Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2016/January

Wikimania 2016: call for proposals is open!

Dear users,
the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 is open! All the members of the Wikimedia projects, researchers and observers are invited to propose a critical issue to be included in the programme of the conference, which will be held in Italy, in Esino Lario, from June 21 to 28.
Through this call we only accept what we call critical issues, i.e. proposals aiming at presenting problems, possible solutions and critical analysis about Wikimedia projects and activities in 18 minutes. These proposals do not need to target newbies, and they can assume attendees to already have a background knowledge on a topic (community, tech, outreach, policies...).
To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. Deadline for submitting proposals is 7th January 2016 and the selection of these proposals will be through a blind peer-reviewed process. Looking forward to your proposals. --Yiyi (talk) 10:22, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

The deadline for the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 has been moved on 17th January 2016, so you have 10 days to submit you proposal(s). To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. --Yiyi (talk) 09:36, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Local oversighters

Hello,
I want to notify you that I have just removed Bawolff's oversight rights, since he indicated that he wished to resign from them. Consequently, also Cspurrier's access had to be removed, as there must always be at least 2 local oversighters per the global policy. Cspurrier's rights can be re-granted if a second oversighter is elected by the community, of course. --MF-Warburg (talk) 22:59, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-02

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

• Wikimedia no longer uses visitor statistics from comScore. [1]
• You can make interactive graphs with the Graph extension. There is now a tutorial for how to do this. [2]

Problems

• Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [3]

Changes this week

• The Nuke extension will work with Flow. This will make it easier to handle spam in Flow. [4]
• New file uploads will now be patrollable. [5]
• Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia if you use Internet Explorer 8, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. [6][7]

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 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [8]
• The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [9][10]
• There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [11][12]
• The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03

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 will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [13]
• Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [14]

Changes this week

• The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [15]
• MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [16]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (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 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:55, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04

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 follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [17][18]
• Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [19]

Changes this week

• You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [20]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (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 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [21]
• The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [22]
• Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [23]

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16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)