User talk:בנימין

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Proposal[edit]

It isn't strange that the only tiny developed democratic country in the Middle East (the only place where Arabs are truly free) is the only one that has an entire article dedicated to their enemies' accusations (real or invented), but countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran or the Palestinians don't have one. My proposal is to create a page about Criticism of the Iranian government... starting with simple facts: it's a theocratic regime which finances terrorism (Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Revolutionary Guards, etc), kills dissidents in Europe, bombs Beirut and Buenos Aires, helps to violently suppress protests in Syria (where its allied dictator is facing major problems) and inside Iran, promotes violence against defenseless civilians in Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, possesses ambitions in Bahrain, scares Sunni Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and threatens to close the strait of Hormuz, violates Human Rights, threatens to erase Israel from the Earth, it's an oligarchical-clerical dictatorship that hangs homosexuals, denies the Holocaust, perpetrates terrorist attacks in Thailand, Georgia, India, Azerbaijan, Kenya, Greece, Turkey, South Africa, Cyprus, Bulgaria (at least 24 countries in five continents)... kills diplomats and tourists, assaults embassies, has an antisemitic imperialist ideology full of dangerous suicidal fanatics and misogynists, stones women for committing "sexual offenses", has genocidal aspirations against another nation, oppresses minorities, has religious ambitions of regional and global power... a danger for the world in general and Israel and the Jewish people in particular. I mean, don't you think we should remove Wikipedia's double standard regarding criticism of other countries?? I'll let you think about it and if you want starting the new article. Greetings.--JellWaffle (talk) 23:38, 30 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but my english is very basic and I know nothing about the politics of the Middle - East. Thank you. בנימין (talk) 18:05, 1 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikitravel images[edit]

All Wikitravel images are Creative Commons 3.0 by-sa licensed by default. Jpatokal (talk) 10:29, 14 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank You. בנימין (talk) 13:51, 14 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anti-Israel POV and vandalism[edit]

This important information was removed from an article by Pluto2012, despite he is the only one who inserted repeated information about territorial and demographic changes. Perhaps you could restore the missing content and finish this nonsense. Thanks.--201.231.95.189 (talk) 17:58, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but I don't know so much the history of the Independence war. בנימין (talk) 05:07, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2014-16[edit]

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

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
  • MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome. [1] [2] [3]
  • Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [4] [5]

VisualEditor news

  • You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click. [6]
  • The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
  • The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen. [7] [8]

Future software changes

  • The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17. [9] [10]
  • Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot). [11]
  • You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [12] [13] [14] [15]
  • Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list. [16]
  • You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [17] [18]
  • The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [19] [20]
  • An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [21]

Problems

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07:18, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-17[edit]

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

Tech News updates

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf1) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 22, and all Wikipedias on April 24 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled as a beta feature on 27 new wikis on April 18. [24] [25]
  • Problems with various fonts in SVG files were fixed last week. Files that use DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Serif Condensed, DejaVu Sans Light, Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts now show correctly. [26] [27] [28] [29]
  • The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [30]
  • You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [31]

VisualEditor news

  • If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [32] [33]
  • VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [34] [35]
  • You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [36] [37] [38]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Czech (cs), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), Hebrew (he), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Thai (th) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias on April 24. Feedback is welcome. [39]
  • Edits by anonymous users will now be marked with a new CSS class (mw-anonuserlink). This way, you can easily make those edits use a different color, font or background. [40] [41]
  • The user preference to remember login will soon be removed from all wikis. The edit review preferences will be moved to the recent changes tab, and the preference for the WikiLove tool will be moved to the editing tab. [42] [43] [44] [45]
  • You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [46] [47]
  • You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [48] [49]
  • It is now proposed to replace Bugzilla, Gerrit and other tools by a single tool called Phabricator. You can test Phabricator and add your opinion on MediaWiki.org. [50]
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on April 22 at 03:30 AM UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [51]

Problems

  • For about 40 minutes on April 17, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
  • There is a problem with the rendering of formulas with MathJax. If you enabled MathJax in your preferences, you might need to turn it off and on again. [52]

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08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-18[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
  • You can now use interwiki prefix c: to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons. [53]

VisualEditor news

  • You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [54]
  • VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [55]
  • VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.

Future software changes

  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome. [56]
  • The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [57]
  • CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [58] [59]
  • You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [60]

Problems

  • For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [61] [62]
  • On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [63] [64]

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07:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-19[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf3) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and all Wikipedias on May 8 (calendar).
  • The Compact Personal Bar was added as a beta feature to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added as a beta feature to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and to all Wikipedias on May 8. To test it, you can enable it now in your preferences on MediaWiki.org. [65]
  • It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool. [66]

VisualEditor news

  • External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. [67]
  • The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete. [68]
  • You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones. [69]
  • There is a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name for file names. [70][71]
  • Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users. [72] [73]
  • You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language. [74] [75]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Japanese (ja), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 8. Feedback is welcome. [76]
  • You can help translate about 100 new language names that have been added to our data source. They are used, for example, as hover text for interwiki links. Send an e-mail to Nemo if you want to help.
  • If you click on a redirect page in your watchlist, you will soon access the redirect itself. [77] [78]

Problems

  • For about 40 minutes around 00:20 UTC on April 29, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.

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07:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-20[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf4) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 8. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and all Wikipedias on May 15 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

  • A new citation system in VisualEditor was enabled on the English Wikipedia. It will soon be enabled on more wikis. [79]
  • Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly. [80]

Future software changes

  • It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently. [81] [82]
  • You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API. [83] [84] [85] [86]
  • You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with Special:Flow. [87] [88]
  • The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work. [89]
  • The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded. [90] [91] [92]
  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on Wikimedia Commons on May 15. Feedback is welcome.
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on May 14 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [93]
  • Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead. [94]

Problems

  • There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error. [95] [96]

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06:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-21[edit]

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

Tech News updates

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
  • The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work. [97] [98] [99]
  • MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome. [100] [101]
  • VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [102] [103]
  • You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.

VisualEditor news

  • VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys. [104] [105]
  • VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [106] [107]
  • VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [108] [109]
  • VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [110]
  • The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [111] [112]

Future software changes

Problems

  • For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [115]

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07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-22[edit]

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

Recent software changes

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

VisualEditor news

  • VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [116] [117] [118] [119]
  • A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [120] [121]
  • VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [122] [123]
  • It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [124]
  • VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [125]

Future software changes

  • Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [126]
  • It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [127] [128]
  • Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [129] [130] [131]
  • You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [132] [133]

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08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-23[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [134]

VisualEditor news

  • Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [135]
  • The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [136] [137]
  • VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [138]
  • There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [139]

Future software changes

Problems

  • For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [146]

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08:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-24[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
  • You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [147] [148]

VisualEditor news

  • You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [149] [150]
  • The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [151] [152] [153]
  • You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [154] [155]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [156]
  • You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [157]
  • On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [158] [159]
  • You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [160] [161]
  • Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [162] [163] [164]
  • You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [165] [166]
  • Hovercards will no longer flicker. [167]

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07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25[edit]

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

Reminder

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

Recent software changes

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

VisualEditor news

  • You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [168]
  • When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [169] [170]
  • You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [171] [172] [173] [174]
  • The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [175] [176] [177]

Future software changes

  • Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [178]
  • You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [179]
  • You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [180] [181]
  • It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [182] [183]
  • Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [184]
  • The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [185]
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
  • You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [186]

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07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-26[edit]

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

Recent software changes

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

VisualEditor news

  • You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [187] [188]
  • When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [189] [190]
  • You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [191] [192]
  • You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [193] [194]

Future software changes

  • You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [195] [196]
  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [197]
  • CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [198]
  • You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [199] [200]
  • An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [201]

Problems

  • On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
  • Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [202]

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

07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-27[edit]

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

Recent software changes

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

VisualEditor news

  • Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [203] [204]
  • A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [205] [206]
  • VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [207] [208] [209] [210]
  • Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [211] [212]

Future software changes

  • You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [213] [214]
  • Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
  • CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [215]
  • All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [216] [217]
  • Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [218]
  • You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [219] [220]
  • You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [221]

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

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-28[edit]

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

Tech News updates

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [222]
  • It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [223] [224]
  • You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [225] [226]

VisualEditor news

  • Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [227] [228]
  • You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [229] [230] [231]
  • When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [232] [233] [234]
  • The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [235]
  • Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [236] [237] [238]

Future software changes

  • Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
  • A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [239]
  • If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [240] [241]
  • Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [242] [243]
  • Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [244] [245]

Problems

  • Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [246] [247]
  • For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [248] [249]

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

07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-29[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
  • It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis. [250] [251]
  • You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
  • You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.

VisualEditor news

  • The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles. [252] [253]
  • The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [254] [255] [256]
  • References will now be shown in the default font size again. [257]

Future software changes

  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16. [258]
  • The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [259] [260]
  • It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files. [261]
  • Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [262] [263]
  • Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis. [264] [265]
  • Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [266] [267]
  • Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [268]

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

07:49, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-30[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [269] [270] [271]
  • The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [272]
  • Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [273] [274]
  • A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [275]

VisualEditor news

  • Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [276]
  • All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [277]
  • You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [278]
  • Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [279] [280] [281] [282] [283] [284]

Future software changes

Problems

  • Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem. [288]

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

07:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-31[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
  • You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.

VisualEditor news

  • You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor. [289] [290]
  • The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit. [291]
  • If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters. [292] [293]
  • You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [294] [295]

Future software changes

  • You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [296] [297]
  • Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. [298]
  • It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [299] [300]

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

08:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-32[edit]

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

Tech News updates

  • Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [301]
  • You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [302] [303] [304]
  • You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files. [305]
  • New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [306] [307]

VisualEditor news

Future software changes

  • You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [319] [320]
  • All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [321]
  • Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [322]

Problems

  • Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [323]
  • Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed. [324]

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

07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-33[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [325]
  • Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [326]

VisualEditor news

  • Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14. [327]

Future software changes

  • Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser! [328] [329] [330]
  • If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning. [331] [332]
  • You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [333] [334]
  • An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [335]

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

07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-34[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
  • There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages. [336] [337] [338]
  • You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [339] [340]
  • You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [341]
  • You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.

Wikidata

  • After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews. [342]
  • After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. [343]

Problems

  • There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [344] [345]

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

07:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-35[edit]

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

VisualEditor news

  • There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed. [346]
  • You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [347]
  • If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [348] [349] [350]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
  • After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page. [351]

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

09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-36[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [352] [353]
  • You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [354] [355]
  • A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [356] [357]
  • If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [358]

VisualEditor news

  • You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [359]
  • We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [360] [361] [362]
  • VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [363]
  • We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [364]
  • You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [365]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
  • There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [366]
  • You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [367]
  • You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
  • You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [368]

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

07:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-37[edit]

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

VisualEditor news

  • From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [369] [370] [371]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
  • You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [372]
  • You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [373]

Problems

  • There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-38[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [374] [375]
  • There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [376] [377] [378]
  • New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [379]

Problems

  • There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [380]

VisualEditor news

  • If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [381]
  • The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [382] [383]
  • You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [384]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
  • These changes are coming with the new version:
    • If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [385] [386] [387]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-39[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
  • Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
  • There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [389] [390]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
  • If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[391] [392]
  • In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [393] [394]
  • The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [395]
  • The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [396]
  • There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [397] [398]
  • In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [399]

Future site changes

  • You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [400]

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

09:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-40[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
  • Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [404] [405]
  • You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [406]
  • If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [407] [408]
  • The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [409]

Future changes

  • You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
  • JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [410]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-41[edit]

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 this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
  • If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [418] [419]
  • We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [420]
  • On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [421] [422]
  • You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [423]
  • 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [424]

Future changes

  • You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [425]
  • More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [426] [427]

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

06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-42[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • 10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [430]
  • Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [431]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
  • 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [432]

Meetings

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

08:54, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-43[edit]

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

  • You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
  • You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [436] [437]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [439]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
  • 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [440]
  • If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [441] [442]

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

13:48, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-44[edit]

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

Problems

  • There was an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [443]
  • There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [444]
  • There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [445]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [446]
  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [447] [448] [449]
  • VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [450]
  • VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [451]
  • The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [452]

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

05:21, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-45[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [456]
  • Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [457] [458] [459]
  • HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
  • Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [460] [461]
  • VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [462]
  • The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [463] [464] [465] [466] [467]
  • After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [468] [469] [470]

Future changes

  • The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [471]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-46[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [472] [473]
  • The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [474]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [475]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
  • You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [476] [477]
  • The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [478]
  • The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [479]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-47[edit]

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

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
  • The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19. [480]

Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator

  • The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
  • You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
  • You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
  • Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
  • You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC. [481]

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

18:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-48[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The move from Bugzilla to Phabricator is done. You can now report bugs in Phabricator. [482]

Problems

  • There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the colspan or rowspan option. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17. [483]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
  • You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options. [484]
  • VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [485]
  • You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [486]
  • VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [487] [488]

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

19:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-50[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [489]
  • You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [490]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [491]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar). [492]
  • You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [493]
  • It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [494] [495]
  • The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [496] [497] [498]
  • (Lua) You can no longer use mw.text.unstrip to get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix. [499] [500]

Future changes

  • Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [501]

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

17:11, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-51[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [502]
  • You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [503]
  • You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar). [504]
  • You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [505]
  • VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [506]
  • The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [507]

Future changes

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

16:44, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-52[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private. [512]

Software changes this week

  • There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6. [513]

Future changes

  • The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [514]
  • A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [515]

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

16:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-01[edit]

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

Software changes

  • There are no technical changes this week.

Feedback about Tech News in 2014

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

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

16:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-03[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [516]
  • You can now use the {{!}} magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [517]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
  • A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [518]
  • The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [519]
  • The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [520] [521] [522]
  • The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [523]

Future changes

  • You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [524]

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

16:47, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-04[edit]

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

Problems

  • All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [527]

Software changes this week

  • There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [528]

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

18:13, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-05[edit]

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

Recent software changes

This week

  • There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [530]

Future changes

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

16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-06[edit]

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

Problems

  • There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [533]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
  • The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [534]
  • You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [535] [536]

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

16:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-07[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [538]
  • UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [539]
  • All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [540]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
  • You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [541] [542] [543]
  • You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [544] [545]
  • It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [546]
  • You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).

Future changes

  • Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [547]
  • In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [548]

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

16:27, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-08[edit]

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

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
  • On Wednesday your Meta user page will be shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. [549] [550] [551]
  • You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [552]
  • In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [553]
  • The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first.​ [554]

Meetings

  • The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [555]
  • You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [556]
  • You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [557]

Future changes

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

17:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-09[edit]

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

Recent software changes

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
  • It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [562]
  • It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [563]
  • Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [564]
  • Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [565]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
  • Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [566]

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

16:29, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10[edit]

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

Recent software changes

  • A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [567]
  • You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
  • You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [568] [569]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
  • You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
  • Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [570] [571] [572] [573]
  • The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [574]
  • The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [575]

Meetings

  • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [576]

Future changes

  • You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [577]

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

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [578] [579]
  • VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [580] [581] [582]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
  • In VisualEditor the "Edit beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [583] [584]
  • The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [585] [586]
  • You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [587] [588]
  • You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [589] [590]
  • If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

Meetings

  • You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
  • You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [591]

Future changes

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

15:19, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-12[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [594]
  • You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [595]
  • It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [596] [597]

Problems

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
  • A puzzle piece icon (icon) now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [598] [599]
  • You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [600] [601]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [602] [603]
  • You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [604]
  • The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [605]

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

15:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
  • The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [606]
  • VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [607] [608] [609]
  • When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [610]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [611]

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

15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [612]
  • You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [613] [614] [615]
  • All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [616]
  • You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [617]
  • VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [618]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
  • VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [619]
  • You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [620]
  • You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [621]
  • You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [622]
  • VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [623] [624] [625] [626]

Meetings

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

15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15[edit]

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

Problems

  • The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [633]
  • Labs was broken several times this week. [634] [635] [636] [637]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
  • You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [638]
  • Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [639] [640]
  • You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [641]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [642]

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

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-16[edit]

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

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
  • Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [648] [649]
  • All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [650]

Meetings

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

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

16:41, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-17[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • There was sometimes a problem when saving a page in VisualEditor. It is now fixed on all wikis. [651]
  • VisualEditor sometimes showed empty warnings for wikis using Flagged Revisions. This is now fixed on all wikis. [652]
  • You can get the new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. With it you can share facts with your friends. [653]
  • If you write JavaScript, you should stop using importScript and importStylesheet. [654]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Labs on Monday. [655]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 21. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 22 (calendar).
  • Developers are renaming 1.5 million accounts. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [656] [657] [658]
  • If your wiki has the auto-fill tool for citations, you can now use it when you edit a reference. [659]
  • You can now give examples for template options in TemplateData. [660]

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

15:30, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-18[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • All accounts are now unique and work on all wikis. [663] [664]
  • You can read a report from experts who tested the security of MediaWiki. [665]
  • There was a problem between VisualEditor and an antivirus software. It is now fixed. [666]
  • You can help test VisualEditor to see if it works in your language. [667]

Problems

  • Some Labs tools had problems due to a software bug. [668]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 29 (calendar).
  • It is now clearer that you can delete several rows and columns when you edit tables in VisualEditor. [669]
  • You now see more information when you search for a template in VisualEditor. [670]
  • You can now cancel when you add citations on desktop, or edit links on mobile, in VisualEditor. [671]
  • You can now see the list of other formats for videos only after they're ready. [672]

Meetings

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

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

15:11, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project[edit]

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

Tech News: 2015-19[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now chat with other users in Phabricator. [673]
  • There was a rare problem with VisualEditor. The text of another wiki could be added to your edit. The issue is now fixed. [674] [675]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 5. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 6 (calendar).
  • It is now easier to add a link in VisualEditor. You can see an image and a description about the page. [676]

Meetings

  • You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on May 5 at 14:30 (UTC). [677]
  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on May 6 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join an event in France on May 22−25. You need to sign up before May 8. [678]

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

15:16, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-20[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now make charts and maps on your wiki with the new "graph" tool. If you have an old browser, you will see images instead. It uses a tool called Vega; you can learn how to use it and write help pages for your wiki. You can use the Vega edit tool to make charts and copy the code to your wiki. Charts and maps use complex code and you should put them into templates. In the future, you will be able to create charts with VisualEditor. [679] [680] [681]
  • You can apply for technical jobs to develop tools for the community. [682]
  • The logos of all wikis are now in a new place. It will make pages load faster. You can still ask to change the logo. You can also use local CSS for brief changes. [683] [684]

Problems

  • There was a problem that caused slow editing. [685]
  • Pages were sometimes removed from your watchlist in VisualEditor. This problem is now fixed. [686]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 13 (calendar).
  • You can now use data from Wikidata on more pages. The page doesn't need to be linked to the Wikidata item. It works on a few wikis and more wikis will be added soon. [687] [688]
  • You should get fewer errors when you add files to Commons. [689]
  • When you use an external link to link to a wiki page, VisualEditor now converts it to a wiki link. [690]
  • When you add a link in VisualEditor, you see pages that match what you type. It is now easier to see where they match. [691]

Meetings

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

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

15:54, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-21[edit]

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 this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from May 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from May 20 (calendar).
  • References are now always in the right order. Also, the reference list now only shows references used on the page. [692]
  • You can no longer create an account with a colon ':' in it. If you already have one, it still works. [693]
  • The toolbar in VisualEditor now looks different. It is easier to see the icons. [694]
  • You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [695] [696]
  • UploadWizard now shows better matches when you add a category to your file. [697]
  • A test about VisualEditor will start on the English Wikipedia on Thursday. [698]

Meetings

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

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

15:29, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-22[edit]

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

Problems

  • VisualEditor was broken for 30 minutes on Tuesday. The problem was due to a tool it uses. [699]
  • Some Labs tools had issues last week. [700] [701]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

16:26, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-23[edit]

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

Problems

  • Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error. [703]
  • Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday. [704]
  • Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28. [705] [706]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
  • You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday. [707]

Meetings

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

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

16:43, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar). [708] [709]
  • If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools. [710]
  • When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool. [711]
  • The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons. [712]

Meetings

Future changes

  • If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for action=query will change at the end of June. [714]

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

17:03, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Users have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool. [715]
  • Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed. [716]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it. [718]
  • If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use compat anymore. [719] [720] [721]

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

15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Some wikis can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users. [722] [723]
  • You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser. [724]

Problems

  • On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours. [725] [726] [727]
  • On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons. [728] [729] [730]
  • Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days. [731] [732] [733]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

15:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Long lines in code blocks now look better. [734]
  • You can now see graphs in VisualEditor. [735]
  • When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page. [736]
  • The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile. [737] [738] [739]
  • You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites. [740]

Problems

  • JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken. [741]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
  • You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color. [742]
  • When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them. [743]
  • If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password. [744]
  • Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for action=query doesn't work any more. [745]

Meetings

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

Future

  • When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org. [746]

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

15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-28[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • On the mobile site, you now see more information when you search for a page. It now shows the description from Wikidata. [747]

Problems

  • The code of long pages is not colored any more. You may see this problem on the pages of long gadgets. [748]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 8. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 9 (calendar).
  • The "Page information" tool shows how many users watch the page. You can now see how many are active. [749] [750]
  • You can now translate articles into English with the new translation tool. [751]

Meetings

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

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

15:13, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-29[edit]

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

Problems

  • There was a problem with editing on Thursday. Some tools like bots and VisualEditor were broken on all wikis for 10 minutes. [753]
  • There was a problem with images on Thursday. They were broken on all wikis for 15 minutes. [754]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

  • You can join a technical meeting at Wikimania in Mexico City this week. [755]

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

15:06, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-30[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 22. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 23 (calendar).
  • You now see more warnings in the image viewer. They tell you to be careful when using the image, for example if it shows a person. [756]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Soon you won't be able to use MathJax to display math. [757]

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

03:06, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-31[edit]

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

Problems

  • There was a problem with some Lua modules on July 22 and 23. Some pages using them did not list them in "what links here". You can fix those pages with a null edit: edit and save the page without making any change.
  • There was a problem with the abuse filter page on big wikis on July 23. It was due to a code error. [763]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from July 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 29. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 30 (calendar).
  • JavaScript authors: You cannot use wgNoticeUserData to get edit counts anymore. [764]

Meetings

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

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

15:05, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-32[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The ContentTranslation extension has been updated:
    • You can now type in list paragraphs on wikis with right-to-left scripts. [765]
    • Some user interface updates changed how details in the ContentTranslation extension look. [766] [767] [768] [769]
  • The error page you see when the sites are not working is now simpler and easier to read. It also shows the Wikimedia logo. [770]
  • MediaWiki now supports redirects for CSS pages. [771]
  • Bots can't guess captchas unlimited times anymore. [772]

Problems

  • There was a problem with thumbnails on wikis with local images on July 24 and 25. It was due to a code error. [773]
  • We can't search by file type on Wikimedia wikis now. [774]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

15:51, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-33[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • MediaWiki can now hide the signature button when you edit a content page. [775]
  • The "Your preferences have been saved" message has changed. You can now see more easily what was saved when you change preferences several times. [776]
  • You can now play Ogg video files in some browsers that don't support this format. This solution uses JavaScript and works on desktop browsers only for now. It will work on mobile later. [777]
  • You can now use the same tools to edit style in VisualEditor on mobile as in desktop browsers. [778]
  • It is now easier to see if there is a JavaScript error in a user or site script. [779]
  • JavaScript authors:
  • The content translation tool now works better. It is easier to use math, and useless tags are no longer added. [784]

Problems

  • More edits have been rejected due to loss of session data lately. This is now fixed. [785]
  • Importing a Lua module sometimes didn't work. This is now fixed. [786]
  • Text was sometimes lost in the content translation tool. One part of the problem is now fixed. [787]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 12. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 13 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard is getting a new look. The look of buttons and checkboxes has already changed. This week, UploadWizard gets a new date picker. The other text fields will change soon. [788]
  • You can now test VisualEditor on mobile devices of all sizes. [789]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Some things in the watchlist will get a new look. [790]

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

14:58, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-34[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Many Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Before they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [791] [792] [793]
  • Some auto-saving problems and other issues in the Content Translation tool are now fixed. Please report to the Content Translation feedback page if you still have problems. [794]

Problems

  • Older gadgets that are not using ResourceLoader are not loading anymore. They need to be updated. [795] [796]
  • On August 12 the machine translation servers and the Content Translation tool didn't work. This was fixed on the same day. [797]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from August 19. It will be on all Wikipedias from August 20 (calendar).
  • You can soon watch when something is added to or removed from a category. [798]

Meetings

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

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

16:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-35[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Disambiguation pages are now excluded from the random page function. [799]

Problems

  • There was a problem with CAPTCHAs in VisualEditor. This has now been fixed. [800]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

13:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [801][802]
  • The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [803]
  • VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [804]
  • Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [805]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

21:37, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-37[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [807]
  • A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [808]
  • You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [809]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [810]
  • The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [811][812]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
  • The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [813]
  • The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [814][815]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [816]
  • Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [817][818]

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

17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-38[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now use the Wikidata query service. [819]
  • Belarusian-Taraškievica Wikipedia was moved from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. This caused some issues, but most of them were resolved. [820]
  • Language preferences might not be changed immediately when you adjust them. Language selection might work slower. Please report any problems. [821][822]

Problems

  • There was a problem when editing International Standard Book Numbers in Visual Editor. This has now been fixed. [823]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists should have been upgraded on September 9. It didn't work as planned and will now happen later. [824]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • ContentTranslation will show more data on the Special:ContentTranslationStats page. For example, it will show translation trends and information about deleted translations. [825]
  • The first version of the translation suggestions feature will be deployed soon. [826]

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

16:18, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-39[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [827][828]
  • Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [829][830][831][832]
  • More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [833]
  • The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [834]

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [835]
  • Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [836][837]
  • UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [838]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
  • The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [839]
  • You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [840]
  • Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [841]

Meetings

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

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-40[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [842]
  • UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [843]
  • You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [844]
  • When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [845]
  • You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [846]
  • The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [847]
  • MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [848]

Problems

  • Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [849][850]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
  • There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [851]
  • The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [852]

Meetings

Future changes

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

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

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-41[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [854]
  • The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [855]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
  • UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [856]
  • UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [857]
  • A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [858]

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

18:33, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor update[edit]

This note is only delivered to English Wikipedia subscribers of the visual editor's newsletter.

The location of the visual editor's preference has been changed from the "Beta" tab to the "Editing" section of your preferences on this wiki. The setting now says Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta. This aligns en.wiki with almost all the other WMF wikis; it doesn’t mean the visual editor is complete, or that it is no longer “in beta phase” though.

This action has not changed anything else for editors: it still honours editors’ previous choices about having it on or off; logged-out users continue to only have access to wikitext; the “Edit” tab is still after the “Edit source” one. You can learn more at the visual editor’s talk page.

We don’t expect this to cause any glitches, but in case your account no longer has the settings that you want, please accept our apologies and correct it in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences. Thank you for your attention, Elitre (WMF) -16:32, 7 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-42[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [859]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [860]
  • Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [861]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-43[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The Recurrent item icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The For technical readers icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
  • Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [862]

Problems

  • A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [863]
  • Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [864]
  • The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [865]

Changes this week

  • Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [866]
  • Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [867][868][869][870]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [871]
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [872][873]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [874][875]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [876]

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

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #5—2015[edit]

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?
You can use the visual editor on smartphones and tablets.

Screenshot showing the menu for switching from the wikitext editor to VisualEditor

Click the pencil icon to open the editor for a page. Inside that, use the gear menu in the upper right corner to "Switch to visual editing".

The editing button will remember which editing environment you used last time, and give you the same one next time. The desktop site will be switching to a system similar to this one in the coming months.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements[edit]

Educational features: The first time you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.

Links:  It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558)  These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.

Uploads:  Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.

Mobile:  Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use the visual editor on any size of device. (T85630)  Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.

Rich editing tools:  You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925)  There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227 and T113354)  When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.

On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.

Future changes[edit]

You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.

Let's work together[edit]

If you can't read this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 23:25, 29 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2015-45[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [877]
  • If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [878]
  • Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [879]

Problems

  • On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [880]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [881]
  • Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [882]

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

16:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Superprotect has been removed. [883]
  • You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [884]
  • JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [885]

Problems

  • Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [886]

Changes this week

  • Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [887]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-47[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [890]
  • Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [891]
  • The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
  • Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [892]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [893][894]

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

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48[edit]

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

Recent changes

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

Future changes

  • From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [895]

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49[edit]

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

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

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [896]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [897]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [898][899]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [900]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [901]

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

16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [902]

Problems

  • Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [903]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [904]
  • IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [905]
  • You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [906]
  • It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [907]
  • You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [908]
  • UploadWizard will look a bit different. [909]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
  • New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [910]

Meetings

Future changes

  • A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [911]

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

17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [912]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52[edit]

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

Tech News

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

Recent changes

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015[edit]

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

Screenshot showing a pop-up dialog for switching from the wikitext editor to VisualEditor
If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:
Screenshot showing a drop-down menu in Special:Preferences

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements[edit]

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes[edit]

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities[edit]

  • Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
    • Remember my last editor,
    • Always give me the visual editor if possible, 
    • Always give me the source editor, and 
    • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the current state for people using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
  • Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned non-free image File:Windows Live Translator Bilingual Viewer.jpg[edit]

⚠
⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Windows Live Translator Bilingual Viewer.jpg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. Cloudbound (talk) 21:51, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-02[edit]

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

Problems

  • Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [917]

Changes this week

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [922]
  • The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [923][924]
  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [925][926]
  • The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [927]
  • Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [928]

Changes this week

  • The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [929]
  • MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [930]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can now follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [931][932]
  • Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [933]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [934]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [935]
  • The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [936]
  • Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [937]

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

16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-05[edit]

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

Problems

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [938]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [939][940]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [941]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [942]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [943][944]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [945]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [946][947][948]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [949][950]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [951]


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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-06[edit]

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

  • Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [952]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [953]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [954]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [955][956]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [957][958]
  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [959][960][961]

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

18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-07[edit]

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 edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [962]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [963]

Problems

  • A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [964][965]

Changes this week

  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [966][967]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [968]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [969]

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

16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-08[edit]

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

Problems

  • There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [972][973]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [974]

Meetings

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

18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #1—2016[edit]

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?
Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features.
Screenshot showing a pop-up menu for column operations in a table
If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.

Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.

Recent changes[edit]

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.

Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.

The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.

Future changes[edit]

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:

  • Remember my last editor,
  • Always give me the visual editor if possible,
  • Always give me the source editor, and
  • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)

The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers would like to know how well the visual editor works in your language. They particularly want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic and others.

Let's work together[edit]

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thanks!

– Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-09[edit]

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

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [975][976]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [977][978]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [979]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [980]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [981]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [982]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-10[edit]

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

  • Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [983]
  • Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [984]
  • The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [985]
  • It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [986]
  • Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [987]

Problems

  • Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [988]
  • The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [989]
  • The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [990]
  • You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [991]
  • Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [992]

Changes this week

  • Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [993]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
  • Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [994]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [995]
  • The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [996]

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

20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-11[edit]

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 this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [999]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
  • The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [1,000]

Meetings

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

18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-12[edit]

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

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
  • In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [1,001]

Changes this week

  • It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [1,002]
  • You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [1,003]
  • 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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [1,004]

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

16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-13[edit]

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

Problems

  • Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [1,007]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
  • You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [1,008]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [1,009]
  • Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

  • Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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

19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-14[edit]

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 this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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

22:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice[edit]

How to switch between editing environments
Part of the toolbar in the visual editor
Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.
Part of the toolbar in the wikitext editor
Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-15[edit]

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 visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [1,012][1,013]
  • Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [1,014][1,015]
  • ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [1,016]
  • The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [1,017]

Problems

  • There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [1,018]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
  • The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [1,019]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [1,020]

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

20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-16[edit]

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 filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [1,021][1,022]
  • You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [1,023]
  • MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [1,024]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [1,025]
  • There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

Meetings

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

20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-17[edit]

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

  • Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [1,026]
  • When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
  • Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [1,027]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [1,028]
  • It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [1,029]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [1,030]

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

21:02, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-18[edit]

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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [1,031]

Problems

Changes this week

Meetings

Future changes

  • Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [1,034]

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

20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-19[edit]

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

  • Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3. [1,035]
  • You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [1,036]
  • Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC. [1,037][1,038]
  • You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor). [1,039]
  • Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [1,040]
  • The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [1,041]
  • Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [1,042]
  • Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [1,043]

Problems

  • MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [1,044]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 12 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems. [1,045]

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

23:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-20[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth. [1,046]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [1,047]

Changes this week

  • Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later. [1,048]
  • Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [1,049]
  • A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [1,050]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5. [1,051]

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

16:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21[edit]

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

Problems

  • Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [1,053]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [1,054]

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

18:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-22[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module. [1,055]

Problems

  • A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review. [1,056][1,057]
  • CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [1,058]

Changes this week

  • When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place. [1,059]
  • The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [1,060]
  • A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki. [1,061][1,062]
  • Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason. [1,063]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 31 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:19, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-23[edit]

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 this week

  • The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in Vector as in other skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week. [1,066]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).

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

20:51, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-24[edit]

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 this week

  • You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [1,072]
  • It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [1,073]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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

18:41, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-25[edit]

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

  • Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [1,074]

Changes this week

  • The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [1,075][1,076]
  • Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [1,077]
  • When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [1,078]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

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19:14, 20 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-26[edit]

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 ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [1,079]
  • The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [1,080]
  • A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [1,081]

Problems

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
  • The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [1,084]

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [1,085]
  • An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [1,086]
  • The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [1,087][1,088][1,089]
  • From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [1,090]
  • Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [1,091]

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

15:42, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [1,092]

Changes this week

  • The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [1,093]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-28[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up. [1,094][1,095][1,096]
  • Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first. [1,097][1,098][1,099]
  • Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed. [1,100][1,101][1,102]

Problems

  • On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too. [1,103]
  • Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 July. It will be on all wikis from 14 July (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:15, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-29[edit]

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

Problems

  • On July 12 all wikis were rolled back to MediaWiki 1.28.0-wmf.8 due to a problem in the log-in system. [1,107][1,108]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
  • Special:Log now has a help link. [1,109]
  • The RevisionSlider can be tested on the beta cluster. From 22 July, it will be available as a beta feature at: German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end". The meeting will be on 20 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [1,110]

Future changes

  • User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages. [1,111][1,112]
  • Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it. [1,113]

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

12:01, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-30[edit]

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

Problems

  • Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed. [1,115]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
  • It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon. [1,116]
  • Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages. [1,117]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [1,118]

Future changes

  • The current icon for Notifications "Notices" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency. [1,119]
  • Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [1,120]

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

19:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-31[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [1,121]
  • The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

Problems

  • Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [1,122]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).

Meetings

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

21:48, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-32[edit]

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 notifications, the icon for Notices has been changed from a speech-bubble icon () to a tray icon () for consistency. The Alerts icon has been redesigned too. The colors have been changed for accessibility. [1,123]

Problems

  • If you use the wikEd gadget, changes you made were not kept when you switched from the wikitext editor to the visual editor while you were editing. This has now been fixed. [1,124]

Changes this week

  • Wikimedia search will now ignore question marks at the end of the sentences or words you use when you search. Until now the question mark was just a wildcard. [1,125]
  • On Commons, UploadWizard will now be available on mobile, rather than just the old upload form. This should reduce the workload for the community in reviewing images. [1,126]
  • When you edit with the visual editor a puzzle symbol tells you there is an invisible template in the article. It will now mention the name of the template. [1,127]
  • The button to read something in another language will move for mobile users. This will happen on 9 August. [1,128]
  • When someone mentions you and links to your user page you get a notification. You will now get a notification when you mention yourself this way. [1,129]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 August. It will be on all wikis from 11 August (calendar).
  • A message on Notifications panel will invite users to try Special:Notifications page. [1,130]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:41, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-33[edit]

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 Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [1,131]
  • Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [1,132]
  • For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [1,133][1,134]

Changes this week

  • The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [1,135]
  • Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [1,136]
  • In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [1,137][1,138]
  • The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [1,139]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [1,140]

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

19:37, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-34[edit]

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 ORES review tool is now available on Special:Contributions as a beta feature. It can make it easier to find contributions that are probably damaging the wikis. The ORES review tool is available on Wikidata and Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Russian Wikipedia. [1,141]
  • The norm and ccnorm functions have been updated to make it easier to write abuse filters. This also affects the TitleBlacklist extension. You don't have to transform "I" and "L" to "1", "O" to "0" and "S" to "5" anymore. [1,142]
  • The old pageview data in the "pagecounts-raw" and "pagecounts-all-sites" files is no longer being updated. You can find the new pageview data here. This happened on August 5. [1,143]

Problems

  • Some big image files could not be thumbnailed. This has now been fixed. [1,144]
  • When you moved a page over a redirect it would delete the redirect without saving it in the logs. This has now been fixed. [1,145]

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully sent out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. You can test this on the test wiki. [1,146][1,147]
  • How you add text after an edit conflict might work in a different way in the future. You can test the prototype. [1,148]

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

21:18, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-35[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Wikimedia mobile sites now don't load images if the user doesn't see them. This is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster. [1,149]
  • When you edit a table with the visual editor, pressing Tab in the last cell of a row will take you to the first cell in the next row. Pressing Shift and Tab in the first cell of a row will take you to the last cell in the previous row. [1,150]

Changes this week

  • The name of the "Save page" button will change. The button will say "Publish page" when you create a new page. It will say "Publish changes" when you change an existing page. [1,151][1,152]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

16:02, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-36[edit]

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

  • Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [1,153]
  • Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [1,154]
  • When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show a validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [1,155]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [1,156][1,157]
  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [1,158][1,159]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

17:12, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-37[edit]

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 this week

  • The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [1,164]
  • A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [1,165][1,166]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:04, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-38[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [1,169]

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

22:09, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-39[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can request it after a community decision. See how to request it. [1,170]
  • When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [1,171]
  • Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [1,172]

Problems

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [1,175]

Meetings

Future changes

  • Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [1,176]

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

18:07, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-40[edit]

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

Changes this week

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

Meetings

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

Future changes

  • Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. [1,177]
  • <slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible. [1,178]

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

21:30, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-41[edit]

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 show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}. [1,179]
  • The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [1,180]
  • Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight. [1,181]

Changes this week

  • Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [1,182]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [1,183]

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

20:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-42[edit]

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

Problems

  • Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning. [1,184]
  • Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [1,185]

Changes this week

  • There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [1,186]

Future changes

  • The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

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

16:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-43[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
  • The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". [1,188]
  • About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [1,189]
  • Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.

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

17:39, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-44[edit]

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

  • Now you can include Commons video films with subtitles in your wiki language. Before you could see translated videos on file page at Commons only. [1,190]
  • Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. [1,191]
  • The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script. [1,192]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3rd (calendar).
  • Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" field when editing templates. [1,193]
  • Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. [1,194]

Future changes

  • New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29. [1,195]

Miscellaneous

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

16:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-45[edit]

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

  • Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. [1,196]
  • First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [1,197]
  • .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [1,198]
  • Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [1,199]

Changes this week

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

23:01, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-46[edit]

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

  • When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [1,204]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
  • In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [1,205]

Meetings

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

Future changes

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

19:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-47[edit]

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

  • Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [1,207]
  • You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [1,208]
  • The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems

  • A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [1,209]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
  • RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [1,210][1,211][1,212]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [1,213]
  • Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page. [1,214]

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

15:33, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-48[edit]

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

Changes this week

  • When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [1,215]
  • When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [1,216]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
  • Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [1,217][1,218]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

21:17, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-49[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [1,219]
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [1,220]
  • ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [1,221]

Changes this week

  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [1,222]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

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

18:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-50[edit]

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

Recent changes

  • Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [1,223]
  • You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [1,224]
  • Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. [1,225]

Problems

  • Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [1,226]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:30, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-51[edit]

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

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.
  • The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [1,227]
  • Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [1,228]

Problems

  • Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [1,229]

Changes this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

  • The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.

Future changes

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

20:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02[edit]

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

Problems

  • Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [1,234]

Changes this week

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

19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-03[edit]

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

Problems

  • video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [1,236]

Changes this week

  • There is a new magic word called {{PAGELANGUAGE}}. It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators. [1,237]
  • When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu. [1,238]
  • You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [1,239]
  • You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [1,240]
  • The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to. [1,241]
  • Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in. [1,242]
  • When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [1,243]
  • 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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

23:24, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-04[edit]

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 see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [1,244]

Changes 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).

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

20:15, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05[edit]

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 OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [1,245]

Changes this week

  • ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later. [1,246]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).

Future changes

  • The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools. [1,247][1,248]
  • The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

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

18:45, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

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