Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2023/June
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Tech News: 2023-23
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Citation and footnote editing can now be started from the reference list when using the visual editor. This feature request was voted #2 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [1]- Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [2]
Problems
- For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [3]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).- Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [4]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-24
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the Dutch, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese Wikipedias. This was the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [5]
- The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [6]
- The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [7]
- The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [8]
Problems
- For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended
__TOC__(or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [9] - Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing
{{DEFAULTSORT:...}}keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [10] 
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReasonwith#wpReason > input. See an example fix. [11]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
- VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [12]
Future changes
- From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
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MediaWiki message delivery 14:51, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
FYI: Sharp decline in interest in news
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65880999 —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:48, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-25
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Changes later this week
- There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
- There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing
\or pressingctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [15][16]
![[15]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_editor_toolbar_search_feature.png){kind=link}
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:08, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-26
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing
/to allprop=extlinksresponses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in theexternallinksdatabase table. [17]
Problems
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
- The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the
.mbox-textCSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [20][21] - Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the
|targets=parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the|skins=parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [22] - All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [23]
- The review form of the Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standardized user interface components. [24]
Future changes
- How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will change in the coming weeks at group2 wikis. This change improves the accessibility of content. You may need to update your site-CSS, or userscripts and gadgets. There are details on what code to check, how to update the code, and where to report any related problems. [25]
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MediaWiki message delivery 16:18, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
Announcing the new Elections Committee members
Hello there,
We are glad to announce the new members and advisors of the Elections Committee. The Elections Committee assists with the design and implementation of the process to select Community- and Affiliate-Selected trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. After an open nomination process, the strongest candidates spoke with the Board and four candidates were asked to join the Elections Committee. Four other candidates were asked to participate as advisors.
Thank you to all the community members who submitted their names for consideration. We look forward to working with the Elections Committee in the near future.
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees,