Project:Tech News

From mediawiki.org
Archives

Tech News: 2018-02

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

  • On Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [1][2]
  • Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [3]
  • Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [4]
  • Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of its old custom one. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [5][6]

Problems

  • Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [7]
  • With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [8]
  • The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [9]
  • Octicons-tools.svg Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

  • Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [11]
  • The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [12][13]
  • Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
  • Octicons-tools.svg WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [14]

Meetings

  • Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • 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 10 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:19, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-3

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

  • Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [15]
  • Octicons-tools.svg There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [16]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [17][18]

Changes later this week

  • Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).

Meetings

  • Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • 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 17 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Octicons-tools.svg A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [19][20]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:45, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-04

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

  • With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [23]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

  • irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [24]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:55, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-05

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

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:06, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-06

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

  • Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to. [26]
  • The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language. [27]
  • Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded. [28]

Problems

  • Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this. [29]

Changes later this week

  • When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users. [30]
  • When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like gallery widths="150px". You could use em or % instead of px but it would make no difference. You can now only use 150px or nothing (150). If you write something else, instead of treating it like px, it will not work. [31]
  • The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of Yes or No it will say Thank and Cancel. It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public. [32]
  • Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it. [33]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:51, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-07

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

  • TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [36][37][38]
  • Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.

Changes later this week

  • You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [39]
  • The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like {{reflist}}, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [40]
  • The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [41]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 February at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:59, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-08

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

Recent changes

  • The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [43][44]
  • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [45]

Problems

  • Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [46]
  • Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like {{sfn}} are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [47][48]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:54, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-09

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

  • Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [50]

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [51][52]
  • Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [53]
  • Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [54][55][56]

Changes later this week

  • Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [57]
  • Advanced item The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [58][59]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 February at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 28 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:52, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-10

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

Recent changes

  • You can now make longer edit summaries. [60]

Changes later this week

  • You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. [61]
  • On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [62][63]
  • Advanced item Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [64]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-11

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

  • 3D models can now be uploaded to Commons. [65]
  • Page Previews has been updated to use HTML for previews. This has fixed many issues. An A/B test was done on English and German Wikipedia to measure how it is used. Other changes were also made. [66]
  • Some edits have to be checked against too many conditions before they can trigger an abuse filter. If that is the reason no filter is triggered the edit will be tagged for review. [67]
  • Auto-saving has been added to the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. Right now it is meant to help if your browser crashes or if you accidentally close a tab. [68]

Problems

  • The abuse filter did not tag all edits that should have been tagged after last week's MediaWiki version had come to the wikis. It was fixed on 9 March (UTC). [69]

Changes later this week

  • You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. This was originally planned to happen last week. [70]
  • It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [71][72]
  • Advanced item A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [73][74][75]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:44, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-12

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

  • On March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed. [76]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item There is no Editing team meeting this week.
  • Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days. [77][78]
  • In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity. Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments on the project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:03, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-13

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

Changes later this week

  • Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [79] [80]
  • Advanced item The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [81]
  • TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [82]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [83]
  • Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-14

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

  • Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.
  • Advanced item The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools, please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.

Problems

  • MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version 1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week. [84][85][86]
  • The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [87]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).
  • Advanced item User subpages ending in .json will now be protected from other people editing them, like .js and .css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage like User:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns. [88]
  • Advanced item Tidy will be replaced by RemexHtml on the next set of wikis. On April 4, we plan to turn off Tidy on all Wikiquotes (except frwikiquote) and Wikimedia chapters and user groups wikis. 23 wikis will have Tidy replaced this time. [89][90][91]
  • Advanced item AbuseFilter will transition to use OOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks. [92] [93]
  • In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [94]
  • You can see names of individual abuse filters in Special:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed. [95]
  • You can now search through filter patterns at Special:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or a regular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted. [96]

Meetings

  • Recurrent item You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you can give your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.
  • Advanced item On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please follow T175706 to monitor progress of Tidy replacement. [97][98]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:28, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Tech_News&oldid=2750735"