This page 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.
Community ban discussions
must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
A change to the administrator inactivity policy
has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
A change to the banning policy
has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.
Technical news
CheckUsers
are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the
edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
The edit filter has
a new featurecontains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.
And so ends the first round of the competition, with 4 points required to qualify for round 2. With 53 contestants qualifying, the groups for round 2 are slightly smaller than usual, with the two leaders from each group due to qualify for round 3 as well as the top sixteen remaining users.
Our top scorers in round 1 were:
Aoba47 led the field with a featured article, 8 good articles and 42 GARs, giving a total of 666 points.
FrB.TG , a WikiCup newcomer, came next with 600 points, gained from a featured article and masses of bonus points.
Ssven2, another WikiCup newcomer, was in third place with 403 points, garnered from a featured article, a featured list, a good article and twelve GARs.
Ceranthor, Numerounovedant, Carbrera, Farang Rak Tham and Cartoon network freak all had over 200 points, but like all the other contestants, now have to start again from scratch. A good achievement was the 193 GARs performed by WikiCup contestants, comparing very favourably with the 54 GAs they achieved.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 1 but before the start of round 2 can be claimed in round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.
If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on
Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Godot13 (
talk),
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk),
Cwmhiraeth (
talk) and
Vanamonde (
talk) 15:27, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #302
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
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.
[3][4]
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.
[5]
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
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.
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
In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now
test global preferences and
give feedback.
Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (
phab:T188279)
Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (
phab:T189320)
Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (
phab:T186726)
Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the
feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to
the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
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.
[7]
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.
[8]
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.
[9]
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).
[10]
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.
[11]
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.
[12][13]
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.
[14][15][16]
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
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.
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.
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.
[17]
Changes later this week
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
There is no Editing team meeting this week.
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.
[18][19]
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.
The property suggestions were updated last week, the last update was in December 2017. The most noticable effect is the higher ranking of "family name" (P734) on items about people.
Input about the suggester is still welcome.
George, le deuxième texte (fr), a website querying Wikidata to find French female authors, in order to bring more diversity in the literature school programs
New, configurable download page for Mix’n’match catalogs (
example)
Looking into current Lua usage to see where we can improve the Lua functions we provide (
phab:T189506)
When there is a constraint violation in a reference, the reference is now automatically expanded to make it more visible (
phab:T177970)
Looked into issues around notifying the Wikipedias about changes happening on Wikidata (sometimes delayed due to too quick bot editing) (
phab:T189772)
Fixed some translation issues in the embeded part of the Query Service (
phab:T188990)
Fixed an issue with usernames being broken for Wikidata changes in watchlist and RC on Wikipedia (
phab:T189320)
Optimizing a heavily used database table (wb_terms) (
phab:T188279)
Polishing a lot of things for lexicographical data first deployment
Upcoming:
EuropeanaTech and Wikidata Workshop Day for GLAMs, Rotterdam (NL), Monday 14 May. A day of GLAM-related workshops around Wikidata and Structured Commons, for beginners and advanced users.
New
search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (
phab:T189679)
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.
[20][21]
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.
[22]
TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018.
[23]
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
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.
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.
[24]
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.
This page 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.
Community ban discussions
must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
A change to the administrator inactivity policy
has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
A change to the banning policy
has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.
Technical news
CheckUsers
are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the
edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
The edit filter has
a new featurecontains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.
And so ends the first round of the competition, with 4 points required to qualify for round 2. With 53 contestants qualifying, the groups for round 2 are slightly smaller than usual, with the two leaders from each group due to qualify for round 3 as well as the top sixteen remaining users.
Our top scorers in round 1 were:
Aoba47 led the field with a featured article, 8 good articles and 42 GARs, giving a total of 666 points.
FrB.TG , a WikiCup newcomer, came next with 600 points, gained from a featured article and masses of bonus points.
Ssven2, another WikiCup newcomer, was in third place with 403 points, garnered from a featured article, a featured list, a good article and twelve GARs.
Ceranthor, Numerounovedant, Carbrera, Farang Rak Tham and Cartoon network freak all had over 200 points, but like all the other contestants, now have to start again from scratch. A good achievement was the 193 GARs performed by WikiCup contestants, comparing very favourably with the 54 GAs they achieved.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 1 but before the start of round 2 can be claimed in round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.
If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on
Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from
Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Godot13 (
talk),
Sturmvogel 66 (
talk),
Cwmhiraeth (
talk) and
Vanamonde (
talk) 15:27, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #302
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
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.
[3][4]
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.
[5]
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
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.
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
In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now
test global preferences and
give feedback.
Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (
phab:T188279)
Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (
phab:T189320)
Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (
phab:T186726)
Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the
feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to
the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
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.
[7]
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.
[8]
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.
[9]
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).
[10]
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.
[11]
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.
[12][13]
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.
[14][15][16]
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
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.
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.
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.
[17]
Changes later this week
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
There is no Editing team meeting this week.
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.
[18][19]
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.
The property suggestions were updated last week, the last update was in December 2017. The most noticable effect is the higher ranking of "family name" (P734) on items about people.
Input about the suggester is still welcome.
George, le deuxième texte (fr), a website querying Wikidata to find French female authors, in order to bring more diversity in the literature school programs
New, configurable download page for Mix’n’match catalogs (
example)
Looking into current Lua usage to see where we can improve the Lua functions we provide (
phab:T189506)
When there is a constraint violation in a reference, the reference is now automatically expanded to make it more visible (
phab:T177970)
Looked into issues around notifying the Wikipedias about changes happening on Wikidata (sometimes delayed due to too quick bot editing) (
phab:T189772)
Fixed some translation issues in the embeded part of the Query Service (
phab:T188990)
Fixed an issue with usernames being broken for Wikidata changes in watchlist and RC on Wikipedia (
phab:T189320)
Optimizing a heavily used database table (wb_terms) (
phab:T188279)
Polishing a lot of things for lexicographical data first deployment
Upcoming:
EuropeanaTech and Wikidata Workshop Day for GLAMs, Rotterdam (NL), Monday 14 May. A day of GLAM-related workshops around Wikidata and Structured Commons, for beginners and advanced users.
New
search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (
phab:T189679)
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.
[20][21]
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.
[22]
TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018.
[23]
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
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.
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.
[24]
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.