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Tech News: 2021-05

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

• IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [1]

Changes later this week

• You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [2]
• Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [3][4]
• Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [5]
• 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).

Future changes

• Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [6][7]
• Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.

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

22:38, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

• As the way Tech News is written is the most common feature to be pointed out both in positive and a negative feedback, I have been making an en-gb version of Tech News for some months now. It's not necessarily British, but it merges extremely short sentences together and allows for terms that anyone well-versed in the English language would understand. Well-versed for example is a term you probably wouldn't find in the regular Tech News. Here's the above issue in en-gb. I also occasionally add some additional explanation or the situation for a particular issue on English-language projects. I haven't really advertised it, pageviews are generally disappointing. I'd like to hear some feedback. Do you like it? Do you have suggestions? Alexis Jazz (talk) 06:17, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
  • @Alexis Jazz: I strongly object to using the translation feature for annotations. The goal of translating and the goal of providing further context, explanations, examples, etc. than are in the original text are very different. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:42, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
• Made a central feedback thread at m:Talk:Tech/News/2021/05/en-gb. Maybe should have done that from the start. Alexis Jazz (talk) 15:03, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Over a century of Editor & Publisher online

https://archive.org/details/pub_editor-publisher —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:13, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-06

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 Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [8]

Changes later this week

• You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [9]
• 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).

Future changes

• When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [10][11]
• Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [12]
• Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [13]

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

17:42, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

NewsVoyage and Wikimedia Small Projects User Group

This is fun: m:Wikimedia Small Projects/NewsVoyage. For those of us gringos who can't parse Spanish, it's a friendly competition between the Spanish Wikinews and Wikivoyage and part of the first spate of challenges initiated by the Small Projects User Group. This is a recognized user group fostering growth and promotion of smaller WMF wikis, particularly Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, and Wikivoyage. As someone who speaks decent Spanish and who is interested in all of these projects, I figured I'd extend the invitation here that if users on the English-language editions want to have a similar friendly contest or otherwise want to get involved but feel like there's a language barrier, I'm happy to mediate. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 12:28, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-07

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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [14][15]
• Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [16]

Changes later this week

• 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).

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

17:56, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Reviewers to use alternate accounts/unsight their edits

phab:T275181
Recently, the bug in mediawiki has removed the option for "mark this edit as sighted" for reviewers, and any reviewer's changes to a sighted revision is autosighted. This is a problematic situation, as a well-meaning reviewer, hoping for a second-set of eyeballs to vet their changes, will end up auto-sighting. I ask reviewers to keep this is mind, and either use alternate account with non-elevated privs, or un-approve their changes, when they clearly did not want to sight their edits. CC @Bddpaux, Green Giant, Gryllida, Pi zero:
•–• 03:06, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Are there any plans to fix this bug? Gryllida (talk) 05:10, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Added link to phabricator ticket.
•–• 06:51, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Translated

Hello: How is it indicated or what «template» used to indicate that an interview is translated from another language to the English language? Marinna (talk) 15:51, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-08

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 will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [17]
• The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [18]

Problems

• Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [19]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

• There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

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00:17, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-09

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

• Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
• A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

• There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [20]
• Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [21]

Changes later this week

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

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

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19:08, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikifunctions logo contest

Hello. Please help to choose a design concept for the logo of the new Wikifunctions wiki. Voting starts today and will be open for 2 weeks. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-Wiki. Thank you! --Quiddity (WMF)

01:45, 2 March 2021 (UTC)