Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE)
Editing news 2020 #3
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Seven years ago this month, the Editing team offered the visual editor to most Wikipedia editors. Since then, editors have achieved many milestones:
- More than 50 million edits have been made using the visual editor on desktop.
- More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
- The visual editor is increasingly popular. The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has increased every year since its introduction.
- In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers (logged-in editors with ≤99 edits) used the visual editor. This percentage has increased every year.
- Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
- On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor. 🚀 👩🚀
- Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
12:48, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #4
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Reply tool
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The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.
- More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
- Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
- Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[1]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
edit- The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
- Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
editNext, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
15:11, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2021 #1
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Reply tool
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The Reply tool is available at most Wikipedias.
- The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
- It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.
Research notes:
- As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
- We have preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[2]
- The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[3] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
A large A/B test will start soon.[4] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. You can still turn it on or off for your own account in Special:Preferences.
New discussion tool
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The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[5] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.
Next: Notifications
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During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at notifications-talk.
18:38, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
Editing news 2021 #2
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Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
- Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
- The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
The next step is to resolve a technical challenge. Then, they will deploy the Reply tool first to the Wikipedias that participated in the study. After that, they will deploy it, in stages, to the other Wikipedias and all WMF-hosted wikis.
You can turn on "Discussion tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.
14:12, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
Editing news 2022 #1
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The New topic tool helps editors create new ==Sections== on discussion pages. New editors are more successful with this new tool. You can read the report. Soon, the Editing team will offer this to all editors at the 20 Wikipedias that participated in the test. You will be able to turn it off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.
Editing news 2022 #2
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The new [subscribe] button notifies people when someone replies to their comments. It helps newcomers get answers to their questions. People reply sooner. You can read the report. The Editing team is turning this tool on for everyone. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences.
Editing news 2023 #1
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This newsletter includes two key updates about the Editing team's work:
- The Editing team will finish adding new features to the Talk pages project and deploy it.
- They are beginning a new project, Edit check.
Talk pages project
The Editing team is nearly finished with this first phase of the Talk pages project. Nearly all new features are available now in the Beta Feature for Discussion tools.
It will show information about how active a discussion is, such as the date of the most recent comment. There will soon be a new "Add topic" button. You will be able to turn them off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. Please tell them what you think.
An A/B test for Discussion tools on the mobile site has finished. Editors were more successful with Discussion tools. The Editing team is enabling these features for all editors on the mobile site.
New Project: Edit Check
The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.