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

Mark Carney category

Hi. I was wondering if there is a reason Mark Carney does not currently have a category? I was going to create one but noticed Mervyn King has not got one either, raising the possibility there is an issue with the role (Governor of the Bank of England) not being important enough. I can quite believe there is a rule I have missed about the importance a person needs before a category is created for them. --CSJJ104 (talk) 19:05, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

@CSJJ104: Executive summary: there are vastly more categories that could be created than we've found time to create.

Although there are categories that are controversial, categories about people and places in the news mostly are not controversial in that sense. We do have a rule of thumb that says we shouldn't create such a category until there are at least three published articles that would go into it, which is to avoid the number of categories getting completely out of hand and, to some extent, to avoid creating categories that really are unimportant. But there are likely hundreds of categories we could create but haven't because it's a lot of work — one sets up the category, with its summary line, sister links, image, and when appropriate usage note; then populates it with all those articles in our archives that belong in it, which requires an admin since the archives are fully protected. I'm looking forward to improvements to this arrangement in the future; notably, semi-automated assistants to make administrative tasks easier, and possible strategies for maintaining sets of categories that are collectively significant even though some of them might be empty or very sparse (such as, all the Indian states, or all the Space Shuttle missions).

As for Mark Carney, it looks like there are about four articles available; I'll see what I can do. --Pi zero (talk) 19:31, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Category:Mark Carney. --Pi zero (talk) 19:56, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for that :) And the explanation.--CSJJ104 (talk) 20:39, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27

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

• A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [1]

Changes this week

• The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [2]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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19:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-28

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

• A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up. [3][4][5]
• Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first. [6][7][8]
• Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed. [9][10][11]

Problems

• On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too. [12]
• Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 July. It will be on all wikis from 14 July (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 12 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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15:14, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Good principles to follow for breaking news

See here From w:WNYC. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:09, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-29

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

• Due to the rollback, new sorting of Notifications on the Fly-Out Menus has been deployed with a delay. [13]
• Due to the rollback, the daily special patch deployment process has been changed. [14]
• In notifications, "Messages" are now called "Notices". [15]

Problems

• On July 12 all wikis were rolled back to MediaWiki 1.28.0-wmf.8 due to a problem in the log-in system. [16][17]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
• Special:Log now has a help link. [18]
• The RevisionSlider can be tested on the beta cluster. From 22 July, it will be available as a beta feature at: German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia. [19][20][21]

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 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end". The meeting will be on 20 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [22]

Future changes

• User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages. [23][24]
• Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it. [25]

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20:18, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-30

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

• Interactive maps have been enabled for Meta wiki and the Catalan, Hebrew, and Macedonian Wikipedias. Learn how to add interactive maps to wiki pages.
• Last week's rollback is now documented. [26]

Problems

• Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed. [27]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
• It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon. [28]
• Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages. [29]

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 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [30]

Future changes

• The current icon for Notifications "Notices" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency. [31]
• Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [32]

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19:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Voting!!

Assuming you meet the requirements to vote for members of the Arbitration Committee.....please do so! Voting ends Saturday. --Bddpaux (talk) 14:57, 28 July 2016 (UTC)