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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
- When trying to move a page, if the target title already exists then a warning message is shown. The warning message will now include a link to the target title. [1]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 January. It will be on all wikis from 9 January (calendar).
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21:21, 6 January 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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [2]
- Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [3]
Changes later this week
Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access and Require administrator access. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [4]
Future changes
- Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [5]
- You can use
<ref follow="…">to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [6]
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
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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
Future changes
- There is a new suggestion for what to show when someone edits without registering an account. This is to give unregistered editors better privacy and make some anti-vandalism work go faster. You can give feedback.
python2tag if you need to continue running Python 2 scripts. The Pywikibot team strongly recommends to migrate to Python 3. You can get help to do so. [7]
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19:41, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 January 2020
- From the editor: Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium
- News and notes: Six million articles on the English language Wikipedia
- Special report: The limits of volunteerism and the gatekeepers of Team Encarta
- Arbitration report: Three cases at ArbCom
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2019
- News from the WMF: Capacity Building: Top 5 Themes from Community Conversations
- Community view: Our most important new article since November 1, 2015
- From the archives: A decade of The Signpost, 2005-2015
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Japan: a wikiProject Report
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 mobile diffs have problems. A couple of buttons are not shown. Structured data diffs on Commons are confusing. The developers are working on fixing it. [9][10]
- Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions can't move discussion pages. This is a bug. The developers are working on fixing it. [11]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- There is JavaScript code on Special:Undelete for administrators that makes it possible to automatically select multiple checkboxes by holding the "Shift" key and clicking. This code is also loaded by accident on other special pages and on articles. This makes pages slower to load. This will be fixed. If you know of other special pages where this is useful please tell the developers at phab:T232688.
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18:53, 27 January 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.
Changes later this week
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20:05, 3 February 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
- There is a new version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem. [12]
Problems
- There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things. [13]
Changes later this week
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19:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
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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
- Pages on Wikidata and Commons now load faster. You can read more about page load performance. [15][16]
Changes later this week
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16:17, 17 February 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.
Changes later this week
Future changes
- There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.
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21:00, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 March 2020
- From the editor: The ball is in your court
- News and notes: Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide
- Special report: More participation, more conversation, more pageviews
- Discussion report: Do you prefer M or P?
- Arbitration report: Two prominent administrators removed
- Community view: The Incredible Invisible Woman
- In focus: History of The Signpost, 2015–2019
- From the archives: Is Wikipedia for sale?
- Traffic report: February articles, floating in the dark
- Gallery: Feel the love
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- Opinion: Wikipedia is another country
- Humour: The Wilhelm scream
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug. [17]
Changes later this week
- If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. [18]
- When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security. [19]
- On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to. [20]
Future changes
- The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. You can give feedback. [21]
- There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
wgMFSpecialCaseMainPagewas used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list. [22]
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00:36, 3 March 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
- There is a new search word called
articletopic. You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon. [23][24][25]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.
- The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year. [26]
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17:15, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
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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
action=changecontentmodelto specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org. [27]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface. [28][29]
- You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.
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21:16, 16 March 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.
Problems
- Some development will be slower than planned. This is because of the current pandemic. You can see the new deployment guidelines. This is to avoid risks when some persons could be unavailable.
- There was a problem when adding interwiki links. The tool you use to add interwiki links could suggest the wrong project to link to. This has now been fixed. [30][31]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- There is a project to make editing easier for newcomers. The developers are trying to understand what initiatives different Wikipedias have to welcome newcomers. They also want to know which templates are often used for maintenance activities. You can help this project by checking if your wiki's pages are listed on Wikidata.
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17:08, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 March 2020
- From the editors: The bad and the good
- News and notes: 2018 Wikipedian of the year blocked
- WikiProject report: WikiProject COVID-19: A WikiProject Report
- Special report: Wikipedia on COVID-19: what we publish and why it matters
- In the media: Blocked in Iran but still covering the big story
- Discussion report: Rethinking draft space
- Arbitration report: Unfinished business
- In focus: "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein …"
- Community view: Wikimedia community responds to COVID-19
- From the archives: Text from Wikipedia good enough for Oxford University Press to claim as own
- Traffic report: The only thing that matters in the world
- Gallery: Visible Women on Wikipedia
- News from the WMF: Amid COVID-19, Wikimedia Foundation offers full pay for reduced hours, mobilizes all staff to work remote, and waives sick time
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
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 beta version of the Wikipedia app for Android can now help users add tags on Commons. These tags are called depicts. [32]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. The current beta feature will become the video player for everyone. The old player will be removed. [33]
- There is a project to make templates easier to use. The next few weeks the developers will present ideas on the project page. You can watch that page if you are interested in giving feedback. [34]
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17:25, 30 March 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.
Problems
- There was a problem with user pages not being shown properly on desktop. This was because of a bug. It will soon be fixed. [35]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- MediaWiki will use a newer version of Unicode. Some characters that did not have an upper case equivalent before do now. Titles beginning with one of these characters will be moved. A list of these titles can be seen on Phabricator. The titles will be renamed by the user
Maintenance script. This will start on 13 April 2020. You can rename them before this if you wish and the new title can be different from the one the script would rename it to. [36]
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19:02, 6 April 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
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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 the
articletopicsearch word on all Wikipedias. It searches articles by topic. [37] - You can see wiki tools in the new Tools Gallery. [38]
- You can see edits from the Wikimedia Cloud Services in a new dashboard.
- When you use filters on a history page you sometimes don't see any edits. There is a text explaining this now. Before it was just empty. [39]
- There is a new Wikimedia Technical Blog. [40]
Problems
- There was a problem with the Wikidata database last week. Some wikis went down for twenty minutes. Wikidata and other projects showed error messages. Interwiki links were not shown, some tools did not work and other problems. Some of this was fixed quickly. The developers are working on fixing the rest. [41][42][43]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- Some graphs have not worked on mobile. This will soon be fixed. [44]
- The article tab on talk pages of redirects links to the target of the redirect. It could link to the redirect page itself instead. You can leave feedback on this.
- For pages using syntax highlighting, the use of the deprecated
<source>tag, as well as the use of the deprecatedencloseparameter, will add tracking categories.
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15:30, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools
Read this in another language • Subscription list
The Editing team has been working on the talk pages project. The goal of the talk pages project is to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019.
The team is building a new tool for replying to comments now. This early version can sign and indent comments automatically. Please test the new Reply tool.
- On 31 March 2020, the new reply tool was offered as a Beta Feature editors at four Wikipedias: Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian. If your community also wants early access to the new tool, contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF).
- The team is planning some upcoming changes. Please review the proposed design and share your thoughts on the talk page. The team will test features such as:
- an easy way to mention another editor ("pinging"),
- a rich-text visual editing option, and
- other features identified through user testing or recommended by editors.
To hear more about Editing Team updates, please add your name to the "Get involved" section of the project page. You can also watch 
– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 13 April 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.
Tech News
- The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 4 May 2020.
Recent changes
div#contentis now.mw-body.div.portalis now.portal.div#footeris now#footer. This is so the skins can use HTML5 elements. If your gadgets or user styles used them you will have to update them. [46]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in Internet Explorer 8 in the future. Internet Explorer 8 was replaced in 2011. [47]
- The font in the diffs will change. [48]
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18:45, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 April 2020
- News and notes: Unbiased information from Ukraine's government?
- In the media: Coronavirus, again and again
- Discussion report: Redesigning Wikipedia, bit by bit
- Featured content: Featured content returns
- Arbitration report: Two difficult cases
- Traffic report: Disease the Rhythm of the Night
- Recent research: Trending topics across languages; auto-detecting bias
- Opinion: Trusting Everybody to Work Together
- On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?
- In focus: Multilingual Wikipedia
- WikiProject report: The Guild of Copy Editors
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 wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [49]
- Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [50]
Changes later this week
- You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [51]
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16:59, 4 May 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
- Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [52]
Problems
- Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [53]
- Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [54][55]
Changes later this week
Future changes
mw.config.exists()ormw.user.tokens.exists(). You can useexists()orget()to check one at a time instead. [56]
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20:41, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:27, 6 May 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
- If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [57][58]
Problems
- There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [59]
- Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [60][61]
Changes later this week
- The Wikipedia app for Android can let users add depicts on Commons. The beta version used computer-aided tagging. This was removed to get more specific depicts. [62]
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [63]
div#p-personal,div#p-navigation,div#p-interaction,div#p-tb,div#p-lang,div#p-namespaces,div#p-variantsanddiv#footer. They will have to removediv. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [64]#p-variants,#p-namespaces,#p-personal,#p-viewsand#p-cactions. They can no longer use> ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.
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17:19, 18 May 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.
Changes later this week
- The visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [65]
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14:18, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 31 May 2020
- From the editor: Meltdown May?
- News and notes: 2019 Picture of the Year, 200 French paid editing accounts blocked, 10 years of Guild Copyediting
- Discussion report: WMF's Universal Code of Conduct
- Featured content: Weathering the storm
- Arbitration report: Board member likely to receive editing restriction
- Traffic report: Come on and slam, and welcome to the jam
- Gallery: Wildlife photos by the book
- News from the WMF: WMF Board announces Community Culture Statement
- Recent research: Automatic detection of covert paid editing; Wiki Workshop 2020
- Community view: Transit routes and mapping during stay-at-home order downtime
- WikiProject report: Revitalizing good articles
- On the bright side: 500,000 articles in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [66]
Problems
- There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [67][68][69]
- The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [70]
Changes later this week
- You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [71]
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22:31, 1 June 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
- Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [72]
- Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them.
<b/>is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work.area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbrcan be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect<references />or<ref />. [73] - There is a banner called
WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions onMediaWiki:Sitenoticeso that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [74][75]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [77]
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21:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
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Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates
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This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Wikipedia:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.
- Reply tool: This is available as a Beta Feature at the four partner wikis (Arabic, Dutch, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias). The Beta Feature will get new features soon. The new features include writing comments in a new visual editing mode and pinging other users by typing
@. You can test the new features on the Beta Cluster. Some other wikis will have a chance to try the Beta Feature in the coming months. - New requirements for user signatures: Soon, users will not be able to save invalid custom signatures in Special:Preferences. This will reduce signature spoofing, prevent page corruption, and make new talk page tools more reliable. Most editors will not be affected.
- New discussion tool: The Editing team is beginning work on a simpler process for starting new discussions. You can see the initial design on the project page.
- Research on the use of talk pages: The Editing team worked with the Wikimedia research team to study how talk pages help editors improve articles. We learned that new editors who use talk pages make more edits to the main namespace than new editors who don't use talk pages.
– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 June 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
Problems
- There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [78]
- Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [79]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- The selectors
.menuand.vectorMenuwill no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts..menushould be replaced byul..vectorMenushould be replaced by.vector-menu. [81]
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21:38, 15 June 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.
Problems
- There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [82]
.vectorTabsshould be replaced with.vector-menu-tabsto fix this. [83]
Changes later this week
- The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [84]
Future changes
- A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 91 wikis still need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [85]
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18:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 28 June 2020
- News and notes: Progress at Wikipedia Library and Wikijournal of Medicine
- Community view: Community open letter on renaming
- Gallery: After the killing of George Floyd
- In the media: Part collaboration and part combat
- Discussion report: Community reacts to WMF rebranding proposals
- Featured content: Sports are returning, with a rainbow
- Arbitration report: Anti-harassment RfC and a checkuser revocation
- Traffic report: The pandemic, alleged murder, a massacre, and other deaths
- News from the WMF: We stand for racial justice
- Recent research: Wikipedia and COVID-19; automated Wikipedia-based fact-checking
- Humour: Cherchez une femme
- On the bright side: For what are you grateful this month?
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Black Lives Matter
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
- Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [86]
- Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [87]
Changes later this week
Future changes
searchGoButtonfor the go button. This issearchButtonfor Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change tosearchButtonin Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to usesearchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.
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16:30, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #3
Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:
- The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
- More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
- Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
- The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
- Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
- On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
- In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 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.
Problems
- The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [88]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [89]
- The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
- Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.
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20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:25, 1 July 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
- Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [90]
Problems
- Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [91][92]
Changes later this week
- Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using
<translate nowrap></translate>on the source page. [93]
Future changes
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16:30, 13 July 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
- A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.
Problems
- There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [98]
- Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [99]
- Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [100]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- There is a
Printable versionlink. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [101]
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19:11, 20 July 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
- The Starter kit is now available for wiki communities. This page lists technical resources, tools, and recommendations. These are essential to operate a wiki project. This is mostly useful for smaller wikis where the community has limited experience with this. [102]
- The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.
Problems
- Translation Notification Bot was sending the same message multiple times to every translator. This has been fixed. [105]
- Some users were receiving the same notification multiple times. This has been fixed. [106]
Changes later this week
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
13:52, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 2 August 2020
- Special report: Wikipedia and the End of Open Collaboration?
- COI and paid editing: Some strange people edit Wikipedia for money
- News and notes: Abstract Wikipedia, a hoax, sex symbols, and a new admin
- In the media: Dog days gone bad
- Discussion report: Fox News, a flight of RfAs, and banning policy
- Featured content: Remembering Art, Valor, and Freedom
- Traffic report: Now for something completely different
- News from the WMF: New Chinese national security law in Hong Kong could limit the privacy of Wikipedia users
- Obituaries: Hasteur and Brian McNeil
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
- All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [107]
- Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [108]
- There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [109]
- A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [110]
Changes later this week
- The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [111]
- Users'
global.jsandglobal.csspages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [112] searchGoButtonidentifier is nowsearchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.counterto prevent large archives was changed. [113]
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15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
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Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:27, 29 July 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
- FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [114]
Problems
- The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [115]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [116][117]
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16:06, 10 August 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
- If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an
undotag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [118] - The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [119]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [120][121]
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20:40, 17 August 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.
Changes later this week
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17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 30 August 2020
- News and notes: The high road and the low road
- In the media: Storytelling large and small
- Featured content: Going for the goal
- Special report: Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way
- Op-Ed: The longest-running hoax
- Traffic report: Heart, soul, umbrellas, and politics
- News from the WMF: Fourteen things we’ve learned by moving Polish Wikimedia conference online
- Recent research: Detecting spam, and pages to protect; non-anonymous editors signal their intelligence with high-quality articles
- Arbitration report: A slow couple of months
- From the archives: Wikipedia for promotional purposes?
Editing news 2020 #4
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Reply tool
The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.
- More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
- Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
- Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[122]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
- The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
- Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 31 August 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.
Problems
- This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [123][124]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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20:08, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:29, 26 August 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.
Changes later this week
- Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [125]
watchlistinstead ofwatch. This was inconsistent before. [126]
Future changes
- The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
- OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [127]
- The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [128][129]
.menuclass. This will not work in the future. Scripts can usenav ulinstead..vectorTabsand.vectorMenuwill also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.
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15:59, 7 September 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.
Problems
- The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [130][131]
Changes later this week
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16:18, 14 September 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
- There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [132][133]
Changes later this week
- The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [134]
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21:25, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 September 2020
- Special report: Paid editing with political connections
- News and notes: More large-scale errors at a "small" wiki
- In the media: WIPO, Seigenthaler incident 15 years later
- Featured content: Life finds a Way
- Arbitration report: Clarifications and requests
- Traffic report: Is there no justice?
- Recent research: Wikipedia's flood biases
The Signpost: 27 September 2020
- Special report: Paid editing with political connections
- News and notes: More large-scale errors at a "small" wiki
- In the media: WIPO, Seigenthaler incident 15 years later
- Featured content: Life finds a Way
- Arbitration report: Clarifications and requests
- Traffic report: Is there no justice?
- Recent research: Wikipedia's flood biases
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
- Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [135]
- Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [136]
Problems
- Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [137]
Changes later this week
Future changes
- You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
- The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
- In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see
Appsas one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [138] - You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
- You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.
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21:23, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:28, 23 September 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
- There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
- You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [139]
Problems
- There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [140]
- Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [141]
Changes later this week
- Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in
[[Child]]renis linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [142]
Future changes
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [143]
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16:24, 5 October 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.
Problems
- Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [144][145][146]
Changes later this week
- Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [147][148]
Future changes
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15:23, 12 October 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.
Changes later this week
Future changes
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [150]
rmspecials()function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses ofrmspecials()withrmwhitespace()wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [151]- Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID
#jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either#siteSubor#mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.
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16:29, 19 October 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.
Problems
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [152]
- Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [153]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [154]
- There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [155]
- The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [156]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 November 2020
- News and notes: Ban on IPs on ptwiki, paid editing for Tatarstan, IP masking
- In the media: Murder, politics, religion, health and books
- Book review: Review of Wikipedia @ 20
- Discussion report: Proposal to change board composition, In The News dumps Trump story
- Featured content: The "Green Terror" is neither green nor sufficiently terrifying. Worst Hallowe'en ever.
- Traffic report: Jump back, what's that sound?
- Interview: Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner
- News from the WMF: Meet the 2020 Wikimedian of the Year
- Recent research: OpenSym 2020: Deletions and gender, masses vs. elites, edit filters
- In focus: The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia
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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [157]
{{formatnum}}parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that{{formatnum:123,456}}is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [158]
Changes later this week
- Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [159]
- The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [160]
Future changes
- A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of
{{formatnum}}when it is given a negative argument. [161] - In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:08, 2 November 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.
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [162]
- From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [163][164]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:49, 9 November 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
- Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [165][166]
Changes later this week
- If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [167]
Future changes
- The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:35, 16 November 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
- Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [168]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
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17:17, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
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The Signpost: 29 November 2020
- News and notes: Jimmy Wales "shouldn't be kicked out before he's ready"
- Op-Ed: Re-righting Wikipedia
- Opinion: How billionaires re-write Wikipedia
- Featured content: Frontonia sp. is thankful for delicious cyanobacteria
- Traffic report: 007 with Borat, the Queen, and an election
- News from Wiki Education: An assignment that changed a life: Kasey Baker
- GLAM plus: West Coast New Zealand's Wikipedian at Large
- Wikicup report: Lee Vilenski wins the 2020 WikiCup
- Recent research: Wikipedia's Shoah coverage succeeds where libraries fail
- Essay: Writing about women
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
Future changes
- The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [170][171]
JOINSwill no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [172]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:44, 30 November 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. [173][174]
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. [175][176]
Future changes
- You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 8 December and 21 December. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:14, 7 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
- There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [177]
Changes later this week
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
21:33, 14 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.
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. [178]
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. [179] - 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. [180]
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20:53, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
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The Signpost: 28 December 2020
- Arbitration report: 2020 election results
- Featured content: Very nearly ringing in the New Year with "Blank Space" – but we got there in time.
- Traffic report: 2020 wraps up
- Recent research: Predicting the next move in Wikipedia discussions
- Essay: Subjective importance
- Gallery: Angels in the architecture
- Humour: 'Twas the Night Before Wikimas