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This is an archive of past discussions from Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2016. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current page.


Tech News: 2016-05

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

  • Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [1]
  • Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [2][3]
  • Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [4]

Changes this week

  • The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [5]
  • Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [6][7]
  • The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [8]
  • The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [9][10][11]
  • The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [12][13]
  • 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).

Meetings

Future changes

  • The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [14]


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21:01, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Frustrated by work not being accepted

I helped collaborate on a news article, but because of a glut of articles in the queue, it wasn't reviewed quickly enough and thus lost its newsworthiness. I still think the article should be added to the archive of stories, even if its not breaking news. Otherwise I feel like all of that work was for nothing. This was my first experience writing for Wikinews and I'm not sure I'll do it again. Link to story's collaboration page. Any thoughts? Lugevas (talk) 05:56, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Lugevas: I do hope you'll consider contributing again. Your efforts are appreciated, though things didn't work out as well as any of us would have liked. First attempts at Wikinews, whatever their specific outcome, are pretty much guaranteed to be learning experiences, and I encourage you to learn all you can from the edits Brian McNeil made to the article, and whatever small insight there is to be had from the review comments, and apply the knowledge to future contribution. The more you know going in to an article, the more smoothly things are likely to work.

Although we don't publish-to-archive — freshness has to hold at the time of publication, as a matter of policy — we do sometimes move an unsuccessful article to userspace. Since in this case there's more than one author involved, I expect we could move it to your userspace and let the earlier author know what we're doing, then if they'd rather a different arrangement we could discuss how to sort it out from there. --Pi zero (talk) 07:25, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Lugevas: That is a real shame and I'm sorry to see your hard work end up tacitly rejected. I agree with Pi that one consolation is that this story will probably have a further development, so at the very least you have some background for a follow-up. Please do stay with this project. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:22, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Unfortunately, project policy doesn't cover/allow putting something in the archive that hasn't been through review and published.
I share your frustration, since I put in work to try and rescue the article. I felt the additional material made it fresh, but that the amount of work I'd done on it disqualified me from reviewing. Having had some negative feedback regarding sports articles on Facebook — that they're not news, an opinion close to my own — I would certainly prefer to have seen this given priority for review. "Easy to write", which is one comment I've seen in relation to sports articles, does not translate into easy to review. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:52, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Brian McNeil: There are so many events going on in the sporting world. Since December 12, we' ve been covering many of the big news taking place. Six articles during this time period were deleted just because there were actually so many articles to be reviewed that we could not avoid them getting stale. (Yes, it is easy to write a sport article: but distancing it from the sources isn't that easy. Over the time, the same structure I used for the first article I wrote (and was published) and it hasn't changed much). As of today, I read that Messi would not be in the Argentine squad for Rio Olympics 2016, and I feel this event would be important in the articles to be written six months later.
AGastya (talk) 13:52, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
But, i should add, it is two days old news, and I don't have free time today to cover it. x_X
AGastya (talk) 13:54, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Priority was a tough call at the time. (A person can only make so many decisions in a day; reviews are decision-heavy and it's awkward to have to make tough decisions about the review queue as a prelude to doing a review. Reducing clutter of trivial mechanical decisions is something I particularly want to do with a souped-up review tool; but I digress.) It seemed plausible to provide coherence of coverage by pursuing the thread of articles about the Aus Open, but even so there were more of them that I could keep up with. --Pi zero (talk) 17:05, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
There's a reason mainstream publications relegate Sport coverage to the back pages. --Brian McNeil / talk 19:40, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Not a rebel, but I start from the end. A good reason of it is advertisement. Can you believe it. Times Of India (ToI) has more advertisement than news. Front page is wasted with a page full of commercial. And I moved to hindustantimes. Same story is being repeated there. And I can't feel more pissed off.
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 20:49, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In the case of ToI, that's what pays for the newspaper. The need for money has, and likely always will be, a detrimental force in journalism. --Brian McNeil / talk 21:48, 3 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
If there are no commercials, the price of newspaper would suddenly rise. But from being one of the best dailies in India, it became AdChoce in printed form. Have a look here.
Agastya Chandrakant ⚽️ 🏆 🎾 🎬 🎤 📰 02:19, 4 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-06

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

  • Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [15]
  • When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [16]
  • RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [17]

Changes this week

  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [18][19]
  • 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).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [20][21]
  • Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [22][23][24]

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

18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-07

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

Recent changes

  • You can now edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [25]
  • You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [26]

Problems

  • A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [27][28]

Changes this week

  • There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [29][30]
  • Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [31]
  • 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).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [32]

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

16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Photographing the Difference Engine in Washington

I'm arranging a visit to photograph one of the two working examples of the Babbage Difference engine that was recently moved from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington. Does anyone have specific parts of the machine I should try to photograph, particularity those we haven't seen or are not normally visible to the public? Anything you'd like me to ask about while I'm there? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:13, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • A working example?
I hope you're planning to get a little bit of video of it in operation! --Brian McNeil / talk 11:35, 16 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, yes, it works. We have four videos at C:Category:Difference Engine No. 2 (Charles Babbage) in the Computer History Museum of demonstrations of the operation. So are these good enough? Or is there something else specifically we'd like to see? Some part of the machine we want to watch cranking and clacking? --Dennis Bratland (talk) 02:07, 17 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-08

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

Problems

  • There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [35][36]

Changes this week

  • After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [37]

Meetings

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18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016: call for posters, discussions and trainings

Hi people,
the calls for posters, discussions and trainings for Wikimania 2016 are officially opened, you can find all the relevant links on the conference wiki:

https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions

The calls will be closed on March 20.

Posters will be reviewed just to make sure that there aren't things which are too much out of scope. Since we have a whole village we will surely find places to attach them, even if we they will be a lot!

Discussions will be managed by a guiding committee who will work on the wiki to meld all the proposals and suggestions.

Trainings will be reviewed by the programme committee. Please note that we request that each training has at least 3-5 interested attendees in order to be put in the programme.

By the beginning of April we will have a first list of all the accepted proposals.

If you have questions we suggest you to ask them on the discussion pages on wiki, so that everyone will be able to see them (and their answers, of course).

We are looking forward to read your ideas! --Yiyi (talk) 13:30, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2016-09

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

  • Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
  • The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
  • The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [38][39]
  • The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [40][41]

Changes this week

  • On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [42]
  • Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [43]
  • Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [44]

Meetings

  • Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [45]
  • You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

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