Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous

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Tech News: 2024-15

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

Recent changes

• Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
• A new Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check. [1][2]
• Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [3]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar). [4][5]
• New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [6]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:37, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-16

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

Problems

• Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [7][8]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar). [9][10]
• Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [11]
• A new variable page_last_edit_age will be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [12]

Future changes

• Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
• Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filter and abuse_filter_history tables. Some queries might need to be updated. [13]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:28, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-17

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

Recent changes

• Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention. [14]
• You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (calendar). [15][16]

Future changes

• This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [17]

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:27, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Vote now to select members of the first U4C

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to your language

Dear all,

I am writing to you to let you know the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open now through May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.

Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.

On behalf of the UCoC project team,

RamzyM (WMF) 20:20, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I tried to leave an opinion

I do not visit Wikinews very often. One of the reasons is that things seem to be broken here a lot. Today I tried to leave an opinion at:

• Comments:Wikinews interviews noted juggler for International Jugglers Day

but it looks like the system swallowed my post, sigh..

Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:40, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech works fine for me.... Hmmm. BigKrow (talk) 16:43, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

@BigKrow, Interesting.

btw while you were leaving your opinion on the article above, I discovered another related post at:Wikinews:Water cooler/technical#LiquidThreads deprecation.

Cheers, and I am really out of here for now, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:56, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-18

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

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [18]
• Seven new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:) [19]
  • a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:) [20]
  • a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:) [21]
  • a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:) [22]
  • a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:) [23]
  • a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:) [24]
  • a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:) [25]
• You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [26]
• Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.

Problems

• Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed. [27]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar). [28][29]

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MediaWiki message delivery 03:33, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

On the Campaign Trail ...

Would there be any interest if I resumed the On the Campaign Trail series as I've done since the 2008 US presidential election? Pizero usually reviewed those and they were quite daunting to review. So what I'm asking is, without Pizero around, is there anyone here who would be willing to take on such a project? Thanks. William S. Saturn (talk) 07:21, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

William S. Saturn: That would be excellent. I can't promise the level of quality in a review that he could, but I'd be happy to take this on. Thanks for your great work over the years. Heavy Water (talk) 19:03, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-19

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

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks. [30][31]
• Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page. [32]
• Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services. [33]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar). [34][35]
• When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs". [36]

Future changes

• A new service will be built to replace Extension:Graph. Details can be found in the latest update regarding this extension.
• Starting May 21, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia will get the possibility to activate "Add a link". This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to all Wikipedias. These communities can activate and configure the feature locally. [37]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 16:44, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-20

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

Recent changes

• On Wikisource there is a special page listing pages of works without corresponding scan images. Now you can use the new magic word __EXPECTWITHOUTSCANS__ to exclude certain pages (list of editions or translations of works) from that list. [38]
• If you use the user-preference "Show preview without reloading the page", then the template-page feature "Preview page with this template" will now also work without reloading the page. [39]
• Kartographer maps can now specify an alternative text via the alt= attribute. This is identical in usage to the alt= attribute in the image and gallery syntax. An exception for this feature is wikis like Wikivoyage where the miniature maps are interactive. [40]
• The old Guided Tour for the "New Filters for Edit Review" feature has been removed. It was created in 2017 to show people with older accounts how the interface had changed, and has now been seen by most of the intended people. [41]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar). [42][43]
• The Special:Search results page will now use CSS flex attributes, for better accessibility, instead of a table. If you have a gadget or script that adjusts search results, you should update your script to the new HTML structure. [44]

Future changes

• In the Vector 2022 skin, main pages will be displayed at full width (like special pages). The goal is to keep the number of characters per line large enough. This is related to the coming changes to typography in Vector 2022. Learn more. [45]
• Two columns of the pagelinks database table (pl_namespace and pl_title) are being dropped soon. Users must use two columns of the new linktarget table instead (lt_namespace and lt_title). In your existing SQL queries:
  1. Replace JOIN pagelinks with JOIN linktarget and pl_ with lt_ in the ON statement
  2. Below that add JOIN pagelinks ON lt_id = pl_target_id
  • See phab:T222224 for technical reasoning. [46][47]

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:58, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Sign up for the language community meeting on May 31st, 16:00 UTC

Hello all,

The next language community meeting is scheduled in a few weeks - May 31st at 16:00 UTC. If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page.

This is a participant-driven meeting, where we share language-specific updates related to various projects, collectively discuss technical issues related to language wikis, and work together to find possible solutions. For example, in the last meeting, the topics included the machine translation service (MinT) and the languages and models it currently supports, localization efforts from the Kiwix team, and technical challenges with numerical sorting in files used on Bengali Wikisource.

Do you have any ideas for topics to share technical updates related to your project? Any problems that you would like to bring for discussion during the meeting? Do you need interpretation support from English to another language? Please reach out to me at ssethi(__AT__)wikimedia.org and add agenda items to the document here.

We look forward to your participation!

MediaWiki message delivery 21:22, 14 May 2024 (UTC)