User talk:Naomi2319/Archive 4
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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
- All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period. [1]
- Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed. [2]
- There is a problem with the global preferences for the "Use Legacy Vector" option. Developers are working on fixing it. [3]
- A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed. [4]
Changes later this week
- The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [5]
- Users'
global.jsandglobal.csspages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [6] 
In the MonoBook skin, the searchGoButtonidentifier is nowsearchButton. This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.- Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses
counterto prevent large archives was changed. [7] 
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).
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15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [8]
Problems
- The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it. [9]
Changes later 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 and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (calendar).
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [10][11]
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16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an
undotag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else. [12] - The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems. [13]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message. [14][15]
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20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).
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17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
Editing news 2020 #4
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Reply tool
The Reply tool has been available as a Beta Feature at the Arabic, Dutch, French and Hungarian Wikipedias since 31 March 2020. The first analysis showed positive results.
- More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
- Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
- Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")[16]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can define a preferred signature prefix in the page MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
- The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
- Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.
15:11, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
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
- This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message. [17][18]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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20:12, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere. [19]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (calendar).
- All MediaWiki API modules will now use
watchlistinstead ofwatch. This was inconsistent before. [20]
Future changes
- The Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the page on mediawiki.org.
- OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change. [21]
- The Wikipedia Android app will send push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for Android 4.4 users. [22][23]
- Wikimedia code review could move to GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the consultation.
- Dropdown menus in the Vector skin use a
.menuclass. This will not work in the future. Scripts can usenav ulinstead..vectorTabsand.vectorMenuwill also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can read more in Phabricator.
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15:59, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- The Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours. [24][25]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (calendar).
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16:19, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page. [26][27]
Changes later this week
- The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them. [28]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (calendar).
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21:28, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Admins can now see links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog. This uses the interface of Special:Undelete. [29]
- Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough. Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki in Phabricator. It is currently five days. [30]
Problems
- Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed. [31]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).
Future changes
- You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
- The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can read more in Phabricator.
- In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see
Appsas one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [32] - You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
- You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate them.
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21:24, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
- You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [33]
Problems
- There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [34]
- Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [35]
- Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
- Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in
[[Child]]renis linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [36]
Future changes
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [37]
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16:25, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late. [38][39][40]
Changes later this week
- Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well. [41][42]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).
Future changes
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15:25, 12 October 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (calendar).
Future changes
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [44]
- In the AbuseFilter extension, the
rmspecials()function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses ofrmspecials()withrmwhitespace()wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [45] - Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID
#jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either#siteSubor#mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of phab:T265373.
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16:32, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [46]
- Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [47]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [48]
- There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [49]
- The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [50]
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17:39, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [51]
- There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the
{{formatnum}}parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that{{formatnum:123,456}}is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [52]
Changes later 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 and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
- Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [53]
- The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [54]
Future changes
- A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of
{{formatnum}}when it is given a negative argument. [55] - In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
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16:10, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- You can see reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can let them know if your wiki is interested. [56]
- From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [57][58]
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15:50, 9 November 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [59][60]
Changes later this week
- If you merged two pages in a namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed. [61]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (calendar).
Future changes
- The Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
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15:37, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Timestamps in Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page. [62]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
- The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January. [63]
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17:19, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (calendar).
Future changes
- The iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a test. [64][65]
- The Wiki Replicas can be used for SQL queries. You can use Quarry, PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database
JOINSwill no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. [66]
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17:45, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [67][68]
Changes later this week
- Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [69][70]
- 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 wikis from 10 December (calendar).
Future changes
- You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 8 December and 21 December. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.
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16:15, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [71]
Changes later this week
- 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 wikis from 17 December (calendar).
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21:34, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
- Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
- The
{{citation needed}}template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [72]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
- You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
- Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a
<langconvert>tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [73] - Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [74]
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20:54, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [75]
- You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [76]
- Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
- The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [77]
- Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [78]
- When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
- There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [79]
- Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the
watchlisttowatchwill still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [80] - Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [81]
- CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [82]
- There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:42, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- 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 wikis from 21 January (calendar).
Future changes
- The Growth team plans to add features to get more visitors to edit to more Wikipedias. You can help translating the interface.
- You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). [83]
- MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:10, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
Editing news 2021 #1
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Reply tool
The Reply tool is available at most Wikipedias.
- The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
- It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.
Research notes:
- As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
- We have preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[84]
- The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[85] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
A large A/B test will start soon.[86] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. You can still turn it on or off for your own account in Special:Preferences.
New discussion tool
The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[87] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.
Next: Notifications
During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at notifications-talk.
18:38, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
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
- You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). You will not be able to read or edit Wikitech for a short time on 28 January at 09:00 (UTC). [88][89]
Changes later this week
- Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [90]
- 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).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:31, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [91]
Changes later this week
- You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [92]
- Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [93][94]
- Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like
1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55as well as the1.2.3.4/27syntax for IP ranges. [95] - 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).
Future changes
- Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [96][97]
- Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be
185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
22:38, 1 February 2021 (UTC)