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Tech News: 2017-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [1]
• When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [2]
• You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [3]
• New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [4]

Problems

• The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [5]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [6]
• You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [7]
• When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [8]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
• String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [9]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [10][11]
• Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [12]
• The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.

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19:05, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CXXXIV, June 2017

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 looks at the Battle of Kokoda and US defence acquisition in the 1960s Op-ed: Hawkeye7 on the Battle of Messines Timeline: This month in World War I

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 12:52, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [13]
• When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [14]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [15]
• Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [16]
• Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [17][18]

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15:30, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Enterox

Dear GermanJoe; I'm Arunav.Net. I really appreciate your effort in correcting the section of articles which you find promotional, however I still feel there is a bias towards certain companies that still has direct or indirect promotional contents, further I find it hard to agree with the "non-notable" point about Enterox as the company has been a part of more than a dozen technology research articles by many reputed research firms and although such articles have been re-published by media agencies including Business Wire; Enterox has never made any form of payments to the research firms or the media agencies as of 15th June 2017. The mention in these articles and news are purely based on the merit of the technology introduced by the company that is enabling "Enterprise Systems with Internet of Things" and "Artificial Intelligence for Customer Relationship Management". Disclaimer: although I would qualify as a "Subject Matter Expert" :) with more that a decade of experience in Enterprise Software and patent in Internet of Things I do agree there is a possibility of conflict of interest as I am a director at Enterox and hence I would refrain from updating wiki articles as it will be hard for me to keep a neutral view-point particular when there are promotional contents from other companies that continue to find place in wiki articles. User:Arunav.Net (talk) 18:42, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

References

Hello @Arunav.Net:, you're welcome. Editors with a possible conflict of interest can still contribute to all unrelated articles of course, and expert input is always welcome. You can also suggest edits regarding Enterox on article talkpages (Template:edit request is useful for these cases), as long as you clearly mention your connection to the topic in such cases. On a sidenote, I agree with your comment about "other companies". Wikipedia is a volunteer project with limited editor ressources - unfortunately some of this problematic content stays unnoticed for years. Thank you for your consideration about Wikipedia's WP:COI guideline. Best regards. GermanJoe (talk) 19:09, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

@Arunav.net: - mistyped the first one. GermanJoe (talk) 19:11, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [19]

Changes this week

• irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [20]
• Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [21]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.

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15:44, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

McKinsey & Company

Hi GermanJoe. I am affiliated with McKinsey & Company. Regarding your edit here, can I suggest you also trim the sentence "its clientele includes 80% of the world's largest corporations.[citation needed]." I do not see this content cited anywhere in the body of the article and in any case the prior sentence seems adequate for the lead. There is no need for us to belabor the point of how prestigious they are in the lead. I also did a quick Google search and did not find any sources for this. CorporateM (Talk) 12:58, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Hello @CorporateM:, I agree and done. Unfortunately a lot of consultancy-related articles talk a lot about prestige, success and accomplishments from the company's PoV - we should try our best to focus more on an uninvolved encyclopedic overview in this area. Thank you for being so transparent about your COI, it really helps to improve such articles in a cooperative manner. GermanJoe (talk) 13:11, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [22]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
• Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [23]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [24]

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15:38, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [25]

Changes this week

• Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
• There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
• EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [26]

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15:32, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CXXXV, July 2017

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Nick-D looks at planning for the unthinkable Op-ed: TomStar81 on Russia's Provisional Government in World War I Timeline: This month in World War I

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 07:34, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-28

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 are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article. [27]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis. [28]
• We will not use Tidy on Wikimedia wikis in the future. It will be replaced by June 2018. It could be earlier. Editors will need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors.

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15:07, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-29

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

• "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [29]

Problems

• On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [30]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is: Migrate to HTML5 section ids. [31] The meeting will be on 19 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [32]

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22:59, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-30

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

• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [33][34][35]
• .mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [36]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
• It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications on a wiki. This new feature will accessible in your preferences, in the Notifications tab, on Wednesday, July 26. Please see the documentation. [37]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikimedia Foundation July 2017 Metrics & Activities Meeting. The meeting is about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are perceived and understood by the world. The meeting will be on 27 July at 19:00 (UTC). See the agenda and how to join.

Future changes

• New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.

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15:58, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-31

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 pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [38]
• Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.

Changes later this week

• Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. [39]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [40]

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21:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CXXXVI, August 2017

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Hawkeye7 on the Battle of Messines and recent Australian Army leadership; Nick-D on South African armour Op-ed: Nick-D talks photography Timeline: This month in World War I

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 13:38, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-32

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 see which Wikipedia language versions are read in a specific country. This tool is called Wikipedia Views Visualized. [41]
• The Architecture Committee is now the Wikimedia Technical Committee. You can read the charter. [42]

Problems

• You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [43]
• The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [44]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).

Future changes

• Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [45]
• Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [46][47]
• Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [48][49]

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21:45, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

invisible language link

You deleted a link of mine to a page on the German WP. I'm not complaining, but I'm puzzled. I tried to link to the original article that was rather badly translated into English by a ...

Oh. Never mind. I just looked at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Germany#Treaty_of_Siegburg. I forgot the leading colon. Thanks. --Thnidu (talk) 05:35, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

@Thnidu: OK - I couldn't find the problem with the wrong language link at first (I blamed WikiData but was totally on the wrong track). But it's fixed now - no worries :). On a sidenote: if you want to link to foreign-language Wiki articles, it's usually better and more clear to use Template:ill (imho). GermanJoe (talk) 05:45, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [50]

Problems

• The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [51][52]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).

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23:29, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

COI und neu bei Wikipedia.org

Hallo, Danke für die Willkommensbotschaft (und wie ich dem Profil ansah, geht auch Deutsch als Kommunikationsweg, was vielleicht einfacher und klarer ist). Ich habe die COI-Seiten gelesen und bin trotzdem noch etwas ratlos (in der deutschen Wikipedia habe ich ja endlich gelernt, was ich darf und was nicht). Ich arbeite für die DFG, die ein öffentlich finanzierter Verein ist - und ich hätte (auch als Privatperson) gerne aktuelle und sachdienliche Informationen zu diesem Verein (und anderem) in Wikipedia (de und en). Wir haben uns intensiver mit der deutschen Wikipedia auseinandergesetzt - und sind mit der Wiki-Mission und -Idee vertraut und unterstützen sie. Die englische ist jedoch Neuland für mich. Darf ich als Mitarbeiter der DFG zu dem Beitrag über selbige beitragen (natürlich selbstverständlich keine Werbung!)? Muss ich und wenn ja wie kenntlich machen, dass ich bei dem Laden arbeite (das darf ja gerne transparent sein!)? Denn ich würde gern im Rahmen der Möglichkeiten auch zu Richtigkeit und Aktualität der Angaben der englischen Seiten beitragen. Und ich hoffe, dieser Beitrag kommt da an, wo' s richtig ist. Viele Grüße Cornelia Lossau (talk) 11:53, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Hallo @Cornelia Lossau: ich beantworte die Frage jetzt auch einfach mal auf Deutsch - obwohl generell Nachrichten in der Englischen Wiki immer in Englisch sein sollten (nur als Hinweis für weitere Edits). Die offizielle Sprachregelung ist: das direkte Editieren von Artikeln mit einem solchen Interessenkonflikt ist "strongly discouraged" - leider hat es in der Englischen Wiki in den letzten Jahren massive Probleme mit Eigenwerbung von Firmen und Organisationen gegeben, daher wird das Thema hier ziemlich kritisch gesehen. Es ist deshalb generell besser, Vorschläge auf der Diskussionsseite für den Artikel zu posten: auf Talk:Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft einfach oben auf den Link "request corrections" klicken, und den sogenannten "edit request" ausfüllen. 2 weitere Tipps: solche Änderungsvorschläge sollten so klar wie möglich formuliert werden, und immer mit einer zuverlässigen Quellenangabe verbunden. Die Bearbeitung solcher Vorschläge kann einige Wochen dauern. Was den Punkt "disclosure" angeht, sind alle benötigten Templates in WP:DISCLOSE (unbezahlter COI) und WP:COIPAYDISCLOSE (bezahlter COI) aufgeführt. Diese Bausteine können auf die entsprechenden Benutzer- und Diskussionsseiten kopiert werden (die variablen Parameter müssen natürlich ergänzt werden). Das ganze Thema "COI" ist nicht wirklich einfach, aber hoffentlich konnte ich etwas weiterhelfen. GermanJoe (talk) 12:24, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-34

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 test the new Timeless skin on the test wiki and mediawiki.org. You can turn it on in your preferences. You can report bugs in Phabricator. It will come to more wikis soon. [53][54]
• Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [55]
• If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [56]
• The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

• Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [57]
• The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [58]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:01, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-35

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

• Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [59][60]
• You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [61]

Problems

• Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [62]

Changes later this week

• You can block users from sending you notifications. [63]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Technical Committee. The topic this week is Migrate to HTML5 section ids. The meeting will be on 30 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [64]
• New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [65]
• The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:10, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Why the revert

Why the revert on List of PDF software. Except Adobe Acrobat I don't see how the other software are more notable on MacOS. If it's only for the external link do a edit instead of reverting... revert is the cancer of Wikipedia Gagarine (talk) 17:51, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Hello @Gagarine:, such large lists are often limited to "Wiki-notable" entries, which already have a stand-alone Wikipedia article based on independent reliable sources (see WP:STANDALONE). The list's lead sentence mentions "This is a list of links to [Wikipedia] articles on software ...". On a sidenote, please check WP:AGF instead of labelling other editors' good-faith edits as "cancer". If you like to discuss this further, I suggest to start a thread at the article's talkpage or at a talkpage about list guidelines. GermanJoe (talk) 18:54, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

I see, thanks for the input. Revert it's not a problem about list but about any page. It's become harder and harder to contribute because of the amount of rules and processes. Those process do have reasons, but yet it raise the entry level. I guess the software should be modernised to integrate those processes so you don't have to learn them. For the 'cancer', I think revert discourage non-hard-core Wikipedia editor and so slowly reducing the editor community. Gagarine (talk) 22:15, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• We are asking Tech News readers five questions to make the newsletter better. You can answer the questions here. We are grateful for every reply we get.

Recent changes

• The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [66][67]

Problems

• Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [68]

Changes later this week

• New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [69]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can see a presentation about and discuss the new Technical Committee on 5 September at 17:30 (UTC). There will be a presentation on YouTube and a discussion in #wikimedia-office on Freenode. You can use the web chat. [70]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:15, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CXXXVII, September 2017

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Nick-D and Hawkeye7 look at two recent releases Op-ed: Hawkeye7 on ANZACs in the Third Ypres Offensive Timeline: This month in World War I

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 23:33, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-37

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 get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [71]
• The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [72]
• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [73]

Problems

• Tech News 2017/36 reported about new filters for edit review coming to watchlists. This was planned to happen last week. It will happen next week instead. [74]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
• OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
• New filters for edit review are available now on recent changes as a beta feature. Some of those filters and other features will be deployed as default features in the coming weeks. Users will be able to opt out in their preferences. [75]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:16, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Management Consultancies

Hi GermanJoe. We worked together briefly on the McKinsey & Company page a while back and I seem to remember you implying you have an interest in management consultancy as a subject more generally. I'm also working for one of their competitors, Bain & Company and thought you might have an interest in chipping in here. Since I have a COI, I am following WP:COI by sharing a draft on the Talk page that I think would bring the page up to GA standards.

Much thanks in advance if you choose to chip in.

PS - I don't know if you noticed this on the McKinsey page back in July, but I didn't think "Corruption" was a neutral section title (I am not allowed to fix it myself)

CorporateM (Talk) 22:28, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Hello @CorporateM:, I probably won't have time (and to perfectly honest the motivation) to analyze a full-length draft. I already spend a bit too much time on Wikipedia as it is ;). However, if you see some urgent issues that can be easily implemented based on reliable sources (smaller "change X to Y" stuff), I'd be glad to help. Just leave a specific edit request on the article talkpage - I have it watchlisted and hopefully won't miss it. Regarding the mentioned McKinsey change about "corruption": I agree that this section is not phrased ideally, but it would be better if it would be improved by someone with more experience with such controversial business-related content (it also wouldn't hurt to get a second reliable source with more context). GermanJoe (talk) 22:58, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

That's fair - I'll see if I can find another editor willing to take a look at "Corruption" as a section title[76] and/or my draft Bain & Co article. To be honest, an experienced business editor is sort of a unicorn around here, but I think @North8000: does a lot of work on company articles?

The only thing that jumps out at me as really awful about the current Bain & Co page is that it has a dedicated section about a $10 million lawsuit. The section exclusively cites press releases and the law firm website. I didn't find any quality secondary sources to indicate this lawsuit for less than 1% of the company's annual revenues was a significant milestone in their history. CorporateM (Talk) 19:53, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

I'd be happy to take a peak. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 11:00, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

The amount of coverage in B&C is certainly undue weight. I trimmed a bit of obvious fat, but more work is needed (and better sourcing). GermanJoe (talk) 12:56, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-38

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 see contributions from an IP range at Special:Contributions. Before you could only see contributions from single IP addresses. Some older contributions from IP ranges could be missing at first because it will take some time to add them. [77][78]
• Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted. Phabricator projects and repositories have been renamed. [79]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 September at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• We are replacing Tidy on Wikimedia wikis. Editors need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors. Some wikis have already switched. If your wiki would like to switch to the new format now, you can file a task.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:32, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

2017 Military history WikiProject Coordinator election

Greetings from the Military history WikiProject! Elections for the Military history WikiProject Coordinators are currently underway. As a member of the WikiProject you are cordially invited to take part by casting your vote(s) for the candidates on the election page. This year's election will conclude at 23:59 UTC 29 September. Thank you for your time. For the current tranche of Coordinators, AustralianRupert (talk) 10:39, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Draft:Vedamo

Moved this to a separate section to avoid confusion. New threads are usually posted at bottom of talkpages. GermanJoe (talk) 12:02, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi, thank you for your messages and clarifying things for me. I do not think I have COI. I personally have used Vedamo few times but I have no relations with people from the company that has created it or the company itself. It is a social responsible project that help a lot of kids disabled from regular education to receive such. I consider I could create an article about Vedamo in Wikipedia, because it is beneficial for people to read about the project and gain knowledge on different educational tools and how they are implemented in different settings. I added Vedamo as a system in the article "Virtual campus", because it really is a Learning Management System as the rest (Moodle, WizIQ, Sakai, Serco, Blackboard, Sharepoint, WebCT, Angel, Alphastudy, Desire2Learn, EdMastery, Elluminate and eCollege) listed, for some of which (Alphastudy, Desire2Learn and EdMastery) there is still no article, which made me think it is OK to add Vedamo and link it to the article after it passes the review. Apart from adding Vedamo, I made few other changes in the article "Virtual campus" which were also reverted and I wonder why. For example, (1) itslearning has a page and I linked it; (2) In the sentence "Classes are usually self paced using online documents and databases..." I linked "self paced" to article "Asynchronous learning" - "asynchronous learning" is the academic term for "self paced learning" and the article explains the method better and adds more information for people reading it. Kind regards, Mstoilkova (talk) 11:20, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Hello @Mstoilkova:, thank you for the clarification that you don't have a possible "conflict of interest" regarding this topic. Regarding the additions of Vedamo: once the draft gets approved, such mentions and links can be added of course - although indiscriminate lists of examples should be avoided, and mentions in articles should be based on independent reliable sources to provide some context. Until the draft is approved, please do not add such entries. Of course other sourced improvements to Wikipedia articles are always appreciated in the meantime. You can also continue to improve your draft, while it is not picked up for review yet. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask me, or you can post for advice at the WP:Teahouse for new editors. Best regards. GermanJoe (talk) 12:02, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-39

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

• Wikitext syntax highlighting is a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. You can now search through the entire article with CTRL+F or cmd+F when you edit. Before it just searched through a part of the article. The developers are also fixing a couple of other bugs. [80][81]
• Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions as a beta feature or by default can now create and move Structured Discussions boards. Structured Discussions was previously called Flow. [82]

Changes later this week

• You now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [83]
• Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [84]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation Readers department has proposed changing the mobile website. You can read more on mediawiki.org. This would be a big change.
• You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:00, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can now use preload features in the visual editor. This means you can create links to create new pages and some text will already be in the edit window when someone clicks on it. [85]

Changes later this week

• If you have turned on "Automatically enable most beta features" you will now get the 2017 wikitext editor. Before this you had to turn it on manually even though it is a beta feature. [86]
• Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [87]
• The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [88]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [89]
• The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:25, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

The Bugle: Issue CXXXVIII, October 2017

Your Military History Newsletter Project news: From the editors; awards and honours; contest results Articles: Last month's new featured and A-class content Book review: Nick-D and Hawkeye7 look at Australian involvement on the Western Front in 1918 and in post-war New Guinea Op-ed: TomStar81 on the October Revolution Timeline: This month in World War I

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 23:42, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

EFH request

Hello GermanJoe, your request for EFH access (Wikipedia:Edit_filter_noticeboard#Request_for_EFH_bit_for_GermanJoe) did not gain sufficient support and was closed without granting. However, the filter you mentioned was unhidden. Your input at WP:EFN regarding filters in general is always welcome. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 01:13, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: thank you for the courteous message. I do not believe that an absolute limitation of EFH access to 2-3 narrow use cases was established as consensus during the edit filter helper RfC. And more importantly, such an arbitrary distinction between valid and invalid usages is not beneficial for the project. Nonetheless, I'll just accept the result and move on. GermanJoe (talk) 10:00, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

With it being a new flag (that took multiple RfC to even create) it may have room for growth, expanding the criteria can be revisited in the future of course. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:34, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-41

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 number of active users listed by {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} and on Special:Statistics will now only include Wikidata edits as activity on Wikidata and not on other wikis too. [90]
• Previously you could create wiki links starting with two colons. Now you need to use one colon. [[::File:X.jpg]] now has to be [[:File:X.jpg]]. There is now a new Linter category. You can see a list on Special:Linterrors/multi-colon-escape. The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. You can read more about using Linter. [91]

Problems

• You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [92]

Changes later this week

• The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [93]
• If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:21, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-42

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 a template with the visual editor it follows the template's format configuration on how to save it. You can now change the format in more powerful ways if your wiki wants it. [94][95]
• 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 has been a beta feature for the last five months. You can now try out the new interface on a page where you will actually get simulated edit conflicts. You can give feedback to the developers.

Problems

• There is a problem with recent changes pages and your watchlist that show a large number of pages. Until it is fixed, Wikidata edits will not be shown on recent changes or in your watchlist on Commons or Russian Wikipedia. If necessary, Wikidata edits will be removed from all wikis. [96]
• Notifications are not working for some actions. For example some users don't get a notification when they are mentioned. The developers are working on fixing this. [97]
• Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [98]

Changes later this week

• Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia from 17 October. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [99]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:31, 16 October 2017 (UTC)