User talk:MichaelMaggs/Archive/2014
Latest comment: 11 years ago by MediaWiki message delivery in topic The Signpost: 24 December 2014
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The Signpost: 01 January 2014
- Traffic report: A year stuck in traffic
In fact, the majority are relatively evenly split between three themes: people of interest, television, and websites.
- Arbitration report: Examining the Committee's year
In 2013, the arbitration committee closed 10 cases, 9 amendment requests, and 26 clarification requests.
- In the media: Does Wikipedia need a medical disclaimer?
On New Year's Day, an article by Tim Sampson published in The Daily Dot and republished shortly after on Mashable covered the currently ongoing medical disclaimer RfC.
- Book review: Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
Dariusz Jemielniak's book is the newest about Wikipedia, published in Poland in 2013 and with an English edition forthcoming in 2014.
- News and notes: The year in review
This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars". But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project is in trouble from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community.
- Discussion report: Article incubator, dates and fractions, medical disclaimer
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia and around the Wikimedia movement include...
- WikiProject report: Where Are They Now? Fifth Edition
The year 2013 has come and gone, adding 50 new WikiProject Reports to our long list of projects we've had the privilege to meet. Last year saw the continuation of our Babel series, featuring WikiProjects from other languages of Wikipedia. We also expanded our selection of special reports, offering readers a growing collection of helpful tips and tools as they participate in WikiProjects.
- Featured content: 2013—the trends
Over the past year 1181 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured picture candidates (FPC), which promoted an average of 46 pictures a month. This was followed by featured article candidates (FAC; 32.5 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 18 a month).
- Technology report: Looking back on 2013
2013 saw a lot of changes to MediaWiki software and Wikimedia infrastructure.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 2. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on January 7 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 9 (calendar).
- The old note-taking site (Etherpad) was removed on December 30, 2013. You can see most of the documents on the new site.
Problems
- On January 2, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage projects were broken for 2 hours due to language cache update issues.
- On the same day, it was not possible to edit most wikis for about 30 minutes, due to a database replication problem.
Future software changes
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the default search method for Italian Wikipedia, French Wikisource, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage sites, and as a second search method for the German Wikipedia and all Wikibooks sites on January 6.
- Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedia users will also be able to enable CirrusSearch in their Beta Features options.
- Plural form rules for some languages will be changed. Many translations of the user interface for Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and other languages will need to be changed.
- You will see a warning when you try to delete a page linked to from other pages.
- You will be able to hide redirect pages on the list of protected pages.
- You will be able to use keyboard shortcuts in the Translate tool, by pressing Alt+1 and similar key groups.
- E-mails sent by MediaWiki will include the name of the site in their
From:line. You will be able to change this name on your wiki by editing theMediaWiki:Emailsenderpage. - Images viewed in the Beta Features media viewer will load faster.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:35, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 08 January 2014
- Public Domain Day: Why the year 2019 is so significant
Public Domain Day—January 1, 2014—gives me an opportunity to reflect on this important asset, mandated by the Constitution of the United States.
- Traffic report: Tragedy and television
The various maladies that befall humanity got some well-known faces this week: the death of the well-liked actor James Avery topped the list, but Michael Schumacher, who is in a coma after a skiing accident, also drew attention.
- Technology report: Gearing up for the Architecture Summit
MediaWiki developers will be meeting in San Francisco on January 23–24 for an Architecture Summit.
- News and notes: WMF employee forced out over "paid advocacy editing"
On 8 January, the Wikimedia Foundation notified the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Sarah Stierch, a popular Wikimedian and the Foundation's Program Evaluation Community Coordinator, was no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, as a result of being paid to create articles on the English Wikipedia.
- Op-ed: WikiCup competition beginning a new year
At the very start of the new year, 2014's WikiCup—an annual competition which has been held on Wikipedia in various forms since 2007—began.
- WikiProject report: Jumping into the television universe
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Television.
- Featured content: A portal to the wonderful world of technology
Twelve articles, three lists, seven pictures, and a portal were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
You can read a recent blog post about how Tech News is put together, translated and sent to you across wikis each week.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 9. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 14, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 16 (calendar).
- Searching in the
File:namespace on Wikimedia Commons may be slow due to a search engine issue.
VisualEditor news
- VisualEditor will be added for all users on several Wikipedias on January 13.
- You can now add and remove
__NOTOC__,__FORCETOC__and__NOEDITSECTION__in the page metadata menu.
Problems
- For a few hours on January 6, it was not possible to edit pages using the Translate tool on Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimania 2013 wiki, due to a settings error.
- For about 20 minutes on January 9, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.
Future software changes
- Wikidata will be added to all Wikisource wikis on January 14.
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the second search method for the English Wikipedia on January 13. On Wikibooks and the German Wikipedia, you will also be able to test it by adding it in your Beta Features options.
- You will soon be able to export page collections into other formats than PDF.
- It will soon be possible to upload groups of photos from Flickr using UploadWizard.
- The Wikimedia Foundation has shared a multimedia vision for 2016. You are invited to comment.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 January 2014
- News and notes: German chapter asks for "reworking" of Funds Dissemination Committee; should MP4 be allowed on Wikimedia sites?
Wikimedia Germany, the largest national affiliate, has authored an extensive critique of the Funds Dissemination Committee's process for issuing funding recommendations for the various large organizations in the movement.
- Technology report: Architecture Summit schedule published
The proposed schedule for the MediaWiki Archicture Summit has been published. The two main plenary sessions will be about HTML templating, and Service-oriented architecture.
- Op-ed: Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles
It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started — largely to make it easier to share scholarly research — most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.
- In the media: Is Google hurting Wikipedia traffic?; "Wikipedia-Mania" in the New York Times
Wikipedia's recent decline in readership, possibly due to Google's Knowledge Graph. ... Judith Newman in the New York Times asks "What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?"
- Traffic report: The Hours are Ours
We now can get a far more accurate picture of which short surges in popularity are likely natural and which are not.
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Sociology
This week, we studied human social behavior with the folks at WikiProject Sociology.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
- You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month.
- As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla.
- You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages.
- You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla.
VisualEditor news
- In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (
). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little. - You can now edit
<gallery />tags with a very basic tool. - You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu.
- When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page.
- When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*).
- The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers.
- Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData.
Problems
- There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results.
- There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem.
- On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours.
Future software changes
- If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again.
- You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis.
- You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page.
- You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
10:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 January 2014
- Book review: Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from Across the Known Multiverse
A particularly esoteric anthology of speculative fiction, filled with imaginary Wikipedia entries from, as the introduction puts it, "the many Wikipedias across the Multiverse."
- News and notes: Modification of WMF protection brought to Arbcom
The Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy's application of pending changes level two on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
- Featured content: Dr. Watson, I presume
Fifteen articles, nine lists, twenty pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia over the last two weeks.
- Special report: The few who write Wikipedia
On 15 January, Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power curve among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.
- Technology report: Architecting the future of MediaWiki
This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.
- In the media: Wikipedia for robots; Wikipedia—a temperamental teenager
An article in USA Today announced that a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense.
- Traffic report: No show for the Globes
While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video.
- The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff.
- The
Special:ActiveUserspage will be removed because it's too slow. - The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
Problems
- On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved.
- For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.
Future software changes
- You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:46, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 January 2014
- Traffic report: Six strikes out
There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.
- WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.
- News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".
- Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.
- Recent research: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years
An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
- Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis.
- The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles.
- You can now link to diffs using
[[Special:Diff/12345]]and similar links. - There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages.
- Searching in the
File:namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. - All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons.
VisualEditor news
Future software changes
- Edits and files hidden with the Oversight tool will be moved to the RevisionDelete system. The Oversight tool will then be removed from Wikimedia wikis.
- For languages where not all sister projects exist, you will be able to link to other language projects using double interwikis (
:ko:v,:v:ko, etc.). - It will soon be possible to use the GettingStarted tool on other wikis than the English Wikipedia. You can translate it on Translatewiki.net.
- You will soon be able to include the Special:Contributions page into other pages.
- You will be able to see where a file is used inside MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files.
- It will soon be possible to send MassMessage messages using the API.
- You will soon see audio statistics on the Special:TimedMediaHandler page.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 January 2014
- Traffic report: Six strikes out
There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.
- WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.
- News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".
- Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.
- Recent research: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years
An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
- The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed.
- You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese).
VisualEditor news
- You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool.
- The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed.
Problems
- On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue.
- On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.
Future software changes
- Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break.
- You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th.
- You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch).
- The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster.
- Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged.
- It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences.
- You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API.
- You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option.
- If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode.
- Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas.
- bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest.
- The
<poem>tag will be renamed to<lines>. The old tag will still work.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 12 February 2014
- In the media: WikiVIP; Art Feminism; Medical articles; PR manipulation; Azerbaijani Wikipedia
As reported in various media outlets this week, including The Next Web and The Daily Dot, this past week, Wikimedia Commons and various language Wikipedias are working together to encourage subjects of Wikipedia articles to record a 10-second clip of their voice to be appended to their Wikipedia article.
- Technology report: Left with no choice
Software evolution does not always mean that features are being added. It also means that old fat is being trimmed. It is no different for MediaWiki.
- News and notes: WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups
In a bold move, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has announced a major change in policy concerning affiliated groups in the worldwide movement, and FDC funding levels to eligible chapters and thematic organizations over the next two years. Both decisions were published last Tuesday after considerable post-meeting consultation with the FDC and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom). The core of the first decision is
- Featured content: Space selfie
Thirteen articles, three lists, and twenty-five images were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia from 19 January to 1 February.
- Traffic report: Sports Day
Two great sporting events, the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, collide in one week, transforming the top ten into a festival of flying feet, a carnival of colliding caraniums and a bacchanal of bouncing balls, combined to influence Wikipedia's most popular articles last week.
- WikiProject report: Game Time in Russia
In celebration of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, we revisited the team at WikiProject Russia to learn how the project has changed since our first interview in 2011.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
- You can now use the list of active users again.
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces.
- You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files.
- You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014.
Problems
- On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem.
- On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue.
- On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
- There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
- On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.
VisualEditor news
- The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page.
- You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor.
- Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing.
- You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor.
08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 19 February 2014
- News and notes: Foundation takes aim at undisclosed paid editing; Greek Wikipedia editor faces down legal challenge
The Wikimedia Foundation has proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' Terms of use to specifically ban undisclosed paid editing. ... Dimitris Liourdis, a lawyer in training who moonlights as an administrator on the Greek Wikipedia, is embroiled in a legal dispute with a Greek politician over alleged edits made to his Wikipedia article.
- Technology report: ULS Comeback
Runa Bhattacharjee has notified the community that the Foundation is ready to turn the Universal Language Selector back on.
- WikiProject report: Countering Systemic Bias
WikiProject Countering System Bias aims to combat imbalanced coverage while encouraging neglected cultural perspectives and points of view, both in articles and in the larger Wikipedia community. As you'll see from the varied experiences and motivations of our nine respondents, the biases that the folks at WP CSB tackle run the full gamut of human characteristics and dispositions. The interview that follows unveils many of Wikipedia's greatest shortcomings.
- Featured content: Holotype
Five articles, seven lists, forty-three pictures, and two portals were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.
- Traffic report: Chilly Valentines
Valentines Day got a somewhat muted reception this week, overshadowed by continuing coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the death of Shirley Temple.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 27 (calendar).
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch) was added to the Italian Wikiquote and all Wikiversity projects. Users can now enable it in their Beta options.
- The Universal Language Selector was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis again. You can enable web fonts in your ULS options (see how).
VisualEditor news
- You will soon be able to add and edit
__STATICREDIRECT__,__[NO]INDEX__and__[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__in the page settings menu. - You will soon be able to use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘+Opt+S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor.
- You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
Future software changes
- You will soon be able to use the
<categorytree>tag again. - You will soon be able to post messages with the MassMessage tool in all talk namespaces.
- Notifications will soon work in all namespaces.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
10:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 February 2014
- Forum: Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?
About a week ago, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' terms of use to specifically ban paid editing, by adding a new clause titled "Paid contributions without disclosure". We have asked two users, one in favor of the measure (Smallbones) and one opposed (Pete Forsyth), to contribute their opinions on the matter.
- Featured content: Odin salutes you
Eight articles, three lists, and nine pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- WikiProject report: Racking brains with neuroscience
This week, we found three Ph.D.s willing to give us a crash course on WikiProject Neuroscience.
- Special report: Diary of a protester: Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest
Ukraine has been gripped by widespread protests over the past three months. Due to a decision by former president Viktor Yanukovych—at Russia's urging—to abandon integration with the European Union, the country was (and in many ways still is) split between the Europe-favoring Ukrainian-speaking western half and the Russian-speaking east and south. Hundreds have died during the unrest, leaving thousands of family members and friends to bury their loved ones. This week our Wikimedian colleagues in Ukraine are facing that challenge after the death of one of their own.
- News and notes: Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy
Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
- Traffic report: Snow big deal
The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list.
- Recent research: CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism
The monthly roundup of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
- When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts.
- You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla.
- You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis.
- The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list.
VisualEditor news
- You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size.
- If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
- Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing.
- VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla.
Future software changes
- The new tool for viewing media files will soon show a progress bar and a thumbnail while loading full images.
- You will soon be able to make user contributions show only page creations.
- Article Feedback Tool will be removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will also no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki.
- Wikis using the new search tool will come back to the old tool for a few hours starting at 00:00 UTC on March 6.
Problems
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
(test) The Signpost: 05 March 2014
- Traffic report: Brinksmen on the brink
There's nothing like a good old bit of Cold War nostalgia, combined with a suitably scary international incident, to focus our attention on the real world. That said, nothing could stem our outpouring of affection for the beloved comedian Harold Ramis, whose death managed to top the week in the face of those international concerns.
- Discussion report: Four paragraph lead, indefinitely blocked IPs, editor reviews broken?
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
- News and notes: Wikipedia Library finding success in matching contributors with sources
This week, the Signpost caught up with the Wikipedia Library (TWL), which aims to connect reference resources with Wikipedia editors who can use them to improve articles. Funded through the Wikimedia Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program, TWL has a new "visiting scholars" initiative and a microgrants program in the works.
- Featured content: Full speed ahead for the WikiCup
The WikiCup competition is ongoing, while six articles, three lists, and ten pictures were promoted to "featured" status of the English Wikipedia this week.
- WikiProject report: Article Rescue Squadron
This week, the Signpost delved into the English Wikipedia's Article Rescue Squadron.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
- You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options.
VisualEditor news
- It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode.
- It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better.
- VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines.
- We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming.
- You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window.
Future software changes
- You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages.
- CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages.
- It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript.
- An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion).
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 12 March 2014
- News and notes: Wikimedians celebrate International Women's Day, Women's History Month
Wikimedians around the world gathered to celebrate Women's History Month and the associated International Women's Day by holding editathons. If you lived in the United Kingdom, you had the opportunity to attend Wikimedia UK's event at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, part of University College London and host to one of the largest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese artifacts in the world.
- Traffic report: War and awards
An intensely busy week, as a confluence of celebratory, curious and urgent topics pushed typical residents like Facebook and Deaths in 2014 out of the top ten entirely.
- Featured content: Ukraine burns
Five articles, two lists, and 52 pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- WikiProject report: Russian WikiProject Entomology
This week, we interviewed Anaxibia from the Russian-language Entomology WikiProject.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf18) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 20 (calendar).
- You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels.
- You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all small wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options.
- You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014.
VisualEditor news
- Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive.
- Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes.
- Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording.
Future software changes
- You will soon see an error message if you try to log-in or register with an invalid or taken username.
- You can now test first version of a tool that includes OpenStreetMap maps inside the UploadWizard. Comments are welcome.
- You will soon be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature.
Problems
- VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 19 March 2014
- Forum: Wikimedia Commons mission: free media for the world or only Wikimedia projects?
Non-US editors and chapters have taken issue with a multitude of image deletions done on the Wikimedia Commons to comply with the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, a US law that brought the country into compliance with the Berne Convention.
- WikiProject report: We have history
This week, we visited WikiProject History, an ancient project with roots dating back to 2001. The project is home to 196 pieces of Featured material and 483 Good and A-class articles independent of the vast accomplishments of its various child projects. WikiProject History maintains a lengthy list of tasks, oversees the history portal, and continues to build Wikipedia's outline of history.
- Interview: Nate Ott: the writer behind 71 articles in the largest-ever good topic
In a record-breaker, the English Wikipedia has a new largest good topic: the 71-article Light cruisers of Germany, which concerns the light cruisers used by Germany during the 20th century.
- Featured content: Spot the bulldozer
Twelve articles, fourteen lists, and six pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- News and notes: Foundation-supported Wikipedian in residence faces scrutiny
One of the first university Wikipedian in residence positions, hosted at Harvard University in 2012, has jumped back into the spotlight amid questions about its ethical integrity.
- Traffic report: Into thin air
The utterly mystifying events surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has not fallen from the sky so much as vanished from it entirely, has left an information-starved public scrambling for precedents, some logical, some... not.
- Technology report: Wikimedia engineering report
The Wikimedia engineering report for February 2014 has been published. A summarized version is also available. Major news include
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf19) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 27 (calendar).
VisualEditor news
- You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings.
- Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode.
- You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation.
- You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor.
Future software changes
- Typography Refresh will be enabled for test wiki and MediaWiki.org users who use the Vector skin on March 27. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3. If you don't use Vector as your skin, you will not be affected.
- You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
- You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 March 2014
- Comment: A foolish request
April Fools' Day is rapidly approaching. Every year, members of the community pull pranks and make (or attempt to make) humorous edits to pages across the project. Every year, the community follows April Fools' Day with a contentious debate about whether or not it is necessary to impose limits on April Fools' Day jokes for future years. It is a polarizing issue.
- Traffic report: Down to a simmer
Topics like the 2014 Crimea crisis or the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 eased down the list, making way for such traditional topics as St Patrick's Day, Reddit threads and even Google Doodles, which have reappeared after a long absence.
- Recent research: Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates
Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia" doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about the Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.
- News and notes: Commons Picture of the Year—winners announced
Results for the two-stage 2013 Commons Picture of the Year have been announced. This year's winning photograph (above) shows a lightbulb that has been cracked, allowing inert gas to escape—and oxygen to enter, so that the tungsten filament burns. From the flames rise elegant curls of blue smoke.
- Featured content: Winter hath a beauty that is all his own
Four articles, two lists, and twelve pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- Op-ed: Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia
On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing, four major iterations, and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we’ve arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.
- Technology report: Why will Wikipedia look like the Signpost?
As you have probably read on this weeks op-ed, or via various other channels of announcement, 3 April will see the introduction of the Typography refresh (or update) for the Vector skin on all Wikipedias. Other projects like Commons will have this update rolled out a few days prior.
- WikiProject report: From the peak
This week, the Signpost interviewed the English Wikipedia's Mountains WikiProject.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf20) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and all Wikipedia wikis on April 3 (calendar).
- Typography Refresh was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3.
- CirrusSearch, the new search tool, was enabled as a beta feature on over 30 new wikis on March 27.
VisualEditor news
- Blocked users now see the same messages in VisualEditor as in the wikitext editor.
- The search box for re-using a reference in VisualEditor is now cleared after each use.
- New links on sub-pages no longer point to the wrong location in VisualEditor.
- VisualEditor's media dialog no longer breaks when opening some types of images.
Future software changes
- You will not be able to use the Wikitech wiki for a short period around 16:00 UTC on April 1 due to a server change.
- CirrusSearch will become the main search engine for all non-Wikipedia wikis except Commons, Meta and Incubator on April 2.
- You will soon be able to use a new special page listing duplicate files.
- Deleting a version of a file or a version of its description page will soon be shown differently in the logs.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 02 April 2014
- News and notes: Wikimedia conferences—soul-searching about costs, attendance, and future
The run-up to the conference has seen the unfolding of two fractious threads on the Wikimedia public mailing list, both of which may serve as background for the last session at Berlin: "Future of the Wikimedia Conference".
- WikiProject report: Deutschland in English
This week, we visited with WikiProject Germany.
- Special report: On the cusp of the Wikimedia Conference
The annual Wikimedia Conference is about to start in Berlin, hosted by Wikimedia Germany, which won the bid to hold the event over three others. This will be the fifth time the chapter has hosted the Wikimedia Conference—it did so from 2009 to 2012, with attendance ranging from 100 to 180 Wikimedians. This year 160 people are expected at the four-day event, which is mainly for representatives of affiliated Wikimedia organisations. The conference has been built around two themes: Organisation, structures, and grants and Success and impact.
- Featured content: April Fools
The Signpost's "Featured content" writers had a bit of fun this week.
- Traffic report: Regressing to the mean
The mysterious fate of MH370 still tops the list, but in all other respects our readership has retreated from the real world into its pop-cultural happy place: TV, movies, music, Reddit and Google Doodles all made an appearance.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf21) was scheduled to be deployed to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 3, however it was temporarily put on hold due to localization issues. (calendar).
- Typography Refresh was enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and on all Wikipedias on April 3. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin.
- CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on over 400 non-Wikipedia wikis on April 2.
Future software changes
- A new special page (Special:TrackingCategories) will soon list all the tracking categories on a wiki.
- All Wikiquote projects will start using language links from Wikidata on April 8.
- The Hovercards feature will soon work with right-to-left languages.
- You will soon be able to download files directly from MediaViewer, the new multimedia tool.
- MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. Comments are welcome.
- You can help check that users can read CAPTCHAs in your language.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:00, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 09 April 2014
- News and notes: Round 2 of FDC funding open to public comments
Community review is open for the four applications in the second and final round of applications to the WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee for 2013–14. Three eligible organisations have applied for funding under the newly named "annual program grants": Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Norway, and the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, which last November was recognised as eligible to apply for FDC funding purposes.
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Law
This week, we interviewed the Law WikiProject.
- Special report: Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz
"I remember laughing and talking and laughing and talking at Wikimania 2012. I took this picture of her that she used for a long while as a profile pic. Someone on Facebook said it looked 'skepchickal', which she loved."
- Traffic report: Conquest of the Couch Potatoes
Television has always been a topic of choice on this site, but it exploded this week. Fully six slots were devoted to television shows, as the final episode of How I Met Your Mother, one of the most popular Wikipedia searches of the last few years, coincided with the season finale of The Walking Dead and the upcoming fourth season of Game of Thrones. The number rises to 8 if movies released on video and new TV tech are are included.
- Featured content: Snow heater and Ash sweep
Five article, five lists, and ten pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. We are looking for contributors to help write new issues every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
- MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome.
- Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7.
VisualEditor news
- You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click.
- The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
- The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen.
Future software changes
- The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17.
- Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot).
- You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key.
- Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list.
- You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category.
- The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab.
- An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion).
Problems
- Wikimedia Foundation servers were updated after a security bug called Heartbleed was discovered last week. You should change your password as an extra precaution.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:18, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Invitation to participate
Hello MichaelMaggs, On the German-language Wikipedia the community has introduced a system for several years in what users conform that they have met other users in real life. This system was created to create more trust between users and thus creating a better and nicer place to work on the wiki. On the German-language Wikipedia it is a huge success and I translated almost everything of this tool in English so that also users from other Wikipedias can use it. It only makes sense to sign up into the system if you have met at least three other users in person. We have met and you have been several occasions where you have met other Wikimedians, so that shouldn't be a problem. You can sign up for the tool, after three other users confirm they have met you, you can confirm other users yourself. About this system, more information can be found at Wikipedia:Personal acquaintances. In the green section are the instructions. On Wikipedia:Personal acquaintances/Participants will grow a list of participants who are active in the English speaking parts of the world. It would be great if would you sign up! :-) Greetings - Romaine (talk) 15:41, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
- PS: On the German-language Wikipedia, everything is translated into English, but you need perhaps to set your preferences on English to show it in this language. Romaine (talk) 15:41, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Tech News updates
- You can now subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed to read Tech News in your news aggregator. The newsletter will now also show on the English Planet Wikimedia every Monday.
- We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf1) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 22, and all Wikipedias on April 24 (calendar).
- CirrusSearch was enabled as a beta feature on 27 new wikis on April 18.
- Problems with various fonts in SVG files were fixed last week. Files that use DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Serif Condensed, DejaVu Sans Light, Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts now show correctly.
- The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster.
- You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014.
VisualEditor news
- If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly.
- VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages.
- You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences.
Future software changes
- MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Czech (cs), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), Hebrew (he), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Thai (th) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias on April 24. Feedback is welcome.
- Edits by anonymous users will now be marked with a new CSS class (
mw-anonuserlink). This way, you can easily make those edits use a different color, font or background. - The user preference to remember login will soon be removed from all wikis. The edit review preferences will be moved to the recent changes tab, and the preference for the WikiLove tool will be moved to the editing tab.
- You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates.
- You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit.
- It is now proposed to replace Bugzilla, Gerrit and other tools by a single tool called Phabricator. You can test Phabricator and add your opinion on MediaWiki.org.
- An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on April 22 at 03:30 AM UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion).
Problems
- For about 40 minutes on April 17, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
- There is a problem with the rendering of formulas with MathJax. If you enabled MathJax in your preferences, you might need to turn it off and on again.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 23 April 2014
- Special report: 2014 Wikimedia Conference—what is the impact?
The annual Wikimedia Conference wound up last Sunday, 13 April—a four-day meeting costing several hundred thousand dollars, hosted in Berlin by Wikimedia Germany and attended by more than 100 Wikimedians.
- Op-ed: Five things a Wikipedian in residence can do
Hey you—yeah you, the Wikipedian! Do you want to help a museum, a library, a university, or other organization explore ways to engage with Wikipedia? Great—you should offer your expertise as a Wikipedian in residence!
- News and notes: Wikimedian passes away
Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, who edited as "Cindamuse" on the Wikimedia projects, passed away in her sleep at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin on 10 April.
- WikiProject_report: To the altar—Catholicism
This week, we visited WikiProject Catholicism.
- Wikimania: Winning bid announced for 2015
After just over a month of deliberation, the Wikimania jury has selected Wikimedia Mexico's bid to host Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City, with a proposed date of 15–19 July.
- Traffic report: Reflecting in Gethsemane
If I were the kind of person who made snap judgments based on flimsy evidence, I'd say our readership is in a funk.
- Featured content: There was I, waiting at the church
Fourteen articles, four lists, seven pictures, and one topic attained "featured" status on the English Wikipedia over the last two weeks.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
- You can now use interwiki prefix
c:to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons.
VisualEditor news
- You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor.
- VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken
MediaWiki:Common.jspages (and similar) were fixed last week. - VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.
Future software changes
- CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
- MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome.
- The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations.
- CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings.
- You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome.
Problems
- For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load.
- On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 30 April 2014
- News and notes: WMF's draft annual plan turns indigestible as an FDC proposal
Like hammering a square peg into a round hole, the Wikimedia Foundation has submitted a draft annual plan for 2014–15 to its own Funds Dissemination Committee. Unlike the WMF's submission to the FDC's inaugural round in October 2012, the "proposal" does not seek funding.
- Traffic report: Going to the Doggs
Not much to report this week. The same post-Easter celebrations (4/20, Earth Day) were popular again this year, except last year we were still reeling from the Boston Marathon bombing.
- Breaking: The Foundation's new executive director
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that its new executive director will be Lila Tretikov, until now a chief product officer in Silicon Valley.
- WikiProject report: Genetics
This week, we unraveled the mysteries of WikiProject Genetics.
- Interview: Wikipedia in the Peabody Essex Museum
Ed Roley, Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum, talks about GLAM engagement with Wikipedia.
- Featured content: Browsing behaviours
Four articles and sixteen featured pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Recent research: Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google
Can you predict the number of seasonal influenza-like illness in the U.S. using data from Wikipedia?
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf3) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and all Wikipedias on May 8 (calendar).
- The Compact Personal Bar was added as a beta feature to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added as a beta feature to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and to all Wikipedias on May 8. To test it, you can enable it now in your preferences on MediaWiki.org.
- It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool.
VisualEditor news
- External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki.
- The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete.
- You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones.
- There is a new type for TemplateData parameters:
wiki-file-namefor file names. - Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users.
- You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language.
Future software changes
- MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Japanese (ja), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 8. Feedback is welcome.
- You can help translate about 100 new language names that have been added to our data source. They are used, for example, as hover text for interwiki links. Send an e-mail to Nemo if you want to help.
- If you click on a redirect page in your watchlist, you will soon access the redirect itself.
Problems
- For about 40 minutes around 00:20 UTC on April 29, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 07 May 2014
- News and notes: New system of discretionary sanctions; Buchenwald; is Pirelli 'Cracking Wikipedia'?
The English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) introduced the first form of what are known as the "discretionary sanction" (DS) in 2009. A new DS regime, called Discretionary sanctions (2014), is the result of an elaborate review process involving both the community, since last September, and the committee, for more than a year.
- Traffic report: TMZedia
For all the claims of Wikipedia bringing the world's knowledge to all who want it, it seems the human race most wants is a tabloid newspaper; a quick source for TV listings, pop culture facts, celebrity gossip and, above all, scandal—with some nice juicy racism thrown in too.
- In focus: Foundation announces long-awaited new executive director
In a live video stream on 1 May, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that Lila Tretikov will be replacing Sue Gardner, its executive director. Gardner, who has been in the position since 2007, declared her intention to leave more than a year ago.
- WikiCup: 2014 WikiCup enters round three
Round 3 of the 2014 WikiCup has just begun; 32 competitors remain.
- In the media: Google and the flu; Adrianne
Boston Children's Hospital postdoctoral fellow David McIver and a team have determined that using page view statistics from Wikipedia, they can track flu progression better than the Center for Disease Control can using Google searches.
- WikiProject report: Singing with Eurovision
Formed in 2003, the Eurovision WikiProject boasts four featured articles and 22 good articles. The Eurovision Song Contest 2014 is currently taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, so we went to the stage to talk with one of the project's members.
- Featured content: Wikipedia at the Rijksmuseum
Four articles, two lists, and five pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf4) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 8. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and all Wikipedias on May 15 (calendar).
VisualEditor news
- A new citation system in VisualEditor was enabled on the English Wikipedia. It will soon be enabled on more wikis.
- Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly.
Future software changes
- It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently.
- You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API.
- You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with
Special:Flow. - The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work.
- The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded.
- MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on Wikimedia Commons on May 15. Feedback is welcome.
- An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on May 14 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion).
- Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
Problems
- There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
06:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 14 May 2014
- Investigative report: Hong Kong's Wikimania 2013—failure to produce financial statement raises questions of probity
On 2 May 2012, the Wikimania jury announced that Hong Kong's bid to hold the 2013 event had beaten four other proposals. Moderator James Forrester wrote: "The Jury has confidence that the Hong Kong bidding team will pull off a magnificent Wikimania,"—and indeed there were positive comments about the event from most attendees.
- WikiProject report: Relaxing in Puerto Rico
This week, the Signpost jumped over the ocean to chat with the Puerto Rico WikiProject.
- News and notes: 'Ask a librarian'—connecting Wikimedians with the National Library of Australia
Editors of Australian-related topics on the English Wikipedia may have noticed an odd addition if they viewed the article's talk pages. For example, on Talk:Darwin, Northern Territory, they might be drawn in by the question mark, nested within what is often a sea of WikiProject templates: "Need help improving this article? Ask a librarian at the National Library of Australia, or the Northern Territory Library." Just what is this?
- Featured content: On the rocks
Six articles, seven lists, and four pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- Traffic report: Eurovision, Google Doodles, Mothers, and 5 May
Eurovision is known for being political, and it was a doozy this week.
- Technology report: Technology report needs editor, Media Viewer offers a new look
The Media Viewer is scheduled to launch on the English Wikipedia next week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News updates
- Tech News is one year old this week; thank you for being with us!
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
- The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work.
- MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome.
- VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences.
- You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.
VisualEditor news
- VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys.
- VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like
{{cite_web}}and not just{{Cite web}}. - VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it.
- VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit.
- The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor.
Future software changes
- User ID number will no longer be visible in preferences.
Problems
- For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 21 May 2014
- News and notes: "Crisis" over Wikimedia Germany's palace revolution
Last Sunday the board of Wikimedia Germany passed 9–1 a vote of no confidence in the chapter's executive director, Pavel Richter, who has held the position since 2009. With more than 50 employees, an annual budget approaching $10 million, and the right to conduct its own fundraising through the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) site banners, Wikimedia Germany is the second-largest organisation in the movement after the WMF itself. The decision was announced on the Wikimedia mailing list by the chapter chair, Nikolas Becker.
- Featured content: Staggering number of featured articles
Thirteen articles, sixteen pictures, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Traffic report: Doodles' dawn
It's a relief to see Google Doodles having an impact again; their wide coverage means that they inspire curiosity on many subjects which, for reasons of nationality, ethnicity or gender, might not be known in the English-speaking world. It's a shame then, that Wikipedia so often fails to keep up; articles on Google Doodles are almost invariably C-class, and seldom do justice to their subjects. Still, interest in Google Doodles has been waning in recent months—Audrey Hepburn last week was the first to top the list since December—so any rise in popularity is worth celebrating.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 (calendar).
- MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
VisualEditor news
- VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them.
- A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the
File:namespace was fixed last week. - VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled.
- It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed.
- VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names.
Future software changes
- Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade.
- It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool.
- Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax
[[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]]will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. - You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 28 May 2014
- News and notes: The English Wikipedia's second featured-article centurion; wiki inventor interviewed on video
With the promotion to featured article of Grus (constellation) on 17 May, Casliber became Wikipedia's second featured-article centurion, following Wehwalt's groundbreaking achievement last December. Cas's first FA, Banksia integrifolia, a group effort, was promoted on 16 November 2006. His first solo project, Diplodocus, followed in January 2007; he has rarely been off the FAC since. In a second story, Ward Cunningham, an American computer programmer who invented the wiki, was interviewed by the WMF.
- Featured content: Zombie fight in the saloon
Wikipedia editor Sven Manguard's work is quite underappreciated a lot of the time, most likely because people haven't heard of it yet: He's developed good relationships with game companies, and is thus able to get full-resolution screenshots released under a Creative Commons license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. This week's trove of new featured items on the English Wikipedia comprises seven articles, three lists, and four pictures.
- Traffic report: Get fitted for flipflops and floppy hats
In the US, Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of summer, and summer is definitely on people's minds this week, with summer films Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past, the apparently designated summer song "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea, and summer TV show, Game of Thrones.
- Recent research: Predicting which article you will edit next
Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders; "Chinese-language time zones" favor Asian pop and IT topics on Wikipedia; and bipartite editing prediction in Wikipedia.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
- CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30.
VisualEditor news
- Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target.
- The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor.
- VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons.
- There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters:
datefor dates and times in the ISO 8601 format.
Future software changes
- MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
- You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist.
- The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search.
- You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot).
Problems
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 04 June 2014
- Special report: IEG funding for women's stories: a new approach to the gender gap
Individual engagement grants (IEGs) are announced twice yearly by a volunteer WMF committee, the most recent of which we covered last December. The scheme, launched at the start of last year, awards funds to individuals or teams of up to four to produce high-impact outcomes for the WMF's online projects. It favours innovative approaches to solving critical issues in the movement.
- News and notes: Two new affiliate-selected trustees
New trustee Frieda Briosch from Italy: we face "a couple of headaches", she says: "how to boost editors, which includes the development of the next strategic plan, and how to keep our project always 'glamorous'."
- Op-ed: "Hospitality, jerks, and what I learned"—the amazing keynote at WikiConference USA
I never feel quite adequate trying to paraphrase Sumana's words: she is so articulate. I highly encourage every person who reads this article to directly watch her keynote—it directly speaks to a lot of Wikimedia's most significant issues, made with great eloquence. We have a serious issue with retaining editors, and parts of her speech could serve as a pretty good partial blueprint towards how we could begin to fix that problem.
- Featured content: Ye stately homes of England
David Iliff, or Diliff, as he is known on here outside of the file pages for his many, many, excellent photographs, is one of Wikipedia's longest-standing professional-standard photographers. This week, the Signpost salutes him.
- In the media: Reliable or not, doctors use Wikipedia
The month of May saw significant coverage concerning the reliability of Wikipedia's medical articles.
- Traffic report: Autumn in summer
The northern summer is a time when one is meant to celebrate the exuberance of life; instead, commemoration of the dead was a significant theme this week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
- You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla.
VisualEditor news
- You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor.
- The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content.
- You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor.
Future software changes
- MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome.
- You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10.
- On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system.
- You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly.
- Templates containing
<ref>or<references>tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. - You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it.
- Hovercards will no longer flicker.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 11 June 2014
- News and notes: PR agencies commit to ethical interactions with Wikipedia
Eleven public relations agencies have declared their intention to follow "ethical engagement practices" in Wikipedia editing. The results were published last Tuesday: a joint statement from the participating PR agencies—representing five of the top ten global agencies and all but one of the top ten in the United States—clarifying their views and practices with regards to the Wikimedia projects.
- Traffic report: The week the wired went weird
It seems that, more than commemorating the great moments in our history, more than even anticipating great sporting events, what our audience wants is the weird.
- Paid editing: Does Wikipedia Pay? The Moderator: William Beutler
William Beutler (WWB), author of the blog The Wikipedian, is a long-time editor and community-watcher. He is also a paid editor (WWB Too). Well—not anymore—because he gave up direct editing of articles in 2011. Instead, for the past three years he has followed Jimmy Wales' Bright Line rule in acting as a researcher and consultant for companies and clients that want to suggest changes to Wikipedia articles and engage on the Talk page.
- Special report: Questions raised over secret voting for WMF trustees
Last week we reported the announcement of two new affiliate-selected WMF trustees. The board of trustees is the most powerful and influential body in the movement, and chapters have been permitted to select two of the 10 seats since 2008, for two-year terms that start in even-numbered years.
- Featured content: Politics, ships, art, and cyclones
Five articles, one list, twelve pictures, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status last week on the English Wikipedia.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Reminder
- You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
- You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.
VisualEditor news
- You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu.
- When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference.
- You can now add and edit
{{DISPLAYTITLE}}and__DISAMBIG__in the page settings menu. - The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct.
Future software changes
- Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome.
- You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time.
- You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis.
- It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users.
- Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17.
- The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to
Special:MostTranscludedPages. - An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
- You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
Hi Michael,
Long time, no talk! I hope you are well and working hard. I'm calling your attention to the discussion above, where the introduction of the new MediaViewer is the subject. Knowing your expertise and sensitivity on legal matters, what is you opinion on the way the WMF is forcing the thing upon us? I was especially irritated with the response I got in here, apparently from some technician at WMF. Best wishes, Alvesgaspar (talk) 11:58, 18 June 2014 (UTC)
- Hi, not something I have been following closely I'm afraid, but I do agree that in its current form the viewer is not very helpful for those of us who work with image pages on Commons. It seems as though the 'WMF' person was not actually from the WMF (now reverted it seems). --MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:15, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 18 June 2014
- News and notes: With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
The Wikimedia Foundation has amended its terms of use to ban editing for pay without disclosing an employer or affiliation on any of its websites. The broad scope of these changes will allow the WMF to selectively enforce their terms of use to avoid ensnaring well-meaning editors.
- Featured content: Worming our way to featured picture
Five articles, five lists, 22 pictures, and one portal were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Special report: Wikimedia Bangladesh: a chapter's five-year journey
The Bangladesh chapter of the Wikimedia movement was formed in 2009. They received official local registration from the national authorities on 10 June 2014. The long road in between was subject to much persistence, patience, and luck—along with a good deal of worry.
- Traffic report: You can't dethrone Thrones
To the surprise of absolutely no one, the 2014 FIFA World Cup was the main draw this week, taking four slots. People appeared desperate to bone up on their trivia; checking not only this year's World Cup, but the last one. Even so, they still couldn't push Game of Thrones from the top ten. It will be interesting to see what happens come next week's season finale.
- WikiProject report: Visiting the city
This week, the Signpost came in from the hinterland to interview members of the Cities WikiProject.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).
VisualEditor news
- You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates.
- When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it.
- You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it.
- You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references.
Future software changes
- You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags.
- CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week.
- CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis.
- You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator.
- An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion).
Problems
- On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
- Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 25 June 2014
- News and notes: US National Archives enshrines Wikipedia in Open Government Plan
The US National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) have committed to engaging with Wikimedia projects in their newest Open Government Plan. The biannual effort is a roadmap for how the agency will accomplish its goals in the digital age.
- Traffic report: Fake war, or real sport?
Despite the interest generated by its season finale, Game of Thrones still couldn't top the World Cup, which still dominated interest, as evidenced by the fact that this top 10 is virtually identical to last week's, just with a different dead celebrity.
- Exclusive: "We need to be true to who we are": Foundation's new executive director speaks to the Signpost
In her first interview since taking office, Lila Tretikov, the Wikimedia Foundation's new executive director, speaks about grantmaking, the global south, and the gender gap.
- Discussion report: Media Viewer, old HTML tags
Discussions on the English Wikipedia this week include...
- Featured content: Showing our Wörth
Ten articles and eleven pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- WikiProject report: The world where dreams come true
This week, the Signpost visited the land of Disney, blockbusters, explosions, dream sequences, and cultural masterpieces: film.
- Recent research: Power users and diversity in WikiProjects
In a recent paper, Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash investigate the question of sustainability in online communities by analysing trends in the growth of WikiProjects.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).
VisualEditor news
- Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc.
- A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week.
- VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page.
- Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly.
Future software changes
- You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags.
- Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
- CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias.
- All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it.
- Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users.
- You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block.
- You will soon be able to use
{{!}}as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 02 July 2014
- In the media: Wiki Education; medical content; PR firms
The Los Angeles Times highlighted a recent Wiki Education Foundation (WEF) course at Pomona College in their article "Wikipedia pops up in bibliographies, and even college curricula". We interviewed Char Booth, the campus ambassador for the course, for additional details.
- Traffic report: The Cup runneth over... and over.
With Game of Thrones over for another year, the World Cup dominated yet again. And that is pretty much that. This list isn't likely to be particularly eventful until the Cup is won.
- News and notes: Wikimedia Israel receives Roaring Lion award
Wikimedia Israel (WMIL) has won a Roaring Lion in the category of Internet and cellular for its public outreach during the tenth anniversary of the Hebrew Wikipedia in July 2013.
- Featured content: Ship-shape
Six articles, five lists, seventeen pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
- WikiProject report: Indigenous Peoples of North America
This week, the Signpost visited the Indigenous peoples of North America WikiProject.
- Technology report: In memoriam: the Toolserver (2005–14)
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Wikimedia Deutschland's Toolserver project was switched off, marking the end of one of the Wikimedia movement's longest running Chapter-led projects. The Toolserver, which was in fact a collection of servers, first came online in 2005, hosting hundreds of webpages and scripts ("tools") made available for use by Wikimedia readers, editors and administrators.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News updates
- We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
- CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias.
- It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis.
- You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias.
VisualEditor news
- Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster.
- You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption.
- When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus.
- The reference tool that adds empty
<ref></ref>tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like{{Cite web}}. - Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ.
Future software changes
- Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
- A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared.
- If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the
<references />tag (or a template). - Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly.
- Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions.
Problems
- Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue.
- For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 09 July 2014
- Special report: Wikimania 2014—what will it cost?
Last May, James Forrester announced to the world that London had been awarded the 2014 Wikimania conference. Functioning as the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, it is separate from the chapter-focused Wikimedia Conference. The first, located in Frankfurt, took place in 2005 and had 380 attendees. London, the tenth, is now expected to attract 1500. With Wikimania ambition, attention, and attendance rising significantly over the last nine years, how have this year's monetary costs come to be?
- Wikicup: Wikicup's third round sees money, space, battleships and more
After an extremely close race, round three is over. 244 points secured a place in Round 4, which is comparable to previous years—321 was required in 2013, and 243 points in 2012.
- Wikimedia in education: Exploring the United States and Canada with LiAnna Davis
The Wikimedia Education Program currently spans 60 programs around the world; students and instructors participate at almost every level of education. The Education program Signpost series presents a snapshot of the Wikimedia Global Education Program as it exists in 2014.
- Featured content: Three cheers for featured pictures!
Five articles, six lists, and nine pictures were promoted to 'featured' status last week on the English Wikipedia.
- News and notes: Echoes of the past haunt new conflict over tech initiative
As with the troubled release of the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) flagship VisualEditor project, the release of the new Media Viewer has also been met with opposition from the English Wikipedia community.
- Traffic report: World Cup, Tim Howard rule the week
Unsurprisingly, the World Cup continued to dominate the English Wikipedia's viewing statistics. In particular, the record-breaking performance of US goalkeeper Tim Howard and the tournament-ending injury to Brazil's Neymar drove large amount of views to their articles.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
- It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis.
- You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
- You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.
VisualEditor news
- The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles.
- The button to make images full size should now work correctly.
- References will now be shown in the default font size again.
Future software changes
- CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16.
- The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example).
- It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files.
- Pages that use
{{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}}more than once will soon show a warning. You can use{{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}}to hide it. - Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis.
- Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory.
- Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:49, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 16 July 2014
- Special report: $10 million lawsuit against Wikipedia editors withdrawn, but plaintiff intends to refile
On the same day the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) announced it would offer assistance to English Wikipedia editors embroiled in a legal dispute with Yank Barry, the lawsuit has been withdrawn without prejudice at the request of Barry's legal team—but this action is being described as "strategic" so that they can refile the lawsuit with a "new, more comprehensive complaint."
- Traffic report: World Cup dominates for another week
This week it's still more and more World Cup, with five entries out of the top ten (and 14 out of the Top 25).
- Wikimedia in education: Serbia takes the stage with Filip Maljkovic
It all started in late 2005, when we first held lectures about Wikipedia in two educational institutions (universities) ...
- Featured content: The Island with the Golden Gun
Eight articles, three lists, and 28 pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- News and notes: Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles
The Swedish Wikipedia's prolific Lsjbot, which has created a significant proportion of the site's 1.7 million articles and has nearly single-handedly pushed it to being the fourth-largest Wikipedia, was covered in the Wall Street Journal this week. The newspaper reported that the bot has created 2.7 million articles, which is apparently a reference to the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias, where Lsjbot is also active, and that "on a good day", it creates 10,000 articles.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
- CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date.
- The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places.
- Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions.
- A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs.
VisualEditor news
- Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome.
- All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons.
- You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target.
- Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week.
Future software changes
- It will soon be possible to watch individual discussions in the Topic namespace rather than whole pages for talk pages using Flow.
- You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages.
- An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode.
- A request for comments on how to improve MediaWiki API was re-started on MediaWiki.org. Your feedback is welcome.
Problems
- Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 23 July 2014
- Wikimedia in education: Education program gaining momentum in Israel
"Great success" in Israel universities is leading to collaboration and editing in high schools.
- Traffic report: The World Cup hangs on, though tragedies seek to replace it
Last week I predicted that the World Cup dominance on the report would be over—but I was wrong. The World Cup Final fell on the 13th of July, which was actually the first day of the week covered by this report, not the last day of the last report. Hence, five of the Top 10 this week are again World Cup related-topics.
- News and notes: Institutional media uploads to Commons get a bit easier
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) today are facing fewer barriers to uploading their content onto Wikimedia projects now that the new GLAM-Wiki Toolset Project has been launched. The tool, which is the fruit of a collaboration between Europeana and several Wikimedia chapters, relieves GLAMs from having to write their own automated scripts and gives them a standardized method of uploading large amounts of their digitized holdings.
- Forum: Did you know?—good idea, needs reform
The English Wikipedia's did you know (DYK) section has been a feature of the site's main page since February 2004. From the beginning, the section has served as a place to highlight Wikipedia's newest articles. But over the last few years, the did you know section has gotten steadily larger and more complex, and non-notable or plagiarized articles have occasionally slipped through the reviewing process, leading numerous editors to call for reforms to the system. We asked two editors to share their views.
- Featured content: Why, they're plum identical!
Ten articles, five lists, and 25 pictures were promoted to featured status on the English Wikipedia last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
- You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.
VisualEditor news
- You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor.
- The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit.
- If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters.
- You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation.
Future software changes
- You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user.
- Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list.
- It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 30 July 2014
- Book review: Knowledge or unreality?
In Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia, Dariusz Jemielniak discusses Wikipedia from the standpoint of an experienced editor and administrator who is also a university professor specializing in management and organizations. In Virtual Reality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?, Charles Seife presents a more broadly themed work reminding us to question the reliability of information found throughout the Internet.
- Recent research: Shifting values in the paid content debate
Kim Osman has performed a fascinating study on the three 2013 failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, Osman analyzed 573 posts from the three main votes on paid editing conducted in the community in November 2013.
- News and notes: How many more hoaxes will Wikipedia find?
Another hoax on the English Wikipedia was uncovered this week—not by any thorough investigation, but through the self-disclosure of an anonymous change made when the editors were in their sophomore year of college. The deliberate misinformation had been in the article for over five years with plenty of individuals noticing, but not one suspected its authenticity. This leads to one obvious question: how many more are there?
- Wikimedia in education: Success in Egypt and the Arab World
A "program of heroes" is leading the charge in Egypt.
- Traffic report: Doom and gloom vs. the power of Reddit
We indeed moved far away from football this week, and further into much more serious issues of war and death. The Israel-Palestinian conflict continues to dominate the news, and the top 10, with Gaza Strip, Israel, and Hamas. The top 25 also includes Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Death also lies behind the popularity of James Garner, the American actor who died on July 19th, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and deaths in 2014.
- Featured content: Skeletons and Skeltons
Two articles, four lists, and seven pictures attained featured status on the English Wikipedia last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News updates
- Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar).
- You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files.
- You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files.
- New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file.
VisualEditor news
- You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor.
- VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys.
- Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week.
- Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed.
Future software changes
- You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits.
- All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31.
- Pages in the
Translations:namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines.
Problems
- Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem.
- Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 06 August 2014
- Technology report: A technologist's Wikimania preview
As the start of Wikimania proper on 8 August approaches, the Signpost looks ahead to what its dozens of presentations might offer the technologically-inclined, whether attending in person or taking advantage of what promises to be a strong digital offering.
- Traffic report: Ebola
Serious news continues to dominate the most popular articles chart on Wikipedia this week, with the Ebola virus disease far and away in the top spot. In the top 25, we see the related articles Ebola virus, which talks about biological aspects, at #18 and 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak at #19.
- Featured content: Bottoms, asses, and the fairies that love them
Eight articles, fifteen pictures, and two topics were promoted to featured status on the English Wikipedia last week.
- Wikimedia in education: Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico
"Major growth" expected in Mexican university after a Wikipedia program is formally accepted by the school's administration.
- News and notes: "History is a human right"—first-ever transparency report released as Europe begins hiding Wikipedia in search results
The Wikimedia Foundation has published its first transparency report, covering from July 2012 to June 2014. The move comes on the same day the organization announced that Google, in order to comply with a recent court order upholding the "right to be forgotten", has removed a number of Wikipedia articles from their European search results.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar).
- Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one.
VisualEditor news
- Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14.
Future software changes
- Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser!
- If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning.
- You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension.
- An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion).
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 13 August 2014
- Special report: Twitter bots catalogue government edits to Wikipedia
Slate reports that Tom Scott, co-creator of the emoji social network Emojli, created a Twitter bot called Parliament WikiEdits to automatically tweet a link to any Wikipedia edits made from an IP address belonging to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Scott's bot initially did not tweet any links to edits made from Parliament and, according to Scott, an "insider" reports that their IP addresses changed. Despite this, Scott's Twitter bot has inspired similar creations in numerous other countries.
- Traffic report: Disease, decimation and distraction
It's been a grim few weeks. It says something that formerly arresting crises like the war in Ukraine, Boko Haram and the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, despite still being ongoing, have fallen out of the top 10 to make way for the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak and the equally if not more intense conflict against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
- Wikimedia in education: Global Education: WMF's Perspective
"Education is at the core of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission."
- Wikimania: Promised the moon, settled for the stars
Wikimania 2014 was held last week in the Barbican Centre in London. Below, the Signpost's former "Technology report" writer Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250) shares his thoughts on a bustling conference.
- News and notes: Media Viewer controversy spreads to German Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundation staff members have now been granted superpowers that would allow them to override community consensus. The new protection level came as a response to attempts of German Wikipedia administrators to implement a community consensus on the new Media Viewer. "Superprotect" is a level above full protection, and prevents edits by administrators.
- Op-ed: Red links, blue links, and erythrophobia
Erythrophobia is the fear of, or sensitivity to, the colour red. Recently, I have seen more and more erythrophobic Wikipedians; specifically, Wikipedians who are scared of red links. In Wikipedia's early days, red links were encouraged and well-loved, and when I started editing in 2006, this was still mostly the case. Jump forward to 2014, and many editors now have an aversion to red links.
- In the media: Monkey selfie, net neutrality, and hoaxes
The Observer reported (August 2) that Google would "restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new 'right to be forgotten' legislation to affect the 110m-page encyclopaedia."
- Featured content: Cambridge got a lot of attention this week
Eight article, six lists, and two topics were promoted to featured status last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
- There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages.
- You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page.
- You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools.
- You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.
Wikidata
- After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews.
- After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote.
Problems
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07:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 August 2014
- Interview: Improving the visibility of digital archival assets using Wikipedia
Dorothy Howard interviews Michael Szajewski, archivist for digital development and university records at Ball State University.
- Traffic report: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero
Comedian Robin Williams' untimely death takes the top spot.
- WikiProject report: Bats and gloves
At the plate with WikiProject Baseball!
- Op-ed: A new metric for Wikimedia
Denny Vrandečić argues that "We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors."
- Featured content: English Wikipedia departs for Japan
Ten articles and three pictures were promoted to featured status last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
VisualEditor news
- There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed.
- You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages.
- If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor.
Future software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
- After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 August 2014
- In the media: Plagiarism and vandalism dominate Wikipedia news
Journalistic integrity, Congressional edits, and other news.
- News and notes: Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster
More discussions about Media Viewer, Superprotect, and software development
- Traffic report: Viral
"This was a week when an actual virus, Ebola, competed for attention with several viral social phenomena; most notably the Ice Bucket Challenge..."
- Featured content: Cheats at Featured Pictures!
Sixteen articles, five lists, five pictures, and one topic were promoted.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata.
- You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the
linksto:keyword in your search. - A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog".
- If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages".
VisualEditor news
- You can no longer delete required fields in templates.
- We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next.
- VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook.
- We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X).
- You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category.
Future software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
- There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in
#wikimedia-officeat freenode. - You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too.
- You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
- You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
07:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 03 September 2014
- Arbitration report: Media viewer case is suspended
"On 1 September, the Arbitrators voted to suspend the Media Viewer case for 60 days. After the suspension period is up, the case is to be closed unless the committee votes otherwise. The case suspension comes in response to several new initiatives and policies announced by the Wikimedia Foundation that may make the case moot. In the same motion, the committee declared that Eloquence's resignation of the administrator right was "under the cloud" and that he can only regain the right through another RfA."
- Featured content: 1882 × 5 in gold, and thruppence more
Two articles, one list, and ten pictures were promoted
- Op-ed: Automated copy-and-paste detection under trial
Doc James and some collaborators are working on quick detection of copyright violations
- Traffic report: Holding Pattern
"This week we saw three of the top ten articles remain in place, with the Ice Bucket Challenge at #1, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at #2, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant at #5, all for a second straight week..."
- WikiProject report: Gray's Anatomy (v. 2)
"This week, the Signpost went out to meet WikiProject Anatomy, dedicated to improving the articles about all our bones, brains, bladders and biceps, and getting them to the high standard expected of a comprehensive encyclopaedia."
- Recent research: A Wikipedia-based Pantheon; new Wikipedia analysis tool suite; how AfC hamstrings newbies
The latest roundup of research about Wikimedia
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
VisualEditor news
- From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next.
Future software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
- You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog.
- You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs.
Problems
- There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 10 September 2014
- Op-ed: Media Viewer software is not ready
Last month, I wrote an open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, inviting others to join me in a simple but important request: roll back the recent actions—both technical and social—by which the Wikimedia Foundation has overruled legitimate decisions of several Wikimedia projects.
- Traffic report: Refuge in celebrity
Even though it's not quite 3/4 over, it's safe to say that 2014 will go down as a year of war, mass murder, plane crashes and terrible diseases. While certainly paying it some heed, it's not surprising that Wikipedia viewers tried this week to find any alternative to that litany of tragedy and pain, and their chosen method of escape was, as usual, celebrity.
- Featured content: The louse and the fish's tongue
The amazing and strange tongue-eating louse replacing a fish's tongue! Because isopods, the subject of a new featured article, are both awesome and really damn weird!
- WikiProject report: Checking that everything's all right
This week, the Signpost decided to have a look around with WikiProject Check Wikipedia a maintenance project not concerned so much with articles' content, but in all the tiny errors that are to be found scattered within them. Their front page gives a list of things they mainly focus on ...
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 software changes
- You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the
mw-disambigCSS class. - There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names.
- New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited.
Problems
VisualEditor news
- If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number.
- The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet.
- You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for.
Future software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
- These changes are coming with the new version:
- If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 September 2014
- In the media: Turkish Twitter outrage, medical translation, audience metrics
The Hürriyet Daily News reports on a series of posts on Twitter from Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Ömer Çelik.
- WikiProject report: A trip up north to Scotland
As Scotland is deciding its future this week, we thought it might be a good idea to get to know the editors of WikiProject Scotland and talk to them about the project.
- News and notes: Wikipedia's traffic statistics are off by nearly one-third
A prominent Wikipedia researcher has discovered that the encyclopedia's widely used article traffic statistics are missing out on approximately one-third of total views.
- Traffic report: Tolstoy leads a varied pack
There is no unifying theme we can slap on top article popularity this week.
- Featured content: Which is not like the others?
Four articles, two lists, and 51 pictures were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
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 software changes
- You can test a new Beta Feature called HHVM. It should make editing faster. Please report bugs if you see them.
Problems
- There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
- Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
- There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
- If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.
- In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender.
- The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing.
- The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes.
- There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for
codeand Ctrl+Shift+5 forstrikethrough. - In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening.
Future site changes
- You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 September 2014
- Featured content: Oil paintings galore
Six articles, four lists, one topic, and 17 pictures were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
- In the media: Indian political editing, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Congressional chelonii
The Hindustan Times speculates (September 18) that politicians and their supporters are "sanitizing" their articles in advance of the 2014 Maharashtra State Assembly election. The Times notes the absence of significant controversies in the articles of particular politicians and the presence of heavily promotional language.
- Recent research: 99.25% of Wikipedia birthdates accurate; focused Wikipedians live longer; merging WordNet, Wikipedia and Wiktionary
0.75% of Wikipedia birthdates are inaccurate, reported Robert Viseur at WikiSym 2014. Those inaccuracies are "low, although higher than the 0.21% observed for the baseline reference sources". Given that biographies represent 15% of English Wikipedia, the third largest category after "arts" and "culture", their accuracy is important.
- Traffic report: Wikipedia watches the referendum in Scotland
This could be the beginning of a new era for this list. Until now, decisions to remove suspicious content have been largely educated guesswork. This week though, we have a new collaborator who can shine a light on the origins and patterns, sorting once and for all the webwheat from the cyberchaff.
- WikiProject report: GAN reviewers take note: competition time
A year and a week later, we're with some of the members of WikiProject Good Articles, who wanted to share the news of their upcoming contest within the project, the GA Cup. The aim of this friendly competition, which is held in the same light friendly manner of the WikiCup and the Core Contest, is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed articles at Good article nominations which has been a constant problem for quite a few years for those running the GA process.
- Arbitration report: Banning Policy, Gender Gap, and Waldorf education
Banning Policy finishes the workshop phase on 23 September. Parties have proposed findings of fact on the topics of the 3RR, the role of Jimbo Wales, and proxying for banned users. A request for arbitration was posted on 20 September about Landmark Worldwide.
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 software changes
- On Commons, you can now see what files are most used across all wikis. You can also see the same list for deleted or uncreated files.
- There are now many more translations for language names.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
- Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them.
- You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added.
- If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it.
- The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats.
Future changes
- You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
- JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 01 October 2014
- From the editor: The Signpost needs your help
Contributing to the Signpost can be one of the most rewarding things an editor can do.
- Dispatches: Let's get serious about plagiarism
This article was first published in the Signpost in 2009. Written by several long-standing editors, including the late Adrianne Wadewitz, the article was subjected to extensive commentary and ultimately influenced the English Wikipedia's plagiarism guideline. With recent debates about close paraphrasing vis-à-vis plagiarism, we feel that this dispatch retains its relevance and deserves a second airing.
- News and notes: Wikipedia article published in peer-reviewed journal; Wikipedia in education
The argument on Wikipedia over the benefits of crowdsourcing versus the primacy of "expert" contributors stretches back to co-founder Larry Sanger's break with the project to start the alternative Citizendium.
- WikiProject report: Animals, farms, forests, USDA? It must be WikiProject Agriculture
This week, the Signpost went down to the farm to have a look at the work of WikiProject Agriculture, which has been in existence since 2007 and has a scope covering crop production, livestock management, aquaculture, dairy farming and forest management.
- Traffic report: Shanah Tovah
Jews wished each other Shanah Tovah ("Good year") this week as Rosh Hashanah was our most popular article. It was also a week not dominated by heavy news and tragedies, so aside from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (#2, sixth week in the Top 10), our popular article list runs the gamut of current events including new television series Gotham (#3), the 2014 Asian Games (#4), and Reddit-fueled popularity for German director Uwe Boll (#7).
- Featured content: Brothers at War
As the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War draws to a close, the race to improve content continues. The Battle of Franklin, fought on November 30, 1864, will, quite appropriately, be Picture of the Day for November 30, 2014, its 150th anniversary. If you want to help commemorate the American Civil War, why not help out at the Military History WikiProject's Operation Brothers at War. Or help out with the World War I centennial, just starting up, Operation Great War Centennial.
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 use the
phab:andphabricator:interwikis to link to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org. - Some wikis have a template to track bugs in Bugzilla. You should update it to work with Phabricator. You can look at the one on mediawiki.org to see how.
- You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki.
- A new tool can now create thumbnails of large TIFF images. This concerns files larger than 50 megapixels. These thumbnails are also sharpened. You can comment on Commons.
- The Media Viewer tool has a clearer link to the file page. It also has buttons to download, share and embed the file. You can enlarge images by clicking on them.
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
- If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit.
- We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next.
- On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis.
- You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8.
- 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster.
Future changes
- You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work.
- More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 08 October 2014
- In the media: Opposition research firm blocked; Australian bushfires
Also, Wikimedia Norge and Nobel Peace Center edit-a-thon
- Featured content: From a wordless novel to a coat of arms via New York City
2 Featured articles, 4 Featured lists, 62 Featured pictures, and 2 Featured portals were promoted.
- Traffic report: Panic and denial
The first case of the Ebola virus on US shores sent people into a tizzy, rushing to their keyboards to try and learn what they could.
- Technology report: HHVM is the greatest thing since sliced bread
No seriously, it is.
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 software changes
- You can now log into Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. Create your account and add your Bugzilla email address. We are copying the bugs from Bugzilla. Bugzilla is still open.
- You will now get the VisualEditor newsletter in your language if someone has translated it. You can add translations. You can know about the next translations by joining the translators list or asking Elitre (WMF).
Problems
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
- 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature.
Meetings
- You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC).
- There is a proposal to organize file pages better. It would use the same tools as Wikidata. You can join a meeting about it on October 16, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC).
- You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC).
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08:54, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 October 2014
- Op-ed: Ships—sexist or sexy?
Why does Wikipedia still use the gendered pronouns "she" and "her" for ships?
- In the media: College player falsely linked to sports scandal by Wikipedia; the Nobel Prizes
Ben Koo of the sports blog Awful Announcing investigated how player Joe Streater's name became involved in recent years with a historic sports scandal.
- Arbitration report: One case closed and two opened
The Banning Policy case was closed on 12 October. Arbcom affirmed that users have "considerable leeway" in terms of how their talk pages are managed.
- Featured content: Bells ring out at the Temple of the Dragon at Peace
Nine articles and twenty-six pictures were promoted to featured status on the English Wikipedia.
- Technology report: Attempting to parse wikitext
This week we sat down with The Earwig to learn about his wikitext parser.
- Traffic report: Now introducing ... mobile data
We are pleased to report that the WP:5000 has now been updated to include mobile views, including a column reflecting the percentage of views coming from mobile devices.
- WikiProject report: Signpost reaches the Midwest
Today, it's the turn of WikiProject Ohio to give us an interview probing deep into of how they manage to run a project covering one fiftieth of the United States, and the workings of how they manufacture their successes and other articles.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.
Recent changes
- You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
- You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists.
File information cleanup
- You can join a wiki project to help tools read file information. It will help people reuse files.
- See how to fix metadata. You can fix it by adding markers to templates and adding templates to files.
- You can see a list of files missing machine-readable information on your wiki.
- The files missing readable data are also in these categories: no license, no description, no author or no source.
Problems
- Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser.
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
- 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature.
- If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
13:48, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 October 2014
- Featured content: Admiral on deck: a modern Ada Lovelace
Four articles, four lists, and fifty-three pictures were promoted to featured status.
- Op-ed: Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution—a wiki-protest
Our op-ed writer this week opines that the organization of Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution" resembles how Wikipedia is organized.
- In the media: The story of Wikipedia; Wikipedia reanimated and republished; New UK government social media rules; death of Italian Wikipedia administrator
Among many newsworthy stories this week, the Signpost notes the passing of Italian Wikipedia administrator and former Wikimedia Italia treasurer [Cotton
- Traffic report: Death, War, Pestilence... Movies and TV
Ebola, movies and television articles appear in this week's top ten.
- WikiProject report: De-orphanning articles—a huge task but with a huge team of volunteers to help
PaintedCarpet explains that "WikiProject Orphanage aims to connect all Wikipedia pages, so that pages can be found and read more easily."
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 was an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself.
- There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly.
- There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday.
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
- VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData.
- VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them.
- VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit".
- The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
05:20, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 October 2014
- Featured content: Go West, young man
By the way, there is a monster at the end of this article
- In the media: Wikipedia a trusted source on Ebola; Wikipedia study labeled government waste; football biography goes viral
Noam Cohen reports in The New York Times (October 26) that Wikipedia's "Ebola Virus Disease article has had 17 million page views in the last month," an indication of the public's reliance on the online encyclopedia.
- Maps tagathon: Find 10,000 digitised maps this weekend
Rather than the usual WikiProject Report, this week our guest author Jheald is telling us about a campaign to identify thousands of old maps which have been digitised, to make them available for georeferencing and upload
- Traffic report: Ebola, Ultron, and Creepy Articles
Ebola virus disease leads the Report for the fourth straight week. The rest of the list is primarily a mix of pop culture topics, including movie Avengers: Age of Ultron (#4) whose trailer was leaked early, and the death of Oscar de la Renta (#7). A BuzzFeed article on creepy Wikipedia articles, no doubt well-timed with Halloween (#9) around the corner, was responsible for three articles in the Top 25, including June and Jennifer Gibbons (#10), Taman Shud Case (#17), Joyce Vincent (#25). And the internet-run-amok controversy of Gamergate cracked the Top 25 for the first time at #19.
- Recent research: Informed consent and privacy; newsmaking on Wikipedia; Wikipedia and organizational theories
In new research conducted in light of proposed changes to data protection legislation in the European Union (EU), authors Bart Custers, Simone van der Hof, and Bart Schermer conducted a comparative analysis of social media and user-generated content websites’ privacy policies along with a user survey (N=8,621 in 26 countries) and interviews in 13 different EU countries on awareness, values, and attitudes toward privacy online.
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 software changes
- The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference.
- You can no longer use the
insource:keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later.
Problems
- There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday.
- Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed.
- HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
- Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the
<indicator>tag in these templates instead to add the icons. - VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one.
- The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes.
- After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData.
Future changes
- The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 05 November 2014
- In the media: Predicting the flu, MH17 conspiracy theories
"Rachel Feltman, in The Washington Post (November 4), examined research in which a team, mostly from Los Alamos National Laboratory, headed by Kyle Hickman developed a model that enabled them "to successfully predict the 2013-2014 flu season in real time" by employing "an algorithm to link flu-related Wikipedia searches with CDC data from the same time." Apparently when individuals search for information about the flu and its symptoms in Wikipedia when they feel ill, this generates data useful in forecasting the the flu season."
- Traffic report: Sweet dreams on Halloween
"It is, perhaps, ironic that humanity chose the week of Halloween to finally put its fears to bed. Let's face it: 2014 has been a year of tragedies, conflicts, plagues and pain, and eventually something had to break... Whether we at last came to terms with our limited ability to affect events, shoved those events under the carpet, or just decided to let go and move on, we turned our eye to more positive things, such as sports heroes, hotly anticipated movies, and lifelong learning; two Google doodles appeared in the top 25 for the first time since the beginning of August."
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 software changes
- You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata.
- The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net.
- Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
- You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
- You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.
Problems
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
- You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions.
- The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More".
- The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 12 November 2014
- In the media: Amazon Echo; EU freedom of panorama; Bluebeard's Castle
"Technology media outlets are abuzz after the November 6 unveiling of the Amazon Echo, an Internet-connected voice command device"; "The EUobserver talks (November 4) with Dimitar Dimitrov (User:Dimi z) about the lack of freedom of panorama in some European Union countries and its implications for Wikimedia projects"; "Scott Cantrell, classical music critic for the Dallas Morning News, recounts efforts to verify an uncited claim in the Wikipedia article for the Béla Bartók opera Bluebeard's Castle."
- Traffic report: Holidays, anyone?
This was very much a week dominated by holidays and pop culture over current events, with new film Interstellar taking the top spot followed by holidays Day of the Dead (#2), Guy Fawkes and his Night (#4 and #5), and Halloween (#8, and its third week on the list). And a foursome of television shows, all return visitors, appear to setting up residence on the greater Top 25: The Walking Dead (#11), American Horror Story: Freak Show (#14), Gotham (#16), and The Flash (#18).
- Featured content: Wikipedia goes to church in Lithuania
Nine articles, two lists, and 55 featured pictures were promoted during the week of 26 October.
- WikiProject report: Talking hospitals
We return to our interview format this week, speaking with the participants of WikiProject Hospitals. This project, formed in 2010, has no Featured content and only three Good articles, yet aided by around 30 hard-working Wikipedians covers a topic that is essential to life.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
- The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19.
Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator
- The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
- You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
- You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
- Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
- You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:28, 17 November 2014 (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
Problems
- There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the
colspanorrowspanoption. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
- You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options.
- VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved.
- You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window.
- VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 November 2014
- Featured content: Orbital Science: Now you're thinking with explosions
Four articles, four lists, eleven pictures, and one topic were promoted.
- In the media: A Russian alternative Wikipedia; Who's your grandfather?; ArtAndFeminism
Numerous media outlets are reporting on a November 14 statement on the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library announcing the formation of a Russian "alternative" to Wikipedia, a "regional electronic encyclopedia" dedicated to "Russian regions and the life of the country".
- Recent research: Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures
The monthly roundup of research related to Wikimedia.
- WikiProject report: Back with the military historians
It's time for this year's edition of the Report looking at possibly our largest wikiproject: Military history. Since our last interview in June 2013, the project has had no break in its huge quest to document everything in their scope, that is, militaries and conflicts of the past. As usual, its participants were eager to answer the questions posed by The Signpost and update us on how they are doing.
- Traffic report: Big in Japan
Often times in popular culture, a subject will be quite popular among a distinct niche of people or region of the world, but little-known elsewhere -- like a musical artist that is boasted to be "big in Japan". The Traffic Report provides a bevy of examples this week.
The Signpost: 03 December 2014
- In the media: Embroidery and cheese
- Featured content: ABCD: Any Body Can Dance!
- Traffic report: Turkey and a movie
- WikiProject report: Today on the island
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 software changes
- All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster.
- You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues.
Problems
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar).
- You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key.
- It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better.
- The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs.
- (Lua) You can no longer use
mw.text.unstripto get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix.
Future changes
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
17:11, 8 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 10 December 2014
- Op-ed: It's GLAM up North!
- Traffic report: Dead Black Men and Science Fiction
- Featured content: Honour him, love and obey? Good idea with military leaders.
This Month in GLAM: November 2014
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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 software changes
- You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata.
- You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects.
- You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.
Software changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar).
- You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu,
Ctrl+ForCmd+F. - VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold.
- The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change.
Future changes
- The star image of the watchlist may change soon.
- You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC).
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:44, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 December 2014
- Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee election results
- Featured content: Tripping hither, tripping thither, Nobody knows why or whither; We must dance and we must sing, Round about our fairy ring!
- Traffic report: A December Lull
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 software changes
- The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private.
Software changes this week
- There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6.
Future changes
- The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations.
- A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 December 2014
- From the editor: Looking for new editors-in-chief
- In the media: Wales on GamerGate
- Featured content: Still quoting Iolanthe, apparently.
- WikiProject report: Microsoft does The Signpost
- Traffic report: North Korea is not pleased
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Software changes
- There are no technical changes this week.
Feedback about Tech News in 2014
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Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)