This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [1]
There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [2]
Changes this week
When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [3]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [4][5]
Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: {{1x| sad :-{ face }}. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [6][7]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use ISBNs to automatically generate citations in the visual editor. This works on wikis that have enabled Citoid. [8]
The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using('mediawiki.util').done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [10]
Changes this week
The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [11]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages. [12][13]
Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. Tech News wrote about this last week. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. You can now see the full list of wikis with this problem and help fix them to avoid that things break later this month. You might find false positives. You can read more about what to fix. [14][15]
Older unreported changes
Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word __NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. [16][17]
Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Did you mean correct? Apuldram (talk) 15:35, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
No. I clarified that the IP's requested change would make the sentence grammatically incorrect. —MRD2014📞contribs 16:16, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
New Page Review - Newsletter No.4
Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello MRD2014,
Since rolling out the right in November, just 6 months ago, we now have 811 reviewers, but the backlog is still mysteriously growing fast. If every reviewer did just 55 reviews, the 22,000 backlog would be gone, in a flash, schwoop, just like that!
But do remember: Rather than speed, quality and depth of patrolling and the use of correct CSD criteria are essential to good reviewing. Do not over-tag. Make use of the message feature to let the creator know about your maintenance tags. See the tutorial again HERE. Get help HERE.
Stay up to date with recent new page developments and have your say, read THIS PAGE.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [18]
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
Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [19]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
An RfC proposing an off-wiki LTA database has been closed. The proposal was broadly supported, with further discussion required regarding what to do with the existing LTA database and defining access requirements. Such a tool/database formed part of the Community health initiative's successful grant proposal.
Some clarifications have been made to the community banning and unblocking policies that effectively sync them with current practice. Specifically, the community has reached a consensus that when blocking a user at WP:AN or WP:ANI, it is considered a "community sanction", and administrators cannot unblock unilaterally if the user has not successfully appealed the sanction to the community.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [21]
When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [22]
You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [23]
New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [24]
Problems
The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [25]
Changes this week
Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [26]
You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [27]
When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [28]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [29]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [30][31]
Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [32]
The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.
Hello! Thanks for reviewing the Days for Girls International article. I worked really hard on trying to achieve a neutral voice in this article. It would be so helpful if you could send a few examples of the sentences that seem particularly promotional and share your ideas on how I might make it less promotional. Also, I worked very hard researching different sources, more than half of the references I cited were not directly from the organization's website. So I'm wondering if citing an organization directly is not allowed at all? Or what is the threshold--how much can you site from an organization directly? It would be so helpful to have some more guidance on how to revise this article so that it would have more chance of being accepted.
Thank you!
Best,
Beth--Bahintz (talk) 00:42, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
@Bahintz: The "Approach" section seems to be the most promotional in tone. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch#Puffery and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view could give you guidance on how to rewrite the section to remove the promotional tone. You could also expand the History section and move it below the Overview section by finding more information on the organization.
Using bold titles in your sections is the proper way to divide sections. Instead, you should use Wikipedia heading format (e.g. == Overview == instead of '''Overview'''). You can do that by clicking "Advanced" in the edit toolbar, clicking "Heading" on the left, and then selecting the heading (use Level 2 first), and if you want to divide a section into further subsections, level 3 and level 4 headings can be used. —MRD2014talkcontribs 01:02, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [33]
When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [34]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [35]
Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [36]
Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [37][38]
Are you sure about VE not being enabled on project space? When I visit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&veaction=edit, it seems to be enabled and slowly launches the lump of bloatware known as VE for me. I partially reverted your revert to reinstate the use of the UI message for the link and maintain consistency between the pairs of similar links, but with both of them pointing at Draft:Sandbox per your revert (on the assumption that you're seeing something I didn't consider). Murph9000 (talk) 00:53, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
@Murph9000: Try clicking "Edit" at the top of any page in the Wikipedia namespace. You will get the wikitext editor and the button to switch to the VisualEditor at the top right of the edit bar is not there. I believe it's only available in the following namespaces: Main, User (not User talk), and Draft. Draft:Sandbox was created for testing with the VisualEditor. —MRD2014 ( T / C ) 01:19, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Well, I have it disabled in prefs, so the edit tab always takes me to source with no option to switch to VE. I only see it by forcing it via the URL params if I am testing something specific to it. It certainly appears to be not fully disabled in project space via that method. I'll take your word for it not being easy to normally get to it (for people who don't have it disabled), which was something I was unaware of. That being the case, I wonder if the message should actually be changed (to not mention alternate editing options when transcluded into WP:Sandbox), as it seems like the text is somewhat at odds with what a default user actually sees in that instance? Murph9000 (talk) 01:30, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
I guess it can only be enabled by manually modifying the URL. On Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Limitations, the first limitation says "In the English Wikipedia, VisualEditor is not enabled for any talk pages, in the Template or Wikipedia namespaces, or in several of the namespaces that are rarely edited. The "Edit" button for VisualEditor is not available on pages where VisualEditor cannot be used. Flow supports editing on discussion pages where it is enabled, using either VisualEditor or simulated wikitext." —MRD2014 ( T / C ) 01:46, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [39]
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [40]
Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [41]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [42]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [43]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [44]
Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Ultraviolet photography is one of the many visual technologies. This image of the rings of Saturn is an example of the application of ultraviolet photography in astronomy.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [45]
Changes this week
Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [46]
Fuzzy search will soon be added to Special:Undelete, allowing administrators to search for deleted page titles with results similar to the search query. You can test this by adding ?fuzzy=1 to the URL, as with Special:Undelete?fuzzy=1. Currently the search only finds pages that exactly match the search term.
A newly revamped database report can help identify users who may be eligible to be autopatrolled.
A potentially compromised account from 2001–2002 attempted to request resysop. Please practice appropriate account security by using a unique password for Wikipedia, and consider enabling two-factor authentication. Currently around 17% of admins have enabled 2FA, up from 16% in February 2017.
Did you know: On 29 June 2017, there were 1,261 administrators on the English Wikipedia – the exact number of administrators as there were ten years ago on 29 June 2007. Since that time, the English Wikipedia has grown from 1.85 million articles to over 5.43 million.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article. [47]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis. [48]
We will not useTidy on Wikimedia wikis in the future. It will be replaced by June 2018. It could be earlier. Editors will need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors.
Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello MRD2014, thank you for your efforts reviewing new pages!
Backlog update:
The new page backlog is currently at 18,511 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a a day.
Some editors are committing to work specifically on patrolling new pages on 15 July. If you have not reviewed new pages in a while, this might be a good time to be involved. Please remember that quality of patrolling is more important than quantity, that the speedy deletion criteria should be followed strictly, and that ovetagging for minor issues should be avoided.
Technology update:
Several requests have been put into Phabractor to increase usability of the New Pages Feed and the Page Curation toolbar. For more details or to suggest improvements go to Wikipedia:Page Curation/Suggested improvements
The tutorial has been updated to include links to the following useful userscripts. If you were not aware of them, they could be useful in your efforts reviewing new pages:
User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js adds a link to the new pages feed and page curation toolbar to your top toolbar on Wikipedia
Following discussion at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers, Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Noticeboard has been marked as historical. Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers is currently the most active central discussion forum for the New Page Patrol project. To keep up to date on the most recent discussions you can add it to your watchlist or visit it periodically.
If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.TonyBallioni (talk) 03:48, 14 July 2017 (UTC)
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