Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous

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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. [1]
• Seven new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:) [2]
  • a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:) [3]
  • a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:) [4]
  • a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:) [5]
  • a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:) [6]
  • a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:) [7]
  • a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:) [8]
• You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [9]
• 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. [10]

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). [11][12]

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

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. [13][14]
• 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. [15]
• 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. [16]

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). [17][18]
• 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". [19]

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. [20]

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. [21]
• 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. [22]
• 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. [23]
• 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. [24]

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). [25][26]
• 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. [27]

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. [28]
• 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. [29][30]

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

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)

Tech News: 2024-21

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

Recent changes

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. [31]
• New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description. [32][33]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar). [34][35]
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:04, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Feedback invited on Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle

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

Dear community members,

The Community Affairs Committee (CAC) of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees invites you to give feedback on a draft Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle. This draft Procedure outlines proposed steps and requirements for opening and closing Wikimedia Sibling Projects, and aims to ensure any newly approved projects are set up for success. This is separate from the procedures for opening or closing language versions of projects, which is handled by the Language Committee or closing projects policy.

You can find the details on this page, as well as the ways to give your feedback from today until the end of the day on June 23, 2024, anywhere on Earth.

You can also share information about this with the interested project communities you work with or support, and you can also help us translate the procedure into more languages, so people can join the discussions in their own language.

On behalf of the CAC,

RamzyM (WMF) 02:25, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I strongly recommend the Wikinews community pay attention to this. When people talk about closing projects, the only two that ever seem to come up are Wikinews and Wikispecies. Bawolff ☺☻ 13:23, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-22

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

Recent changes

• Several bugs related to the latest updates to the UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons have been fixed. For more information, see T365107 and T365119.
• In March 2024 a new addPortlet API was added to allow gadgets to create new portlets (menus) in the skin. In certain skins this can be used to create dropdowns. Gadget developers are invited to try it and give feedback.
• Some CSS in the Minerva skin has been removed to enable easier community configuration. Interface editors should check the rendering on mobile devices for aspects related to the classes: .collapsible, .multicol, .reflist, .coordinates, .topicon. Further details are available on replacement CSS if it is needed.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar). [36][37]
• When you visit a wiki where you don't yet have a local account, local rules such as edit filters can sometimes prevent your account from being created. Starting this week, MediaWiki takes your global rights into account when evaluating whether you can override such local rules. [38]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)