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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
Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen.
[1]
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
30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please
consult the documentation and please get in touch on
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
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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 see new files on
Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from.
[3]
When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox.
[4]
You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article.
[5]
New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June.
[6]
Problems
The
MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen.
[7]
Changes this week
Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the
compact language links will see languages they have in their
Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in
your preferences.
[8]
You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions.
[9]
When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead.
[10]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules.
[11]
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
6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see
a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all.
[12][13]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too.
[14]
The
Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the
draft that describes the new committee.
MySociety (
Q10851773) are publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'".
Data donation: following WikiCite, our friends at
DBLP (
Q1224715) have begun to donate data, with >4,800 values in the first batch, including >1,300 DBLP ID (
P2456) plus assorted aliases, and values for VIAF ID (
P214), GND ID (
P227), ORCID iD (
P496), ACM Digital Library author ID (
P864), zbMATH author ID (
P1556), & Google Scholar ID (
P1960).
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please
consult the documentation and please get in touch on
SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on
SuggestBot's talk page. --
SuggestBot (
talk) 11:46, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
MySociety (
Q10851773) have now completed publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'". Here is the full set:
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
Some wikis have the larger and brighter
OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long.
[15]
When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results.
[16]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the
test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account.
[17]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects.
[18]
Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at
Special:Undelete.
[19][20]
This newsletter starts with the motto "common endeavour for 21st century content". To unpack that slogan somewhat, we are particularly interested in the new, post-Wikidata collection of techniques that are flourishing under the Wikimedia collaborative umbrella. To linked data, SPARQL queries and WikiCite, add gamified participation, text mining and new holding areas, with bots, tech and humans working harmoniously.
Scientists, librarians and Wikimedians are coming together and providing a more unified view of an emerging area. Further integration of both its community and its technical aspects can be anticipated.
While Wikipedia will remain the discursive heart of Wikimedia, data-rich and semantic content will support it. We'll aim to be both broad and selective in our coverage. This publication Facto Post (the very opposite of
retroactive) and call to action are brought to you monthly by
ContentMine.
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please
consult the documentation and please get in touch on
SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on
SuggestBot's talk page. --
SuggestBot (
talk) 11:59, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
Due the necessary time for people to get visas (about 3 months), we changed the deadline for the scholarship applications. You can
apply for a scholarship before July 16th. We will then make sure that the applicants receive a response on July 25th.
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
ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40
UTC. It has now been fixed.
[21]
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down.
[22]
Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data.
[23]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.