John F. Lewis

Welcome to Meta!

Hello, John F. Lewis. Welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). Happy editing!

-- Meta-Wiki Welcome (talk) 02:16, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Global.js

Your global.js is appearing at CAT:DEL because of the {{delete}} in it. :-P This can be fixed if the syntax is like the following.

// Tags
//<nowiki>
if(typeof(taggerConfig) == 'undefined') taggerConfig = {};
// taggerConfig.tags = [];
// taggerConfig.editSummary = [];
taggerConfig.tags[1] = '{{delete}}';
taggerConfig.editSummary[taggerConfig.tags[1]] = 'delete';
//</nowiki>

Notice the 'nowiki' tags. Regards --Glaisher [talk] 06:52, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Whoops :p Fixed. John F. Lewis (talk) 07:05, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata to 15M

I have reverted this edit of yours because d:Q15000000 is not, in fact, the 15 millionth currently existing Wikidata item, which is what we track in that table (i.e., there has to actually be 15 million items to say the wiki has reached 15 million — as I type this, the on-wiki statistics are showing only 13,533,499). - dcljr (talk) 02:40, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Ah, apologies for that then. John F. Lewis (talk) 07:57, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Beginning of MassMessage, end of EdwardsBot

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WMT

Any news about WMT? PiRSquared17 (talk) 00:29, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Not really. Still waiting on the toolslabs node. Savh was talking about something relating to the spambots bot which I think they want to talk to you about. Apart from that, nope. John F. Lewis (talk) 00:31, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

None crashed? PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:02, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Are you mad at me?

Are you mad at me for opposing your idea about blocking DanielTom? Because it is not going to work. --Golden_burg111 21:06, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

No... You should not be changing other peoples comments full stop. John F. Lewis (talk) 21:10, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Note: I was trying to help out. I was about to notify him. --Golden_burg111 21:11, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, comment or notify users instead. Changing the word support to oppose can make a very big difference :) John F. Lewis (talk) 21:12, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Goldenburg, you should know that it is possible to agree with part of what someone says, but not the whole comment. Southparkfan said that he agreed with Vogone that (s)he isn't very active, but that doesn't mean he opposes the request. Please do not modify other users' comments again, except in noncontroversial cases (like fixing a link). PiRSquared17 (talk) 21:15, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Stop

Stop quarrelling with DT on my talkpage, or better, stop quarrelling at all. --Vituzzu (talk) 19:51, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Revert without visiting Talk Page

Dear John F. Lewis,

To revert edits is one thing, but not giving any explanation is impolite in my opinion. Why?

Explain? John F. Lewis (talk) 13:16, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Everybody (even those who are not signed in) has a Talk Page. Showing goo will is using them whenever you revert or make any chages (which is basically not allowed) to contributions in Talk Pages. Thank you and good luck,  Klaas|Z4␟V:  08:04, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

There is a difference between good faith edits and blatant bad faith edits/trolling. Here, I reverted the latter and I do not need to explain. If challenged, I will explain or if a possibly good faith contributor, but not one who is bad faith. John F. Lewis (talk) 15:20, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

zhwikinews

n:zh:Wikinews:茶館/存檔/2014年 is an archive page. Why did you post messages there?--GZWDer (talk) 13:32, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Because I didn't know. John F. Lewis (talk) 16:29, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Request

Dear John F. Lewis, you're a new message in test.wikidata. Thanks in advanced ♫♫ Leitoxx ♪♪ 21:22, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Replied. John F. Lewis (talk) 21:36, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Answered. Kind Regards ♫♫ Leitoxx ♪♪ 00:16, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

ukwikinews

Hello. The page you made edits in is our Square's (Village pump's) archive, not the Square itself. It's not a problem to move added information to the proper page, I'll do that now, but I'd like to know where you get to the page you edited from thus a link can be fixed. --Base (talk) 12:34, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-21

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 is one year old this week; thank you for being with us!

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
• The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work. [1] [2] [3]
• MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome. [4] [5]
• VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [6] [7]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys. [8] [9]
• VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [10] [11]
• VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [12] [13]
• VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [14]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [15] [16]

Future software changes

• User ID number will no longer be visible in preferences. [17] [18]

Problems

• For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [19]

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

07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-22

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 (1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 (calendar).
• MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [20] [21] [22] [23]
• A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [24] [25]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [26] [27]
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [28]
• VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [29]

Future software changes

• Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [30]
• It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [31] [32]
• Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [33] [34] [35]
• You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [36] [37]

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

08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-23

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 (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [38]

VisualEditor news

• Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [39]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [40] [41]
• VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [42]
• There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [43]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
• You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist. [44] [45]
• The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search. [46] [47]
• You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot). [48] [49]

Problems

• For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [50]

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

08:07, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-24

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 (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
• You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [51] [52]

VisualEditor news

• You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [53] [54]
• The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [55] [56] [57]
• You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [58] [59]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [60]
• You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [61]
• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [62] [63]
• You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [64] [65]
• Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [66] [67] [68]
• You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [69] [70]
• Hovercards will no longer flicker. [71]

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

07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25

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

Reminder

• You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

• You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [72]
• When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [73] [74]
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [75] [76] [77] [78]
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [79] [80] [81]

Future software changes

• Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [82]
• You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [83]
• You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [84] [85]
• It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [86] [87]
• Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [88]
• The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [89]
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
• You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [90]

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

07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-26

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 (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [91] [92]
• When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [93] [94]
• You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [95] [96]
• You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [97] [98]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [99] [100]
• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [101]
• CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [102]
• You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [103] [104]
• An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [105]

Problems

• On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
• Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [106]

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

07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-27

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 (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [107] [108]
• A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [109] [110]
• VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [111] [112] [113] [114]
• Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [115] [116]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [117] [118]
• Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
• CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [119]
• All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [120] [121]
• Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [122]
• You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [123] [124]
• You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [125]

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

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-28

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

• We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [126]
• It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [127] [128]
• You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [129] [130]

VisualEditor news

• Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [131] [132]
• You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [133] [134] [135]
• When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [136] [137] [138]
• The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [139]
• Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [140] [141] [142]

Future software changes

• Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
• A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [143]
• If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [144] [145]
• Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [146] [147]
• Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [148] [149]

Problems

• Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [150] [151]
• For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [152] [153]

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

07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

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. [154] [155]
• 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. [156] [157]
• The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [158] [159] [160]
• References will now be shown in the default font size again. [161]

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. [162]
• The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [163] [164]
• 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. [165]
• Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [166] [167]
• 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. [168] [169]
• Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [170] [171]
• Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [172]

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

07:49, 14 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. [173] [174] [175]
• 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. [176]
• Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [177] [178]
• A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [179]

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. [180]
• 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. [181]
• You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [182]
• Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [183] [184] [185] [186] [187] [188]

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. [189]
• You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [190]
• An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [191]
• 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. [192]

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)

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. [193] [194]
• 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. [195]
• 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. [196] [197]
• You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [198] [199]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [200] [201]
• 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. [202]
• It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [203] [204]

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

08:09, 28 July 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). [205]
• You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [206] [207] [208]
• 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. [209]
• New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [210] [211]

VisualEditor news

• You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [212] [213]
• VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [214]
• Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [215] [216] [217] [218]
• Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [219] [220] [221] [222]

Future software changes

• You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [223] [224]
• All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [225]
• Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [226]

Problems

• Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [227]
• 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. [228]

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)

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). [229]
• Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [230]

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. [231]

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! [232] [233] [234]
• 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. [235] [236]
• You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [237] [238]
• 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). [239]

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)

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. [240] [241] [242]
• You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [243] [244]
• You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [245]
• 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. [246]
• 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. [247]

Problems

• There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [248] [249]

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

07:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decitions

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

I'm notifying you because you participated in one of several relevant discussions. -Pete F (talk) 22:11, 20 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. [250]
• You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [251]
• If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [252] [253] [254]

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. [255]

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)

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. [256] [257]
• You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [258] [259]
• 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". [260] [261]
• If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [262]

VisualEditor news

• You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [263]
• 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. [264] [265] [266]
• VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [267]
• We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [268]
• You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [269]

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. [270]
• 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. [271]
• 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. [272]

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

07:49, 1 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. [273] [274] [275]

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. [276]
• You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [277]

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)

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. [278] [279]
• 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. [280] [281] [282]
• 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. [283]

Problems

• There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [284]

VisualEditor news

• If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [285]
• The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [286] [287]
• You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [288]

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. [289] [290] [291]

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)

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. [292]

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. [293] [294]

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.[295] [296]
• In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [297] [298]
• The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [299]
• 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. [300]
• There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [301] [302]
• In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [303]

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. [304]

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

09:05, 22 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. [305] [306]
• There are now many more translations for language names. [307]

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. [308] [309]
• 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. [310]
• If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [311] [312]
• The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [313]

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. [314]

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)

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. [315] [316]
• 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. [317] [318]
• You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [319]
• 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. [320]
• 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. [321]

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. [322] [323]
• 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. [324]
• On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [325] [326]
• You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [327]
• 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [328]

Future changes

• You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [329]
• More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [330] [331]

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)

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. [332] [333]
• 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. [334]
• Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [335]

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. [336]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC). [337]
• 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). [338]
• You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [339]

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

08:54, 13 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. [340] [341]

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. [342]

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. [343]

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. [344]
• If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [345] [346]

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

13:48, 20 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. [347]
• There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [348]
• There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [349]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [350]
• 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. [351] [352] [353]
• VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [354]
• VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [355]
• 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. [356]

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)

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. [357]
• You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [358] [359]

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. [360]
• 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. [361] [362] [363]
• 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. [364] [365]
• 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. [366]
• The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [367] [368] [369] [370] [371]
• After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [372] [373] [374]

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. [375]

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)

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. [376] [377]
• The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [378]

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. [379]

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. [380] [381]
• 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". [382]
• The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [383]

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)

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. [384]

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. [385]

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)

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. [386]

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. [387]

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. [388]
• VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [389]
• You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [390]
• VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [391] [392]

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)

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. [393]
• You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [394]

Problems

• There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [395]

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). [396]
• You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [397]
• It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [398] [399]
• The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [400] [401] [402]
• (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. [403] [404]

Future changes

• Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [405]

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)

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. [406]
• You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [407]
• 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). [408]
• You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [409]
• VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [410]
• The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [411]

Future changes

• The star image of the watchlist may change soon. [412] [413]
• You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC). [414] [415]

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

16:44, 15 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. [416]

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. [417]

Future changes

• The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [418]
• A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [419]

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)

Tech News: 2015-01

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

• There are no technical changes this week.

Feedback about Tech News in 2014

• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2014? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us at m:Talk:Tech/News. You can write in your language. Thank you!

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

16:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-03

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

• Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [420]
• You can now use the {{!}} magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [421]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
• A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [422]
• The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [423]
• The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [424] [425] [426]
• The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [427]

Future changes

• You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [428]

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

16:47, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-04

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 download the new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. The new version shows lead images, better galleries and content from Wikidata. It also has many other new features.[429] [430]
• Programs and bots still can't read information about images on many wikis. You can see the list of wikis with the most files to fix. Wikipedia in Italian, Indonesian and Japanese language have the most files to fix. On the biggest wikis you should use bots. Bots can add information templates to groups of files. You can ask other tech users to help you.

Problems

• All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [431]

Software changes this week

• There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [432]

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

18:13, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-05

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 translate articles with the new ContentTranslation tool on several wikis. [433]

This week

• There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [434]

Future changes

• You can join a project to improve WikiProjects. [435]
• The Compact Personal Bar will be removed for now. It has a bug that breaks the tool to choose your language. It will come back when the bug is fixed. [436]

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

16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-06

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 a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [437]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
• The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [438]
• You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [439] [440]

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

16:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-07

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 use {{#lsth: PageName | SectionName }} to transclude a section with its title. [441]

Problems

• MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [442]
• UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [443]
• All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [444]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
• You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [445] [446] [447]
• You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [448] [449]
• It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [450]
• You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).

Future changes

• Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [451]
• In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [452]

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

16:26, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-08

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 has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
• On Wednesday your Meta user page will be shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. [453] [454] [455]
• You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [456]
• In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [457]
• The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first.​ [458]

Meetings

• The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [459]
• You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [460]
• You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [461]

Future changes

• You can comment on a proposal about abandoned Labs tools.

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

17:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-09

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 new accounts are now global. [462]
• Your Meta user page is now shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can report problems if you see any. You can ask a bot to delete your old user pages. [463] [464] [465]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
• It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [466]
• It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [467]
• Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [468]
• Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [469]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
• Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [470]

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

16:28, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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

• A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [471]
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
• You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [472] [473]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
• Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [474] [475] [476] [477]
• The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [478]
• The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [479]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [480]

Future changes

• You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [481]

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

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11

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 create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [482] [483]
• VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [484] [485] [486]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
• In VisualEditor the "Edit ^beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [487] [488]
• The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [489] [490]
• You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [491] [492]
• You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [493] [494]
• If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [495]

Future changes

• You can get help to become a developer. You can learn more on the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy pages. [496]
• You will soon be able to read technical reports in Phabricator. [497]

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

15:18, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-12

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 servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [498]
• You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [499]
• It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [500] [501]

Problems

• Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
• A puzzle piece icon () now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [502] [503]
• You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [504] [505]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [506] [507]
• You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [508]
• The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [509]

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

15:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Updated scripts

Hi John F. Lewis. I edited your global.js to update you to the latest version of force ltr, which is compatible with the latest MediaWiki changes and resides on the Wikimedia Tool Labs for easier updates. I also updated various deprecated functions. Let me know if anything breaks. :) —Pathoschild 03:20, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13

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 has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
• The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [510]
• VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [511] [512] [513]
• When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [514]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [515]

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

15:09, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14

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 hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [516]
• You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [517] [518] [519]
• All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [520]
• You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [521]
• VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [522]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
• VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [523]
• You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [524]
• You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [525]
• You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [526]
• VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [527] [528] [529] [530]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on IRC on March 31 at 16:00 (UTC). [531]
• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:18, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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 join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [532]
• You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [533] [534]
• The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [535]
• You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [536]

Problems

• The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [537]
• Labs was broken several times this week. [538] [539] [540] [541]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
• You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [542]
• Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [543] [544]
• You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [545]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [546]

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

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-16

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 read the latest news about VisualEditor.
• You can now use the new translation tool on 22 Wikipedias. You now see the tool the first time you create a new page. [547]
• The list of bad user names on your wiki no longer works. The global list replaces it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [548] [549]

Problems

• Some wikis had issues on Wednesday. [550] [551]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
• Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [552] [553]
• All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [554]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 15 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17

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 sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [555]
• VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [556]
• You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [557]
• If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [558]

Problems

• There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [559]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
• Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [560] [561] [562]
• If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [563]
• You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [564]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 22 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to add and remove tags on edits. [565] [566]

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

15:30, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18

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

Recent changes

• All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [567] [568]
• You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [569]
• There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [570]
• You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [571]

Problems

• Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [572]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
• It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [573]
• You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [574]
• You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [575]
• You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [576]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 29 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:11, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.

Tech News: 2015-19

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 chat with other users in Phabricator. [577]
• There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [578] [579]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
• It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [580]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [581]
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [582]

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

15:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Ping

Dear John, I sent an e-mail related to Wikimania 2015 wiki. I hope you can see it soon. Thanks in advance, --ProtoplasmaKid (WM-MX) (talk) 02:14, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20

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 make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [583] [584] [585]
• You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [586]
• The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [587] [588]

Problems

• There was a problem that caused slow editing. [589]
• Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [590]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
• You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [591] [592]
• You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [593]
• When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [594]
• When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [595]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 13 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:38, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21

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 watch a video about the new graph tool.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
• References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [596]
• You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [597]
• The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [598]
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [599] [600]
• UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [601]
• A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [602]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 21 at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a technical meeting in France this week.

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

15:21, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22

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

• VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [603]
• Some Labs tools had issues last week. [604] [605]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 20. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 28 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can add your ideas of new tools to help active users like you. [606]

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

16:16, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23

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

Problems

• Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [607]
• Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [608]
• Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [609] [610]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
• You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [611]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:35, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [612] [613]
• If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [614]
• When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [615]
• The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [616]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC). [617]

Future changes

• If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [618]

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

16:29, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25

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

Recent changes

• Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [619]
• Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [620]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC). [621]

Future changes

• Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [622]
• If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [623] [624] [625]

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

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26

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

Recent changes

• Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [626] [627]
• You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [628]

Problems

• On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [629] [630] [631]
• On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [632] [633] [634]
• Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [635] [636] [637]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Global CSS/JS migration

Hello John F. Lewis. You have global scripts in User:John F. Lewis/global.js, which you import using your local JS pages. Since August 2014, your global.js and global.css pages are loaded automatically on all wikis. Since you already import them yourself, you may experience script errors or tools being added twice. Do you want me to remove the global imports from your local pages using Synchbot (without changing any other content)? —Pathoschild 02:07, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Sure, thanks. John F. Lewis (talk) 07:20, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Done! You can see the log on your archive page. —Pathoschild 18:46, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27

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

Recent changes

• Long lines in code blocks now look better. [638]
• You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [639]
• When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [640]
• The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [641] [642] [643]
• You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [644]

Problems

• JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [645]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
• You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [646]
• When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [647]
• If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [648]
• Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [649]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future

• When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [650]

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

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28

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

Recent changes

• On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [651]

Problems

• The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [652]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
• The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [653] [654]
• You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [655]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 7 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29

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

Recent changes

• You can now see a list of pages with errors in code coloring. [656]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [657]
• There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [658]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 15. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 16 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [659]

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

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
• You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [660]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 21 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [661]

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

03:05, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31

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

Recent changes

• You can now use redirects to link to JavaScript pages. [662]
• You cannot use the compact user bar any more. [663]
• You can change your options to see bigger images. [664]
• You can watch short videos about how to use VisualEditor. [665]
• You can now edit pages linked in "what links here" more easily. [666]

Problems

• There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
• There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [667]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
• JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [668]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on July 28 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32

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

Recent changes

• The ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
  • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [669]
  • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [670] [671] [672] [673]
• The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [674]
• MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [675]
• Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [676]

Problems

• There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [677]
• We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [678]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 6 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 4 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33

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

Recent changes

• MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [679]
• The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [680]
• You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [681]
• You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [682]
• It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [683]
• JavaScript authors:
  • You can no longer use the Sajax library. You can see a list of pages to fix. [684] [685]
  • You can no longer use document.write on Wikimedia wikis. You can see a list of pages to fix. [686] [687]
• The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [688]

Problems

• More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [689]
• Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [690]
• Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [691]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
• UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [692]
• You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [693]

Meetings

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

Future changes

• Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [694]

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

14:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34

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

Recent changes

• Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [695] [696] [697]
• Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [698]

Problems

• Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [699] [700]
• On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [701]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
• You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [702]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 18 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35

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

Recent changes

• Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [703]

Problems

• There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [704]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 26. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 27 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on August 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

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

Recent changes

• VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [705][706]
• The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [707]
• VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [708]
• Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [709]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

• The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [710]

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

21:36, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37

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

Recent changes

• You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [711]
• A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [712]
• You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [713]

Problems

• There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [714]
• The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [715][716]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
• The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [717]
• The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [718][719]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [720]
• Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [721][722]

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

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38

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

Recent changes

• You can now use the Wikidata query service. [723]
• Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [724]
• Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [725][726]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [727]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [728]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 15 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [729]
• The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [730]

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

16:17, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39

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

Recent changes

• There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [731][732]
• Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [733][734][735][736]
• More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [737]
• The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [738]

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [739]
• Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [740][741]
• UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [742]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
• The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [743]
• You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [744]
• Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [745]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

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

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40

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

Recent changes

• In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [746]
• UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [747]
• You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [748]
• When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [749]
• You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [750]
• The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [751]
• MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [752]

Problems

• Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [753][754]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
• There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [755]
• The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [756]

Meetings

• You can join the strategy process of the Reading department of Wikimedia Engineering. [757]
• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

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

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Please sign new Wikimedia confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information by 31 December

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are beginning the transition to the new policy.

An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.

The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that OTRS volunteers sign the new confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015 to retain their access. You are receiving this email because you have been identified as an OTRS volunteer and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015, you will lose your OTRS access. OTRS volunteers have a specific agreement available, if you have recently signed the general confidentiality agreement for another role (such as CheckUser or Oversight), you do not need to sign the general agreement again, but you will still need to sign the OTRS agreement.

Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign

If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnumwikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 31 December 2015 to retain your OTRS access. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.

Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:20, 28 September 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Tech News: 2015-41

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

Recent changes

• The link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [758]
• The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [759]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
• UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [760]
• UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [761]
• A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [762]

Meetings

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

Future changes

• Wikidata requests your input on how to improve the editing of Wikidata's data in other locations, such as Wikipedias.

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

18:32, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-42

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

Recent changes

• The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [763]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [764]
• Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [765]

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 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-43

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

• Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [766]

Problems

• A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [767]
• Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [768]
• The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [769]

Changes this week

• Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [770]
• Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [771][772][773][774]

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 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

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

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [775]
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [776][777]
• When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [778][779]
• Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [780]

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

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-45

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 changes

• You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [781]
• If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [782]
• Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [783]

Problems

• On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [784]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (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 3 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join. You can also read the latest VisualEditor newsletter.

Future changes

• A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [785]
• Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [786]

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

16:42, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

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 changes

• Superprotect has been removed. [787]
• You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [788]
• JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [789]

Problems

• Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [790]

Changes this week

• Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [791]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (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 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new tool to navigate through diff pages is being developed. You can test it out and give feedback. [792]
• The options on Special:Watchlist will look slightly different. [793]

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

17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-47

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

Changes this week

• You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [794]
• Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [795]
• The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
• Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [796]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (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 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [797][798]

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

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

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

• A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

• There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Language Engineering team. The topic is: Content Translation updates and Questions & Answers. The meeting will be on 25 November at 13:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• 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 24 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: Raise MediaWiki's PHP version requirement and update coding standards". The meeting will be on 25 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [799]

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49

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. [800]
• 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. [801]

Changes this week

• Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [802][803]
• 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. [804]
• 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. [805]

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

16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50

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 changes

• Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [806]

Problems

• Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [807]

Changes this week

• You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [808]
• IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [809]
• You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [810]
• It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [811]
• You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [812]
• UploadWizard will look a bit different. [813]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
• New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [814]

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 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [815]

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

17:52, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

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

Changes this week

• Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [816]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (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 15 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is talking about the agenda for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. The meeting will be on 16 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join. [817]

Future changes

• A new gadget manager will come next year. The new gadget system is called Gadgets 2.0. [818]

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

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

• Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

• CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
• The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

• There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

• Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
• No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-02

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

Recent changes

• Wikimedia no longer uses visitor statistics from comScore. [819]
• You can make interactive graphs with the Graph extension. There is now a tutorial for how to do this. [820]

Problems

• Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [821]

Changes this week

• The Nuke extension will work with Flow. This will make it easier to handle spam in Flow. [822]
• New file uploads will now be patrollable. [823]
• Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia if you use Internet Explorer 8, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. [824][825]

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 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [826]
• The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [827][828]
• There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [829][830]
• The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03

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 will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [831]
• Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [832]

Changes this week

• The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [833]
• MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [834]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (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 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04

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 follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [835][836]
• Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [837]

Changes this week

• You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [838]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (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 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [839]
• The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [840]
• Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [841]

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

16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05

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

• Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [842]
• Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [843][844]
• Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [845]

Changes this week

• The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [846]
• Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [847][848]
• The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [849]
• The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [850][851][852]
• The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [853][854]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (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 2 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is expiring watch list entries. The meeting will be on 3 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [855]

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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)