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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 ( calendar).
• MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [1] [2] [3] [4]
• A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [5] [6]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [7] [8]
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [9]
• VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [10]

Future software changes

• Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [11]
• It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [12] [13]
• Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [14] [15] [16]
• You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [17] [18]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 ( calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [19]

VisualEditor news

• Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [20]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [21] [22]
• VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [23]
• There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [24]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
• You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist. [25] [26]
• The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search. [27] [28]
• You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin ( screenshot). [29] [30]

Problems

• For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [31]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 ( calendar).
• You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [32] [33]

VisualEditor news

• You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [34] [35]
• The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [36] [37] [38]
• You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [39] [40]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [41]
• You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [42]
• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [43] [44]
• You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files ( example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [45] [46]
• Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [47] [48] [49]
• You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [50] [51]
• Hovercards will no longer flicker. [52]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

Reminder

• You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 ( calendar).
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

• You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [53]
• When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [54] [55]
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [56] [57] [58] [59]
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [60] [61] [62]

Future software changes

• Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [63]
• You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [64]
• You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [65] [66]
• It will soon be possible to globally rename global ( SUL) users. [67] [68]
• Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [69]
• The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [70]
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode ( time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
• You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [71]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 ( calendar).

VisualEditor news

• You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [72] [73]
• When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [74] [75]
• You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [76] [77]
• You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [78] [79]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [80] [81]
• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [82]
• CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [83]
• You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [84] [85]
• An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode ( time conversion). [86]

Problems

• On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
• Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [87]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki ( 1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 ( calendar).

VisualEditor news

• Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [88] [89]
• A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [90] [91]
• VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [92] [93] [94] [95]
• Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [96] [97]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [98] [99]
• Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
• CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [100]
• All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [101] [102]
• Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global ( SUL) users. [103]
• You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [104] [105]
• You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [106]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.