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Tech News: 2014-29

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
• It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis. [1] [2]
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
• You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.

VisualEditor news

• The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles. [3] [4]
• The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [5] [6] [7]
• References will now be shown in the default font size again. [8]

Future software changes

• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16. [9]
• The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [10] [11]
• It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files. [12]
• Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [13] [14]
• Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis. [15] [16]
• Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [17] [18]
• Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [19]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:48, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 July 2014

• Special report: $10 million lawsuit against Wikipedia editors withdrawn, but plaintiff intends to refile

• Traffic report: World Cup dominates for another week

• Wikimedia in education: Serbia takes the stage with Filip Maljkovic

• Featured content: The Island with the Golden Gun

• News and notes: Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:26, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #118

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about removing person data
  • Discussion to increase the support votes required for successful RfAs
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Main Page redesign suggestions
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ID, GUI toolkit or framework, SFDb ID, non-native language spoken, nominated for, number of seats in legislature, Cycling Archives Cyclist ID, licensed to broadcast to
• Development
  • Finished setting up JSON dumps. If everything goes well, a first dump will be available on Monday evening
  • Worked on badges UI integration and made initial progress at making them editable
  • Did a lot of JavaScript refactoring in order to put Api related code into an own component
  • Made it possible to access data from Wikidata items on Wikidata itself using Lua (not yet enabled)
  • Fixed a bug that allowed creation of items with the same label+description of another item
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:14, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-30

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [20] [21] [22]
• The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [23]
• Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [24] [25]
• A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [26]

VisualEditor news

• Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [27]
• All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [28]
• You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [29]
• Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35]

Future software changes

• It will soon be possible to watch individual discussions in the Topic namespace rather than whole pages for talk pages using Flow. [36]
• You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [37]
• An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [38]
• A request for comments on how to improve MediaWiki API was re-started on MediaWiki.org. Your feedback is welcome.

Problems

• Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem. [39]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Battle of Fort Stevens Edit-a-Thon!

Greetings!

Sorry for the last minute update, but our friends at the DC Historical Society have scheduled a Battle of Fort Stevens Edit-a-Thon to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War battle fought in the District. The event will last from noon to 2 PM on Wednesday, July 30. Hope you can make it!

Best,

James Hare

(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 21:16, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 July 2014

• Wikimedia in education: Education program gaining momentum in Israel

• Traffic report: The World Cup hangs on, though tragedies seek to replace it

• News and notes: Institutional media uploads to Commons get a bit easier

• Forum: Did you know?—good idea, needs reform

• Featured content: Why, they're plum identical!

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:30, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #119

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • User conduct policies RfC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The first draft for the Main page redesign is ready for review (a summary of proposed changes can be found at Project Chat)
  • User:Thepwnco is working on updating Wikidata documentation for all sister projects, starting with Wikidata:Wikisource
  • Drop by the Wikidata Lounge, a new initiative to promote friendliness and civility started by d:User:Micru
  • Wikinews will get sitelink support on August 19th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: b-side, executive producer, OpenPlaques identifier, pet, Lost Art-ID, journey origin
• Development
  • Published the first JSON dumps
  • Finishing touches on badges support
  • Finishing touches on redirects
  • Finishing touches on the "in other projects" beta feature that displays links to sister projects in the sidebar of Wikipedia for example
  • Tested and fixed issues with allowing sitelinks to Wikidata pages and accessing item data via Lua on Wikidata itself
  • Final tests before we can start switching to the new serialization format
  • The code for simple queries is being reviewed by the Foundation. This is hopefully the last step before we can deploy this too.
  • Worked on improving the code of the {{#property}} parser function in preparation of allowing arbitrary data access and allowing linked output.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:48, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-31

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
• You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.

VisualEditor news

• You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor. [40] [41]
• The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit. [42]
• If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters. [43] [44]
• You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [45] [46]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [47] [48]
• Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. [49]
• It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [50] [51]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:08, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 July 2014

• Book review: Knowledge or unreality?

• Recent research: Shifting values in the paid content debate

• News and notes: How many more hoaxes will Wikipedia find?

• Wikimedia in education: Success in Egypt and the Arab World

• Traffic report: Doom and gloom vs. the power of Reddit

• Featured content: Skeletons and Skeltons

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:06, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #120

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: Gabbe
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • List of Wikidata talks at Wikimania 2014
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata's new Main page is almost ready to go live, but is still in need of a visually-appealing banner! Got an idea for an eye-catching design that represents what Wikidata's all about? Submit proposals before August 11 at d:Wikidata:Portal Redesign/Banner
  • Wikidata's tours are now translatable. You may help translating at d:Wikidata:Tours/Items and d:Wikidata:Tours/Statements.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: published in
  • Showcase items: Kleinmachnow
• Development
  • Created CLI script to import entities into the QueryEngine store (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Querycli.jpg)
  • More work on redirects (should be good to deploy on August 19th)
  • More work on the monolingual datatype
  • Started work on rewriting the sitelinks part of the user interface (that’s the first coding steps of getting us a new user interface design)
  • Final touches on badges (should be good to deploy on August 19th)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:42, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-32

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

Tech News updates

• Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [52]
• You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [53] [54] [55]
• You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files. [56]
• New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [57] [58]

VisualEditor news

• You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [59] [60]
• VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [61]
• Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [62] [63] [64] [65]
• Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [66] [67] [68] [69]

Future software changes

• You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [70] [71]
• All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [72]
• Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [73]

Problems

• Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [74]
• Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed. [75]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Sunday August 17: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share

Sunday August 17: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share

You are invited to join the the Wikimedia NYC community for our upcoming wiki-salon and knowledge-sharing workshop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sunday August 17 NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share (RSVP). 2pm–5pm at Yeoryia Studios at Epic Security Building, 2067 Broadway (5th floor). Afterwards at 5pm, we'll walk to a social wiki-dinner together at a neighborhood restaurant (to be decided). We hope to see you there!--Pharos (talk) 15:57, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

(You can unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by removing your name from this list.)

The Signpost: 06 August 2014

• Technology report: A technologist's Wikimania preview

• Traffic report: Ebola

• Featured content: Bottoms, asses, and the fairies that love them

• Wikimedia in education: Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico

• News and notes: "History is a human right"—first-ever transparency report released as Europe begins hiding Wikipedia in search results

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:51, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-33

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

Recent software changes

• Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [76]
• Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [77]

VisualEditor news

• Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14. [78]

Future software changes

• Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser! [79] [80] [81]
• If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning. [82] [83]
• You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [84] [85]
• An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [86]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #121

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimania \o/ It was amazing and Wikidata all over the place. Wikidata's true potential is starting to show.
  • Guided tours and Wikidata: How to explain a complex project and encourage new editors
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Editing Wikidata directly from Wikipedia
  • Histropedia now uses Wikidata to build timelines
  • Slides and videos of first Wikidata talks at Wikimania online: 1 2 3 (more slides and videos will follow))
  • First prototype screenshot of asking questions to Wikipedia mobile readers (similar to Wikidata the Game)
  • Userboxes
• Did you know?
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Interesting Content, WikiProject sum of all paintings
• Development
  • Attended Wikimania and Socrates
  • Worked on rewriting the sitelinks part of the user interface to make it ready for the new user interface design
  • Discussed Wikidata, structured data on Commons and a ton of other things with many people at Wikimania
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:57, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #122

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfOS: John F. Lewis
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help choose which banner will be featured on the new Main page! Click here to view the two banner candidates and leave your feedback before August 20th 16:00 UTC.
  • Wikidata Translate, a Wikidata-based Google translator open source clone.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: journey destination, score method, grave picture, present in work, Fide ID, Norsk filmografi ID, Jewish Encyclopedia ID, plea, collection size
  • New task forces: WikiProject Movies
• Development
  • Finished a large number of new features and got them ready for roll-out. More in this email.
  • Wikibase made a big step forward to finally switch to DataModel 1.0.
  • Improved support for entity IDs bigger than 2 billion (32 bit integer).
  • We had to adapt Wikibase to some major changes (more major than usual, partly caused by discussions at Wikimania) in MediaWiki core: The default Vector skin became it’s own component and the ResourceLoader got some small but important updates.
  • Continued work on refactoring code of the user interface to make it ready for new design
  • Wrote a script to get number of users having wikidata in their recent changes/watchlist from the database
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:26, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 August 2014

• Special report: Twitter bots catalogue government edits to Wikipedia

• Traffic report: Disease, decimation and distraction

• Wikimedia in education: Global Education: WMF's Perspective

• Wikimania: Promised the moon, settled for the stars

• News and notes: Media Viewer controversy spreads to German Wikipedia

• Op-ed: Red links, blue links, and erythrophobia

• In the media: Monkey selfie, net neutrality, and hoaxes

• Featured content: Cambridge got a lot of attention this week

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:56, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-34

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
• There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages. [87] [88] [89]
• You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [90] [91]
• You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [92]
• You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.

Wikidata

• After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews. [93]
• After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. [94]

Problems

• There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [95] [96]

Tech news written by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:16, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

GOCE July drive and August blitz

Guild of Copy Editors July 2014 backlog elimination drive wrap-up Participation: Thanks to everyone who participated in the July drive. Of the 40 people who signed up this drive, 22 copy edited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Progress report: We reduced our article backlog from 2400 articles to 2199 articles in July. This is a new month-end record low for the backlog. Nice work, everyone! Blitz: The August blitz will run from August 24–30. The blitz will focus on articles from the GOCE's Requests page. Awards will be given out to everyone who copy edits at least one of the target articles. The blitz will run from August 24–30. Sign up here! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:10, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 August 2014

• Interview: Improving the visibility of digital archival assets using Wikipedia

• Traffic report: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

• WikiProject report: Bats and gloves

• Op-ed: A new metric for Wikimedia

• Featured content: English Wikipedia departs for Japan

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:09, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #123

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata at Wikimania 2014 in London
  • "Growing items" by User:Micru, an essay about modelling concepts and understanding items
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The new Main page will go live early next week! See the announcement at Project chat for more details and to leave any last comments
  • It will be possible to show the badges like "Featured Article" stored on Wikidata in the sidebar of the clients (Wikipedia, Wikisource, ...) starting Tuesday. Wikipedia will follow on Thursday.
  • Starting Tuesday we will deploy a new beta feature on the clients. It will allow you to show links to other sister projects in the sidebar based on the links in Wikidata.
  • Planning for structured data support for Commons is starting to pick up speed. Get involved: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2014-August/000774.html Also maybe attend the office hour?
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: list of monuments, list of works, legal form, catholic.ru ID, motto, Sandbox Monolingual text, nickname, official name, Sports Reference ID, people missing, fictional universe described in
  • Newest WikiProjects: Wikidata:WikiProject Structured Data for Commons
• Development
  • Deployed lots of new features like badges, access to language links for Wikinews and Wikidata, the monolingual text data type and redirects!
  • Working hard on making the new UI a reality, mainly refactoring the UI widgets right now. Covers a lot of ground and will take some time.
  • More work on HHVM issues that need to be fixed before Wikidata can switch to it.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:30, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-35

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

VisualEditor news

• There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed. [97]
• You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [98]
• If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [99] [100] [101]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
• After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page. [102]

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

09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 August 2014

• In the media: Plagiarism and vandalism dominate Wikipedia news

• News and notes: Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster

• Traffic report: Viral

• Featured content: Cheats at Featured Pictures!

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:37, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #124

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • past: OpenSym
  • upcoming: IRC office hour about structured data for Wikimedia Commons
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New Main Page and other new features
  • Breaking changes for gadgets
  • Badges support via Wikidata has been rolled out to Wikipedia and other sister projects. If the icons shown are not the ones your project would like please request a change here.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NIEA building ID, Cadw Building ID, color index, absolute magnitude
• Development
  • Deployed more new stuff \o/ (in other projects sidebar; new internal serialization format; showing badges on the Wikipedias and other sister projects; Special:GoToLinkedPage)
  • Added a new “item-redirect” permission
  • Continuous work and reviews for the new JavaScript user interface
  • DataModel 1.0 will be more strict when adding Claims or Statements to Entities. Quite some tests needed to be made compatible
  • Adopted to recent API changes (getPossibleErrors and others got dropped)
  • Replaced hundreds of class name aliases in the code with the actual class names
  • Attended OpenSym
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-36

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

Recent software changes

• You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [103] [104]
• You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [105] [106]
• A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [107] [108]
• If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [109]

VisualEditor news

• You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [110]
• We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [111] [112] [113]
• VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [114]
• We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [115]
• You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [116]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
• There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [117]
• You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [118]
• You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
• You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [119]

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

07:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet

Come one and come all. To a presentation at the Laurel Historical Society about how you can help verify, validate, and edit the information that is on the front line of local history.

Picture your self leading the masses to improve Wikimedia one article at a time.

• Show the Internet who is the better editor.
• Be the creator of culture that you know you are.
• Spread the knowledge of noteworthy people who no one but you cares about.
• Lead the charge to a better Wikipedia --- eventually.

Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:07, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet

See you at the Laurel Pool Room, 9th and Main Street, Laurel, MD on Thursday, September 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM EST. See http://www.meetup.com/Wikimedia-DC/events/205494212/ for more information. Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:13, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia DC invites revolutionaries, free thinkers, and other sundry editors to a DC WikiSalon

The WikiSalon is a special meetup usually held during the first and third full weeks of every month, from 7 PM to 9 PM. It's an informal gathering of Wikimedia enthusiasts, who come together to discuss Wikimedia wikis and collaboratively edit. There's no set agenda, and guests are welcome to recommend articles for the group to edit or edit on their own.

If you're coming by Metro, the closest station is Dupont Circle (on the Red Line). If you're driving, a lot of parking opens up downtown after 6:30 PM, so finding a parking space (even a free one) should be easy. Once you've found the building, go to Cove on the second floor. We will be in the conference room.

When: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 at 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: The Cove, Dupont Circle, 1730 Connecticut Avenue NW, 2nd floor, 20009, DC

For more information, see http://www.meetup.com/Wikimedia-DC/events/205500822/

My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 02:25, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 September 2014

• Arbitration report: Media viewer case is suspended

• Featured content: 1882 × 5 in gold, and thruppence more

• Op-ed: Automated copy-and-paste detection under trial

• Traffic report: Holding Pattern

• WikiProject report: Gray's Anatomy (v. 2)

• Recent research: A Wikipedia-based Pantheon; new Wikipedia analysis tool suite; how AfC hamstrings newbies

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:03, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia DC's Wonderful meetups

Wikimedia DC's Upcoming meetups

• Thursday, September 11: “Wikipedia and YOUR History: Taking Control of the Internet, One Article at a Time!”

  A presentation at the Laurel Historical Society about how you can help verify, validate, and edit the information that is on the front line of local history. Laurel Pool Room, 9th and Main Street in Laurel, MD. 7 PM.

• Wednesday, September 17: WikiSalon

  Come for the pizza, stay for the conversation. 7 PM – 9 PM

• Saturday, September 20: September Meetup

  Get dinner and drinks with fellow Wikipedians! 6 PM

• Sunday, September 21: Laurel History Edit-a-Thon

  Local history for Wikipedia! 10:15 AM – 4 PM

• Saturday, September 27 – Sunday, September 28: Please RSVP for the Open Government WikiHack at Eventbrite by clicking on the link. The National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia DC are teaming up to come up with solutions that help integrate government data into Wikipedia. 10:30 AM – 5 PM each day

My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 22:49, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-37

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

VisualEditor news

• From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [120] [121] [122]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
• You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [123]
• You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [124]

Problems

• There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #125

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Why Wikidata is so important to Histropedia
  • Wikidata Outreach: What happened?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The new main page can now be translated.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: reporting mark, maximum glide ratio , FIFA player code, WALS family code, WALS genus code, WALS lect code, category for people died here, category for people born here, PRDL Author ID
• Development
  • Performance improvements for "in other projects sidebar" beta feature and bug fixes in the feature on wikis with sidebar cache enabled (e.g. zhwiki, commons)
  • Worked on performance improvements to badges feature
  • Fixing bug with xml format in the API, and added tests for it so hopefully this does not break again!
  • Worked more on enabling statements on properties
  • Further work on new user interface design groundwork - mostly refactoring and enabling editing of multiple sitelinks and label/alias/description at once
  • First pokes at usage tracking
  • Drafted an RfC to improve recent changes so we can show Wikidata changes also when enhanced recent changes is enabled
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 18:43, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 September 2014

• Op-ed: Media Viewer software is not ready

• Traffic report: Refuge in celebrity

• Featured content: The louse and the fish's tongue

• WikiProject report: Checking that everything's all right

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:55, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-38

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 software changes

• You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [125] [126]
• There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [127] [128] [129]
• New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [130]

Problems

• There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [131]

VisualEditor news

• If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [132]
• The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [133] [134]
• You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [135]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
• These changes are coming with the new version:
  • If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [136] [137] [138]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 September 2014

• In the media: Turkish Twitter outrage, medical translation, audience metrics

• WikiProject report: A trip up north to Scotland

• News and notes: Wikipedia's traffic statistics are off by nearly one-third

• Traffic report: Tolstoy leads a varied pack

• Featured content: Which is not like the others?

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:36, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-39

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 software changes

• You can test a new Beta Feature called HHVM. It should make editing faster. Please report bugs if you see them. [139]

Problems

• There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
• Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
• There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [140] [141]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
• If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[142] [143]
• In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [144] [145]
• The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [146]
• The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [147]
• There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [148] [149]
• In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [150]

Future site changes

• You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [151]

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

09:04, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

You're invited! Litquake Edit-a-thon in San Francisco

You are invited! → Litquake Edit-a-thon → See you there!

In the area? You're invited to    San Francisco Meetup # 22   Date: October 11, 2014   Time: 1-5 pm   Place: 149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105   prev: Meetup 21 - next: Meetup 23 | All SF meetups & events The Edit-a-thon will occur in parallel with Litquake, the San Francisco Bay Area's annual literature festival. Writers from all over the Bay Area and the world will be in town during the nine day festival, so the timing is just right for us to meetup and create/translate/expand/improve articles about literature and writers. All levels of Wikipedia editing experience are welcome. This event will include new editor training. RSVP →here←. --Rosiestep (talk) 03:27, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 September 2014

• Featured content: Oil paintings galore

• In the media: Indian political editing, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Congressional chelonii

• Recent research: 99.25% of Wikipedia birthdates accurate; focused Wikipedians live longer; merging WordNet, Wikipedia and Wiktionary

• Traffic report: Wikipedia watches the referendum in Scotland

• WikiProject report: GAN reviewers take note: competition time

• Arbitration report: Banning Policy, Gender Gap, and Waldorf education

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:50, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-40

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 software changes

• On Commons, you can now see what files are most used across all wikis. You can also see the same list for deleted or uncreated files. [152] [153]
• There are now many more translations for language names. [154]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
• Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [155] [156]
• You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [157]
• If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [158] [159]
• The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [160]

Future changes

• You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
• JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [161]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #126

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • A new blocking policy has been accepted.
  • Proposal for an individual engagement grant to use Wikidata items for citations needs your input
  • RfC: redirect vs. deletion
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • past: Open Government WikiHack organized by Wikimedia DC in Washington, DC
  • upcoming: Wikidata training organized by Wikimedia UK with Magnus in London
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • With the deployment next Tuesday you will be able to edit all sitelinks at once as well as all fields of the "in other languages" box. This is an intermediate step towards the new user interface and will evolve further over the next weeks. You can see what is coming on Tuesday now already on test.wikidata.org.
  • WikiProject Names aims to improve name related data on Wikidata. Initial focus is on first names (given names). Half of items for first names still need cleaning up, but 15% of items for persons already have a given name defined.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Stack Exchange tag, vici.org ID, sourcing circumstances, has contributing factor, has immediate cause, birth name (Monolingual text), title, Nupill Literatura Digital - Document, Nupill Literatura Digital - Author, Commons Creator template, monogram, cause of, Cycling Quotient ID, male population, female population, number of households, contributing factor of, immediate cause of, used by, end cause, family name identical to this first name, country for sport, parents of hybrids, Glad identifier, kulturnoe-nasledie.ru identifier
  • Showcase items: Hessian Broadcasting Corporation, Fishing Creek
• Development
  • Jan Zerebecki has joined the Wikidata dev team.
  • Worked on supporting statements on properties in WikibaseDataModelSerialization (bugzilla:66425)
  • Fixed broken xml api output (bugzilla:70531), as well as some inconsistencies in the xml format and added tests that should help avoid future breakage in the xml format
  • Finished performance improvements for badges
  • Worked on entity usage tracking
  • Pietro from the EAGLE project came to visit us, one of the first 3rd party users of Wikibase. See http://www.eagle-network.eu
  • Added a hook point to allow 3rd party users (like the EAGLE project) of Wikibase to control what goes into the search index
  • Started work on a widget that lets you edit badges right in the item instead of going to the special page
  • Use checkboxes instead of a multiselect to edit badges on d:Special:SetSiteLink
  • Work on hhvm-related issues in Wikibase and temporarily disabled the beta feature on Wikidata until fixes are deployed for the issues.
  • Deployed new code on test.wikidata! (to be deployed on wikidata on Tuesday), see mw:Wikidata_deployment#wmf.2F1.25wmf1
  • Work on fixing empty maps in the JSON serialization, differentiate them from empty lists (fixed prerequisite bugzilla:70606)
  • Jeroen made a little video demonstrating how you can get a clone of Wikibase DataModel, set it up, and run it's tests: https://asciinema.org/a/12530
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:13, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, Q3 2014

The WikiProject Video Games Newsletter
Volume 7, No. 3 — 3rd Quarter, 2014
Previous issue | Index | Next issue

Project At a Glance
As of Q3 2014, the project has:

• 185 Featured Articles
• 66 Featured Lists
• 10 Featured Topics
• 17 Featured Pictures

• 42 A-Class Articles
• 727 Good Articles
• 12 Good Topics

---

Content

• Changes to Featured and Good content
• News items and announcements

• Feature: Sourcing video game articles
• Interview: Guyinblack25

---

Project Navigation

• VG Project Main pages

  • Main project – talk
  • Project category – talk
  • Portal – talk

  VG Project Departments

  • Assessment – talk
  • Cleanup – talk
  • Peer review – talk

   

  • Reference library – talk
  • Newsletter – talk
  • Video game images – talk

To receive future editions of this newsletter, click here to sign up on the distribution list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:30, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 October 2014

• From the editor: The Signpost needs your help

• Dispatches: Let's get serious about plagiarism

• News and notes: Wikipedia article published in peer-reviewed journal; Wikipedia in education

• WikiProject report: Animals, farms, forests, USDA? It must be WikiProject Agriculture

• Traffic report: Shanah Tovah

• Featured content: Brothers at War

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:25, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #127

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • [[:d:Wikidata:Requests for comment/User conduct policies|Closed RfC: User conduct policies]
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Toolkit 0.3.0 released - Wikidata Toolkit
  • ProteinBoxBot is making Wikidata the canonical resource for referencing and translating identifiers for genes and proteins from different species
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: depends on, motto, series ordinal, Federal Register Document Number, monogram, cause of, Cycling Quotient ID
• Development
  • Investigated and fixed issues with time values
  • Investigated issues with coordinate value precision
  • Fixed a number of issues related to HHVM
  • Further work on usage tracking
  • Created smoke tests for items and properties
  • Created a widget to edit badges directly on the item without going through the special page
  • Prepared for a week of work with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers next week to get more planning done for structured data support for Commons
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:48, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

The wonderful annual meeting! And more!

Hello, fellow Wikipedian!

I am excited to announce our upcoming Annual Meeting at the National Archives! We'll have free lunch, an introduction by Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, and a discussion featuring Ed Summers, the creator of CongressEdits. Join your fellow DC-area Wikipedians on Saturday, October 18 from 12 to 4:30 PM. RSVP today!

Also coming up we have the Human Origins edit-a-thon on October 17 and the WikiSalon on October 22. Hope to see you at our upcoming events!

Best,

James Hare

(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 21:20, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-41

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

• You can use the phab: and phabricator: interwikis to link to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org. [162] [163]
• Some wikis have a template to track bugs in Bugzilla. You should update it to work with Phabricator. You can look at the one on mediawiki.org to see how. [164] [165]
• You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [166]
• A new tool can now create thumbnails of large TIFF images. This concerns files larger than 50 megapixels. These thumbnails are also sharpened. You can comment on Commons. [167]
• The Media Viewer tool has a clearer link to the file page. It also has buttons to download, share and embed the file. You can enlarge images by clicking on them. [168]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
• If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [169] [170]
• We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [171]
• On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [172] [173]
• You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [174]
• 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [175]

Future changes

• You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [176]
• More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [177] [178]

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

06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 October 2014

• In the media: Opposition research firm blocked; Australian bushfires

• Featured content: From a wordless novel to a coat of arms via New York City

• Traffic report: Panic and denial

• Technology report: HHVM is the greatest thing since sliced bread

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:41, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #128

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Nikosguard
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming IRC office hour about structured data on Commons
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • All human genes are now wikidata items, for example: Here is one (of approximately 40,000) called "spinocerebellar ataxia 37" - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18081265. Blog post about this to appear here: http://blog.wikimedia.de/tag/wikidata/
  • Want to be kept up-to-date on structured data on Commons? There is now a new newsletter you can subscribe to.
  • Interested in some statistics about the data on Wikidata? Check Wikidata Stats every now and then. (Thanks Magnus for moving it to the new dump format.)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: UBERON ID, Yandex.Music ID, has quality, Exceptionnal heritage of Wallonia ID, Orphanet ID, demonym (monoligual text), maximum Strahler number
• Development
  • Spent the week with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers to get more clarity about structured data on Commons. We'll be asking for feedback on a lot of stuff over the next weeks. The main info hub is taking shape at Commons:Structured data.
  • More fixes for the switch to HHVM
  • Looked into possible performance improvements. Some of them will be taken into the next sprint.
  • Battled a handful of nasty issues on the live-site
  • Wikibase DataModel 1.1 was released
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:32, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-42

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 software changes

• You can now log into Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. Create your account and add your Bugzilla email address. We are copying the bugs from Bugzilla. Bugzilla is still open. [179] [180]
• You will now get the VisualEditor newsletter in your language if someone has translated it. You can add translations. You can know about the next translations by joining the translators list or asking Elitre (WMF).

Problems

• 10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [181]
• Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [182]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
• 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [183]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC). [184]
• There is a proposal to organize file pages better. It would use the same tools as Wikidata. You can join a meeting about it on October 16, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [185]
• You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [186]

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

08:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

GOCE October 2014 newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors October 2014 newsletter is now ready for review. Highlights: Results of the August Blitz and September Drive A few changes around the Guild's pages Sign up for the October Blitz Review the Coordinators election results – Your project coordinators: Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978 and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:16, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 October 2014

• Op-ed: Ships—sexist or sexy?

• In the media: College player falsely linked to sports scandal by Wikipedia; the Nobel Prizes

• Arbitration report: One case closed and two opened

• Featured content: Bells ring out at the Temple of the Dragon at Peace

• Technology report: Attempting to parse wikitext

• Traffic report: Now introducing ... mobile data

• WikiProject report: Signpost reaches the Midwest

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:48, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

• You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
• You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [187] [188]

File information cleanup

• You can join a wiki project to help tools read file information. It will help people reuse files.
• See how to fix metadata. You can fix it by adding markers to templates and adding templates to files.
• You can see a list of files missing machine-readable information on your wiki.
• The files missing readable data are also in these categories: no license, no description, no author or no source. [189]

Problems

• Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [190]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
• 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [191]
• If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [192] [193]

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

13:47, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #129

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Do you want to see constraint violation reports and referencing improved? Please provide input.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (log)
  • hackathon around scholarly articles on Wikidata (etherpad with notes)
  • Blog post about the meeting to discuss structured data on Commons in Berlin
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Clusters of humans and species on Wikidata
  • New parameter in the template Property documentation: subject item; see [this example edit] for how to use it
  • New tool: Linked Items. Returns sorted, de-duped list of Q values from a Wikipedia page, or chunk of wiki-text. Thank you, Magnus!
  • Wikidata annotation tool is looking for feedback
  • Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase by Denny and Markus has been published. It gives a very nice non-technical overview of Wikidata.
  • Magnus re-wrote Wiki ShootMe to now use Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Always wanted to know which topics have amazing articles on Wikimedia projects across many languages? Here you go!
  • Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number
• Development
  • Improvements to sitelink editing usability
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 2.0
  • Profiling and performance improvements in Wikibase and Wikibase DataModel
  • Implementing LabelLookup, which is needed to improve performance of EntityId formatting. This will lead to improved item page loading times.
  • Added new featured list and recommended article badges.
  • Remove most usage of class aliases to be compatible with HHVM (dependencies of bugzilla:71295)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 October 2014

• Featured content: Admiral on deck: a modern Ada Lovelace

• Op-ed: Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution—a wiki-protest

• In the media: The story of Wikipedia; Wikipedia reanimated and republished; New UK government social media rules; death of Italian Wikipedia administrator

• Traffic report: Death, War, Pestilence... Movies and TV

• WikiProject report: De-orphanning articles—a huge task but with a huge team of volunteers to help

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:22, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Game now has a 'Commons Categories' game
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number
• Development
  • Made significant performance improvements (to be rolled out next week)
  • Worked on usability improvements to the editing of sitelinks
  • When you link to an image on Wikimedia Commons in a statement it will now show up in “global usage” there.
  • Made the phpunit tests for Wikibase much faster
  • Wikibase phpunit tests on travis pass with hhvm now
  • Fixed label/description uniqueness constraint checks
  • Work on entity usage tracking
  • Year formatter now shows the year instead of the unformatted ISO string in case of a precision mismatch
  • Diff and old revision pages don’t run the JavaScript UI any more, should be much faster now
  • Introduced a Changers concept to the JavaScript frontend, wrapping the API and entityStore functionality
  • Identified issue causing content in the old serialization format to be included in XML dumps
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:28, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-44

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 an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [194]
• There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [195]
• There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [196]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [197]
• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [198] [199] [200]
• VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [201]
• VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [202]
• The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [203]

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

05:20, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 October 2014

• Featured content: Go West, young man

• In the media: Wikipedia a trusted source on Ebola; Wikipedia study labeled government waste; football biography goes viral

• Maps tagathon: Find 10,000 digitised maps this weekend

• Traffic report: Ebola, Ultron, and Creepy Articles

• Recent research: Informed consent and privacy; newsmaking on Wikipedia; Wikipedia and organizational theories

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:29, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #131

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata turned 2 on Wednesday! Have a look at the notes from the community and development team and add your note. Also don't forget to check out all the cool presents (a painting, speed improvements, a huge load of unconnected articles that you can help connect via the Wikidata Game, WikidataLDF, a recent changes visualisation)!
  • Wikidata II
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata is nominated for 2 Open Data Awards! \o/ Magnus and Lydia will attend the award ceremony next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
  • Wikidata as the central hub for open life science data
  • What is Wikipedia about? Great data viz based on Wikidata
  • Super Lachaise, a mobile app based on Wikidata for a cemetery in Paris
  • Random items without statements
  • Tutorial: How to make a “descendants of” timeline using Wikidata
  • Updated statistics on the topics with most highly-rated articles on Wikipedia
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID, Municipality code of Brazil, Pleiades identifier, MalaCards ID, natural product of taxon, official blog, University of Barcelona authority ID, Beilstein Registry Number, Gmelin Number
• Development
  • Worked around memory corruption in zend PHP
  • HHVM beta feature is enabled again for Wikidata
  • Fixes for various breaking changes in mediawiki core
  • Work on language fall backs for new serialization code
  • Work on fixing XML dumps
  • Work on making Special:Version correct again for Wikidata extensions
  • Implemented LabelLookup to improve performance further
  • Worked more on remaining tasks for simple queries
  • Poked remaining tasks for statements on properties
  • Further improvements to the usability and workflow of sitelink editing
  • Wrote browser tests for authority control gadget
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 14:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-45

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 software changes

• The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference. [204]
• You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [205] [206]

Problems

• There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [207]
• Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [208] [209] [210]
• HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
• Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [211] [212]
• VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [213]
• The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [214] [215] [216] [217] [218]
• After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [219] [220] [221]

Future changes

• The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [222]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 November 2014

• In the media: Predicting the flu, MH17 conspiracy theories

• Traffic report: Sweet dreams on Halloween

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:01, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #132

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Zero error rate - help improve the quality of Wikidata's data

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Lydia, Magnus and Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the ODI award gala

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata won the Open Data Award by the Open Data Institute in the category Publisher \o/ (blog post by ODI, blog post by WMDE)
  • Tutorial: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries
• Did you know?
  • Less than 23% of Wikidata items have no statement. Down from ~53% a year ago.
  • Newest properties: consecrator, Slovene Cultural Heritage designation, penalty, charge, judge, defender, prosecutor, defendant, number of casualties, deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID
• Development
  • Continued work on LabelLookup and related code to further improve performance
  • Made it possible to show references in statements on property pages. (Remaining bugs before roll-out are issues with adding/editing/removing statements on property pages.)
  • Further improvements to sitelink editing (The edit toolbar now floats so it doesn't scroll out of the page on a long list of sitelinks. An empty row for adding a new sitelink is shown by default when editing to make this faster and take less scrolling.)
  • Further adapting of simple query code so we can get it to review at the Foundation again.
  • Lots of bug fixes all over the place
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:05, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-46

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 software changes

• You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [223] [224]
• The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [225]

File information cleanup

• Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
• You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
• You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [226]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
• You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [227] [228]
• The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [229]
• The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [230]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #133

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming office hours for Commons (Nov 20th) and Wikidata (Dec 3rd). More details on the office hour page.
  • GLAM/Wikidata hackathon in Amsterdam
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help make sure these items have labels in your language
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NATO code for grade
• Development
  • Work on reviving the tree of life built from Wikidata data
  • Added a "featured portal" badge (Q17580674)
  • Improved the performance of getting labels and sitelinks in Lua (and decreased the memory usage)
  • Did groundwork on applying page deletions to the repo
  • Refactor initialization of EntityView so that we can use batched label lookup for improved performance.
  • Added IRC to available protocolls for the URL datatype
  • Improved calendar model display
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:00, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 November 2014

• In the media: Amazon Echo; EU freedom of panorama; Bluebeard's Castle

• Traffic report: Holidays, anyone?

• Featured content: Wikipedia goes to church in Lithuania

• WikiProject report: Talking hospitals

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:45, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-47

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

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
• The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19. [231]

Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator

• The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
• You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
• You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
• Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
• You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC. [232]

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

18:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Copyright checks when performing AfC reviews

Hello Amorymeltzer. This message is part of a mass mailing to people who appear active in reviewing articles for creation submissions. First of all, thank you for taking part in this important work! I'm sorry this message is a form letter – it really was the only way I could think of to covey the issue economically. Of course, this also means that I have not looked to see whether the matter is applicable to you in particular.

The issue is in rather large numbers of copyright violations ("copyvios") making their way through AfC reviews without being detected (even when easy to check, and even when hallmarks of copyvios in the text that should have invited a check, were glaring). A second issue is the correct method of dealing with them when discovered.

If you don't do so already, I'd like to ask for your to help with this problem by taking on the practice of performing a copyvio check as the first step in any AfC review. The most basic method is to simply copy a unique but small portion of text from the draft body and run it through a search engine in quotation marks. Trying this from two different paragraphs is recommended. (If you have any question about whether the text was copied from the draft, rather than the other way around (a "backwards copyvio"), the Wayback Machine is very useful for sussing that out.)

If you do find a copyright violation, please do not decline the draft on that basis. Copyright violations need to be dealt with immediately as they may harm those whose content is being used and expose Wikipedia to potential legal liability. If the draft is substantially a copyvio, and there's no non-infringing version to revert to, please mark the page for speedy deletion right away using {{db-g12|url=URL of source}}. If there is an assertion of permission, please replace the draft article's content with {{subst:copyvio|url=URL of source}}.

Some of the more obvious indicia of a copyvio are use of the first person ("we/our/us..."), phrases like "this site", or apparent artifacts of content written for somewhere else ("top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", use of smartquotes, etc.); inappropriate tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone or a very slanted marketing voice with weasel words; including intellectual property symbols (™,®); and blocks of text being added all at once in a finished form with no misspellings or other errors.

I hope this message finds you well and thanks again you for your efforts in this area. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC).

       Sent via--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #134

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Had a great hackathon for GLAM and Wikidata in Amsterdam last weekend
  • IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (logs)
  • Building a periodic table using Wikidata
  • Lydia will be speaking at internetdagarna in Stockholm on Monday
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Commons will get Phase 2 on December 2nd
  • The Sum of all Paintings - new app to nicely display data related to artwork
  • Institutions on Commons without an item on Wikidata
  • Wikidata descriptions being used to help clarify search results in the Wikipedia mobile app
  • WikidataTodo now shows you tasks to be done on Wikidata related to a specific country as well
  • VisualEditor coming as a beta feature
  • Statements on properties are getting closer to the finish line. You could help figure out which properties to use for describing and classifying properties.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MarineTraffic Port ID, MarineTraffic Ship ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer, SIREN number, CLARA-ID, History of Parliament ID, IRC channel, Commons Institution page
• Development
  • When a page is deleted on a client (Wikipedia, etc) its sitelink is now removed automatically from its Wikidata item
  • Reworked the automatic precision detection for coordinates
  • The long planned split of the code base into two independent Wikibase Repo and Client extensions is getting closer pretty fast these weeks
  • Made good progress on making the sitelinks section much more compact and moving it into the right-hand sidebar
  • While still reworking lots of details that slightly changed in DataModel 2.0 we already started working on a possible DataModel 3.0
  • More performance optimizations in the form of more advanced label lookup implementations
  • Implemented file-based cache of SiteStore to improve performance
  • Bug fixes
  • Updated the property suggester with new data! :)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:47, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-48

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 move from Bugzilla to Phabricator is done. You can now report bugs in Phabricator. [233]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the colspan or rowspan option. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17. [234]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
• You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options. [235]
• VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [236]
• You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [237]
• VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [238] [239]

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

19:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Thursday December 4: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share

Thursday December 4: NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share

You are invited to join the the Wikimedia NYC community for our upcoming wiki-salon and knowledge-sharing workshop in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Thursday December 4 NYC Wiki-Salon and Skill Share (RSVP). 6:30pm–8pm at Babycastles, 137 West 14th Street Afterwards at 8pm, we'll walk to a social wiki-dinner together at a neighborhood restaurant (to be decided). We hope to see you there!--Pharos (talk) 07:10, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

(You can unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by removing your name from this list.)

The Signpost: 26 November 2014

• Featured content: Orbital Science: Now you're thinking with explosions

• In the media: A Russian alternative Wikipedia; Who's your grandfather?; ArtAndFeminism

• Recent research: Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures

• WikiProject report: Back with the military historians

• Traffic report: Big in Japan

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:21, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #135

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Internetdagaarna in Stockholm
  • Past: Hacks/Hackers in Berlin
  • Picture this!
  • Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB - where next?
  • Wikidata and identifiers - part 2, the matching process
  • IRC office hour on Wednesday
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Commons will get access to the data on Wikidata on Tuesday
  • Statements on properties and language fallbacks are coming
  • VisualEditor is now available as a beta feature to make editing of project and help pages easier
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: China Vitae ID, Formatter URL, subject item, equivalent property, SIL code, Thai cultural heritage ID, has melody, MarineTraffic Port ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer
• Development
  • Moved the sitelink section into a sidebar (if the page is too narrow it will float below the statement section like it is now)
  • Wrapping up work on injecting LabelLookups into EntityView (should boost performance)
  • Implemented new notification bar to replace the notification bubble we had before
  • Fixed more issues with geocoordinates
  • Wrapping up work on client side usage tracking (important for arbitrary access)
  • Making language fallback work for referenced entities (via LabelLookup)
  • Transformations for pass XML dumps got merged, should fix phabricator:T74348
  • Enabled Statements on Properties on http://test.wikidata.org for testing
  • JSON dumps will no longer contain redirects from the week after next week on
  • Improved performance of client’s other projects sidebar
  • Worked on bug triage (looking at the testme bugs)
  • Replaced the custom Wikidata Jenkins continuous integration slaves with regular ones
  • Fixed error in DataModel that was noticed by DataModelSerializer tests
  • Input on mw:Wikibase/Indexing
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:14, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 December 2014

• Op-ed: Who edits health-related content on Wikipedia and why?

• In the media: Embroidery and cheese

• Featured content: ABCD: Any Body Can Dance!

• Traffic report: Turkey and a movie

• WikiProject report: Today on the island

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:30, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

End-of-the-year meetups

Hello,

You're invited to the end-of-the-year meetup at Busboys and Poets on Sunday, December 14 at 6 PM. There is Wi-Fi, so bring your computer if you want!

You are also invited to our WikiSalon on Thursday, December 18 at 7 PM.

Hope to see you at our upcoming events!

Best,

James Hare

(To unsubscribe, remove your username here.) 02:22, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #136

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • IRC office hour (log)
  • Wikidata for research - a grant proposal anyone can edit
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Commons now has access to the data on Wikidata
  • Statements on properties are now live
  • Sneak peek at a prototype for checking Wikidata's data against 3rd party databases
  • The Game has a new mode: alma mater
  • Work is ongoing for a bot job to tag thousands of objects in OpenStreetMap with the equivalent Wikidata ID
  • Resolver finds Wikidata items for a given identifier (VIAF, GND, IMDB, ...)
  • English-Wikipedia now has a template, RedQ, which puts a Wikidata link next to red links for subjects which have no Wikipedia article in any language, This should prevent duplicate Wikidata items from being created when an article is written, and assist Wikipedia editors to find relevant facts and sources. Please copy it to other-language Wikipedias.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: working title, undercarriage
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Wikidata for research aims to integrate Wikidata more closely with research, and to this end, a grant proposal is being drafted.
• Development
  • Started work on units
  • More work on evaluating options for querying
  • Implemented Property DataType (for relationships between properties)
  • Improvements to get by with fewer memcache request on clients
  • Work on file-based cache of the SiteStore
  • Work on improved label lookup performance
  • Wrapping up work on usage tracking
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:48, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-50

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 software changes

• All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [240]
• You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [241]

Problems

• There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [242]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar). [243]
• You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [244]
• It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [245] [246]
• The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [247] [248] [249]
• (Lua) You can no longer use mw.text.unstrip to get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix. [250] [251]

Future changes

• Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [252]

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

17:11, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

GOCE coordinator elections

Greetings from the Guild of Copy Editors Candidate nominations for Guild coordinators to serve from January 1 to June 30, 2015, are currently underway. The nomination period will close at 23:59 on December 15 (UTC), after which voting will commence until 23:59 on December 31, 2014. Self-nominations are welcomed. Please consider getting involved; it's your Guild and it won't coordinate itself, so if you'd like to help coordinate Guild activities we'd love to hear from you. Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, and Miniapolis. Message sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:17, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 December 2014

• Op-ed: It's GLAM up North!

• In the media: Wikipedia is "a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess"

• Traffic report: Dead Black Men and Science Fiction

• Featured content: Honour him, love and obey? Good idea with military leaders.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:50, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

December 2014 GOCE newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2014 Newsletter Drive: Thanks to everyone who participated in November's Backlog Elimination Drive. Of the 43 people who signed up for this drive, 26 copy edited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. Progress report: The November Drive removed 26 requests from the Requests page and 509 articles from the {{copy edit}} backlog. We copy edited 83 articles tagged in the target months; July, August, and September 2013. Together with tag removals from articles unsuitable for copy editing, we eliminated July 2013 from the backlog and reduced August and September's tags to 61 and 70 respectively. As of 01:01, 1 December 2014 (UTC), the backlog stood at 1,974 articles, dipping below 2,000 for the first time in the Guild's history (see graph at right). Well done everyone! Blitz: The December Blitz will run from December 14–20 and will focus on articles related to Religion, in recognition of this month's religious holidays in much of the English-speaking world. Awards will be given out to everyone who copy edits at least one of the target articles. Sign up here! Election time again: The election of coordinators to serve from 1 January to 30 June 2015 is now underway. Candidates can nominate themselves or others from December 01, 00:01 (UTC), until December 15, 23:59. The voting period will run from December 16, 00:01 (UTC), until December 31, 23:59. You can read about coordinators' duties here. Please consider getting involved and remember to cast you vote—it's your Guild and it doesn't organize itself! Thank you all once again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve anything without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978, and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:15, 14 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #137

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Running Wikidata queries on scientific publications
  • Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia
  • past: Wikidata workshop in NYC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Ancient philosopher communities visualized based on Wikidata data
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: departure transaction, acquisition transaction, port, curator, pendant of
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Music
• Development
  • More work on making it possible to query Wikidata data (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
  • Further improvements to performance on the clients (Wikipedia etc)
  • Fixed and improved JSON dump creation process
  • Finishing touches on new sitelinks section
  • Worked more on supporting quantities with units - first basic version is making good progress
  • Unprotected Q183 (Germany) again (had to be protected to ensure site availability)
  • Improved performance for page views on Wikidata (no longer accessing actual entity data blob, when page is available from parser cache)
  • Moved issues from github to phabricator and closed/checked bugs marked for testing
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:00, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-51

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 software changes

• You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [253]
• You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [254]
• You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar). [255]
• You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [256]
• VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [257]
• The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [258]

Future changes

• The star image of the watchlist may change soon. [259] [260]
• You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC). [261] [262]

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

16:43, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Comprehensive List of Viruses Attributing Genome Type to Key Life Cycle Features

Greetings. I am a bioinformaticist working on a large genome-sequence-analysis project. Partly in support of this project, I have created a comprehensive list of viruses that links their genomic organization (Baltimore classification) with multiple key life cycle features. Earlier this year, I interacted with personnel at Wiki with the goal of adding this data to WikiLists. Unfortunatley, I did not keep my correspondence and, now that I am ready to publish the list, I cannot remember what I was directed to do. Can you assist?

DrHuff (talk) 17:58, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 December 2014

• Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee election results

• Featured content: Tripping hither, tripping thither, Nobody knows why or whither; We must dance and we must sing, Round about our fairy ring!

• In the media: Wikipedia's year in review video; Checking in with Wikipedia's founders

• Traffic report: A December Lull

• Read this Signpost in full
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:07, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #138

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: Petr Matas
  • Closed RfAs: Jared Preston (Successful)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Welcome Freebase!
    • Freebase announcement
    • Wikidata announcement
    • Wikiproject
    • Primary sources tool
    • Heise
    • Venturebeat
    • Gigaom
  • Wikidata for Research – presenting the team and a first sketch of the workplan
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New features! Language fallbacks, property data type and performance improvements
  • New tree of life based on Wikidata data
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: subproperty of, mandatory qualifier, NIST/CODATA ID, EgliseInfo ID
  • New task forces: Freebase, Sled dog racing
  • Showcase items: Lion
• Development
  • Happy holidays from the dev team, everyone :)
  • ~=[,,_,,]:3
  • Enabled other projects sidebar feature as default on Italian Wikipedia
  • Deployed new code to Wikidata, including performance improvements, language fallback, and property data type
  • Fixed some small issues that popped up after deployment
  • Ongoing work on performance improvements (batched label lookup)
  • Ongoing work on the JavaScript widgets needed for the planned redesign
  • Ongoing work on the WikibaseJavaScriptApi extension that was split from the Wikibase code base
  • Finished tree of life
  • Some more work on support for units
  • Closed/checked even more ‘testme’ bugs on Phabricator
  • Wikidata Query has gotten a number of stability fixes. To increase availability and performance we now have multiple instances of it with a load balancer in front of it.
  • The data for the entity suggester has been updated. Suggestions when adding new statements should be even better now.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 17:49, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-52

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 software changes

• The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private. [263]

Software changes this week

• There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6. [264]

Future changes

• The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [265]
• A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [266]

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

16:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

GOCE holiday 2014 newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors Late December 2014 Newsletter Blitz: Thanks to everyone who participated in the December Blitz. Of the 14 editors who signed up for the blitz, 11 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here. January drive: The January backlog-reduction drive is just around the corner; sign up here! Election time again: The election of coordinators to serve from January 1 to June 30, 2015 is now underway. The voting period runs from December 16, 00:01 (UTC), until December 31, 23:59. Please cast your vote—it's your Guild, and it doesn't run itself! Happy holidays from your GOCE coordinators Jonesey95, Baffle gab1978 and Miniapolis. To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:43, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2014

• From the editor: Looking for new editors-in-chief

• In the media: Wales on GamerGate

• Featured content: Still quoting Iolanthe, apparently.

• WikiProject report: Microsoft does The Signpost

• Traffic report: North Korea is not pleased

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:25, 25 December 2014 (UTC)