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.
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 new
termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages.
[1]
The
new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues.
[2]
The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute.
[3]
The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:.
[4]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (
calendar).
When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the
Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to
change your password for a
stronger password.
[5]
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
moveClaim allows you to move or copy claims from one item to another. This is especially useful when splitting items, or creating lots of similar items.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Seventh birthday of Wikidata: you can start thinking about organizing a meetup in your area to celebrate the birthday, or about a present for the community!
The first draft of
the program of the WikidataCon is now available. The content of the three main session rooms will be live-streamed and recorded for people who cannot participate in the conference.
Because of a database switch, Wikidata will be in read-only more on September 10th at 05:00 UTC, for max. 30min (
phab:T230762)
Recent tool:
@Wikidatabot, a Telegram bot that allows you to search for something on Wikidata from Telegram
New game:
Wikidata Mall, a Telegram management simulation game where content is generated from Wikidata
Wikidata got a high-resolution logo, thanks to
Odder (
phab:T230120)
New monolingual code languages are added, thanks to
Jon Harald Søby: TLI (Tlingit), clc (Tsilhqotʹin), alc (Kawésqar), kld (Gamilaraay), peo (Old Persian)
Fixed a bug in constraint violations indicator that was not showing up sometimes (
phab:T227866)
Make Lua's function mw.wikibase.entityExists return true for redirects (
phab:T192462)
Reviewed and followed up on highlighting statements when using "#P" in URL (
phab:T178745)
Wikidata Bridge: saving the Wikidata edit when submitting (
phab:T226999)
Showing the label for the Property instead of the id (
phab:T227759)
Overcoming a conceptional oversight between mediawiki and standard language codes (
phab:T231833)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Zurich Training in
Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
Namescript fills in labels, descriptions and aliases of items about names, making it easier to create such items (you only need to provide a few statements).
Structured Data on Commons - A Blog Series, written by me, is a five-part posting that covers the basics of the software and features that were built to make structured data happen. The series is meant to be friendly to those who may have some knowledge of Commons, but may not know much about the structured data project.
I hope these are informative and useful, comments and questions are welcome. All the blogs offer a comment feature, and you can log in with your Wikimedia account using
oAuth. I look forward to seeing some posts over there. --
Keegan (WMF) (
talk)
21:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
The third grant-funded round of
WikiProject X has been completed. Unfortunately, while this round has not resulted in a deployed product, I am not planning to resume working on the project for the foreseeable future. Please see the
final report for more information.
Upcoming:
Wikidata Zurich Training in
Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
This
Recent changes tool allows to get a list of unpatrolled Wikidata changes with enhanced filters that are more adapted to Wikidata than the standard Recent Changes page. Available actions include mass patroling and easier revert interface.
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.
[10]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Special:Contributions will get the standard
OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a
script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to.
[11]
Following
a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added:
C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.
Technical news
As
previously noted, tighter
password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.
Management has migrated to phabricator; to report a bug or request a feature, please create a new task with the
script's tag
Message translation has been reduced; for common messages that are already translated in mediawiki core, the system translations are used, in order to reduce duplication of efforts
Recent additions
New pages are shown at the start of a site's feed
Log entries are shown at the end of a site's feed
Basic validation has been added to user settings, applied before saving
Site validation has also been added; a site (excluding unique projects like wikidata, meta, commons, etc.) is considered to be valid if it is the form of "language.project", where both the language code and project name are valid. It does not, however, check that the actual site is valid; only that it could be. In other words, even though sco.wiktionary refers to a site that doesn't exist, it is considered valid, because sco is a valid language code (sco.wikipedia is a working site) and wiktionary is a valid project.
Announcements
BREAKING CHANGE: Backwards compatibility supporting the use of sites as *.*.org (like 'en.wikipedia.org' or 'meta.wikimedia.org'), deprecated in version 1.7.5, will be removed soon; all sites should now be saved as *.* (like 'de.wikinews' or 'fr.wikisource')
BREAKING CHANGE: Storing user sites as window.GlobalWatchlistSites, deprecated in version version 1.11.11, will be removed soon; all settings should be stored in the window.GlobalWatchlistConfig object
Both of these breaking changes will be implemented alongside version 4.0; until then, any use of the config page (
m:Special:BlankPage/GlobalWatchlistConfig) will result in saving settings in the newest format
Next release
Version 4.0 should be released in around a week. It will include the new features mentioned above, as well as removal of backwards compatibility for settings and sites.
soweego links Wikidata to large third-party catalogs. Together with its friend
Mix'n'match, it helps Wikidata to become the universal linking hub of open data.
Two Wikidata users were nominated for a “WikiEule”, the German Wikipedia community’s annual awards:
MisterSynergy (
nomination) for an “EngagementEule” (special commitment to the wiki projects) and
Tobias1984 (
nomination) for an “OrgaEule” (organizational work).
You can nominate projects for the
WikidataCon award until October 7th at 23:59 UTC (today).
During the summer,
WikidataJS became WikibaseJS! More specifically:
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon.
[13]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can
leave feedback.
There is a new
technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community.
Subscribe to get the information in the future.
Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria
can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.
Lei (Nico) Zheng, et al. (2019) The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, Article 215 (November 2019), 20 pages. DOI:
10.1145/3359317 (also
blog post).
Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, et al. (2019) Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue.
ACL Anthology ID: W19-5914 +
arXiv:1909.11980
Tool of the week
ShowTalkLabels: with this script enabled, when a talk page is shown on your watchlist or similar pages, the label of the related entity is shown.
Other noteworthy stuff
We now have
d:Q70000000 (3,5-dimethyl-3H-pyrazole, chemical compound) and
Lexeme:L200000 (spiritualistically, English adverb)
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 use
more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version.
[14]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer
supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You
can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else.
[15]
In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can
read more and discuss.
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
API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives.
[16]
Problems
There is a
translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed.
[17]
The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed.
[18]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (
calendar).
Reference Previews will be a beta feature on
all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
23 October. See
how to join.
The Wikidata Wor(l)dmap is showing translations of the same concept on a world map. To use it, type a word (for example "water") in the search field, then observe the map. You can zoom in the map. The data comes from Wikidata item labels and the coordinate location property of the language.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons),
was selected as one of the five finalists in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. The final event will be held on November 16.
Issue with Wikidata Query Service: aggregate variables can no longer reuse the names of other variables (
T235540).
You can translate labels in the background image of Wikidata front page by adding translation to
this file
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 post proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist.
[19][20]
You can share feedback and ideas on the
Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (
em) for some specific cases.
[21][22]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January.
[23]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can
know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Today, on October 29th, it’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here.
Message from the Wikidata development team
The
Community Wishlist Survey 2020 from Wikimedia Foundation started. This year, it is focused on small projects and Wikidata-related wishes will not be included.
You can help
expanding the list of databases, encyclopedias, etc. which could be added to
Mix'n'match. Can be used for property creation too.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Martin Poulter on Wikidata projects at the University of Oxford, 05, November.
Agenda
SPARQL RC is showing the recent changes on items that are listed from a specific query. It is very useful to monitor the changes on a specific subset of data, for example data that you recently imported in Wikidata.
{{query page}} is a new template that can be used to store SPARQL queries on a dedicated wiki page, to be transcluded in various styles (
announcement)
Made the Lua functions mw.wikibase.getBestStatements and mw.wikibase.getAllStatements faster if called more than once for the same statement on a single page
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
At
Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the
URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites.
[24]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors.
[25]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
To report a bug or request a feature, please create a new task on
Phabricator with the
script's tag
Recent additions
Site validation has been tightened. Previously, only the language code and project name had to be valid - now, they must be a valid combination (i.e. en.wikiversity exists, and so is valid, but sco.wikiversity is not valid, because no such wiki exists).
When the global watchlist feed is loading, an OOUI widget will be shown, rather than an animated gif.
An option has been added to no longer group edits to the same page. For now, this isn't very useful, since metadata for the edits (editor, summary, tags, etc.) are not yet shown, but they will be soon. Until then, ungrouped edits are treated the same as pages with only 1 edit - the minor and bot flags are displayed if applicable. If edits are grouped, the minor and bot flags are only shown if they apply to all of the edits.
Upcoming changes
Starting with version 5.0, there will be an option at the settings page to switch to and from a "stable" version of the script. When activated, the script import in your global.js should be replaced, and then the page refreshed with the new script loaded. The stable script will live at
m:User:DannyS712/Global watchlist/stable.js, and will be updated with each full release. Otherwise, it shouldn't be edited, providing a version that is less prone to bugs as the script is developed.
Announcements
WARNING: Starting with version 5.1, the option to mark the pages of a site as seen be implemented using the entirewatchlist API option, rather than manually listing the titles. This is being done to simplify the implementation code. This will result in the same functionality as marking all pages as seen via
Special:Watchlist (i.e. even if the page isn't visible due to your filter choices, it will still be marked as seen). If you would like to keep using the current method for a while, please switch to the stable branch.
Next release
Version 5.0 has just gone live. It includes the new features mentioned above.
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (
phabricator:T236749)
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
MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a
PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in
Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can
read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons),
won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines.
Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a
lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes
on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can
see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or
global renames.
[26]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
I am investigating adding more context to each entry that is shown (such as the edit summaries, tags, patrol marks, the user who made the edit, etc.). Is there any desire for such additions? If so, what should be added first, and what is a low priority? Please leave feedback on the relevant phabricator task,
phab:T238300.
Recent additions
Site validation has been overhauled. Rather than hard-coding a list of valid sites, users will be able to watch any site where they have an attached local user account. If a site is rejected as invalid, please ensure that there is indeed a local account attached to your global account.
Users will now be alerted regarding the results of attempting to update their settings.
Live updates have been added - when activated, the script will refresh in the background, and then load the new feed, every 7.5 seconds. In the future, this frequency may be configurable.
OOUI icons have been added to most buttons.
There is now an option to eliminate the confirmation dialog when marking all sites as seen.
Announcements
WARNING: Starting with version 6.1, site aliases currently used when saving settings will be removed, and only sites in the form of `lang.project` will be accepted.
As noted in the last update, marking a site as seen now uses entirewatchlist, which means that any changes to watched pages between when the watchlist was loaded and when the site was "marked as seen" may be ignored.
Next release
Version 6.0 was just finalized for the development and stable branches of the script.
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.
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 new
termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages.
[1]
The
new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues.
[2]
The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute.
[3]
The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:.
[4]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (
calendar).
When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the
Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to
change your password for a
stronger password.
[5]
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
moveClaim allows you to move or copy claims from one item to another. This is especially useful when splitting items, or creating lots of similar items.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Seventh birthday of Wikidata: you can start thinking about organizing a meetup in your area to celebrate the birthday, or about a present for the community!
The first draft of
the program of the WikidataCon is now available. The content of the three main session rooms will be live-streamed and recorded for people who cannot participate in the conference.
Because of a database switch, Wikidata will be in read-only more on September 10th at 05:00 UTC, for max. 30min (
phab:T230762)
Recent tool:
@Wikidatabot, a Telegram bot that allows you to search for something on Wikidata from Telegram
New game:
Wikidata Mall, a Telegram management simulation game where content is generated from Wikidata
Wikidata got a high-resolution logo, thanks to
Odder (
phab:T230120)
New monolingual code languages are added, thanks to
Jon Harald Søby: TLI (Tlingit), clc (Tsilhqotʹin), alc (Kawésqar), kld (Gamilaraay), peo (Old Persian)
Fixed a bug in constraint violations indicator that was not showing up sometimes (
phab:T227866)
Make Lua's function mw.wikibase.entityExists return true for redirects (
phab:T192462)
Reviewed and followed up on highlighting statements when using "#P" in URL (
phab:T178745)
Wikidata Bridge: saving the Wikidata edit when submitting (
phab:T226999)
Showing the label for the Property instead of the id (
phab:T227759)
Overcoming a conceptional oversight between mediawiki and standard language codes (
phab:T231833)
Upcoming:
Wikidata Zurich Training in
Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
Namescript fills in labels, descriptions and aliases of items about names, making it easier to create such items (you only need to provide a few statements).
Structured Data on Commons - A Blog Series, written by me, is a five-part posting that covers the basics of the software and features that were built to make structured data happen. The series is meant to be friendly to those who may have some knowledge of Commons, but may not know much about the structured data project.
I hope these are informative and useful, comments and questions are welcome. All the blogs offer a comment feature, and you can log in with your Wikimedia account using
oAuth. I look forward to seeing some posts over there. --
Keegan (WMF) (
talk)
21:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
The third grant-funded round of
WikiProject X has been completed. Unfortunately, while this round has not resulted in a deployed product, I am not planning to resume working on the project for the foreseeable future. Please see the
final report for more information.
Upcoming:
Wikidata Zurich Training in
Zurich on the weekend of November 2-3. There will be presentations and hands-on sessions on editing, querying and coding for Wikidata.
This
Recent changes tool allows to get a list of unpatrolled Wikidata changes with enhanced filters that are more adapted to Wikidata than the standard Recent Changes page. Available actions include mass patroling and easier revert interface.
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.
[10]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Special:Contributions will get the standard
OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a
script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to.
[11]
Following
a discussion, a new criterion for speedy category renaming was added:
C2F: One eponymous article, which applies if the category contains only an eponymous article or media file, provided that the category has not otherwise been emptied shortly before the nomination. The default outcome is an upmerge to the parent categories.
Technical news
As
previously noted, tighter
password requirements for Administrators were put in place last year. Wikipedia should now alert you if your password is less than 10 characters long and thus too short.
Management has migrated to phabricator; to report a bug or request a feature, please create a new task with the
script's tag
Message translation has been reduced; for common messages that are already translated in mediawiki core, the system translations are used, in order to reduce duplication of efforts
Recent additions
New pages are shown at the start of a site's feed
Log entries are shown at the end of a site's feed
Basic validation has been added to user settings, applied before saving
Site validation has also been added; a site (excluding unique projects like wikidata, meta, commons, etc.) is considered to be valid if it is the form of "language.project", where both the language code and project name are valid. It does not, however, check that the actual site is valid; only that it could be. In other words, even though sco.wiktionary refers to a site that doesn't exist, it is considered valid, because sco is a valid language code (sco.wikipedia is a working site) and wiktionary is a valid project.
Announcements
BREAKING CHANGE: Backwards compatibility supporting the use of sites as *.*.org (like 'en.wikipedia.org' or 'meta.wikimedia.org'), deprecated in version 1.7.5, will be removed soon; all sites should now be saved as *.* (like 'de.wikinews' or 'fr.wikisource')
BREAKING CHANGE: Storing user sites as window.GlobalWatchlistSites, deprecated in version version 1.11.11, will be removed soon; all settings should be stored in the window.GlobalWatchlistConfig object
Both of these breaking changes will be implemented alongside version 4.0; until then, any use of the config page (
m:Special:BlankPage/GlobalWatchlistConfig) will result in saving settings in the newest format
Next release
Version 4.0 should be released in around a week. It will include the new features mentioned above, as well as removal of backwards compatibility for settings and sites.
soweego links Wikidata to large third-party catalogs. Together with its friend
Mix'n'match, it helps Wikidata to become the universal linking hub of open data.
Two Wikidata users were nominated for a “WikiEule”, the German Wikipedia community’s annual awards:
MisterSynergy (
nomination) for an “EngagementEule” (special commitment to the wiki projects) and
Tobias1984 (
nomination) for an “OrgaEule” (organizational work).
You can nominate projects for the
WikidataCon award until October 7th at 23:59 UTC (today).
During the summer,
WikidataJS became WikibaseJS! More specifically:
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon.
[13]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can
leave feedback.
There is a new
technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community.
Subscribe to get the information in the future.
Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria
can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.
Lei (Nico) Zheng, et al. (2019) The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW, Article 215 (November 2019), 20 pages. DOI:
10.1145/3359317 (also
blog post).
Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, et al. (2019) Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge. Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue.
ACL Anthology ID: W19-5914 +
arXiv:1909.11980
Tool of the week
ShowTalkLabels: with this script enabled, when a talk page is shown on your watchlist or similar pages, the label of the related entity is shown.
Other noteworthy stuff
We now have
d:Q70000000 (3,5-dimethyl-3H-pyrazole, chemical compound) and
Lexeme:L200000 (spiritualistically, English adverb)
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 use
more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version.
[14]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer
supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You
can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else.
[15]
In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can
read more and discuss.
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
API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives.
[16]
Problems
There is a
translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed.
[17]
The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed.
[18]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (
calendar).
Reference Previews will be a beta feature on
all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
23 October. See
how to join.
The Wikidata Wor(l)dmap is showing translations of the same concept on a world map. To use it, type a word (for example "water") in the search field, then observe the map. You can zoom in the map. The data comes from Wikidata item labels and the coordinate location property of the language.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons),
was selected as one of the five finalists in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. The final event will be held on November 16.
Issue with Wikidata Query Service: aggregate variables can no longer reuse the names of other variables (
T235540).
You can translate labels in the background image of Wikidata front page by adding translation to
this file
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 post proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist.
[19][20]
You can share feedback and ideas on the
Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (
em) for some specific cases.
[21][22]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January.
[23]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can
know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Today, on October 29th, it’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here.
Message from the Wikidata development team
The
Community Wishlist Survey 2020 from Wikimedia Foundation started. This year, it is focused on small projects and Wikidata-related wishes will not be included.
You can help
expanding the list of databases, encyclopedias, etc. which could be added to
Mix'n'match. Can be used for property creation too.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Martin Poulter on Wikidata projects at the University of Oxford, 05, November.
Agenda
SPARQL RC is showing the recent changes on items that are listed from a specific query. It is very useful to monitor the changes on a specific subset of data, for example data that you recently imported in Wikidata.
{{query page}} is a new template that can be used to store SPARQL queries on a dedicated wiki page, to be transcluded in various styles (
announcement)
Made the Lua functions mw.wikibase.getBestStatements and mw.wikibase.getAllStatements faster if called more than once for the same statement on a single page
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
At
Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the
URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites.
[24]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors.
[25]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
To report a bug or request a feature, please create a new task on
Phabricator with the
script's tag
Recent additions
Site validation has been tightened. Previously, only the language code and project name had to be valid - now, they must be a valid combination (i.e. en.wikiversity exists, and so is valid, but sco.wikiversity is not valid, because no such wiki exists).
When the global watchlist feed is loading, an OOUI widget will be shown, rather than an animated gif.
An option has been added to no longer group edits to the same page. For now, this isn't very useful, since metadata for the edits (editor, summary, tags, etc.) are not yet shown, but they will be soon. Until then, ungrouped edits are treated the same as pages with only 1 edit - the minor and bot flags are displayed if applicable. If edits are grouped, the minor and bot flags are only shown if they apply to all of the edits.
Upcoming changes
Starting with version 5.0, there will be an option at the settings page to switch to and from a "stable" version of the script. When activated, the script import in your global.js should be replaced, and then the page refreshed with the new script loaded. The stable script will live at
m:User:DannyS712/Global watchlist/stable.js, and will be updated with each full release. Otherwise, it shouldn't be edited, providing a version that is less prone to bugs as the script is developed.
Announcements
WARNING: Starting with version 5.1, the option to mark the pages of a site as seen be implemented using the entirewatchlist API option, rather than manually listing the titles. This is being done to simplify the implementation code. This will result in the same functionality as marking all pages as seen via
Special:Watchlist (i.e. even if the page isn't visible due to your filter choices, it will still be marked as seen). If you would like to keep using the current method for a while, please switch to the stable branch.
Next release
Version 5.0 has just gone live. It includes the new features mentioned above.
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (
phabricator:T236749)
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
MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a
PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in
Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can
read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons),
won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines.
Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a
lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes
on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can
see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or
global renames.
[26]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
I am investigating adding more context to each entry that is shown (such as the edit summaries, tags, patrol marks, the user who made the edit, etc.). Is there any desire for such additions? If so, what should be added first, and what is a low priority? Please leave feedback on the relevant phabricator task,
phab:T238300.
Recent additions
Site validation has been overhauled. Rather than hard-coding a list of valid sites, users will be able to watch any site where they have an attached local user account. If a site is rejected as invalid, please ensure that there is indeed a local account attached to your global account.
Users will now be alerted regarding the results of attempting to update their settings.
Live updates have been added - when activated, the script will refresh in the background, and then load the new feed, every 7.5 seconds. In the future, this frequency may be configurable.
OOUI icons have been added to most buttons.
There is now an option to eliminate the confirmation dialog when marking all sites as seen.
Announcements
WARNING: Starting with version 6.1, site aliases currently used when saving settings will be removed, and only sites in the form of `lang.project` will be accepted.
As noted in the last update, marking a site as seen now uses entirewatchlist, which means that any changes to watched pages between when the watchlist was loaded and when the site was "marked as seen" may be ignored.
Next release
Version 6.0 was just finalized for the development and stable branches of the script.