Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous

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Tech News: 2019-33

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

Recent changes

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools. Feedback on the discussion page is appreciated. [1]
• Due to the absence of volunteer maintenance of Cologne Blue skin, the link to activate it will be hidden. The skin will still work, but editors using it are encouraged to switch to another skin. [2]

Changes later this week

• Due to Wikimania, there is no deployment this week. [3]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Wikidata item" link will be moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" section on all Wikimedia projects, starting on August 21. Full announcement, Phabricator task.

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

18:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

I noticed "Wikidata item" moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" yesterday, however, today it seems to have moved back to "Tools". --SVTCobra 16:47, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

New people

Something reminded me that there may be entities who can be very interested in news writing and benefit from it more than an average individual who learns to think better after some news writing.

• Uni journalism classes are a good example, as the teacher receives free access to high quality peer review which becomes a part of the education process and can be used in their marking scheme.
• Primary and high schools can benefit from this, as they often need to study the 5Ws as a part of their standard curriculum in Literacy.
• Uni computer science people might benefit from this if they do a programming class and do a group assignment to develop a tool that aids authoring or review.

What are other entities that might be interested? I'm just checking as I would be happy to create 'landing pages' for different kind of educators or other groups, and share links to these landing pages with a few institutions in my local area. --Gryllida (talk) 00:01, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Note: this is for brainstorming. As many as you can think of would be great to have. Gryllida (talk) 00:02, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Most recently, my own planning for Wikinews has leaned toward two notions:

• We ought to look for ways to help children learn fact-based thinking; we're not a child-friendly environment, it goes with being uncensored and I certainly wouldn't wish to change that but it's worth some thought to what we might do in that direction.
• Whatever semi-automated assistance we build for writing articles ("article wizard(s)") should also encourage the writer in fact-based thinking.

Another general line of thought is expressed in a planning essay I drafted not too long ago on Wikibooks: Wikiness. --Pi zero (talk) 00:40, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Regarding children, I think wikis have the advantage (compared with, say, w:Minetest or some other educational games) of transparency. Gryllida (talk) 07:31, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

New tools and IP masking

Hey everyone,

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to work on two things that affect how we patrol changes and handle vandalism and harassment. We want to make the tools that are used to handle bad edits better. We also want to get better privacy for unregistered users so their IP addresses are no longer shown to everyone in the world. We would not hide IP addresses until we have better tools for patrolling.

We have an idea of what tools could be working better and how a more limited access to IP addresses would change things, but we need to hear from more wikis. You can read more about the project on Meta and post comments and feedback. Now is when we need to hear from you to be able to give you better tools to handle vandalism, spam and harassment.

You can post in your language if you can't write in English.

Johan (WMF)

14:18, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-36

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

Recent changes

• You can use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [4]
• The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
• The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [5]
• The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [6]
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [7]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
• When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [8]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [9]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [10]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [11]
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [12]

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

09:08, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Bernie Sanders on journalism

• Dan Kennedy. "Bernie Sanders Proves You Don't Have To Like Journalists In Order To Love Journalism" — WGBH News, September 4, 2019

--Pi zero (talk) 16:03, 4 September 2019 (UTC)