This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
A warm welcome to our new intern, Lucas Werkmeister! You may now him for his work on queries as WikidataFacts. He will work in the team for the next months.
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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [1]
The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [2]
English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [3]
Problems
Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [4]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:54, 6 April 2017 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2017-04-06T22:54:00.000Z","author":"MediaWiki message delivery","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-MediaWiki_message_delivery-2017-04-06T22:54:00.000Z-Books_and_Bytes_-_Issue_21","replies":[]}}-->
There's now also a #100wikidays challenge on Wikidata, aptly named #100wikidatadays! It is a personal challenge in which a person very significantly improves (at least) one Wikidata items per day, for 100 days in a row. There was already a version of the challenge on various Wikipedias, on Commons and on Wikisource - now on Wikidata as well. Participate and make Wikidata shine!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [7]
New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [8]
The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [9]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.
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 add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [10]
The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [12]
Problems
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.
Changes this week
There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [13]
From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. [14][15]
The fourth fiscal quarter began the first of this month, and Collaboration Team has begun work on our new quarterly goals. In the coming months, we'll be working to release the New Filters for Edit Review beta on all wikis and then to improve the beta as much as possible based on user feedback. On that score, we're planning a round of user interviews on the new tools in May to get detailed information about usability and usefulness. If you've tried the new features and have thoughts, please share them with us in any language.
Our other focus right now is to look at what changes will be needed to spread the new filtering interface to other review pages, especially Watchlist. We're also exploring how to incorporate the tools we didn't include in the new interface in this round, like the Tag Filters, time-frame selector and Namespace filter.
New Filters for Edit review are now available on Polish, Portuguese, Persian, Russian and Turkish Wikipedias as a Beta feature. French Wikipedia and Mediawikiwiki have the filters as a Beta feature too, but without the quality and intent filters. [16]
Special:RecentChangesLinked now displays a message when no results are found for a given combination of filters. [17]
Problems
Polish Wikipedia is experiencing an issue with predictions (quality and intent filters using ORES). The different predictions are in conflict. An edit can be considered as "good" and "bad" at the same time, and the filter levels are somewhat redundant. We have formulated a plan to address this and are working on a fix, which is deployed progressively on Polish Wikipedia. [18]
The issue on Polish Wikipedia is shared by a few other wikis: Dutch, Czech and Hebrew, and Wikidata. The deployment for those wikis has been postponed to Tuesday, May 9. Wikis without this predictions problem have been deployed or will be deployed with no change on the schedule. [19]
Interestingly, the "problem" with those wikis is that they perform better than we anticipated. Once the fix is in place, the tools will work with particular simplicity on these wikis.
Future changes
English Wikipedia and all wikis without ORES prediction services will get the New Filters for Edit review on Monday, April 24. [20]
All remaining wikis will get the New Filters for Edit review on Tuesday, May 9. [21]
Wikidata edits will be added as a type of change on New Filters for Edit review. [22]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups.[27]
Problems
Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [28]
Changes this week
The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [29]
Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [30]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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Wednesday night you are invited! Bay Area WikiSalon
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Please join us in downtown San Francisco!
The last Wednesday evening of every month, wiki enthusiasts gather for the Bay Area WikiSalon series to collaborate, mingle, and learn about new projects and ideas.
We allow time for informal conversation and working on articles. Newcomers and experienced wiki users are encouraged to attend. Free Wi-Fi is available so bring your editing devices. We will have beverages (including beer and wine) plus light snacks. We will have some announcements and lightning talks from the floor, and a breakout session. This is our one year anniversary, so there will be cake!
Please RSVP here,and bring a photo ID that matches your registration name. This also helps us figure out how much food and drink to bring in.
Hi - The RSVP form linked from the page for tomorrow's salon currently says March. Funcrunch (talk) 16:21, 25 April 2017 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2017-04-25T16:21:00.000Z","author":"Funcrunch","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Funcrunch-2017-04-25T16:21:00.000Z-April_2017_WikiSalon","replies":["c-Checkingfax-2017-04-26T09:14:00.000Z-Funcrunch-2017-04-25T16:21:00.000Z"]}}-->
Hi, Funcrunch. Good eye. Thanks! Fixed it. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}09:14, 26 April 2017 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2017-04-26T09:14:00.000Z","author":"Checkingfax","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Checkingfax-2017-04-26T09:14:00.000Z-Funcrunch-2017-04-25T16:21:00.000Z","replies":[]}}-->
Hello, Checkingfax. I wanted to give you a heads up that I left you a note on the Walmart Talk page, continuing our discussion of the Walmart Neighborhood Market section. I'm happy to answer any questions on this. Thanks, JLD at Walmart (talk) 14:31, 25 April 2017 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2017-04-25T14:31:00.000Z","author":"JLD at Walmart","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-JLD_at_Walmart-2017-04-25T14:31:00.000Z-Walmart_Neighborhood_Market","replies":["c-Checkingfax-2017-04-26T09:23:00.000Z-JLD_at_Walmart-2017-04-25T14:31:00.000Z"]}}-->
Hi, JLD at Walmart. I have replied on the Talk page. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}09:23, 26 April 2017 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2017-04-26T09:23:00.000Z","author":"Checkingfax","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Checkingfax-2017-04-26T09:23:00.000Z-JLD_at_Walmart-2017-04-25T14:31:00.000Z","replies":[]}}-->
__DTSUBSCRIBEBUTTONDESKTOP__{"headingLevel":2,"name":"h-Rosiestep-2017-04-28T19:22:00.000Z","type":"heading","level":0,"id":"h-May_2017_at_Women_in_Red-Monthly_Tasks-2017-04-28T19:22:00.000Z","replies":["c-Rosiestep-2017-04-28T19:22:00.000Z-May_2017_at_Women_in_Red"],"uneditableSection":true,"text":"May 2017 at Women in Red","linkableTitle":"May 2017 at Women in Red"}-->
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Welcome to Women in Red's
May 2017 worldwide online editathons.
Participation is welcome in any language.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. This is the same thing as Tech News wrote about in issue 2017/16. You need to addmw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ) block for your scripts also, or add mediawiki.util dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. [32][33]
Problems
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [34]
The Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [35]