User talk:94rain

Tech News: 2019-39
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * Some edits that used the visual editor were not working. This has now been fixed.
 * Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The developers are working on the problem.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 September. It will be on all wikis from 26 September (calendar).
 * You will be able to read but not to edit an important number of mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes on 24 September at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis.
 * You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on 26 September at 05:00 (UTC).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Internet Explorer 6 and 7 might not be supported in the future. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They would not get security support. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them makes the wikis less secure for everyone else.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:20, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-39
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * Some edits that used the visual editor were not working. This has now been fixed.
 * Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The developers are working on the problem.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 September. It will be on all wikis from 26 September (calendar).
 * You will be able to read but not to edit an important number of mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes on 24 September at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis.
 * You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on 26 September at 05:00 (UTC).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Internet Explorer 6 and 7 might not be supported in the future. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They would not get security support. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them makes the wikis less secure for everyone else.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:21, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-39
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * Some edits that used the visual editor were not working. This has now been fixed.
 * Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The developers are working on the problem.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 September. It will be on all wikis from 26 September (calendar).
 * You will be able to read but not to edit an important number of mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes on 24 September at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis.
 * You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on 26 September at 05:00 (UTC).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Internet Explorer 6 and 7 might not be supported in the future. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They would not get security support. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them makes the wikis less secure for everyone else.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:27, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-40
 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
 * Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working on a watchlist expiry feature. This means you can put things on your watchlist for a period of time instead of forever. They are looking for feedback on the questions they have.
 * Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other  pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:49, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #10
Welcome to the tenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

 * Growth team features are now fully deployed in Arabic Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia (along with Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias). If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then, go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
 * We have deployed features that help newcomers find their newcomer homepage. These features were successful, and more than doubled the number of newcomers who find their homepage.  In Czech Wikipedia, 72% of newcomers visit their homepage and in Korean Wikipedia, 49% of newcomers visit their homepage.
 * You can now join the Growth discussion space on the Wikimedia Space. This space has been created during Wikimania, to coordinate initiatives around welcoming newcomers. Please come and say hello!

Growth at Wikimania

 * Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimania in Stockholm. We helped organize a conference track around Community Growth, presented about our team's work, and had many conversations with community members from around the world.
 * Here are the most important links:
 * Notes and learnings from Wikimania
 * Video of Growth team presentation about our work and learnings from the past year
 * Slides from Growth team presentation
 * These are some of our topline notes:
 * Alignment on newcomer retention: It seems like Wikimania attendees generally believe that newcomer retention is an important problem.
 * Connecting offline to online: Enthusiasm for ideas that connect our features better to offline events, such as making homepage mentors correspond to offline mentors.
 * Mentor dashboard: Experienced users requested a dashboard with which they could monitor newcomers who may need help.

Newcomer tasks -- feedback needed!

 * The Growth team's main project right now is newcomer tasks, which will suggest easy edits for newcomers. It will be built as a new module for the newcomer homepage.
 * We hope that this project will help newcomers build their skills before attempting more difficult edits, such as creating new articles or adding images.
 * These are the three main challenges we've been working on:
 * Where to find the tasks? After considering many different sources for tasks, we've decided to start by using maintenance templates, which are applied by editors on most wikis, and including tasks like copy editing, adding links, and adding references.
 * How to match to interests? Research shows that users are more likely to work on articles that are related to their interests.  We are currently prototyping methods to ask newcomers their interests and then find articles that match.
 * How to guide the newcomer? Once a newcomer has selected a recommended article, they will need guidance on how to complete the edit.  We have decided to use the help panel to provide that guidance while the newcomer edits.
 * We are currently engineering on this feature, and we recently published notes from user tests that give mostly positive feedback.
 * You can explore the design for newcomer tasks in these interactive mockups. We hope to hear from you about your thoughts on the project talk page.  Do you think this could be helpful for newcomers?  What are we missing?

'' Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. '' 18:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)