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.
Problems
This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on
the announcement message.
[1][2]
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
Normally pages can be moved to a title that has no existing page yet or to a page that has only one revision, which is a redirect to the page to be moved. A new user right allows editors to move pages over one-revision pages that redirect to anywhere.
[3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 September. It will be on all wikis from 10 September (
calendar).
All MediaWiki
API modules will now use watchlist instead of watch. This was inconsistent before.
[4]
Future changes
The
Wikipedia Android app team might work on patrolling tools in the future. You can let them know what tools would be useful for you or for less experienced patrollers. See the
page on mediawiki.org.
OTRS will be updated to a new version. This will probably take around two days. OTRS agents will not have access to the system during these days. Emails that come in during the update will be delivered when the update is done. The plan is to start around 08:00 UTC on 14 September. This could change.
[5]
The Wikipedia Android app will send
push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will need
Google Play Services to work. It will also be possible to get the app without Google Play Services but push notifications will not work. Google Play Services is also used to make the app work for
Android 4.4 users.
[6][7]
Wikimedia code review could move to
GitLab. It would be hosted on Wikimedia servers. You can take part in the
consultation.
Dropdown menus in
the Vector skin use a .menu class. This will not work in the future. Scripts can use nav ul instead. .vectorTabs and .vectorMenu will also not work. Some scripts need to be updated. You can
read more in Phabricator.
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
The
Wikipedia apps briefly showed pages without
CSS last week. This meant they looked wrong. It was quickly fixed but cached pages without CSS were shown for a few hours.
[8][9]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 September. It will be on all wikis from 17 September (
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
There is a new tag for reverted edits. For example you can see it in the recent changes feed or in the article history. It is added to edits when they have been undone, rollbacked or manually reverted to an older version of the page.
[10][11]
Changes later this week
The number of times you can do something in a period of time on wiki is limited. This could be the number of edits per minute or the number of users you email in a day. Some users are not affected by all limits because of their user rights. They could soon see the limit even if it does not affect them.
[12]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 September. It will be on all wikis from 24 September (
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.
Editors are automatically added to some user groups. For example editors are added to
autoconfirmed users when they have edited enough times and long enough.
Abuse filters can hinder users from automatically getting user rights for a period of time. They can also remove rights user have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki
in Phabricator. It is currently five days.
[14]
Problems
Last year some abuse filters stopped working because of a new change. If they tried to use variables that were unavailable for that action they would fail. This has now been fixed.
[15]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page or history page. They are also not shown when you edit an article. This could change. It is not decided if for example the history page should link to another history page or to the article. You can take part in the
discussion in Phabricator.
The link colours could change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. You can
read more in Phabricator.
In your preferences you can choose to get different notifications on the web or by email. You will see Apps as one of the alternatives later this week. This is because the
Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the
preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021.
[16]
You can soon put pages on your watchlist for a limited time. This could be useful if you want to watch something for a shorter time but don't want it on your watchlist forever. It now works on
mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can
read more and
see when it will come to other wikis.
Possible old sock of an already closed CCI inquiry
Hello. I was wondering if you could help me out with this. I was looking at
Cair Paravel-Latin School to clean up any copied and pasted sections. My question is whether the edits by Topekahawk in this article are related to JHawk88 based on the timeline of these edits:
After JHawk88 added a copyvio on
March 29, 2010, Topekahawk was the next editor to this article. After you removed JHawk88's copyvio on April 29, 2010, Topekahawk was the next editor and had 3 consecutive edits to this article.
One of their edits was a
copyvio.
I notice that Topkeahawk is not listed in Jhawk88's CCI opened on
April 28, 2010. Also, Topkeahawk's copyvio on May 4 2010 happened days after the CCI was opened. There's also
not many articles they've both edited on, but I'm wondering since they both have hawk in their username. If they are unrelated, then that's alright with me. Thanks! --
MrLinkinPark333 (
talk) 21:08, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
Just based on timing and the much more narrow focus of their editing, I'm doubtful that it's a sock. Just another fan of the
Jayhawks. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
VernoWhitney (
talk) 01:46, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
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 a
new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page.
[17]
Problems
There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late.
[18]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
[19]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (
calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis.
[20]
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[21]
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
Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late.
[22][23][24]
Changes later this week
Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test
CSS and
JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well.
[25][26]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (
calendar).
Future changes
A new stable version of
Pywikibot is coming soon.
[27]
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 20 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 October. It will be on all wikis from 22 October (
calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[28]
In the
AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on
Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
[29]
Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID #jump-to-nav. This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either #siteSub or #mw-content-text. A list of affected scripts is at the top of
phab:T265373.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on
October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
[30]
Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed.
[31]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Since the introduction of the
interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can.
[32]
There was a problem with the
Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits.
[33]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized.
[34]
Sysops will
once again be able to view the deleted history of JS/CSS pages; this was restricted to
interface administrators when that group was introduced.
Twinkle's block module now includes the ability to note the specific case when applying a
discretionary sanctions block and/or template.
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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old
TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to
downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of
browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.
[35]
There is a new automatic
tracking category available:
Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g.{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the
documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be
translated at translatewiki.
[36]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (
calendar).
Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter).
[37]
The
Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in
Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read
the help page and
the troubleshooting guide for more information.
[38]
Future changes
A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument.
[39]
In the future
IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.
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
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
You can see
reference previews. This shows a preview of the footnote when you hover over it. This has been a
beta feature. It will move out of beta and be enabled by default. There will be an option not to use it. The developers are looking for small or medium-sized wikis to be the first ones. You can
let them know if your wiki is interested.
[40]
From November 16 the categories will not be sorted in order for a short time. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the
internationalisation library. They will use a script to fix the existing categories. This can take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[41][42]
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
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a
library. For a brief period on 16 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for most languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can
read more.
[43][44]
Changes later this week
If you merged two pages in a
namespace where pages can't redirect this used to break the merge history. This will now be fixed.
[45]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 November. It will be on all wikis from 19 November (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Community Wishlist Survey is now open for proposals. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 16 to 30 November. You can vote on proposals from 8 December to 21 December.
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
Timestamps in
Special:Log are now links. They go to Special:Log for only that entry. This is how timestamps work on for example the history page.
[46]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The Wikimedia
Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to
claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from 1 December. Unclaimed projects can be deleted from 1 January.
[47]
Hello! Voting in the 2020 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 7 December 2020. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2020 election, please review
the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{
NoACEMM}} to your user talk page.
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk) 02:27, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
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 1 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 December. It will be on all wikis from 3 December (
calendar).
Future changes
The
iOS Wikipedia app will show readers more of the article history. They can see new updates and easier see how the article has changed over time. This is an experiment. It will first be shown only to some iOS app users as a
test.
[48][49]
The
Wiki Replicas can be used for
SQL queries. You can use
Quarry,
PAWS or other ways to do this. To make the Wiki Replicas stable there will be two changes. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work. You can also only query a database if you connect to it directly. This will happen in February 2021. If you think this affects you and you need help you can
post on Phabricator or on
Wikitech.
[50]
Voting for proposals in the
2021 Community Wishlist Survey, which determines what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year, will take place from 8 December through 21 December. In particular, there are sections regarding
administrators and
anti-harassment.
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 now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function.
[51][52]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki.
[53][54]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (
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
There is a
Wikipedia app for
KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too.
[55]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (
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.
Tech News
Because of the
holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added.
[56]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can
propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
Some wikis use
LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page.
[57]
Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in
Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January.
[58]
By
motion,
standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily
authorizedfor all pages relating to the
Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
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 choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the
CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed.
[59]
You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry.
[60]
Admins can use the
abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later.
[61]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on
Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works.
[62]
When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database.
[64]
There was a
new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read
a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (
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.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (
calendar).
MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can
let the developers know.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Bracket matching will be added to the
CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January.
[70]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (
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.
Problems
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since
Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed.
[71]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource.
[72]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background.
[73][74]
Wikis use
abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges.
[75]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (
calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update
MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can
read more.
[76][77]
Cloud VPS and
Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can
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
Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app.
[78]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on
Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The
GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on
Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on
Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis.
[79]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (
calendar).
Future changes
When admins
protect pages the form will use the
OOUI look.
Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones.
[80][81]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new
short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your
reading lists or recording
email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
[82]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address
Cloud VPS and
Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead.
[83]
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
There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned.
[84][85]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new
short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your
reading lists or recording
email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
[86]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (
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 visual editor will now use
MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images.
[87]
Editing a
timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly.
[89]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (
calendar).
Future changes
There is a
user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the
Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
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
Wikis using the
Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere
through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
A new version of the
VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.
Problems
There was a problem with the
job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits.
[90]
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari.
[91]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (
calendar).
A
request for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a
2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
A
request for comment is in progress to remove
F7 (invalid fair-use claim)
subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
A
request for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
When blocking an IPv6 address with
Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to
just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at
WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
By
motion, the
discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the
GamerGate case are
now authorized under a new
Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
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
Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can
test it and
leave feedback.
When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article.
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Problems
Many graphs have
JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing.
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Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (
calendar).
The
New Discussion tool will soon be a new
discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions.
[95]
Future changes
There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can
read more.
Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with
Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown.
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New JavaScript-based functions will not work in
Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can
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
Wikis that are part of the
desktop improvements project can now use a new
search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also
test it early.
Editors who put up banners or change site-wide
JavaScript code should use the
client error graph to see that their changes has not caused problems. You can
read more.
[98]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (
calendar).
Future changes
You can add a
newline or
carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems.
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You will be able to read but not edit
12 wikis for a short period of time on
23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
You can use
Quarry for
SQL queries to the
Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can
post on Phabricator or on
Wikitech.
PAWS and other ways to do
SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later.
[101]
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 a
Wikipedia app for
KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a
simulator so you can see what it looks like.
You will be able to read but not edit
twelve wikis for a short period of time on
23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (
calendar).
Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain.
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Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work.
[105]
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 very old
web browsersdon’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers.
[106]
IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern
EventStreams.
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Problems
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a
job queue problem.
[108]
Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this.
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Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (
calendar).
Following a
request for comment,
F7 (invalid fair-use claim)
subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a
request for comment,
page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a
job queue problem. (
T278350)
Code to support some very old
web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (
T277803)
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
Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first.
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Changes later this week
The
citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the
Extended Date/Time Format.
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The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (
calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new
Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is
a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post
on Phabricator or on
Wikitech.
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
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use
Znuny instead of
OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon.
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If you use
syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces.
[115][116][117]
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks
similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before.
[118]
The
latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for
technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment
in Phabricator if you have objections.
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
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with
TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster.
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Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (
calendar).