User talk:RobLa-WMF/Archive 1

Meetings notes
Hi! I've centralized and standardized meetings notes at Meetings. Please let me know if you have any concerns. --MZMcBride 22:48, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much for copying on wiki WMF Projects/OWA/OWA Meeting 2010-11-18 etc.! Do you know if there's a way to make Etherpad produce a complete list of public pages created on the installation? Thank you, Nemo 23:32, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Other projects cannot share the same MediaWiki global variable names
What did you mean in by "most other projects cannot share the same MediaWiki global variable names"? Given that our globals are namespaced by a $wg prefix, namespace collisions doesn't seem a problem for third parties. Platonides 21:46, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The abundance of globals in our software is in direct conflict with the coding standards of most projects. Maybe they technically could reuse components from our system, but they won't. -- RobLa-WMF 21:57, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

"backcompat" tag and being a pedant
My initial thought is that your email to wikitech-l about the tag "backcompat" is counter-intuitive, and a labelling "backincompat" may be more explicit.

My concern is that "backcompat' can be ambiguous. it can mean either To the geeks it may be obvious, to those of us speaking English it is less so.  Anyway, just 20c worth of thoughts for consideration before it progresses. — billinghurst  sDrewth  14:13, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
 * that the change *is* backwards compatible so mark it as such; or
 * that the change "is incompatible" so mark it as such

Test
testtesttest

Platform engineering
Hi, I'm Edward and I am writing a book on Wikipedia. I am trying to understand how the WMF budget is spent, but I not a computer expert and I am struggling to understand the difference between 'technical operations' and 'platform' and things like that. I'm assuming that technical operations is stuff like servers and datacentres and wires and routers and things, whereas 'platform' is more like MediaWiki software. Would that be about right? Sorry for being an idiot. (I do run a wiki myself as you can see from my user page, but that's about as far as it goes). Edward Buckner (talk) 18:51, 24 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Edward, not a stupid question at all (I get asked this a lot), and you basically have it right. Wikimedia Platform Engineering mainly deals with the MediaWiki side of things (as well as some other things that require intensive software development, such as our custom layer between Lucene search engine and MediaWiki).  Platform Engineering has four subteams, actually, only one of which (MediaWiki Core) fits that description.  The other subgroups (Engineering Community, Quality Assurance, and Analytics Engineering) do work that is suggested by their names.  The Wikimedia Platform Engineering page attempts to break this down.  Hope this helps! -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 01:57, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Rob that's really helpful - many thanks. Edward Buckner (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-27
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.


 * Recent software changes: (Not all changes will affect you.)


 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf9) was added to test wikis on June 27. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 8, and on all Wikipedias on July 11.
 * On Wikisource, the canonical names of the "Index" and "Page" namespaces in the Proofread Page extension are no longer localized (bug #47596). Please check scripts that depend on.
 * A JavaScript problem caused the "" and "" tabs in the Vector skin to be moved into the drop-down menu on right-to-left wikis. The issue is now fixed and links are visible as before (bug #50196).
 * There was a short site outage on June 28.
 * The automated Category: now includes broken file links inserted inside the  tag (bug #50119).
 * The Nearby feature is now enabled on Commons and shows images in a user's area.
 * There is now a special page listing disambiguation pages for wikis that use the Disambiguator extension (bug #44040).
 * The old version of the Article feedback tool (version 4) was removed from wikis that still used it.
 * VisualEditor news:
 * Many bugs that caused text to be removed or damaged have been fixed, including one related to copy-paste (bug #49816).
 * VisualEditor now offers a visual interface to edit references.
 * In preparation for enabling the VisualEditor on a wider scale, new documentation has been created, including a list of frequently-asked questions and a user guide with many images. Please help with translations.
 * Several problems related to overlapping of elements with the VisualEditor toolbar have been fixed (bug #50096, #50159, #50324).
 * TemplateData information is now displayed for templates that are added to a page (bug #49778).
 * Section edit links now show links to both VisualEditor and the old (source) editor (bug #49666).
 * Images are now loaded securely when using HTTPS (bug #43015).


 * Future software changes:
 * VisualEditor will be enabled for all logged-in English Wikipedia users on July 1, and for all users on July 8.
 * From July 8, it will be possible to upload WAV and native FLAC files to Commons, and use them directly on wiki pages (bug-49505>bugzilla:49505|bug #49505).
 * The Universal Language Selector will be added to the English Wikipedia on July 2, and to remaining wikis on July 9.


 * Erratum
 * Tech news #26 incorrectly reported that audio transcoding was added to TimedMediaHandler; it was actually statistics about audio transcoding that were added.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 14:33, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-28
Latest technews>m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News|tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. more-transl>m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2013/28|Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)


 * VisualEditor news:
 * VisualEditor deployment [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVisualEditor%2FFeedback&diff=563042612&oldid=563038914 has been delayed] by a week. It is now planned to enable the editor for logged–in editors on chosen Wikipedias on July 22, and on all Wikipedias on July 29.
 * A bug that made it impossible to save VisualEditor edits that triggered a CAPTCHA has been fixed.
 * Several bugs that occurred on right–to–left wikis have been fixed last week (bug #49416, bug #49613, bug #50543).
 * Uploading files has been restricted on Meta Wiki to administrators and the newly created uploader group. An exemption doctrine policy is being developed (bug #50287).
 * Emergency priority CentralNotice banners will always be shown unless users have hidden them, ignoring cookies set for lower priority banners.

Future software changes


 * MediaWiki will allow choosing a specific page of a PDF document or a thumbnail of a video file to show up inside the  tag (bug #8480).
 * It will now be possible to create empty  messages, for instance in order to disable them (bug #50124).
 * The Nearby feature will soon be enabled on Wikivoyage wikis again.
 * The Notifications extension messages will now include a direct link to diffs on wiki as well as in notification e-mails (bug #48183).
 * Table of contents will now use the HTML  element instead of , fixing a nine–year–old bug #658.
 * First mock–ups of a mobile Wikidata application have been published by Pragun Bhutani as part of his Google Summer of Code project.
 * A discussion on minimum documentation practices in MediaWiki code has been started and awaits comments from the community.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 18:44, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-29
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)


 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf10) was added to test wikis on July 11. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 15, and on all Wikipedias on July 18.
 * The Disambiguator extension was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis on July 9 (bug #50174). To use it, add the  code to disambiguation templates ([//de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=120414784&oldid=76564202 see example]).
 * The Universal Language Selector was added to all remaining wikis on July 9, finishing the process of replacing the Narayam and WebFonts extensions.
 * The CommonsDelinker bot is now on-line and operating again, after a password problem was fixed (bug #51016).
 * VisualEditor news:
 * According to the schedule, VisualEditor will be available to all users on the English Wikipedia on July 15.
 * Users should add TemplateData to templates to prepare for VisualEditor. A tutorial is available.
 * Parameters marked as "required" in TemplateData are now auto-added when you add a template (bug #50747).
 * Warnings are now displayed in VisualEditor when users edit pages that are protected or have edit notices (bug #50415).
 * Many other bugs have been fixed in VisualEditor during the past two weeks.
 * The Wikimedia technical report for June has been published, with a summary that can be translated.

Future software changes
 * A new version of the Single User Login system for global accounts will be enabled on July 17. Users will now automatically go back to the previous page instead of seeing the "Login success" page with logos.
 * The software that resizes images on all wikis will change on July 18. Resizing of big images will be faster and more reliable, and the resolution limit for GIF, PNG and TIFF files (currently set at 50 megapixels) will be removed.
 * Edit tags (mostly used by AbuseFilter) will now also be on diff pages. They include a link to Special:Tags before the edit summary. Wikis that use links in tag messages should remove them.
 * Global edit filters are currently in testing and will be added to wikis later.
 * Wikivoyage wikis will start to use Wikidata for interwiki links on July 22.
 * A new [//tools.wmflabs.org/bawolff/gallery/index.php?title=Featured_pictures/Non-photographic_media image gallery design] has been proposed by Brian Wolff; comments and feedback are welcome.
 * An IRC discussion about Bugzilla is planned for July 16, at 16:00 (UTC) on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion).

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 17:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-30
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)


 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 18. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 22, and on all Wikipedias on July 25.
 * A new version of the Flow Prototype can be tested on Wikimedia Labs.
 * VisualEditor news:
 * The schedule to add VisualEditor to non-English Wikipedias has been changed: the new editor will be available for logged-in users on the German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) and Swedish (sv) Wikipedias on July 24, and for all users on those wikis on July 29.
 * A warning is now displayed if an edit made with VisualEditor matches an edit filter (bug #50472).
 * SpamBlacklist messages are also supported (bug #50826).
 * Users can now edit  blocks (bug #47678).
 * When a user types text at the end of a link, the link now expands to that text.
 * Freely-licensed fonts for the Cree, Inuktitut and Urdu languages were added to Universal Language Selector, fixing bug #42421 and bug #46693.
 * A Wikidata search plugin for the Firefox web browser was released by Jeroen De Dauw and can be downloaded from the Mozilla add-ons website.

Future software changes


 * The change of the Wikimedia image scaling system from ImageMagick to VipsScaler (announced in the previous issue) has been postponed until bug #51370 is fixed.
 * Administrators will no longer see an unblock link for autoblocked IP addresses on the contributions page (bug #46457).
 * A request for comments on site-wide CSS was started on MediaWiki.org.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 21:17, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-31
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes; not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 25. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 29, and on all Wikipedias on August 1.
 * Wikivoyage was offline for around 40 minutes on July 24.
 * Pywikipediabot moved their code from SVN to git; bot owners need to update their tools.
 * The Notifications and Thanks extensions were added to Meta-Wiki on July 26; other wikis will get them soon.
 * It is now possible to add edit summaries on Wikidata using the API; the feature will be added to user interface soon.
 * The software that resizes large PNG images on all wikis was changed on July 25. Resizing of PNG files bigger than 35 megapixels should be faster and more reliable now.
 * Three new webfonts (Gentium, Old Persian and Shapour) will be added to Universal Language Selector., ,
 * Special:MIMESearch, which gives a list of files by type, will be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis with MediaWiki version 1.22/wmf12 (bug #13438).
 * A mailing list to discuss multimedia features was started; users are encouraged to sign up.
 * VisualEditor news:
 * On July 24, VisualEditor was added for logged-in users on the German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) and Swedish (sv) Wikipedias; it will be added for all users on those wikis on July 29.
 * A preference to completely disable VisualEditor while it is in beta phase was added on July 24.
 * Many bugs were fixed in right-to-left languages.
 * It is possible again to scroll down in the template editing window (bug #51739).
 * VisualEditor now works with the FlaggedRevisions extension. (bug #49699)
 * If the user opens VisualEditor using a section edit link, the title of the section is added to the edit summary (bug #50872).
 * Invisible templates now can't be deleted by accident or on purpose (bug #51322).

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 20:59, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-34;
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features


 * The previous version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 15. It was enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 22.
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 22. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 29.
 * You can now use new styles of galleries. Please give feedback to User:Bawolff.
 * You can now visit a random page in a category, for example Special:RandomInCategory/Science. (25931)
 * You can now use the and  ), math text ([[File:VisualEditor - Icon - Equation.svg|border] for ), Egyptian hieroglyphs (VisualEditor - Icon - Hieroglyphics.svg for   ), and to say that text is in another language (VisualEditor - Icon - Language.svg for lang="ar" dir="rtl" ). (51609, 51612, 51611, 51590, 51610, 52352)
 * You can now use VisualEditor with the Opera browser.

Future
 * Starting on August 26, you will be able to use data from Wikidata on Wikivoyage sites.
 * Starting on August 27, you will also get notifications on the mobile site if you're logged in to a wiki using notifications.
 * Starting on August 28, all users with an account will be using HTTPS to access Wikimedia sites. HTTPS brings better security and improves your privacy. Some countries (like China) will not use HTTPS. If HTTPS causes problems for you, tell us on meta.
 * Starting on August 29, you will get the code editor interface to edit JavaScript and CSS pages on all wikis.
 * The plan to use Solr for search in MediaWiki was changed; instead, Elasticsearch is now planned.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 20:15, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-40
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features
 * Special:Listfiles can now display old versions of files a user has uploaded. A new link was also added (Special:AllMyFiles) that gives a list of all files the current user has ever uploaded (that haven't been deleted).
 * There is now an Android application to contribute to translatewiki.net from mobile devices.

VisualEditor news
 * VisualEditor now has a new toolbar with drop-down menus for advanced tools.
 * Many bugs were fixed, some related to copy-and-paste.
 * You can now move references, list of references, templates and other elements with the mouse ("drag-and-drop").
 * You are invited to comment on designs for the interface to add references in VisualEditor.

Future
 * Developers are looking for ideas of small technical projects that new developers could work on. Please add your ideas.
 * Developers are looking for wikis who would accept to try using secure links (HTTPS) for all users.
 * You can join an IRC discussion about "Beta features", a tool to try new features, on October 3.
 * You can join an IRC discussion about Flow, the new wiki discussion tool, on October 17.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 20:18, 2 October 2013 (UTC)