 2017.
The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!
Recent changes
Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [13]
Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [14]
Problems
Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [15]
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.
Meetings
The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.
December 29th marked the end of the first round, after it was extended from its previously scheduled conclusion at the end of November. Because of the smaller pool of contestants this year, it was decided to keep sign-ups open throughout the month of December.
This extension proved to be very helpful as we saw that more users signed up and completed many reviews. Krishna Chaitanya Velaga earned an impressive 402 points, followed by Cartoon network freak with a close 338 points. Shearonink who signed up after our extension was in third with 170 points.
We had a rule clarification in Round 1 which was that many articles were being passed with blatant copyright violations and plagarism occurring in the articles. Thus, the judges have concluded that if an article is passed even if it has a copyright violation/plagarism, we will not provide points for that article as it wouldn't be considered a "complete review" under the scoring rules.
In the end, 94 articles were reviewed by 14 users who will all advance to Round 2. The judges had planned on having 16 contestants advance but since only 14 did, we are changing the pools in this round. We will be having 2 pools of 3 and 2 pools of 4 in Round 2, with the top 2 in each pool advancing to Round 3 as well as the top participant ("9th place") of all remaining competitors. Round 2 will begin on January 1 at 00:00:00 UTC and will end on January 29 at 23:59:59 UTC. Information about Round 2 and the pools can be found here.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
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 you update a page with translations on wikis with the Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed. [17]
The new version of MediaWiki was released to all wikis last week (calendar).
MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis. [18]
The live option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated. [19]
Problems
Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [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.
video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [22]
Changes this week
There is a new magic word called {{PAGELANGUAGE}}. It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators. [23]
When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu. [24]
You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [25]
The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to. [27]
Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in. [28]
When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [29]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (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 January 17 at 20:00 (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 a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [30]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 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.
Recent changes
The OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [31]
Changes this week
ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [32]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).
Future changes
The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [33][34]
The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.
Sunday saw the end of Round 2. Shearonink took out Round 2 with an amazing score of 499. In second place, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga earned an astounding 236 points, and in third place, Cartoon network freak received 136 points. Originally, we had plans for one wild card for 9th place, however it appears that both Chris troutman and J Milburn were tied for 9th place. Therefore, we have decided to have both advance to Round 3.
In Round 2, 91 reviews were completed! At the beginning of this GA Cup, the longest wait was over 7 months; at the end of Round 2, the longest wait had decreased to a little over 6 months. It's clear that we continue to make a difference at GAN and throughout Wikipedia, something we should all be proud of. Thanks to all our competitors for helping to make the GA Cup a continued success, and for your part in helping other editors improve articles. We hope to see all remaining users fighting it out in Round 3 so we can keep decreasing the backlog.
To qualify for the third round, contestants had to earn the two highest scores in each of the four pools in Round 2; plus, one wildcard. For Round 3, users were placed in 3 random pools of 3. To qualify for the Final of the 3rd Annual GA Cup, the top user in each pool will progress, and there will also be one wildcard. This means that the participant who comes in 4th place (all pools combined) will also move on. Round 3 has already started and will end on February 26 at 23:59:59 UTC. Information about Round 3 and the pools can be found here.
Also, we'd like to announce the departure of judge Zwerg Nase. We thank him for all his hardwork and hope to see him back in the future.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletter, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant still competing, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
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 block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [35]
Changes this week
Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after. [36]
There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change. [37]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (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 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems. [38][39]
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
EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now 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. [40]
Problems
The Firefox add-onFirefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg. [41]
Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this. [42]
Changes this week
The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later. [43]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (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 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring. [44]
Rcsprinter123, thanks for bring the above article to my attention.
I was never really ever comfortable with using parish counts for settlements as, like you've highlighted, parishes can contain several distinct communities and to get a specific area count clearly means this is not ideal, especially with the wide range of parish sizes. I much prefer a built-up area count as that is more identifiable with boundaries of a settlement and covers unparished areas too.
The page already contained a number of communities where many of the counts were from parishes, and so in keeping with this, tried to follow suit.
I'm happy to be in keeping with the 5k limit as that to me is reasonable.
Let me know about any further concerns.
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 edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the Wikimedia design guide. [45]
Changes this week
Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the Beta Feature called Hovercards. [46]
There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options: type and peers. The type option solves this problem. You can use peers to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers. [47]
OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [48]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (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 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Thanks for adding maps highlighting the locations of town in Massachusetts to the articles on those towns! However, would it be possible to create maps that don't indicate the boundaries of census-designated places (at least to use in the articles that aren't about CDPs themselves? Maps like this one make it look like the CDP boundaries are of equal status to the city/town boundaries, which of course they're not—city/town boundaries have legal status in Massachusetts, while CDP boundaries are just census designations for statistical purposes. The linked map, for example, makes it look like Essex County has about 9 more towns than it actually has. AJD (talk) 23:47, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Town in Massachusetts are incorporated areas. The fact that it's the Census Bureau that gets this wrong doesn't mean it's not wrong, and it doesn't mean it's not confusing to display a map that appears to show arbitrary statistical areas on an equal footing with incorporated municipalities. AJD (talk) 00:37, 22 February 2017 (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.
Problems
On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [49]
Changes this week
You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor. [50]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (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 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later. [51]
The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia. [52][53]
Thanks for the updates to many articles for places in New Jersey that benefit from the maps you've added. How are these maps being created and is this something that I might be able to learn? Alansohn (talk) 21:55, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
And so ends the first round of the competition, with 4 points required to qualify for round 2. It would have been 5 points, but when a late entrant was permitted to join the contest in February, a promise was made that his inclusion would not result in the exclusion of any other competitor. To achieve this, the six entrants that had the lowest positive score of 4 points have been added to the 64 people who otherwise would have qualified. As a result, some of the groups have nine contestants rather than eight. Our top four scorers in round 1 were:
Cas Liber, last year's winner, led the field with two featured articles on birds and a total score of 674.
Iry-Hor, a WikiCup newcomer, came next with a featured article, a good article and a tally of 282 bonus points for a score of 517. All these points came from the article Nyuserre Ini, an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh,
1989, another WikiCup newcomer, was in joint third place at 240. 1989 has claimed points for two featured lists and one good article relating to anime and comedy series, all of which were awarded bonus points.
Peacemaker67 shared third place with five good articles and thirteen good article reviews, mostly on naval vessels. He is also new to the competition.
The largest number of DYKs have been submitted by Vivvt and The C of E, who each claimed for seven, and MBlaze Lightning achieved eight articles at ITN. Carbrera and Peacemaker67 each claimed for five GAs and Krishna Chaitanya Velaga was well out in front for GARs, having reviewed 32. No featured pictures, featured topics or good topics yet, but we have achieved three featured articles and a splendid total of fifty good articles.
So, on to the second round. Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 1 but before the start of round 2 can be claimed in round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points equally.
If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is a good article candidate, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66 and Cwmhiraeth13:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Sunday, February 26 saw the end of Round 3. Shearonink finished in first with 616 points, which is more than the point totals for all the other competitors combined! In second place, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga earned an impressive 152 points, followed by Sturmvogel_66 in third with 111 points. Chris troutman and Kees08 each received a wild-card and were able to advance to the Final Round. There was a major error on the part of the judges, and initially, 8 users were advanced instead of 5. This has been corrected, and we sincerely apologize for this confusion.
In Round 3, 71 reviews were completed! At the beginning of this GA Cup, the longest wait was over 7 months; at the end of Round 3, the longest wait is still holding steady at a little over 6 months, the same as for the previous round. By the end of all three Rounds, the total number of nominations increased slightly - this suggests that users are more willing to nominate, knowing that their articles will be reviewed. We hope to see all remaining users fighting it out in the Final so we can keep tackling the backlog.
In the Final Round, the user with the highest score will be the winner. The Final has already started and will end on March 31st at 23:59:59 UTC. Information about Finals and the pools can be found here.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant still competing, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
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 search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't. [54]
When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view. [55]
Problems
Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [56]
Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately. [57]
Changes this week
The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view. [58]
The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log. [59]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (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 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Clarification
The 2017/09 issue of Tech News mentioned 3D file formats you can soon upload to Commons. The AMF format will be available later.
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
You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. [60][61]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (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 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [62]
CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [63][64]
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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [65]
You can see monthly page views when you click on Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API. [67]
The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later. [68]
The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers. [69]
Problems
On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it. [70]
Changes this week
When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs. [71]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (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 21 March 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
When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes. [72]
Problems
Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed. [73][74]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (calendar).
I'm sorry about reverting your edit - I hold my hands up on that one. Perhaps I should avoid editing on here at that time of the night! - Coradia175 (talk) 13:21, 3 April 2017 (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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [75]
The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [76]
English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. 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. [77]
Problems
Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [78]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 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 4 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.
Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [81]
New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [82]
The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [83]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 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 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 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.
RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.
Saturday, April 1 concluded the 2016-2017 GA Cup. 64 reviews were completed by our finalists. Although the backlog increased by 42 over the reviewing period instead of declining, the increase suggests that the contest is encouraging editors to nominate articles for review.
Congratulations to Shearonink, who is the winner of the Cup, finishing with 672 points! Once again, just as in last round, this is more than the point totals for all the other competitors combined! It was a close race for second place between Krishna Chaitanya Velaga, who achieved 164 points, and Sturmvogel_66, who earned 150. Though Sturmvogel_66 reviewed one more article than Krishna Chaitanya Velaga, Krishna Chaitanya Velaga managed to earn 14 points more due to reviewing older articles. Our two wildcard competitors, Kees08 and Chris troutman, came in fourth and fifth, respectively.
There were some bumps in the competition this time: The sign-up deadline and the first round were both extended due to fewer competitors signing up then was planned for. And there were delays in tallying points and getting out the newsletter. The judges apologize for this latter difficulty. Lastly, mid-way through the competition we bid farewell to Zwerg Nase, who stepped down from their position as judge due to other commitments. Information about the Final can be found here.
Thank you to all of our competitors, and congrats to our winners!
To subscribe or unsubscribe to future GA Cup newsletters, please add or remove your name to our mailing list. If you are a participant still competing, you will be on the mailing list no matter what as this is the easiest way to communicate between all participants.
The BAG Newsletter is now the Bots Newsletter, per discussion. As such, we've subscribed all bot operators to the newsletter. You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.
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 add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [84]
The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [86]
Problems
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. 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. This will also happen on 3 May.
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 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [87]
From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will 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. [88][89]
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.[91]
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. [92]
Changes this week
The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [93]
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. [94]
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.
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