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.
Problems
Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen.
[1]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
30 May at 19:00 (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.
Recent changes
You can see new files on
Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from.
[3]
When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox.
[4]
You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article.
[5]
New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June.
[6]
Problems
The
MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen.
[7]
Changes this week
Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the
compact language links will see languages they have in their
Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in
your preferences.
[8]
You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions.
[9]
When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead.
[10]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules.
[11]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see
a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all.
[12][13]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too.
[14]
The
Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the
draft that describes the new committee.
MySociety (
Q10851773) are publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'".
Data donation: following WikiCite, our friends at
DBLP (
Q1224715) have begun to donate data, with >4,800 values in the first batch, including >1,300 DBLP ID (
P2456) plus assorted aliases, and values for VIAF ID (
P214), GND ID (
P227), ORCID iD (
P496), ACM Digital Library author ID (
P864), zbMATH author ID (
P1556), & Google Scholar ID (
P1960).
The Collaboration team is delighted to publish its first newsletter! Your feedback
is welcome.
This quarter the team will focus on improving Special:RecentChanges and create a ReviewStream, a new feed designed to improve the edit-review process. Both are part of the new
Edit Review Improvements project.
Documentation concerning Notifications types has been updated. That page is ready for translations.
[15]
For developers, how to create a new Notification type has been updated.
[16]
Tools owners will be notified when OAuth app changes state.
[17]
When you edit text and
mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions.
[18]
Users are notified if they are
mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit.
[19]
Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. Now you can get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This is an opt-in option in your preferences.
[20][21]
On Notifications, the badge is colored if you have some notifications. If you see these notifications, the badge will turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one.
[22]
Problems
For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. It has been fixed.
[23][24]
When a title was created with some wikitext inside of it, Notifications were not linking that title when they were mentioned. This is now fixed.
[25]
Some Notifications messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed.
[26]
Future changes
On Special:Notifications, pages and counts related to disabled notification types will not be shown anymore.
[27]
Flow is available as a Beta feature on Greek Wikipedia.
[28]
A satisfaction survey was conducted concerning Flow in September 2016. Results will be published in December 2016.
[29]
Wikitext interface for Flow is now using a monospaced font.
[30]
It is now possible to moderate a Flow topic that have been resolved without re-opening it.
[31]
It is now possible to watch and unwatch topics directly from the Notification panel.
[32]
Problems
It is not possible to enable or disable Flow as a Beta feature on wikis where that option is available. This is under investigation.
[33]
Some Flow messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed.
[34]
Future changes
Communities that have Flow enabled manually on user talk pages will be asked to move on to a Beta feature activation to simplify the process.
[35]
Notifications related to Flow will be grouped on your Notifications preferences. It will be easier to choose which Notifications you want to have from Flow.
[36]
Informations about Edit Review Improvements project
have been published. That page is ready for translations.
[37]
ReviewStream feed product description
is available. ReviewStream is a machine-readable feed that’s designed to be used by a variety of edit-review tools.
Some tests are done with users to refine the design of those filters.
You can volunteer for such tests.
[38]
Communities
that already have ORESgoodfaith and damaging filters enabled will be contacted to try that change as a Beta feature.
[39]
Miscellaneous
On that newsletter, some particular items are highlighted by an icon, to ease reading. The icon highlights items that may interest volunteer translators and the icon highlights items that are relevant for readers with technical knowledge.
MySociety (
Q10851773) have now completed publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'". Here is the full set:
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
Some wikis have the larger and brighter
OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long.
[40]
When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results.
[41]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 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
13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the
test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account.
[42]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects.
[43]
Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at
Special:Undelete.
[44][45]
Hello, Checkingfax - I was just looking at the article on
Landscape design, and I saw an external link in the
Landscape design#Design approach section. I didn't know what to do with it. Can you fix or move it? Thanks. –
Corinne (
talk) 00:54, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for fixing that. I didn't know it was that simple. How do you decide whether to simply put the external link into the ref format or to put in the the See also or External links section at the end of the article? –
Corinne (
talk) 15:42, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Corinne. If it is used inline, I usually convert it inline. I can do a better job of filling out the citation template with more metadata. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 01:01, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
UPDATE:
Corinne. I was in a rush when I converted the link before. Just now I went to fill in more metadata and discovered the link was merely SPAM; it linked to a landscaper's business website, so I removed the link. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 01:08, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, Checkingfax! That's great you saw that. Why does your signature look different? It looks like the formatting I would use to ping you, with curly brackets, a "u", a pipe, and then your user name. It looks strange. –
Corinne (
talk) 01:30, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Corinne. I have a custom signature that I created in my Preferences. I made it so you can copy my signature to your clipboard and then paste it as a ping. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 08:47, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #265
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Due the necessary time for people to get visas (about 3 months), we changed the deadline for the scholarship applications. You can
apply for a scholarship before July 16th. We will then make sure that the applicants receive a response on July 25th.
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
ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40
UTC. It has now been fixed.
[46]
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down.
[47]
Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data.
[48]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 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
20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
The team is moving full speed ahead on a follow-up project to the New Filters for Edit Review beta dubbed "Integrated Filters." The name refers to the fact that we are integrating the Recent Changes tools that currently remain in the old user interface (like Namespace and Tag filters), along with some tools and capabilities from Watchlist and elsewhere, into the new Recent Changes interface.
You can get an overview of the Integrated Filters projects, and the general release strategy, on the
description page of the project Phabricator board. Among the more interesting new capabilities:
Category filters: We'll be adding the ability to filter by category. This is a little tricky, since wiki categories often work in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, with the broadest categories returning the fewest results—because categories like "Science" or "Art" tend to contain not articles but other categories. So we're exploring solutions where a category search will crawl at least a layer or two down the category treat to, hopefully, bring back more useful results.
[49]
User filters: We're adding the ability to filter by any username, similar to what's available already on the the User Contributions page.
[50]
Live update: Users will have the ability to look at a more or less continuous flow of changes. This is a much requested feature that we expect will open up new possibilities for Recent Changes, especially for patrollers who want to see vandalism or other changes as they happen. While the updates won't truly be "live," the page updates will be frequent, similar to the way real-time tools (like RTRC or LiveRC) works.
[51]
We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchenwikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.
Recent changes
It is now possible to save your favorite filters sets by using bookmarks.
[52]
There were some issues with loading highlighted results when the URL was copied and pasted. This is now fixed.
[55]
A "Watchlisted pages" filter group now lets reviewers use Recent Changes, and all its tools, to patrol changes to pages they've Watchlisted. If you have any feedback about how useful this is nor isn't—especially given that we plan to add the new filtering interface to the Watchlist page —
let us know.
There were issues with the tools still in the older filtering UI — like the Namespace filter and the number of results selectors. These have been fixed.
[56]
Now that users can save filter settings, and declare any settings they want as the Recent Changes page default, we'll be reviewing the RC page Preferences with an eye to getting rid of as many as we can. For instance, if you want to hide minor edits or Category changes by default, you can now do that right on the RC page, instead of having to go to a separate page to manage defaults.
On many Recent Changes Pages, the community has defined a large number of links that are displayed directly under the page name (
example on Polish Wikipedia). Many of these links are unrelated or only peripherally related to Recent Changes, add informational complexity of the RC page.
Research shows that they are used only rarely or never. We want to clarify RecentChanges page functionality, so we plan to put the links into a collapsible panel.
Should the panel default to open or closed? That is, should the default state (which users can change with one click) show the links as hidden or displayed?
Let us know what you think.
The most used links are shortcuts to certain type of edits, (Mobile, Newcomers...). Users can already
save their favorite filter settings to the Saved Settings menu, which should make some of the existing links redundant. We plan to provide default bookmarks for the most used filters combinations.
[57]
Wikimedia Deutschland have scheduled the notifications of Wikibase notifications to Wikimedia projects: all the Wikivoyages on May 3; all the Wikipedias except en, fr, de on May 30; all other projects on June 13 and Wikipedias en, fr, de on September 5.
[58]
It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications.
[59]
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.
Problems
Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen.
[1]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
30 May at 19:00 (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.
Recent changes
You can see new files on
Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from.
[3]
When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox.
[4]
You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article.
[5]
New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June.
[6]
Problems
The
MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen.
[7]
Changes this week
Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the
compact language links will see languages they have in their
Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in
your preferences.
[8]
You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions.
[9]
When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead.
[10]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (
calendar).
String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules.
[11]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
6 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
The
2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see
a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all.
[12][13]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too.
[14]
The
Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the
draft that describes the new committee.
MySociety (
Q10851773) are publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'".
Data donation: following WikiCite, our friends at
DBLP (
Q1224715) have begun to donate data, with >4,800 values in the first batch, including >1,300 DBLP ID (
P2456) plus assorted aliases, and values for VIAF ID (
P214), GND ID (
P227), ORCID iD (
P496), ACM Digital Library author ID (
P864), zbMATH author ID (
P1556), & Google Scholar ID (
P1960).
The Collaboration team is delighted to publish its first newsletter! Your feedback
is welcome.
This quarter the team will focus on improving Special:RecentChanges and create a ReviewStream, a new feed designed to improve the edit-review process. Both are part of the new
Edit Review Improvements project.
Documentation concerning Notifications types has been updated. That page is ready for translations.
[15]
For developers, how to create a new Notification type has been updated.
[16]
Tools owners will be notified when OAuth app changes state.
[17]
When you edit text and
mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions.
[18]
Users are notified if they are
mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit.
[19]
Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. Now you can get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This is an opt-in option in your preferences.
[20][21]
On Notifications, the badge is colored if you have some notifications. If you see these notifications, the badge will turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one.
[22]
Problems
For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. It has been fixed.
[23][24]
When a title was created with some wikitext inside of it, Notifications were not linking that title when they were mentioned. This is now fixed.
[25]
Some Notifications messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed.
[26]
Future changes
On Special:Notifications, pages and counts related to disabled notification types will not be shown anymore.
[27]
Flow is available as a Beta feature on Greek Wikipedia.
[28]
A satisfaction survey was conducted concerning Flow in September 2016. Results will be published in December 2016.
[29]
Wikitext interface for Flow is now using a monospaced font.
[30]
It is now possible to moderate a Flow topic that have been resolved without re-opening it.
[31]
It is now possible to watch and unwatch topics directly from the Notification panel.
[32]
Problems
It is not possible to enable or disable Flow as a Beta feature on wikis where that option is available. This is under investigation.
[33]
Some Flow messages were not supporting {{GENDER:}}. This is now fixed.
[34]
Future changes
Communities that have Flow enabled manually on user talk pages will be asked to move on to a Beta feature activation to simplify the process.
[35]
Notifications related to Flow will be grouped on your Notifications preferences. It will be easier to choose which Notifications you want to have from Flow.
[36]
Informations about Edit Review Improvements project
have been published. That page is ready for translations.
[37]
ReviewStream feed product description
is available. ReviewStream is a machine-readable feed that’s designed to be used by a variety of edit-review tools.
Some tests are done with users to refine the design of those filters.
You can volunteer for such tests.
[38]
Communities
that already have ORESgoodfaith and damaging filters enabled will be contacted to try that change as a Beta feature.
[39]
Miscellaneous
On that newsletter, some particular items are highlighted by an icon, to ease reading. The icon highlights items that may interest volunteer translators and the icon highlights items that are relevant for readers with technical knowledge.
MySociety (
Q10851773) have now completed publishing a "five part series examining how to use Wikidata to answer the question: 'What is the gender breakdown of heads of government across the world?'". Here is the full set:
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
Some wikis have the larger and brighter
OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long.
[40]
When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results.
[41]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 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
13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the
test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account.
[42]
Wikimedia wikis use
OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is
Electron. You can
tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects.
[43]
Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at
Special:Undelete.
[44][45]
Hello, Checkingfax - I was just looking at the article on
Landscape design, and I saw an external link in the
Landscape design#Design approach section. I didn't know what to do with it. Can you fix or move it? Thanks. –
Corinne (
talk) 00:54, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for fixing that. I didn't know it was that simple. How do you decide whether to simply put the external link into the ref format or to put in the the See also or External links section at the end of the article? –
Corinne (
talk) 15:42, 26 May 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Corinne. If it is used inline, I usually convert it inline. I can do a better job of filling out the citation template with more metadata. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 01:01, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
UPDATE:
Corinne. I was in a rush when I converted the link before. Just now I went to fill in more metadata and discovered the link was merely SPAM; it linked to a landscaper's business website, so I removed the link. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 01:08, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, Checkingfax! That's great you saw that. Why does your signature look different? It looks like the formatting I would use to ping you, with curly brackets, a "u", a pipe, and then your user name. It looks strange. –
Corinne (
talk) 01:30, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Corinne. I have a custom signature that I created in my Preferences. I made it so you can copy my signature to your clipboard and then paste it as a ping. Cheers! {{u|
Checkingfax}} {
Talk} 08:47, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #265
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Due the necessary time for people to get visas (about 3 months), we changed the deadline for the scholarship applications. You can
apply for a scholarship before July 16th. We will then make sure that the applicants receive a response on July 25th.
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
ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40
UTC. It has now been fixed.
[46]
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down.
[47]
Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data.
[48]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 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
20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
The team is moving full speed ahead on a follow-up project to the New Filters for Edit Review beta dubbed "Integrated Filters." The name refers to the fact that we are integrating the Recent Changes tools that currently remain in the old user interface (like Namespace and Tag filters), along with some tools and capabilities from Watchlist and elsewhere, into the new Recent Changes interface.
You can get an overview of the Integrated Filters projects, and the general release strategy, on the
description page of the project Phabricator board. Among the more interesting new capabilities:
Category filters: We'll be adding the ability to filter by category. This is a little tricky, since wiki categories often work in a somewhat counter-intuitive way, with the broadest categories returning the fewest results—because categories like "Science" or "Art" tend to contain not articles but other categories. So we're exploring solutions where a category search will crawl at least a layer or two down the category treat to, hopefully, bring back more useful results.
[49]
User filters: We're adding the ability to filter by any username, similar to what's available already on the the User Contributions page.
[50]
Live update: Users will have the ability to look at a more or less continuous flow of changes. This is a much requested feature that we expect will open up new possibilities for Recent Changes, especially for patrollers who want to see vandalism or other changes as they happen. While the updates won't truly be "live," the page updates will be frequent, similar to the way real-time tools (like RTRC or LiveRC) works.
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We're looking for people we can interview about their experiences with the new beta. If you’re a regular user of Recent Changes and have tried the new features—and if you can spare an hour to chat in English with our design researcher—please email dchenwikimedia.org with the subject line “user interview.” Let us know how to get in touch with you and what time zone (city, country...) you’re in.
Recent changes
It is now possible to save your favorite filters sets by using bookmarks.
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There were some issues with loading highlighted results when the URL was copied and pasted. This is now fixed.
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A "Watchlisted pages" filter group now lets reviewers use Recent Changes, and all its tools, to patrol changes to pages they've Watchlisted. If you have any feedback about how useful this is nor isn't—especially given that we plan to add the new filtering interface to the Watchlist page —
let us know.
There were issues with the tools still in the older filtering UI — like the Namespace filter and the number of results selectors. These have been fixed.
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Now that users can save filter settings, and declare any settings they want as the Recent Changes page default, we'll be reviewing the RC page Preferences with an eye to getting rid of as many as we can. For instance, if you want to hide minor edits or Category changes by default, you can now do that right on the RC page, instead of having to go to a separate page to manage defaults.
On many Recent Changes Pages, the community has defined a large number of links that are displayed directly under the page name (
example on Polish Wikipedia). Many of these links are unrelated or only peripherally related to Recent Changes, add informational complexity of the RC page.
Research shows that they are used only rarely or never. We want to clarify RecentChanges page functionality, so we plan to put the links into a collapsible panel.
Should the panel default to open or closed? That is, should the default state (which users can change with one click) show the links as hidden or displayed?
Let us know what you think.
The most used links are shortcuts to certain type of edits, (Mobile, Newcomers...). Users can already
save their favorite filter settings to the Saved Settings menu, which should make some of the existing links redundant. We plan to provide default bookmarks for the most used filters combinations.
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Wikimedia Deutschland have scheduled the notifications of Wikibase notifications to Wikimedia projects: all the Wikivoyages on May 3; all the Wikipedias except en, fr, de on May 30; all other projects on June 13 and Wikipedias en, fr, de on September 5.
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It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications.
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