 | 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. |
The Signpost: 29 March 2024
- Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year
- Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors
- Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune
- Humour: Letters from the editors
- Comix: Layout issue
Administrators' newsletter – April 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).
Administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.
Technical news
- The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. ( T313405)
Arbitration
- An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
- Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
Tech News: 2024-14
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
- Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed. [1]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (
calendar).
[2]
[3]
Future changes
- The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:34, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-15
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
- Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
A new
Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a
user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the
project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.- Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check. [4] [5]
- Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [6]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (
calendar).
[7]
[8]
- New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [9]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-16
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
- Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [10] [11]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (
calendar).
[12]
[13]
- Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [14]
- A new variable
page_last_edit_agewill be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [15]
Future changes
- Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including
Quarry). This affects only the abuse_filterandabuse_filter_historytables. Some queries might need to be updated. [16]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:27, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Blanking pages
Hello, Uhai,
I'm not sure why you are doing this but I'm coming across draft pages that, for some reason, you have blanked even though you are not the draft creator. Please do not blank pages unless there is objectionable content like a copyright violations or BLP violations. The proper step that is supposed to be taken is to revert your blanking and wait another 6 months for a CSD G13 deletion. It serves no purpose to blank any article or draft unless this is a good reason for doing so and, in the case of G13s, it just delays their deletion for another half year. So, please do not do this kind of editing any longer. Thank you. Liz Read! Talk! 00:43, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
- I don't know what the confusion is here as my edit summaries are pretty descriptive and I also provided an explanation the last time you brought this to my talk page. These drafts do contain unsourced (auto)biographical content, often significantly intimate details including scans of signatures, personal photographs, addresses, family member details, telephone numbers, and social media, and are contrary to Wikipedia's purpose. And what you are referring to is less than fifteen edits that I have made to only the most egregious or abhorrent examples—and I don't think I have even done this since the last time you brought this to my attention. Nonetheless, as soon as there is a valid CSD criterion for removing this garbage from Wikipedia I will take that route instead. Some admins do delete this content under G11 de facto (self-promotion, self-written vanity pages) but interpretation and enforcement of this criterion are wildly variable and I'm not going to shop for admins who understand these issues (and there are a few) vs. those who decline G11 because they're not up to their necks in flowery prose reading the page in question.
- Importantly, the blame for extending the lifetimes of these problematic drafts before G13 does not go to me but instead belongs to those who would revert my edits and restore unsourced BLP content.
- Feel free to go to ANI with diffs and if there is community consensus for unsourced BLP content, autobiographical or not, to remain in the draft space or that my behavior is inappropriate, I will cease. Otherwise please let me know if consensus for this has been reached previously. Uhai ( talk) 12:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-17
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
- Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention. [17]
- You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (
calendar).
[18]
[19]
Future changes
- This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [20]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:26, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 25 April 2024
- In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics and another wikirace on live TV
- News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law
- WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)
- Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users
- Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem
Tech News: 2024-18
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
.jpg)
- The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [21]
- Seven new wikis have been created:
- You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [29]
- Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.
Problems
-
Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using
mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed. [30]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (
calendar).
[31]
[32]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:31, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
| 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. |
The Signpost: 29 March 2024
- Technology report: Millions of readers still seeing broken pages as "temporary" disabling of graph extension nears its second year
- Recent research: "Newcomer Homepage" feature mostly fails to boost new editors
- Traffic report: He rules over everything, on the land called planet Dune
- Humour: Letters from the editors
- Comix: Layout issue
Administrators' newsletter – April 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).
Administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
- An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.
Technical news
- The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. ( T313405)
Arbitration
- An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
- Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
Tech News: 2024-14
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
- Users of the reading accessibility beta feature will notice that the default line height for the standard and large text options has changed. [1]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (
calendar).
[2]
[3]
Future changes
- The Wikimedia Foundation has an annual plan. The annual plan decides what the Wikimedia Foundation will work on. You can now read the draft key results for the Product and Technology department. They are suggestions for what results the Foundation wants from big technical changes from July 2024 to June 2025. You can comment on the talk page.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:34, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-15
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
- Web browsers can use tools called extensions. There is now a Chrome extension called Citation Needed which you can use to see if an online statement is supported by a Wikipedia article. This is a small experiment to see if Wikipedia can be used this way. Because it is a small experiment, it can only be used in Chrome in English.
- A new
Edit Recovery feature has been added to all wikis, available as a
user preference. Once you enable it, your in-progress edits will be stored in your web browser, and if you accidentally close an editing window or your browser or computer crashes, you will be prompted to recover the unpublished text. Please leave any feedback on the
project talk page. This was the #8 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
- Initial results of Edit check experiments have been published. Edit Check is now deployed as a default feature at the wikis that tested it. Let us know if you want your wiki to be part of the next deployment of Edit check. [4] [5]
- Readers using the Minerva skin on mobile will notice there has been an improvement in the line height across all typography settings. [6]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (
calendar).
[7]
[8]
- New accounts and logged-out users will get the visual editor as their default editor on mobile. This deployment is made at all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. [9]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-16
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
- Between 2 April and 8 April, on wikis using Flagged Revisions, the "Reverted" tag was not applied to undone edits. In addition, page moves, protections and imports were not autoreviewed. This problem is now fixed. [10] [11]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (
calendar).
[12]
[13]
- Default category sort keys will now affect categories added by templates placed in footnotes. Previously footnotes used the page title as the default sort key even if a different default sort key was specified (category-specific sort keys already worked). [14]
- A new variable
page_last_edit_agewill be added to abuse filters. It tells how many seconds ago the last edit to a page was made. [15]
Future changes
- Volunteer developers are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. Learn more.
- Four database fields will be removed from database replicas (including
Quarry). This affects only the
abuse_filterandabuse_filter_historytables. Some queries might need to be updated. [16]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 23:27, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
Blanking pages
Hello, Uhai,
I'm not sure why you are doing this but I'm coming across draft pages that, for some reason, you have blanked even though you are not the draft creator. Please do not blank pages unless there is objectionable content like a copyright violations or BLP violations. The proper step that is supposed to be taken is to revert your blanking and wait another 6 months for a CSD G13 deletion. It serves no purpose to blank any article or draft unless this is a good reason for doing so and, in the case of G13s, it just delays their deletion for another half year. So, please do not do this kind of editing any longer. Thank you. Liz Read! Talk! 00:43, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
- I don't know what the confusion is here as my edit summaries are pretty descriptive and I also provided an explanation the last time you brought this to my talk page. These drafts do contain unsourced (auto)biographical content, often significantly intimate details including scans of signatures, personal photographs, addresses, family member details, telephone numbers, and social media, and are contrary to Wikipedia's purpose. And what you are referring to is less than fifteen edits that I have made to only the most egregious or abhorrent examples—and I don't think I have even done this since the last time you brought this to my attention. Nonetheless, as soon as there is a valid CSD criterion for removing this garbage from Wikipedia I will take that route instead. Some admins do delete this content under G11 de facto (self-promotion, self-written vanity pages) but interpretation and enforcement of this criterion are wildly variable and I'm not going to shop for admins who understand these issues (and there are a few) vs. those who decline G11 because they're not up to their necks in flowery prose reading the page in question.
- Importantly, the blame for extending the lifetimes of these problematic drafts before G13 does not go to me but instead belongs to those who would revert my edits and restore unsourced BLP content.
- Feel free to go to ANI with diffs and if there is community consensus for unsourced BLP content, autobiographical or not, to remain in the draft space or that my behavior is inappropriate, I will cease. Otherwise please let me know if consensus for this has been reached previously. Uhai ( talk) 12:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-17
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
- Starting this week, newcomers editing Wikipedia will be encouraged to try structured tasks. Structured tasks have been shown to improve newcomer activation and retention. [17]
- You can nominate your favorite tools for the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award. Nominations will be open until May 10.
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 April. It will be on all wikis from 25 April (
calendar).
[18]
[19]
Future changes
- This is the last warning that by the end of May 2024 the Vector 2022 skin will no longer share site and user scripts/styles with old Vector. For user-scripts that you want to keep using on Vector 2022, copy the contents of Special:MyPage/vector.js to Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js. There are more technical details available. Interface administrators who foresee this leading to lots of technical support questions may wish to send a mass message to your community, as was done on French Wikipedia. [20]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 20:26, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 25 April 2024
- In the media: Censorship and wikiwashing looming over RuWiki, edit wars over San Francisco politics and another wikirace on live TV
- News and notes: A sigh of relief for open access as Italy makes a slight U-turn on their cultural heritage reproduction law
- WikiConference report: WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Newspapers (Not WP:NOTNEWS)
- Recent research: New survey of over 100,000 Wikipedia users
- Traffic report: O.J., cricket and a three body problem
Tech News: 2024-18
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 appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [21]
- Seven new wikis have been created:
- You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [29]
- Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.
Problems
-
Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using
mapstyle="osm". This wasn't working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn't supported. This has now been fixed. [30]
Changes later this week
- The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (
calendar).
[31]
[32]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 03:31, 30 April 2024 (UTC)