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.
Changes later this week
Profiling statistics for an
abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can
file a phabricator task to do so.
[1]
Abuse filters will now treat integers and
floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged.
[2][3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See
how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from
books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki.
PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function.
[4]
Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3.
[5]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The iOS and Android apps now have
synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an
ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step.
[7]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
24 April at 18:30 (UTC). See
how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
<mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of
flagged revisions will not get this feature in May.
[8]
The rollback function could change. This was a
German community request. All editors with rollback rights can
leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).
WikiWorkshop, a forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects the Wikimedia projects, in Lyon, April 24th. Seven papers related to Wikidata will be presented.
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 parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links.
[9]
Problems
We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can
help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process
on Phabricator.
[10]
When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date.
[12]
You can soon turn on the
Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the
performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly.
[13]
There is a new
abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can
read more on mediawiki.org.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
1 May at 18:30 (UTC). See
how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called
Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on
the talk page or email jharewikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018.
[14][15][16]
You are invited to join the effort to revitalize and improve the
Portal system...
The
Portals WikiProject was rebooted on April 17th, and is going strong. Fifty-nine editors have joined so far, with more joining daily.
We're having a blast, and excitement is high...
Our goal is to update, upgrade, and maintain portals.
In addition to working directly on portals, we are developing tools to make portals more dynamic (self-updating), and to make building and maintaining portals easier. We've finished two tools so far, with more to come. They are
Template:Transclude lead excerpt and
Template:Transclude random excerpt.
Discussions are underway about how to further upgrade portals, and what the portals of the future will be.
There are plenty of tasks (including WikiGnome tasks too).
With more to come.
We may even surprise ourselves and exceed all expectations. Who knows what we will be able to accomplish in what may become the biggest Wikicollaboration in years.