This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of
the holidays.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (
calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week.
[1][2]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of
Structured Discussions' deprecation work.
[3]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from
Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for
manual redirects.
[4]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using
version 1.41. Feedback about
the new site is welcome on the
project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the
Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can
register for the event and read more.
Malvern College has been delisted after a
Good article reassessment. We now have 13 Good Articles. Any farther additions to the article to help it regain its GA status are welcome by addressing the concerns raised at
the reassessment page.
Following a
motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were
enacted in June 2009.
Welcome to the one hundred and eighty ninth
WikiProject Yorkshire monthly newsletter.
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 (down from 18,873 last month to 18,855 on 4 January 2024). In the area of GAs
WP:YORKS at 216 is ahead of
WP:GM who have 89.
WP:YORKS also has the lead in FAs at 92 while
WP:GM has 65 out of a total number of 4,872 articles.
Currently we have seventy five 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.
Happy New Year
A Happy New Year to all members of the project and thanks for all the work you have put in supporting articles relating to Yorkshire in the last year.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The January 2024 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no nominations on 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 January 2024 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.
13:12, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-02
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
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can
install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing.
[5]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (
calendar).
[6][7]
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
Pages that use the JSON
contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size.
[8]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all
supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future.
[9]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024
has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (
calendar).
[12][13]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately.
[14]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed.
[15]
Hello, I'm
Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that
this edit performed by you, on the page
FC Halifax Town, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:
A "
bare URL and
missing title" error. References show this error when they do not have a title. Please edit the article to add the appropriate title parameter to the reference. (
Fix |
Ask for help)
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
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed.
[16]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (
calendar).
[17][18]
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
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change
on Diff or
on Mediawiki.org.
[19]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on
the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (
calendar).
[20][21]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead.
[23]
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 18,855 last month to 18,943 on 31 January 2024). In the area of GAs
WP:YORKS at 217 is ahead of
WP:GM who have 89.
WP:YORKS also has the lead in FAs at 93 while
WP:GM has 65 out of a total number of 4,916 articles.
Currently we have seventy five 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.
Unreferenced backlog
There is an
Unreferenced Article Backlog drive running throughout February across Wikipedia, it would be good for project members to be involved in this and help reduce the number of unreferenced articles supported by the project. You do not have to signup to be involved. There are currently 245 in the "Cites no sources" section of the
project's clean-up listing that could do with some sources adding to them.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The February 2024 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no nominations on 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 February 2024 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.
An
RfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
Technical news
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (
T326065)
Arbitration
Following a
motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is
requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at
WP:AE.
A vote to ratify the charter for the
Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via
Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found
here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the
Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes.
Read more
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 mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to
the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity.
Learn more about "action blocks".
[24][25]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (
calendar).
[26][27]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed.
[28]
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with
Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make
Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For
46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February,
unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings.
[29][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
The
WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels.
[31][32][33] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service.
[34][35]
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black;
this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (
calendar).
[36][37]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,
[38] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped.
[39]
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
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails.
[40]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for
Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with
Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see
this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the
task's description.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (
calendar).
[42][43]
Selected tools on the grid engine have been
stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the
team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext.
[44]
There was a legal case and the Governors of CHS had to make an award for defamation to E Logan as did the HDM. References to this should be removed
.
None of the other Head teachers are referenced on this page perhaps you could replace the references to this highly controversial and damaging episode with a list of the Head teachers of the school as listed on the official Cottingham High School website.
Mr Eric Greenwood
Mr Clive Whyley
Mr Michael Mahoney
Mrs Pamela Childs
Mr Tom Darbyshire
Mrs Elizabeth Logan
Mr Ratheram
Mr Kerby
Cansey (
talk) 11:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
Have you any reliable sources, other than school, to cover your changes?
Keith D (
talk) 21:41, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-09
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
mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis.
Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well.
[45]
The
mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))).
[46]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (
calendar).
[47][48]
Future changes
The right to change
edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in
this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Welcome to the one hundred and ninty first
WikiProject Yorkshire monthly newsletter.
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 18,943 last month to 19,208 on 28 February 2024). In the area of GAs
WP:YORKS at 219 is ahead of
WP:GM who have 90.
WP:YORKS also has the lead in FAs at 93 while
WP:GM has 65 out of a total number of 4,983 articles.
Currently we have seventy six 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 March 2024 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no nominations on 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 March 2024 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.
Northallerton has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the
reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article.
Hog FarmTalk 02:19, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-10
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 Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old
Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the
Wikisource extension.
[49]
Maintenance on
etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in
this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made.
[50]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header.
[51]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (
calendar).
[52][53]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[54]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See
Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (
more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (
more info).
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 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (
calendar).
[55][56]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the
Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed.
[57]
The active link color in
Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices.
[58]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost.
[59]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[60][61]
Hi, Any particular reason why you removed the link to the web page on the Turkish baths at Ben Rhydding since you mention them, and though they had a building of their own, you say nothing about them. I have in any event replaced the link to the Wiki page on Victorian Turkish baths. I hope this is OK by you?
Ishpoloni (
talk) 20:28, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Sorry, I thought you wrote the page and I now see you are a top top administrator. However, the question still remains. If there is no article on Wikipedia, is it not the role of an encyclopaedia to disseminate information which is relevant, but elsewhere? It does seem silly in this case not to point to something that was worth only a passing mention whenm it was a very important part of the hydro. Especially as I only noticed the date error as I was linking the page to a page on Victorian Turkish baths in hydros which is in the process of being written. Best wishes,
Ishpoloni (
talk) 21:08, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
@
Ishpoloni: Hello, I removed it as we do not embed external links in the text of articles. These go in the reference associated with the text or in the External links section of the article.
Keith D (
talk) 21:19, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Many thanks for the explanation. I'm still very new at this and when I clicked the hyperlink sign it asked whether I wanted a Wiki link or an external link. So I just clicked external and in it went. There must be a dozen in the pages I've uploaded over the past month or so on the Victorian Turkish baths page—I'll change them over during the coming week. Thanks again.
Ishpoloni (
talk) 22:33, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Hi, could the protection you put on John O'Shea over 10 years ago be removed? The summary for the issue was an IP editing timestamps against consensus. This is no longer an issue when he is not an active footballer any more. Obviously we can keep protection when the issue is vandalism or BLP violations, but this seems to be a very specific issue that is now resolved. I would be amazed if this IP came back to cause an issue over a decade later
Unknown Temptation (
talk) 16:01, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
@
Unknown Temptation: Hello, I have removed protection as you requested. Hopefully we can live without it now.
Keith D (
talk) 18:41, 14 March 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-12
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 notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the
Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher.
[62]
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers.
[63]
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes.
[64][65][66]
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in
right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now.
[68]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (
calendar).
[69][70]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at
14:00 UTC.
[71][72]
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
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in
Vector 2022 skin. A
checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (
calendar).
[73][74]
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.