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
Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3.
[1]
Users are invited to try
Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC.
[3][4]
You can use
keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor).
[5]
Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore.
[6]
The
UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons.
[7]
Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved.
[8]
Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org.
[9]
Problems
MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue.
[10]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 12 (
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
May 10 at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please
tell the developers if the change will cause problems.
[11]
They're at it again. Bullying, threatening, hiding. Trying to take credit for other's work and trying to cover tracks. Since you're such a keen upholder of wiki rules and are such a supporter of wiki etiquette, I'm sure you will want to visit the talk page of Eurovision Song Contest 2016 and put an end now to their bullying.
78.75.230.200 (
talk) 16:25, 14 May 2016 (UTC)-reply
You see? I'm sure you'll be taking action against "Wesley Mouse" or whatever troll name they've adopted. Nice try though!
78.75.230.200 (
talk) 16:46, 14 May 2016 (UTC)reply
Now you are calling me a "troll". Wow, the attacks really are coming in thick and fast. You really are making a rod for your own back. Especially since I have reported you to an administrator, who will be following your contributions and will see that you are the one causing all the trouble. Wes Mouse✒ 16:49, 14 May 2016 (UTC)reply
The IP has been blocked for disruptive behaviour.--
BabbaQ (
talk) 17:41, 14 May 2016 (UTC)reply
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 image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth.
[12]
Problems
Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis.
[13]
Changes this week
Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later.
[14]
Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce.
[15]
A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users.
[16]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (
calendar).
Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When
Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5.
[17]
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect
Asiavision Song Contest 2009. Since you had some involvement with the Asiavision Song Contest 2009 redirect, you might want to participate in
the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Wes Mouse✒ 09:20, 19 May 2016 (UTC)reply
Hi! Just wanted to thank you for your creation of this guy: .
I'm really proud of the scoreboard table there, but the greatest flaw was easily the lack of an svg for the split scores. So your creation is much appreciated! --
Lejman (
talk) 19:10, 21 May 2016 (UTC)reply
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 now see a
warning message on pages that try to use {{
DISPLAYTITLE}} but it doesn't work because it doesn't match the page's actual title.
[18]
Problems
Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories.
[19]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (
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
May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12.
[20]
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
There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module.
[21]
Problems
A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review.
[22][23]
CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed.
[24]
Changes this week
When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place.
[25]
A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact
Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki.
[27][28]
Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason.
[29]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (
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
31 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
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!
A file that you uploaded or altered,
File:Alfa Romeo logo.png, has been listed at
Wikipedia:Files for discussion. Please see the
discussion to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you.
Stefan2 (
talk) 11:25, 4 June 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 12,568 last month to 12,628 on 4 June). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 126 is ahead of
WP:GM who have 85.
WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 62 out of a total number of 3,724 articles.
Currently we have forty Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The June 2016 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a
clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the
watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR. You will also have to check that the Commons link is set correctly.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered June 2016 by
MediaWiki message delivery.
If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
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
MathML/
SVG is now the default <math> rendering mode on Wikimedia projects.
[30][31]
Changes this week
The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in
Vector as in other
skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week.
[32]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (
calendar).
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 wikis now use
AuthManager. If you have new problems related to logging in or being logged in,
report them.
[33]
Visiting
Special:Notifications doesn't automatically mark notifications as read anymore. You can go between read, unread or all notifications on
Special:Notifications. Notifications on
Special:Notifications are grouped by day. You can mark every daily group as read individually. Notifications are displayed by groups of 50 on
Special:Notifications and you can find former notifications by using navigation arrows.
[34][35][36][37]
Changes this week
You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits.
[38]
It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor.
[39]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (
calendar).
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
Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen.
[40]
Changes this week
The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages.
[41][42]
Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup.
[43]
When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks.
[44]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (
calendar).
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
The
ORES service has now moved to
a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The
ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors.
[45]
The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed.
[46]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (
calendar).
The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear.
[50]
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
28 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help.
[51]
An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation.
[52]
The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually.
[53][54][55]
From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected.
[56]
Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later.
[57]
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!
Thanks for uploading File:Pick (TV channel).png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a
claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see
our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the
criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --
B-bot (
talk) 18:18, 30 June 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 12,628 last month to 12,769 on 29 June). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 127 is ahead of
WP:GM who have 85.
WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 62 out of a total number of 3,620 articles.
Currently we have forty Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The July 2016 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a
clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the
watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR. You will also have to check that the Commons link is set correctly.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered July 2016 by
MediaWiki message delivery.
If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
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.
[58]
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.
[59]
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.
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.
[60][61][62]
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.
[63][64][65]
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.
[66][67][68]
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.
[69]
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.
Thanks for uploading File:ČT1 logo.svg. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a
claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see
our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the
criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --
B-bot (
talk) 18:07, 15 July 2016 (UTC)reply
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.
[70]
In notifications, "Messages" are now called "Notices".
[72]
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.
[73][74]
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).
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
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.
[76]
Future changes
User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages.
[77][78]
Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it.
[79]
A file that you uploaded or altered,
File:ESC 1964 logo.png, has been listed at
Wikipedia:Files for discussion. Please see the
discussion to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you.
Sfan00 IMG (
talk) 09:36, 23 July 2016 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed.
[81]
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.
[82]
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.
[83]
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.
[84]
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.
[85]
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!
Axg. The city in Ukraine has been renamed as part of the 2015
Decommunization in Ukraine law.
This source does verify that the Ukrainian parliament voted 247-97 on May 19 to rename the third-largest city of Dnipropetrovsk, to Dnipro. Just thought I'd point this out. I personally think the city article needs to be re-addressed to show this change of newly voted common name. Wes Mouse✒ 23:45, 30 July 2016 (UTC)reply
Orphaned non-free image File:SIC Portugal.png
Thanks for uploading File:SIC Portugal.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a
claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see
our policy for non-free media).
Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the
criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --
B-bot (
talk) 18:06, 31 July 2016 (UTC)reply