User talk:Tropicalkitty/Archives/2023
 | Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in 2023, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion or the archives index. |
The Signpost: 1 January 2023
- Interview: ComplexRational's RfA debrief
- Technology report: Wikimedia Foundation's Abstract Wikipedia project "at substantial risk of failure"
- Essay: Mobile editing
- Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee Election 2022
- Recent research: Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement in talk page disputes
- Featured content: Would you like to swing on a star?
- Traffic report: Football, football, football! Wikipedia Football Club!
- CommonsComix: #4: The Course of WikiEmpire
- From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
Tech News: 2023-02
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
- You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags. [1]
- Special:WhatLinksHere shows all pages that link to a specific page. There is now a prototype for how to sort those pages alphabetically. You can see the discussion in the Phabricator ticket.
- You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page. [2]
- A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time. [3]
- Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use
matrix:to create Matrix links on wiki pages. [4] - You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages. [5]
Changes later this week
- Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 16 January 2023
- Special report: Coverage of 2022 bans reveals editors serving long sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020
- News and notes: Revised Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines up for vote, WMF counsel departs, generative models under discussion
- In the media: Court orders user data in libel case, Saudi Wikipedia in the crosshairs, Larry Sanger at it again
- Technology report: View it! A new tool for image discovery
- In focus: Busting into Grand Central
- Serendipity: How I bought part of Wikipedia – for less than $100
- Featured content: Flip your lid
- Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2022
- From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
Tech News: 2023-03
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID]in place ofdiff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change. [6]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).
- Some changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on
Talk:andUser talk:namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such asMeta talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, includingMeta:pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can change your preferences (beta feature). [7] - On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page. [8]
- The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC. Learn more.
Future changes
- The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in the CWS sandbox.
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Tech News: 2023-04
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue. [9]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
- If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity. [10][11]
- The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.
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Tech News: 2023-05
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
- Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage. [12]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).
Future changes
- Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
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Growth team newsletter #24
Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!
Newcomer experience projects
The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:
- Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
- Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
- "Add an image" GLAM events - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
- Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.
Newcomer tasks
- Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [13]
- The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [14]
Mentorship
- When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [15]
- Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [16]
- Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
- Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
- If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.
Other news
- In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [17]
- This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.
Translations
- Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
- Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations
14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 February 2023
- From the editor: New for the Signpost: Author pages, tag pages, and a decent article search function
- News and notes: Foundation update on fundraising, new page patrol, Tides, and Wikipedia blocked in Pakistan
- Disinformation report: Wikipedia on Santos
- Op-Ed: Estonian businessman and political donor brings lawsuit against head of national Wikimedia chapter
- Recent research: Wikipedia's "moderate yet systematic" liberal citation bias
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Organized Labour
- Tips and tricks: XTools: Data analytics for your list of created articles
- Featured content: 20,000 Featureds under the Sea
- Traffic report: Films, deaths and ChatGPT
Tech News: 2023-06
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- In the Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default. [18]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).
- Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [19]
- Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [20]
- Community Wishlist Survey 2023 will stop receiving new proposals on Monday, 6 February 2023, at 18:00 UTC. Proposers should complete any edits by then, to give time for translations and review. Voting will begin on Friday, 10 February.
Future changes
- Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the gadget definitions prior to this change, and add
skins=…for any gadgets which should not load on mobile. More details are available.
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Tech News: 2023-07
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [21]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
- The Reply tool and other parts of DiscussionTools will be deployed for all editors using the mobile site. You can read more about this decision. [22]
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [23][24][25]
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The Signpost: 20 February 2023
- In the media: Arbitrators open case after article alleges Wikipedia "intentionally distorts" Holocaust coverage
- Disinformation report: The "largest con in corporate history"?
- Tips and tricks: All about writing at DYK
- Featured content: Eden, lost.
- Gallery: Love is in the air
- From the archives: 5, 10, and 15 years ago: Let's (not) delete the Main Page!
- Humour: The RfA Candidate's Song
Tech News: 2023-08
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [26]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
- The voting phase for the Community Wishlist Survey 2023 ends on 24 February at 18:00 UTC. The results of the survey will be announced on 28 February.
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [27][28][29]
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Tech News: 2023-09
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [30][31]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [32]
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Tech News: 2023-10
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 changes
- The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
- On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [33]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
- A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [34]
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The Signpost: 9 March 2023
- News and notes: What's going on with the Wikimedia Endowment?
- Technology report: Second flight of the Soviet space bears: Testing ChatGPT's accuracy
- In the media: What should Wikipedia do? Publish Russian propoganda? Be less woke? Cover the Holocaust in Poland differently?
- Featured content: In which over two-thirds of the featured articles section needs to be copied over to WikiProject Military History's newsletter
- Recent research: "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust" in Poland and "self-focus bias" in coverage of global events
- From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
Tech News: 2023-11
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [35][36]
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The Signpost: 20 March 2023
- News and notes: Wikimania submissions deadline looms, Russian government after our lucky charms, AI woes nix CNET from RS slate
- Eyewitness: Three more stories from Ukrainian Wikimedians
- In the media: Paid editing, plagiarism payouts, proponents of a ploy, and people peeved at perceived preferences
- Featured content: Way too many featured articles
- Interview: 228/2/1: the inside scoop on Aoidh's RfA
- Traffic report: Who died? Who won? Who lost?
The Signpost: 20 March 2023
- News and notes: Wikimania submissions deadline looms, Russian government after our lucky charms, AI woes nix CNET from RS slate
- Eyewitness: Three more stories from Ukrainian Wikimedians
- In the media: Paid editing, plagiarism payouts, proponents of a ploy, and people peeved at perceived preferences
- Featured content: Way too many featured articles
- Interview: 228/2/1: the inside scoop on Aoidh's RfA
- Traffic report: Who died? Who won? Who lost?
Tech News: 2023-12
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [37]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.- The Special:AbuseFilter edit window will be resizable and larger by default. This feature request was voted #80 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
- There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [38]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
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Tech News: 2023-13
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [39]
- Some Global AbuseFilter actions will no longer apply to local projects. [40]
- Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [41]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
Future changes
- You will be able to choose visual diffs on all history pages at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias. [42]
- The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [43]
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Growth team newsletter #25
Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Celebrations
Leveling up release
- We released Leveling up features to our pilot wikis on March 22 for an initial A/B test.
- In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
- We are closely monitoring the short term impact of this feature as well as the longer term effect on newcomer productivity and retention. If the experiment shows positive results, we will release this feature to more wikis.
5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February
- In February 2023, 5,035 images were added via the newcomer “add an image” feature (on all wikis where available); 155 were reverted.
- Since the feature “add an image” was launched: 36,803 images have been added; 2,957 images were reverted.
Recent changes
- Add a link
- Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled. [44][45]
- We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in Tech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit your Homepage.
- The Impact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published initial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis. [46]
- Donor Thank you page experiment – Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
- Growth features are now the default experience on both test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org. You can test our features there.
Upcoming work
- Add an image – We plan to offer section-level image suggestions as a structured task for newcomers.
- IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation – We will support this project for all Growth Team maintained products and extensions that may be affected by IP Masking. [50]
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-14
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
- The system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories. [51][52][53][54][55]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
- Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version. [56]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntentmodule has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQueryhover()oron()instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide. [57]- Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account. [58]
- You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new
__ARCHIVEDTALK__magic word. There will also be a new.mw-archivedtalkCSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page. [59][60][61]
Future changes
- The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
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The Signpost: 3 April 2023
- From the editor: Some long-overdue retractions
- News and notes: Sounding out, a universal code of conduct, and dealing with AI
- In the media: Twiddling Wikipedia during an online contest, and other news
- Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" case is ongoing
- Featured content: Hail, poetry! Thou heav'n-born maid
- Recent research: Language bias: Wikipedia captures at least the "silhouette of the elephant", unlike ChatGPT
- From the archives: April Fools' through the ages
- Disinformation report: Sus socks support suits, seems systemic
Little help?
I saw how you dealt with a previous person on my page... not sure how to deal with them this time around... it's happening again.
Tech News: 2023-15
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
- In the visual editor, it is now possible to edit captions of images in galleries without opening the gallery dialog. This feature request was voted #61 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [62]
- You can now receive notifications when another user edits your user page. See the "Edits to my user page" option in your Preferences. This feature request was voted #3 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [63]
Problems
- There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed. [64]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [65][66]
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Tech News: 2023-16
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 now see nearby articles on a Kartographer map with the button for the new feature "Show nearby articles". Six wikis have been testing this feature since October. [67][68]
- The Special:GlobalWatchlist page now has links for "mark page as read" for each entry. This feature request was voted #161 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [69]
Problems
- At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week. [70][71]
- For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed. [72]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
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Tech News: 2023-17
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
- The date-selection menu on pages such as Special:Contributions will now show year-ranges that are in the current and past decade, instead of the current and future decade. This feature request was voted #145 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [73]
Problems
- Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities. [74]
- For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed. [75][76][77]
Changes later this week
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [78]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Future changes
- The Editing team plans an A/B test for a usability analysis of the Talk page project. The planned measurements are available. Your wiki may be invited to participate. Please suggest improvements to the measurement plan at the discussion page.
- The Wikimedia Foundation annual plan 2023-2024 draft is open for comment and input until May 19. The final plan will be published in July 2023 on Meta-wiki.
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The Signpost: 26 April 2023
- News and notes: Staff departures at Wikimedia Foundation, Jimbo hands in the bits, and graphs' zeppelin burns
- In the media: Contested truth claims in Wikipedia
- Obituary: Remembering David "DGG" Goodman
- Arbitration report: Holocaust in Poland, Jimbo in the hot seat, and a desysopping
- Special report: Signpost statistics between years 2005 and 2022
- News from the WMF: Collective planning with the Wikimedia Foundation
- Featured content: In which we described the featured articles in rhyme again
- From the archives: April Fools' through the ages, part two
- Humour: The law of hats
- Traffic report: Long live machine, the future supreme
Tech News: 2023-18
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
- The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the French and Italian Wikipedias. More languages will be added in the near future. This is part of the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [79][80][81]
- The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [82]
- The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [83]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The Signpost: 8 May 2023
- News and notes: New legal "deVLOPments" in the EU
- In the media: Vivek's smelly socks, online safety, and politics
- Recent research: Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions
- Featured content: I wrote a poem for each article, I found rhymes for all the lists;
My first featured picture of this year now finally exists!
- Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" approaches conclusion
- News from the WMF: Planning together with the Wikimedia Foundation
Tech News: 2023-19
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
- Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
- When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [84]
- The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports
wikitextas a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such ashtml5,moin, andhtml+handlebars, can now be replaced. [85] - Preloading text to new pages/sections now supports preloading from localized MediaWiki interface messages. Here is an example at the Czech Wikipedia that uses
preload=MediaWiki:July. [86]
Problems
- Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [87]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
- Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [88]
Future changes
- During the next year, MediaWiki will stop using IP addresses to identify logged-out users, and will start automatically assigning unique temporary usernames. Read more at IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Updates. You can join the discussion about the format of the temporary usernames. [89]
- There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [90][91]
-
jquery.tipsywill be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with.tipsy(can be commented out.OO.ui.PopupWidgetcan be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [92]
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Tech News: 2023-20
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [93]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [94]
Future changes
- There is a recently formed team at the Wikimedia Foundation which will be focusing on experimenting with new tools. Currently they are building a prototype ChatGPT plugin that allows information generated by ChatGPT to be properly attributed to the Wikimedia projects.
- Gadget and userscript developers should replace
jquery.cookiewithmediawiki.cookie. Thejquery.cookielibrary will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [95]
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The Signpost: 22 May 2023
- In the media: History, propaganda and censorship
- Arbitration report: Final decision in "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland"
- Featured content: A very musical week for featured articles
- Traffic report: Coronation, chatbot, celebs
Tech News: 2023-21
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
- The "recent edits" time period for page watchers is now 30 days. It used to be 180 days. This was a Community Wishlist Survey proposal. [96]
Changes later this week
- An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [97]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
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16:55, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
Disruptions
Thank you for letting me know about the archives. There is no end to our troubles with this person, both for me and other admins. This is the latest one, and this time on Wikidata. He even undoes edits of mine on Wikidata if I ignore him, or if I protect my user page. I have no idea what he is talking about or referring to. None of us admins here have or had anything to do with his things, as far as I know, and no one can understand what his problem is. Especially with all the horrific insults he hurls at us and the Foundation on almost daily basis. Most of us admins get harassed all the time for these made-up reasons, and bans don't work because of constant use of proxies, and even presenting himself as other people (both male and female). Inexplicable behaviour. B. Jankuloski (talk) 05:49, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
- Hi, I saw your message over there, and no worries (about me letting you know). Yeah, this kind of disruption is a regular occurrence unfortunately. Tropicalkitty (talk) 06:36, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #26
Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
One million Suggested Edits
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
- The Suggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
- Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
- Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
- Newer Suggested edits, like Add a link and Add an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)
Positive reinforcement
Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried Growth features to keep editing.
- The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis. [98]
- The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
- The Personalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.
Add an image
- We are creating a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. We have tested the accuracy of suggestions, and the development of this new task is well-underway. [99]
Other updates
- We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis. [100]
- After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
- We helped with code review for the 2023 Community Wish to add Notifications for user page edits. [101]
- We have been attending several community events, that we documented in our Growth’s Community events report.
What's next for Growth?
- We shared an overview of Growth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-22
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [102]
- The page Special:EditWatchlist now has "Check all" options to select all the pages within a namespace. This feature request was voted #161 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [103]
Problems
- For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [104]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
- VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [105]
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The Signpost: 5 June 2023
- News and notes: WMRU director forks new 'pedia, birds flap in top '22 piccy, WMF weighs in on Indian gov's map axe plea
- Featured content: Poetry under pressure
- Traffic report: Celebs, controversies and a chatbot in the public eye
Tech News: 2023-23
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
- Citation and footnote editing can now be started from the reference list when using the visual editor. This feature request was voted #2 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [106]
- Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [107]
Problems
- For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [108]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
- Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [109]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Tech News: 2023-24
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the Dutch, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese Wikipedias. This was the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [110]
- The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [111]
- The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [112]
- The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [113]
Problems
- For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended
__TOC__(or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [114] - Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing
{{DEFAULTSORT:...}}keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [115] - Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace
#wpReasonwith#wpReason > input. See an example fix. [116]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
- VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [117]
Future changes
- From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
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The Signpost: 19 June 2023
- News and notes: WMF Terms of Use now in force, new Creative Commons licensing
- Featured content: Content, featured
- Recent research: Hoaxers prefer currently-popular topics
Tech News: 2023-25
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
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
- There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing
\or pressingctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [120][121]
![[120]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_editor_toolbar_search_feature.png){kind=link}
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Really
YOU know I have their OWN number and you need to call it now! Or visit judgemathistv.com and file a complaint against CORY STARK and AMY NEIDHARDT. DO IT NOW IT'S YOUR FAULT!!!!! 47.40.47.247 14:00, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
- Please don’t post private information about others. It is subject to deletion. Tropicalkitty (talk) 14:08, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-26
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
- The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing
/to allprop=extlinksresponses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in theexternallinksdatabase table. [122]
Problems
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
- The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the
.mbox-textCSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [125][126] - Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the
|targets=parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the|skins=parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [127] - All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [128]
- The review form of the Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standardized user interface components. [129]
Future changes
- How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will change in the coming weeks at group2 wikis. This change improves the accessibility of content. You may need to update your site-CSS, or userscripts and gadgets. There are details on what code to check, how to update the code, and where to report any related problems. [130]
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MediaWiki message delivery 16:19, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
Study Invite
Hello! I noticed that you actively counter vandalism. Thank you! I wonder if you'd be interested in our ongoing study, which aims to evaluate AI models that power SWViewer, Huggle, and many anti-vandal tools. If you're interested, please find more information on our recruitment page. Thanks for your consideration! Tzusheng (talk) 03:48, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 3 July 2023
- Disinformation report: Imploded submersible outfit foiled trying to sing own praises on Wikipedia
- Featured content: Incensed
- Traffic report: Are you afraid of spiders? Arnold? The Idol? ChatGPT?
Tech News: 2023-27
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
- As part of the rolling out of the audio links that play on click wishlist proposal, small wikis will now be able to use the inline audio player that is implemented by the Phonos extension. [131]
- From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [132]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
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MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-28
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
- The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
- Global abuse filters have been enabled on all Wikimedia projects, except English and Japanese Wikipedias (who opted out). This change was made following a global request for comments. [133]
- Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [134]
- The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
- The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [135]
- Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [136]
Future changes
- There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [137]
- There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery 19:54, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 July 2023
- In the media: Tentacles of Emirates plot attempt to ensnare Wikipedia
- Tips and tricks: What automation can do for you (and your WikiProject)
- Featured content: Scrollin', scrollin', scrollin', keep those readers scrollin', got to keep on scrollin', Rawhide!
- Traffic report: The Idol becomes the Master
Tech News: 2023-29
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
- We are now serving 1% of all global user traffic from Kubernetes (you can read more technical details). We are planning to increment this percentage regularly. You can follow the progress of this work.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
- MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create
en-caanden-gbsubpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [138] - The
action=growthsetmentorstatusAPI will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use theaction=growthmanagementorlistAPI now. [139]
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-30
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- On July 18, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a survey about the technical decision making process for people who do technical work that relies on software that is maintained by the Foundation or affiliates. If this applies to you, please take part in the survey. The survey will be open for three weeks, until August 7. You can find more information in the announcement e-mail on wikitech-l.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
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MediaWiki message delivery 02:20, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-31
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
- The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
- The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [140][141]
- The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [142]
Problems
- It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [143]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
- Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [144]
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:54, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 1 August 2023
- News and notes: City officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians, Ruwiki founder banned, WMF launches Mastodon server
- In the media: Truth, AI, bull from politicians, and climate change
- Disinformation report: Hot climate, hot hit, hot money, hot news hot off the presses!
- Tips and tricks: Citation tools for dummies!
- In focus: Journals cited by Wikipedia
- Opinion: Are global bans the last step?
- Featured content: Featured Content, 1 to 15 July
- Traffic report: Come on Oppie, let's go party
Growth team newsletter #27
Welcome to the twenty-seventh newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Annual plan for Growth
We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.
Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.
After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:
- Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
- Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
Please let us know what you think about these projects on the related talk page, or Growth's annual plan talk page.
Suggested edits
We released a new Section-level “add an image” structured task to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.
Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [145]
Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.
Mentorship
The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.
More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [146]
The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
Positive reinforcement
We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.
In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.
Growth contributes to IP Editing migration
The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:
- the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
- change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [147]
Community Configuration 2.0
We are still in the early planning stage of the Community Configuration 2.0 project:
- We are gathering internal Wikimedia Foundation teams' needs, so as community feedback. [148]
- We have started to investigate design improvements. [149]
- We are also reviewing similar tools that are part of other products. [150]
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
12:42, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-32
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
- Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [151]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 21:21, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-33
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
- The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [152]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [153]
Future changes
- A few gadgets/user scripts which add icons to the Minerva skin need to have their CSS updated. There are more details available including a search for all existing instances and how to update them.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 05:59, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 August 2023
- News and notes: Dude, Where's My Donations? Wikimedia Foundation announces another million in grants for non-Wikimedia-related projects
- Tips and tricks: How to find images for your articles, check their copyright, upload them, and restore them
- Cobwebs: Getting serious about writing
- Serendipity: Why I stopped taking photographs almost altogether
- Featured content: Barbenheimer confirmed
- Traffic report: Come on in, and pull yourself up a chair
Tech News: 2023-34
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
- The GDrive to Commons Uploader tool is now available. It enables securely selecting and uploading files from your Google Drive directly to Wikimedia Commons. [154]
- From now on, we will announce new Wikimedia wikis in Tech News, so you can update any tools or pages.
- Since the last edition, two new wikis have been created:
- To catch up, the next most recent six wikis are:
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Future changes
- There is an existing stable interface policy for MediaWiki backend code. There is a proposed stable interface policy for frontend code. This is relevant for anyone who works on gadgets or Wikimedia frontend code. You can read it, discuss it, and let the proposer know if there are any problems. [163]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:25, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-35
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
- As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [164]
- All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [165]
- Wikisource users can now use the
prpbengalicurrencylabel to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the<pagelist>tag. [166] - Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [167][168]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
- New signups for a Wikimedia developer account will start being pushed towards idm.wikimedia.org, rather than going via Wikitech. Further information about the new system is available.
- All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [169]
Future changes
- The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the
<=>symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task. - A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 14:00, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 31 August 2023
- From the editor: Beta version of signpost.news now online
- News and notes: You like RecentChanges?
- In the media: Taking it sleazy
- Recent research: The five barriers that impede "stitching" collaboration between Commons and Wikipedia
- Draftspace: Bad Jokes and Other Draftspace Novelties
- Humour: The Dehumourification Plan
- Traffic report: Raise your drinking glass, here's to yesterday
Tech News: 2023-36
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
- EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [170]
- As part of the changes for the Generate Audio for IPA and Audio links that play on click wishlist proposals, the inline audio player mode of Phonos has been deployed to all projects. [171]
- There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [172]
- One new wiki has been created:
Problems
- The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [174]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [175][176]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 4 September 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-37
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
- ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [177]
- When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [178]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
- The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team invites anyone involved in the technical field of Wikimedia projects to signup to and join one of their listening sessions on 13 September. Another date will be scheduled later. The goal is to improve the technical decision-making processes.
- As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [179]
Future changes
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [180]
- The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 21:08, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 16 September 2023
- In the media: "Just flirting", going Dutch and Shapps for the defence?
- Obituary: Nosebagbear
- Featured content: Catching up
- Traffic report: Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
Tech News: 2023-38
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
- MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [181][182]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
- All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [183]
- All wikis will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. [184]
Future changes
- The team investigating the Graph Extension posted a proposal for reenabling it and they need your input.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 19:19, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-39
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
- The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [185]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
- The ResourceLoader
mediawiki.uimodules are now deprecated as part of the move to Vue.js and Codex. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it. More details are available in the task and your questions are welcome there. - Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
- New variables will be added to AbuseFilter:
global_account_groupsandglobal_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [186][187]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 16:51, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
Rollback on simplewiki
I have added rollback to your account on simplewiki. You seem to need it. Let me know if you'd prefer not to have it. Thx fr33kman 20:11, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-40
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
- There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [188]
- Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like
wikitextorcss. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
- The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [189]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 01:27, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 3 October 2023
- News and notes: Wikimedia Endowment financial statement published
- Recent research: Readers prefer ChatGPT over Wikipedia; concerns about limiting "anyone can edit" principle "may be overstated"
- Featured content: By your logic,
- Poetry: "The Sight"
Tech News: 2023-41
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
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [191]
- At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature. [192]
- In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID
#page-actionswill be replaced with#p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 14:39, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #28
Welcome to the twenty-eighth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Community configuration 2.0
- Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
- Technical approach and associated tasks are detailed in this Epic task on Phabricator.
- Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.
IP Masking
- The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
- Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)
Mentorship
- We assembled some resources for mentors at Mediawiki wiki. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
- We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (T347024)
- Half of newcomers at English Wikipedia get a mentor assigned to them. To ensure every newcomer receives mentorship, we need additional volunteer mentors at English Wikipedia to achieve a 100% coverage rate. We also encourage experienced users from other wikis to help newcomers at their own community.
Scaling Growth features
- We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
- We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
- At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.
Other news
- We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This is now fixed.
- You can read a report about the Growth team’s representation at Wikimania in Singapore here. Growth team members presented two sessions at Wikimania Singapore.
- After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Trizek_(WMF) Discussion 23:16, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-42
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 Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [193]
- Edit notices are now available within the MobileFrontend/Minerva skin. This feature was inspired by the gadget on English Wikipedia. See more details in T316178.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
- In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to
addPortletLinkand#p-namespacesthat was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:47, 16 October 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 23 October 2023
- News and notes: Where have all the administrators gone?
- In the media: Thirst traps, the fastest loading sites on the web, and the original collaborative writing
- Gallery: Before and After: Why you don't need to know how to restore images to make massive improvements
- Featured content: Yo, ho! Blow the man down!
- Traffic report: The calm and the storm
- News from Diff: Sawtpedia: Giving a Voice to Wikipedia Using QR Codes
Tech News: 2023-43
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
- There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
- Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [194]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:16, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-44
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
- The Design Systems team has released version 1.0.0 of Codex, the new design system for Wikimedia. See the full announcement about the release of Codex 1.0.0.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
- Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many 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. [195][196]
- Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [197]
Future changes
- There is a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension. You can help by reviewing this proposal and sharing what you think about it.
- The WMF is working on making it possible for administrators to edit MediaWiki configuration directly. This is similar to previous work on Special:EditGrowthConfig. A technical RfC is running until November 08, where you can provide feedback.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:21, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 6 November 2023
- Arbitration report: Admin bewilderingly unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was extremely banned in 2015
- In the media: UK gov bigwig accused of ripping off WP articles for book, Wikipedians accused of being dicks by a rich man
- Opinion: An open letter to Elon Musk
- WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2023
- News from Wiki Ed: Equity lists on Wikipedia
- Recent research: How English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades
- Featured content: Like putting a golf course in a historic site.
- Traffic report: Cricket jumpscare
Tech News: 2023-45
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
- In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [198]
Problems
- Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [199]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
- The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [200][201]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 21:06, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-46
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
- Four new wikis have been created:
Problems
- Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [206]
- Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [207]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
- Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
- Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where
meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [208]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 November 2023
- In the media: Propaganda and photos, lunatics and a lunar backup
- News and notes: Update on Wikimedia's financial health
- Traffic report: If it bleeds, it leads
- Recent research: Canceling disputes as the real function of ArbCom
- Wikimania: Wikimania 2024 scholarships
Tech News: 2023-47
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 later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [209][210]
- Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [211][212][213]
- The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [214]
Future changes
- There is an update on re-enabling the Graph Extension. To speed up the process, Vega 2 will not be supported and only some protocols will be available at launch. You can help by sharing what you think about the plan.
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MediaWiki message delivery 00:55, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-48
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [215][216]
- MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow
async/awaitsyntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [217] - The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:08, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #29
Welcome to the twenty-ninth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Community Conversations
The Growth team will host its first community conversation Monday, 4 December (19:00 - 20:30 UTC). The topic for this meeting will be Mentorship.
This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit the conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.
Impact Module
At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the New Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback. [218]
Add a Link
We released “add a link” to 35 more Wikipedias. [219] [220]
We have a few Wikipedias remaining:
- German and English Wikipedia will be contacted at the beginning of January 2024.
- There are a few small wikis that will not receive the task until they have enough articles for the algorithm to work properly.
Community Configuration
- We shared Community Configuration 2.0 plans with technical stakeholders. [221] 🖂
- Initial Community Configuration design ideas have been shared and discussed with community members.
- A basic Community Configuration 2.0 demo is released on ToolForge.
- Developers can find some initial proof of concept code shared on gitlab.
Mentorship
When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed. [222]
We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion. [223]
We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved. [224]
It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor. [225]
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 4 December 2023
- In the media: Turmoil on Hebrew Wikipedia, grave dancing, Olga's impact and inspiring Bhutanese nuns
- Disinformation report: "Wikipedia and the assault on history"
- Comix: Bold comics for a new age
- Essay: I am going to die
- Featured content: Real gangsters move in silence
- Traffic report: And it's hard to watch some cricket, in the cold November Rain
- Humour: Mandy Rice-Davis Applies
Tech News: 2023-49
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [226]
- The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit
{{DEFAULTSORT:...}}keywords. [227]
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [228][229]
- On 6 December, people who have the enabled the preference for "Show discussion activity" will notice the talk page usability improvements appear on pages that include the
__NEWSECTIONLINK__magic word. If you notice any issues, please share them with the team on Phabricator.
Future changes
- The Toolforge Grid Engine shutdown process will start on December 14. Maintainers of tools that still use this old system should plan to migrate to Kubernetes, or tell the team your plans on Phabricator in the task about your tool, before that date. [230]
- Communities using Structured Discussions are being contacted regarding the upcoming deprecation of Structured Discussions. You can read more about this project, and share your comments, on the project's page.
Events
- Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
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MediaWiki message delivery 23:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-50
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
- On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [231][232]
Problems
- There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [233][234]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [235][236]
Future changes
- The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
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MediaWiki message delivery 02:12, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-51
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
- The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [237][238]
- Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [239]
- There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [240]
Future changes
- The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
- The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
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MediaWiki message delivery 16:18, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 December 2023
- Special report: Did the Chinese Communist Party send astroturfers to sabotage a hacktivist's Wikipedia article?
- News and notes: The Italian Public Domain wars continue, Wikimedia RU set to dissolve, and a recap of WLM 2023
- In the media: Consider the humble fork
- Discussion report: Arabic Wikipedia blackout; Wikimedians discuss SpongeBob, copyrights, and AI
- In focus: Liquidation of Wikimedia RU
- Technology report: Dark mode is coming
- Recent research: "LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less" with Wikidata
- Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols
- Comix: Lollus lmaois 200C tincture
- Crossword: when the crossword is sus
- Traffic report: What's the big deal? I'm an animal!
- From the editor: A piccy iz worth OVAR 9000!!!11oneone! wordz ^_^
- Humour: Guess the joke contest