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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 post proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist.
[1][2]
You can share feedback and ideas on the
Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (
em) for some specific cases.
[3][4]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January.
[5]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can
know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Today, on October 29th, it’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here.
Message from the Wikidata development team
The
Community Wishlist Survey 2020 from Wikimedia Foundation started. This year, it is focused on small projects and Wikidata-related wishes will not be included.
You can help
expanding the list of databases, encyclopedias, etc. which could be added to
Mix'n'match. Can be used for property creation too.
This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.
Getting the queue to 0
There are now 810 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the
NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some
really cool awards.
Coordinator
Admin
Barkeep49 has been officially invested as
NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.
This month's refresher course
Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers:
This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See
The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.
Tools
It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.
Reviewer Feedback
Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs.
New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional
peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.
Second set of eyes
Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the
Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
Do be sure to have
our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.
Arbitration Committee
The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.
Community Wish list
There is to be no
wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.
To opt-out of future mailings, you can remove yourself
here
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Martin Poulter on Wikidata projects at the University of Oxford, 05, November.
Agenda
SPARQL RC is showing the recent changes on items that are listed from a specific query. It is very useful to monitor the changes on a specific subset of data, for example data that you recently imported in Wikidata.
{{query page}} is a new template that can be used to store SPARQL queries on a dedicated wiki page, to be transcluded in various styles (
announcement)
Made the Lua functions mw.wikibase.getBestStatements and mw.wikibase.getAllStatements faster if called more than once for the same statement on a single 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.
Recent changes
At
Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the
URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites.
[6]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors.
[7]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (
phabricator:T236749)
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 can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a
PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in
Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can
read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
The National Museum is a Czech museum institution intended to systematically establish, prepare, and publicly exhibit natural scientific and historical collections. It was founded in 1818 and is located in Prague.