Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2021/January

Tech News: 2021-02

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

• You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [1]
• You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [2]
• Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
  • The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [3]
  • Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [4]
  • When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
• There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [5]
• Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [6]
• Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [7]
• CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [8]
• There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).

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

15:42, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Laura Poitras fired from First Look Media two months ago

https://www.praxisfilms.org/open-letter-from-laura-poitras/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:13, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-03

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

Changes later this week

• 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 wikis from 21 January (calendar).

Future changes

• The Growth team plans to add features to get more visitors to edit to more Wikipedias. You can help translating the interface.
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). [9]
• MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.

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

16:10, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Name

Why did Wikinews call this the "water cooler" instead of "village pump" like on most wikis? Just asking. --Red-back spider (talk) 10:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Because it lives quite up to its name, don't you think, @Red-back spider:? Many wikis derrive nomenclature from enwp, people have a tendency to build things that has been into existence for quite some time. However, some times, people come up with something they find suits well. Many a times, our IRC channnel and water cooler pages are where we have our "water cooler talks".
•–• 11:05, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

@Acagastya: Oh, I see. I checked water cooler in the dictionary. --Red-back spider (talk) 19:35, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Btw, only a few sisters use "village pump". Wikibooks calls their discussion area the "reading room". Wikivoyage has a Travellers' Pub, and Wikisource has a Scriptorium. --Pi zero (talk) 19:47, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

On the Simple English Wikipedia, we simply call it "Simple Talk", so I think there is a variation on the names different wikis use in relation to the wiki's purpose. --IWI (talk) 19:58, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-04

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on 26 January at 07:00 (UTC). You will not be able to read or edit Wikitech for a short time on 28 January at 09:00 (UTC). [10][11]

Changes later this week

• Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [12]
• 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).

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

18:31, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Moving Wikimania 2021 to a Virtual Event

Hello. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. Please help translate to your language. Thank you!

Wikimania will be a virtual event this year, and hosted by a wide group of community members. Whenever the next in-person large gathering is possible again, the ESEAP Core Organizing Team will be in charge of it. Stay tuned for more information about how you can get involved in the planning process and other aspects of the event. Please read the longer version of this announcement on wikimedia-l.

ESEAP Core Organizing Team, Wikimania Steering Committee, Wikimedia Foundation Events Team, 15:15, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Project Grant Open Call

This is the announcement for the Project Grants program open call that started on January 11, with the submission deadline of February 10, 2021.
This first open call will be focussed on Community Organizing proposals. A second open call focused on research and software proposals is scheduled from February 15 with a submission deadline of March 16, 2021.

For the Round 1 open call, we invite you to propose grant applications that fall under community development and organizing (offline and online) categories. Project Grant funds are available to support individuals, groups, and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, from organizing a better process on your wiki, coordinating a campaign or editathon series to providing other support for community building. We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:

• Weekly proposals clinics via Zoom during the Open Call. Join us for #Upcoming_Proposal_Clinics|real-time discussions with Program Officers and select thematic experts and get live feedback about your Project Grants proposal. We’ll answer questions and help you make your proposal better. We also offer these support pages to help you build your proposal:
• Video tutorials for writing a strong application
  
• General planning page for Project Grants
  
• Program guidelines and criteria
  

Program officers are also available to offer individualized proposal support upon request. Contact us if you would like feedback or more information.

We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into motion, and submit your proposal by February 10, 2021!

Please feel free to get in touch with questions about getting started with your grant application, or about serving on the Project Grants Committee. Contact us at projectgrantsTemplate:Atwikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:00, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

A real shame

I saw this article:

Forest killer's Twitter account still available after 7 years

cannot be published at wikinews. It could have been a very timely article because of the suspension of Donald Trump's twitter account. Too bad. Ottawahitech (talk) 03:47, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

In the form submitted it doesn't fit our guidelines. The guidelines are, however, sometimes much more flexible in the hands of a veteran Wikinewsie than might appear to a less experienced contributor. --Pi zero (talk) 04:44, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't think it is a shame at all. It is simply not what we do here. I suggest you re-read what our goals and missions are.
103.48.104.210 (talk) 04:46, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

OK @103.48.104.210 I'll bite. What is it that you believe you are doing here? It is not clear to me, and possibly not to others. I am asking after checking out some wikinews user-talkpages. Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 01:20, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: What exactly do you mean? --IWI (talk) 03:12, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

The news article in question appears to be historical commentary related to a topic that is related to an event that occurred a bit under two weeks before this thread was started. We require a focal event fresh at the time of publication, which appears to me to be what the IP's remark was referring to. --Pi zero (talk) 03:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@ImprovedWikiImprovment:Good question, I already forgot what this thread is all about :-) So lets review together shall we:

The thread started when I expressed my regret that an article which has since been deleted will not be published at enWN. In response to my post Pi zero said something that I interpreted as an encouragement to experienced newsies to develop this doomed article. The next post was from the anon, who I suspect is Acagastya but I am not sure, who if you look at the indentation responded to Pi zero, but from the content was probably responding to my original post, expressing their view that the article in question does not fit their view of what should be published at enWN to which I responded by asking what their view of good articles are.

Back to others, Ottawahitech (talk) 16:30, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Boston Globe Will Consider People's Requests To Have Articles About Them Anonymized

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/boston-globe-will-consider-peoples-requests-to-have-articles-about-them-anonymized/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:30, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Koavf: This has been happening for years, I think. Many articles on enwiki about people who were famous have lost their www-refs. I have always assumed this was the reason? Ottawahitech (talk) 00:51, 30 January 2021 (UTC)