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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 filter
Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users.
[1][2]
MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB.
[4]
Changes this week
Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes.
[5]
There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.
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
April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from
SuggestBot,
Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on
WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my
NIOSH duties) and
WikiProject Women scientists.
Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the
Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)
With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: {{Wikipedia Requests}}. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying article=, category=, or wikiproject=, and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do {{
Wikipedia Requests|category=Living people}}. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!
Help us build our list!
The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.
If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Requests#Transition project and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.
An open database means new tools
WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that
Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.
And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.
Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name s52475__wpx_p. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called projectindex. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!
On the horizon
The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
The
WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was
requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.
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
Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21.
[6]
When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can
read more about how to find the edits.
Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed.
[7]
Changes this week
Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26.
[8]
It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard.
[9]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (
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
April 26 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis.
[10]
On
2 May 2016, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Hypercycle (chemistry), which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (
here's how,
Hypercycle (chemistry)), and it may be added to
the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the
Did you know talk page.
Substantially reduced server load for item and property displaying (
phab:T132662)
There are currently some issues with the order of latitude/longitude inn coordinates in the query service map visualization. It will be fixed tonight.
Removed unsupported sort and dir parameters from the wikibase.api.RepoApi JavaScript module. This may break user JavaScript calling getEntitiesByPage (
phab:T119856).
Worked on new flyers for institutions that want to cooperate with Wikidata and developers wanting to use our data (will be published on Commons once they're done)
Moved forward with internationalization of the query service interface (not on translatewiki.net yet but being worked on)
Worked on making it possible to extend SPARQL queries in simplified natural language version. It will also no longer add query prefixes when editing the query. Those are not live yet.
Fixed a bug where admins got a blank page when trying to view deleted revisions (
phabricator:T132645)
Investigating issues with bad suggestions for properties when adding new statements (
phabricator:T132839)
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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9.
[11]
Problems
There was a security problem with the
MobileFrontend extension. It showed information that had been oversighted. This has now been fixed.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 4. It will be on all wikis from May 5 (
calendar).
Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is
discussed on Meta.
[14]
Our
Main Page now has a section for popular items to show you what is trending on Wikidata based on several people editing an item over the last few days
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.
[15]
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.
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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).
[19]
Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore.
[20]
The
UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons.
[21]
Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved.
[22]
Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org.
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Problems
MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue.
[24]
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.
[25]
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.
[26]
Problems
Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis.
[27]
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.
[28]
Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce.
[29]
A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users.
[30]
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.
[31]