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.
Wikidata weekly summary #308
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.
Changes later this week
Profiling statistics for an
abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can
file a phabricator task to do so.
[1]
Abuse filters will now treat integers and
floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged.
[2][3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (
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
17 April 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 on
18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from
books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki.
PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function.
[4]
Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3.
[5]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The iOS and Android apps now have
synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an
ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step.
[7]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (
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
24 April 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 on
25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
<mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of
flagged revisions will not get this feature in May.
[8]
The rollback function could change. This was a
German community request. All editors with rollback rights can
leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).
WikiWorkshop, a forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects the Wikimedia projects, in Lyon, April 24th. Seven papers related to Wikidata will be presented.
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 parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links.
[9]
Problems
We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can
help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process
on Phabricator.
[10]
When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date.
[12]
You can soon turn on the
Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the
performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly.
[13]
There is a new
abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can
read more on mediawiki.org.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (
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
1 May 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 on
2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called
Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on
the talk page or email jharewikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018.
[14][15][16]
A
proposal is being discussed which would create a new "event coordinator" right that would allow users to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit.
Technical news
AbuseFilter has received numerous improvements, including an
OOUI overhaul,
syntax highlighting, ability to
search existing filters, and a few new functions. In particular, the search feature can be used to ensure there aren't existing filters for what you need, and the new equals_to_any function can be used when checking multiple namespaces. One major upcoming change is the ability to
see which filters are the slowest. This information is currently only available to those with access to
Logstash.
When blocking anonymous users, a
cookie will be applied that reloads the block if the user changes their IP. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. This currently only
occurs when hard-blocking accounts.
The block notice shown on mobile will soon
be more informative and point users to a
help page on how to request an unblock, just as it currently does on
desktop.
There will soon be a
calendar widget at
Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.
Lankiveil (Craig Franklin) passed away in mid-April. Lankiveil joined Wikipedia on 12 August 2004 and became an administrator on 31 August 2008. During his time with the Wikimedia community, Lankiveil served as an oversighter for the English Wikipedia and as president of Wikimedia Australia.
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions
here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter.
Join the team! Finally, don't forget to
subscribe!
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
Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones.
[17]
Problems
The
abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed.
[18]
Changes later this week
The
advanced search function beta feature will be on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist.
[19]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (
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
8 May 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 on
9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018.
[20][21]
Serbia report: Strong support from the Ministry of culture and information of Republic of Serbia: Financing the three WIR programs and realizing GLAM seminars
Sweden report: National museum of world Culture; Sounds and pronunciations; Nordic Museum
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The new
Advanced Search interface is now available as a
Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated.
[22]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (
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 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can
give feedback and suggestions.
The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it.
Read more on mediawiki.org[23]
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
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 May (
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
23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article. You can
give feedback. The last day for feedback is 27 May.
WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at
the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.
Deletion tags
Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.
Backlog drive:
A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at
WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.
Editathons
There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the '
move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.
Paid editing - new policy
Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to
WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant
BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for
organisations and companies.
Not English
A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with
WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.
News
Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
The next issue of
The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.
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
global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week.
[24][25]
It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
[26]
There is now a checkbox on
Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
[27]
Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script.
[28]
There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this.
[29]
Problems
Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations.
[30]
Changes later this week
There will be a new special page named
PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the
password rules for each user group on that wiki.
[31]
A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them.
[32]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (
calendar).
Wikis can
enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can
ask for help if you need it.
[33]
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
29 May 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 on
30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles.
[34]
A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development.
[35]
Some wikis will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July.
[36][37]
Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see:
phab:T195520 &
Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (
phab:T194247)
Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (
phab:T99899)
Added Docker image to Wikibase website (
phab:T189936)
Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (
phab:T192080)
Following a
successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the
"event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the
"account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
IP-based
cookie blocks should be
deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build
granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at
the talk page.
It is
now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
Arbitration
A
recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e.
Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.
Richard Rohr OFM (born 1943, pictured at podium) is an American Franciscan friar ordained in 1970. He is a known inspirational speaker and has published numerous recorded talks and books.
You can now use
global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g.
World map showing population of each country.
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions
here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter.
Join the team! Finally, don't forget to
subscribe!
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
MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different.
[38]
Redirect links in
Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again.
[41]
Problems
You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if
your wiki is one of them.
MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late.
[42]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (
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
5 June 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 on
6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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.
Wikidata weekly summary #308
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.
Changes later this week
Profiling statistics for an
abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can
file a phabricator task to do so.
[1]
Abuse filters will now treat integers and
floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged.
[2][3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (
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
17 April 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 on
18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from
books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki.
PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function.
[4]
Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3.
[5]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The iOS and Android apps now have
synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an
ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step.
[7]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (
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
24 April 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 on
25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
<mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of
flagged revisions will not get this feature in May.
[8]
The rollback function could change. This was a
German community request. All editors with rollback rights can
leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).
WikiWorkshop, a forum bringing together researchers exploring all aspects the Wikimedia projects, in Lyon, April 24th. Seven papers related to Wikidata will be presented.
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 parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links.
[9]
Problems
We are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can
help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process
on Phabricator.
[10]
When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date.
[12]
You can soon turn on the
Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the
performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly.
[13]
There is a new
abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can
read more on mediawiki.org.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 May. It will be on all wikis from 3 May (
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
1 May 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 on
2 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called
Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on
the talk page or email jharewikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 2 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018.
[14][15][16]
A
proposal is being discussed which would create a new "event coordinator" right that would allow users to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit.
Technical news
AbuseFilter has received numerous improvements, including an
OOUI overhaul,
syntax highlighting, ability to
search existing filters, and a few new functions. In particular, the search feature can be used to ensure there aren't existing filters for what you need, and the new equals_to_any function can be used when checking multiple namespaces. One major upcoming change is the ability to
see which filters are the slowest. This information is currently only available to those with access to
Logstash.
When blocking anonymous users, a
cookie will be applied that reloads the block if the user changes their IP. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. This currently only
occurs when hard-blocking accounts.
The block notice shown on mobile will soon
be more informative and point users to a
help page on how to request an unblock, just as it currently does on
desktop.
There will soon be a
calendar widget at
Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.
Lankiveil (Craig Franklin) passed away in mid-April. Lankiveil joined Wikipedia on 12 August 2004 and became an administrator on 31 August 2008. During his time with the Wikimedia community, Lankiveil served as an oversighter for the English Wikipedia and as president of Wikimedia Australia.
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions
here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter.
Join the team! Finally, don't forget to
subscribe!
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
Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones.
[17]
Problems
The
abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed.
[18]
Changes later this week
The
advanced search function beta feature will be on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist.
[19]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (
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
8 May 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 on
9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018.
[20][21]
Serbia report: Strong support from the Ministry of culture and information of Republic of Serbia: Financing the three WIR programs and realizing GLAM seminars
Sweden report: National museum of world Culture; Sounds and pronunciations; Nordic Museum
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The new
Advanced Search interface is now available as a
Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated.
[22]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (
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 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can
give feedback and suggestions.
The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it.
Read more on mediawiki.org[23]
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
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 May (
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
23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article. You can
give feedback. The last day for feedback is 27 May.
WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at
the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.
Deletion tags
Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.
Backlog drive:
A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at
WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.
Editathons
There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the '
move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.
Paid editing - new policy
Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to
WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant
BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for
organisations and companies.
Not English
A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with
WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.
News
Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
The next issue of
The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.
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
global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week.
[24][25]
It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
[26]
There is now a checkbox on
Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
[27]
Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script.
[28]
There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this.
[29]
Problems
Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations.
[30]
Changes later this week
There will be a new special page named
PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the
password rules for each user group on that wiki.
[31]
A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them.
[32]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 May. It will be on all wikis from 31 May (
calendar).
Wikis can
enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can
ask for help if you need it.
[33]
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
29 May 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 on
30 May at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles.
[34]
A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development.
[35]
Some wikis will switch to use the
Remex parsing library. This is
to replace Tidy. It will happen on 30 May and 13 June. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories will switch. This includes Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July.
[36][37]
Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see:
phab:T195520 &
Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (
phab:T194247)
Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (
phab:T99899)
Added Docker image to Wikibase website (
phab:T189936)
Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (
phab:T192080)
Following a
successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the
"event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the
"account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
IP-based
cookie blocks should be
deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build
granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at
the talk page.
It is
now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
Arbitration
A
recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e.
Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.
Richard Rohr OFM (born 1943, pictured at podium) is an American Franciscan friar ordained in 1970. He is a known inspirational speaker and has published numerous recorded talks and books.
You can now use
global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g.
World map showing population of each country.
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions
here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter.
Join the team! Finally, don't forget to
subscribe!
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
MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different.
[38]
Redirect links in
Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again.
[41]
Problems
You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if
your wiki is one of them.
MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late.
[42]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (
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
5 June 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 on
6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See
how to join.