Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-02/Technology report

Technology report

Tech news in brief

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The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [1]
Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [2]

Changes this week

Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [3][4]
There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (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 1 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is using the <figure> tag for media. The meeting will be on 2 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [5]
Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [6]

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These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Regarding a Category Watchlist.. I wrote a tool Backlinks Watchlist to notify when backlinks to a page change. This allows to monitor, for example, when a Template is used. Thus if you wrote a template and want to be notified whenever someone uses it. It can also monitor backlinks to any page, such as a User or File page. -- GreenC 17:30, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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