User talk:Ocaasi/Archive 9

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Tech News: 2015-39

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

There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here. [1][2]
Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong. [3][4][5][6]
More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article. [7]
The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users. [8]

Problems

Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time. [9]
Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week. [10][11]
UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed. [12]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [13]
You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it. [14]
Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata. [15]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

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

18:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 September 2015

In the media: PETA makes "monkey selfie" a three-way copyright battle; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Op-ed: Can we please stop bashing Wikipedia?

Featured content: Inside Duke Humfrey's Library

WikiProject report: Dancing to the beat of a... wikiproject?

Traffic report: ¡Viva la Revolución! Kinda.

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Tech News: 2015-40

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

In UploadWizard, the dialog to see an image preview has been removed. You already see the images in the thumbnails when you upload them. [16]
UploadWizard dialogs look a bit different now. They have been updated to the new OOUI look. [17]
You can now edit music scores in VisualEditor. You can add new sheet music scores and get live updates when you edit one. [18]
When you send an e-mail to another editor using Special:EmailUser, that user will now get a notification on the wiki as well. [19]
You can now see 500 images when you upload images from Flickr with UploadWizard. Before this change the limit was 50. [20]
The Wikimedia mailing lists have been upgraded. [21]
MediaWiki developers spent a day looking at proposed code changes in Gerrit. The goal was to clean up the backlog and give feedback to volunteer developers. [22]

Problems

Some visitors had problems reaching the Wikimedia sites for an hour on September 24. [23][24]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 30. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 1 (calendar).
There will be a new beta feature that allows editors to use Flow on their user talkpage if they want to. Each wiki can decide if they want to enable it. [25]
The Content Translation tool can give translation suggestions. This feature will now be available in more languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Catalan. [26]

Meetings

You can join the strategy process of the Reading department of Wikimedia Engineering. [27]
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikimedia Foundation developers want the community to decide who can use OAuth in the future. You can discuss it on Meta.

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

15:15, 28 September 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 13

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 13, August-September 2015
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs), Nikkimaria (talk · contribs)

New donations - EBSCO, IMF, more newspaper archives, and Arabic resources
Expansion into new languages, including Viet and Catalan
Spotlight: Elsevier partnership garners controversy, dialogue
Conferences: PKP, IFLA, upcoming events

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:30, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

You're invited! Women in Red World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Architecture

You are invited! Join us remotely!

World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Architecture

Dates: 15 to 25 October 2015
Location: Worldwide/virtual/online event
Host/Facilitator: Women in Red (WiR): Did you know that only 15% of the biographies on Wikipedia are about women? WiR focuses on "content gender gap". If you'd like to help contribute articles on women and women's works, we warmly welcome you!
Sponsor: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in association with Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, Women in Design, and Wikiproject Women Wikipedia Design
Event details: This is a virtual edit-a-thon hosted by WiR in parallel with a series of "physical" Guggenheim edit-a-thons. It will allow all those keen to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women in architecture and design to participate. The campaign aims to further the goals of Ada Lovelace Day for STEM, and Art+Feminism for art, in a field that by its nature combines both. As the virtual edit-a-thon stretches over a week and a half, inexperienced participants will be able to draw on the assistance of more experienced editors while creating, translating or improving articles on women who are (or have been) prominent in this field. All levels of Wikipedia editing experience are welcome.
RSVP and learn more: →here←--Ipigott (talk) 15:24, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 September 2015

News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation fundraising report, Montreal to host 2017 Wikimania

In the media: Irish legislative editing; coffee quarrel; more sports vandalism

Op-ed: Wikipedia needs more administrators

Recent research: Wiktionary special; newbies, conflict and tolerance; Is Wikipedia's search function inferior?

Tech news: Tech news in brief

Tech News: 2015-41

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 link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [28]
The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [29]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [30]
UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [31]
A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [32]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Wikidata requests your input on how to improve the editing of Wikidata's data in other locations, such as Wikipedias.

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

18:33, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

TWA issue with VE

Hi Jake. Now that Visual Editor is enabled for all (or most, I forget) new accounts, TWA needs a couple of tweaks. Primarily, it asks users to click Edit, which now uses VE which doesn't play nicely with TWA. If they're changed to Edit Source I'm sure that would solve the issue for now. Just had someone come in to the irc help channel with a looping issue and it seems like VE was the problem. Sam Walton (talk) 19:15, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Sam, I'll update it today! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

A beer for you!

You try this had Habit Okiee cool going

SivaMohan123 CH SIVA MOHAN 12:08, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor update

This note is only delivered to English Wikipedia subscribers of the visual editor's newsletter.

The location of the visual editor's preference has been changed from the "Beta" tab to the "Editing" section of your preferences on this wiki. The setting now says Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta. This aligns en.wiki with almost all the other WMF wikis; it doesn’t mean the visual editor is complete, or that it is no longer “in beta phase” though.

This action has not changed anything else for editors: it still honours editors’ previous choices about having it on or off; logged-out users continue to only have access to wikitext; the “Edit” tab is still after the “Edit source” one. You can learn more at the visual editor’s talk page.

We don’t expect this to cause any glitches, but in case your account no longer has the settings that you want, please accept our apologies and correct it in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences. Thank you for your attention, Elitre (WMF) -16:32, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Support request with team editing experiment project

Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta. 16:41, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: September 2015

This Month in GLAM – Volume V, Issue IX, September 2015
Headlines
Argentina report: Edit-a-thon & editing challenges Belgium report: Wiki Loves Art; Publications; SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage France report: Clever September Germany report: Opening up (with) the Prussians! Italy report: Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 Italian edition and photographic archives Macedonia report: Bringing Wikipedia closer to animal lovers Netherlands report: Who's afraid of Jacob van Ruisdael? Various gifts from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden Spain report: Wiki Loves Monuments; Wiki Takes Ayora; Glaming Madrid; Wikimedia Connection; Creative Commons Valladolid Film Festival Sweden report: Books, exhibitions, maritime connections and monuments UK report: Wake me up, when September ends... USA report: Edit-a-thon in Seattle Open Access report: Homo naledi; Wikigate; Open Access Week Wikidata report: Wikidata this month Calendar: October's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 01:44, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 October 2015

Op-ed: Walled gardens of corruption

Traffic report: Reality is for losers

Featured content: This Week's Featured Content

Gallery: Winners of Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 in Pakistan

Arbitration report: Warning: Contains GMOs

Technology report: Tech news in brief

In the media: Jailed Saudi blogger wins award; PR editing and Wiki-embarassment; Pakistan's third-richest person?

Tech News: 2015-42

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 database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [33]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [34]
Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [35]

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 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:29, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

TWA

I've just removed a template edit request from Wikipedia_talk:TWA/Portal (the hidden page title doesn't make it an easy page to link to or to discuss). This is the third or fourth I've removed or declined in the last couple of months. Is there something in the closing stages of the adventure, or wherever feedback is solicited, that is encouraging this kind of error? Regards, Bazj (talk) 09:28, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Bazj, thanks for cleaning that up. Yes, it happens periodically because every page in The Wikipedia Adventure is a subpage of TWA and so all of the attempts during the game to 'vandalize' the game are routed here as edit requests (since the game's pages are protected). For example, that edit request came from an attempt to change Wikipedia:TWA/Badge. This is kind of unavoidable, although I can attempt to monitor the feed more closely and deny them myself. Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 October 2015

Op-ed: WikiConference USA 2015: built on good faith

WikiConference report: US gathering sees speeches from Andrew Lih, AfroCrowd, and the Archivist of the United States

Editorial: Why the news media needs a Wikipedian in residence

News and notes: 2015–2016 Q1 fundraising update sparks mailing list debate

Traffic report: Screens, Sport, Reddit, and Death

Featured content: A fistful of dollars

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Blog: Third Wikimedia Spain conference takes place in Madrid

Tech News: 2015-43

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

Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [36]

Problems

A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [37]
Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [38]
The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [39]

Changes this week

Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [40]
Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [41][42][43][44]

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 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 October 2015

Editorial: Women and Wikipedia: the world is watching

News and notes: Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA dismissed; Affiliates mailing list launched

In the media: "Wikipedia's hostility to women"

Special report: One year of GamerGate, or how I learned to stop worrying and love bare rule-level consensus

Featured content: A more balanced week

Op-ed: Wikipedia is significantly amplifying the impact of Open Access publications

Arbitration report: Four ArbCom cases ongoing

Traffic report: Hiding under the covers of the Internet

Technology report: Tech news in brief

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • October 2015

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

We did it!

In July, we launched five pilot WikiProjects: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. We also use the new design, named "WPX UI," on WikiProject Women in Technology, Women in Red, WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health. We are currently looking for projects for the next round of testing. If you are interested, please sign up on the Pilots page.

Shortly after our launch we presented at Wikimania 2015. Our slides are on Wikimedia Commons.

Then after all that work, we went through the process of figuring out whether we accomplished our goal. We reached out to participants on the redesigned WikiProjects, and we asked them to complete a survey. (If you filled out your survey—thank you!) While there are still some issues with the WikiProject tools and the new design, there appears to be general satisfaction (at least among those who responded). The results of the survey and more are documented in our grant report filed with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work continues!

There is more work that needs to be done, so we have applied for a renewal of our grant. Comments on the proposal are welcome. We would like to improve what we have already started on the English Wikipedia and to also expand to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Why those? Because they are multilingual projects and because there needs to be better coordination across Wikimedia projects. More details are available in the renewal proposal.

How can the Wikimedia Foundation support WikiProjects?

The Wikimedia Developer Summit will be held in San Francisco in January 2016. The recently established Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in investigating what technical support they can provide for WikiProjects, i.e., support beyond just templates and bots. I have plenty of opinions myself, but I want to hear what you think. The session is being planned on Phabricator, the Wikimedia bug tracker. If you are not familiar with Phabricator, you can log in with your Wikipedia username and password through the "Login or Register: MediaWiki" button on the login page. Your feedback can help make editing Wikipedia a better experience.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 09:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

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 this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [45]
You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [46][47]
When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [48][49]
Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [50]

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

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	This Barnstar is Awarded for contributing to Wikipedia Adventure. I loved Wikipedia Adventure a lot thanks Dinnypaul (talk) 16:32, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #5—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

You can use the visual editor on smartphones and tablets.

Click the pencil icon to open the editor for a page. Inside that, use the gear menu in the upper right corner to "Switch to visual editing".

The editing button will remember which editing environment you used last time, and give you the same one next time. The desktop site will be switching to a system similar to this one in the coming months.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

Educational features: The first time you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.

Links: It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558) These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.

Uploads: Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.

Mobile: Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use the visual editor on any size of device. (T85630) Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.

Rich editing tools: You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925) There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227 and T113354) When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.

On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.

Future changes

You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.

Let's work together

Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page uses Flow for discussions.
Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).
Local admins can set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki. If you need help, then please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
The weekly task triage meetings are open to volunteers. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you can't read this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 04:16, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 October 2015

From the editor: The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help

News and notes: English Wikipedia reaches five million articles

In the media: The world's Wikipedia gaps; Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA

Op-ed: It’s time to stop the bullying

Arbitration report: A second attempt at Arbitration enforcement

Traffic report: Canada, the most popular nation on Earth

Recent research: Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama top "Wikipedia social network"; featured article editing patterns in 12 languages

Featured content: Birds, turtles, and other things

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Community letter: Five million articles

Tech News: 2015-45

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 see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage. [51]
If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results. [52]
Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile. [53]

Problems

On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes. [54]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

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 3 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join. You can also read the latest VisualEditor newsletter.

Future changes

A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links. [55]
Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates. [56]

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

16:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

Nice to meet you at that open-access panel

Hey Jake - good to meet you the other night. Hope we run into each other again - I'll probably be trying to check out more meetups, but feel free to reach out if you'd like to grab coffee or or a drink. I work in downtown SF and and live in the Mission. Haven't had much bandwith for the wiki since I've spent the last year in a grueling transition to the software field. II | (t - c) 06:32, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

@ImperfectlyInformed:, it was great to meet you too! Let's get coffee some Wednesday or Thursday in SF, maybe in early September? I wish you luck on your code developer transition; I have no doubt you'll bring the same thoroughness and usefulness to that new pursuit as you do on WP. Cheers, Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 2 November 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:COI declaration

Wikipedia:COI declaration, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:COI declaration and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:COI declaration during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Widefox; talk 19:10, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 November 2015

Op-ed: You are invited to participate in the Community Wishlist Survey

News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation finances; Superprotect is gone

In the media: Ahmadiyya Jabrayilov: propaganda myth or history?

Traffic report: Death, the Dead, and Spectres are abroad

Featured content: Christianity, music, and cricket

Gallery: Princess of Asturias Awards 2015 ceremony

Technology report: Tech news in brief

You're invited! Women in Red World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Science

You are invited! Join us remotely!

World Virtual Edit-a-thon on Women in Science

Dates: 8 to 29 November 2015
Location: Worldwide/virtual/online event
Host/Facilitator: Women in Red (WiR) in collaboration with Women scientists: Did you know that only 15% of the biographies on Wikipedia are about women? WiR focuses on "content gender gap". If you'd like to help contribute articles on women and women's works, we warmly welcome you!
Sponsor: New York Academy of Sciences
Event details: This is a virtual edit-a-thon hosted by WiR in parallel with a "physical" event during the afternoon of Sunday, November 22 in New York City. It will allow all those keen to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women in science to participate. As the virtual edit-a-thon stretches over three weeks, new participants will be able to draw on the assistance of more experienced editors while creating, translating or improving articles on women who are (or have been) prominent in the field. All levels of Wikipedia editing experience are welcome.
RSVP and learn more: →here←

--Rosiestep (talk) 02:50, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-46

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

Superprotect has been removed. [57]
You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made. [58]
JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch. [59]

Problems

Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon. [60]

Changes this week

Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work. [61]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

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 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

A new tool to navigate through diff pages is being developed. You can test it out and give feedback. [62]
The options on Special:Watchlist will look slightly different. [63]

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

17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2015

This Month in GLAM – Volume V, Issue X, October 2015
Headlines
Argentina report: Edit-a-thon & editing challenges Belgium report: Flemish institutions start with Wikidata project France report: From Brittany to Provence Italy report: The history of Fascism in Italian libraries Macedonia report: Wikipedian in residence at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts Spain report: GLAMing Madrid, libraries and free images Sweden report: 55 000+ links to Wikipedia; Exhibits, concepts and biographies UK report: 'Hywel Dda' edit-a-thon & Pic-a-thon USA report: GLAM activities in Philadelphia & Seattle Open Access report: Open Access Week; Recent uploads Wikidata report: Wikidata this month Calendar: November's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:57, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 November 2015

Op-ed: As one thousand of us requested, Superprotect has been removed

Arbitration report: Elections, redirections, and a resignation from the Committee

Discussion report: Compromise of two administrator accounts prompts security review

Featured content: Texas, film, and cycling

In the media: Sanger on Wikipedia; Silver on Vox; lawyers on monkeys

Traffic report: Doodles of popularity

Gallery: Paris

Tech News: 2015-47

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 this week

You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information. [64]
Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme. [65]
The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page. [66]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

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 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016. [67][68]

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

19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Dream already came true?

"Something I have been dreaming of is a simple widget that computes the following: "The number of total pageviews to all articles I have ever created totals x." It would make an amazing userpage counter. Is this now doable?"

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)/Archive_18#Pageview_statistics_for_all_articles_created_by_a_user
https://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/metronom.php? veeeeeeeery slooooooooow!!!!

Redirects are a problem. (BTW, In November 2013, English Wikipedia pages originally created by Magnus Manske had 11,145,119 views...) --Atlasowa (talk) 12:34, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 November 2015

Special report: ArbCom election—candidates’ opinions analysed

In the media: Icelandic milestone; apolitical editing

Discussion report: BASC disbanded; other developments in the discussion world

Arbitration report: Ban Appeals Subcommittee goes up in smoke; 21 candidates running

Featured content: Fantasia on a Theme by Jimbo Wales

Traffic report: Darkness and light

Tech News: 2015-48

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

A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Language Engineering team. The topic is: Content Translation updates and Questions & Answers. The meeting will be on 25 November at 13:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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 24 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: Raise MediaWiki's PHP version requirement and update coding standards". The meeting will be on 25 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [69]

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:25, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 November 2015

Op-ed: Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone

News and notes: Fundraising update; FDC recommendations

In the media: Erasmus Prize awarded to Wikipedia; trouble on the Russian Wikipedia

Recent research: Do Wikipedia citations mirror scholarly impact?; co-star networks in silent films

Featured content: Caves and stuff

Traffic report: J'en ai ras le bol

Arbitration report: Third Palestine-Israel case closes; Voting begins

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Blog: Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland urge Reiss Engelhorn Museum to reconsider suit over public domain works of art

Tech News: 2015-49

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 symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [70]
Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [71]

Changes this week

Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [72][73]
There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

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 1 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is using the <figure> tag for media. The meeting will be on 2 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [74]
Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [75]

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

16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 December 2015

Op-ed: Whither Wikidata?

News and notes: Online harassment consultation; High voter turnout at ArbCom elections

In the media: Is Wikidata as transparent as it seems?; Wikimedia Fund-raising drive launches

Traffic report: Jonesing for episodes

Featured content: This Week's Featured Content

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Tech News: 2015-50

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

Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [76]

Problems

Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [77]

Changes this week

You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [78]
IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [79]
You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [80]
It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [81]
You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [82]
UploadWizard will look a bit different. [83]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [84]

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 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [85]

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

17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 14

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 14, October-November 2015
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs), Nikkimaria (talk · contribs)

New donations - Gale, Brill, plus Finnish and Farsi resources
Open Access Week recap, and DOIs, Wikipedia, and scholarly citations
Spotlight: 1Lib1Ref - a citation drive for librarians

Read the full newsletter

The Interior, via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: November 2015

This Month in GLAM – Volume V, Issue XI, November 2015
Headlines
Argentina report: Edit-a-thons and Digitization project France report: November comes and November goes, Wikimedians stay! Germany report: GLAM and copyright Italy report: Food images donation and much more! Mexico report: Rock and movies in Wikipedia Spain report: GLAMing Madrid, Wiki Loves Earth and Carmen Thyssen Museum Sweden report: Exhibitions and more images UK report: November in the UK USA report: GLAM activities in Seattle Special story: Guerrilla GLAMː An alternate way of doing GLAM in indie-way Open Access report: OpenCon; Robots, oysters and amber Wikidata report: Wikidata this month Calendar: December's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 02:49, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 December 2015

News and notes: ArbCom election results announced

Op-ed: Wikidata: Knowledge from different points of view

In the media: Political editing in the context of the US presidential primaries

Gallery: Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 winners

Traffic report: So do you laugh, or does it cry?

Featured content: Sports, ships, arts... and some other things

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Tech News: 2015-51

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 this week

Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [86]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

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 15 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is talking about the agenda for the Wikimedia Developer Summit. The meeting will be on 16 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join. [87]

Future changes

A new gadget manager will come next year. The new gadget system is called Gadgets 2.0. [88]

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

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 December 2015

In focus: Drone photography: New possibilities and new challenges

In the media: Wales in China; #Edit2015

Arbitration report: GMO case decided

Featured content: An unusually slow week

WikiProject report: Women in Red—using teamwork and partnerships to elevate online and offline collaborations

Traffic report: A feast of Spam

Gallery: WikiConference USA 2015: images, slide decks, and videos

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
- Remember my last editor,
- Always give me the visual editor if possible,
- Always give me the source editor, and
- Show me both editor tabs. (This is the current state for people using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 December 2015

News and notes: WMF Board dismisses community-elected trustee

Arbitration report: Second Arbitration Enforcement case concludes as another case is suspended

Featured content: The post-Christmas edition

Traffic report: The Force we expected

Year in review: The top ten Wikipedia stories of 2015

In the media: Wikipedia plagued by a "Basket of Deception"

Gallery: It's that time of year again

Code repo for TWA

Hi Ocaasi, I've just been looking for where TWA's scripts are hosted to see if I could help out in development/bug squashing, but I think my search-fu is lacking. You seem relatively involved with TWA, do you happen to know where the best place is to get in on development? Happy New Years -- samtar ^whisper 12:37, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi samtar! It should be easier to find and I'll add a link to the talk page. Everything is at WP:TWA/Index, you can find the links to each of the 7 mediawiki code pages there. I'd really appreciate help with bug-squashing. I may also want to initiate a changeover or secondary tour which uses VE instead of the markup editor. That's actually not a huge project and would just involve adding a button and changing some of the editing mechanics/guide-box placement. Thanks for the interest in helping out!! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Not a problem at all! A user reported a bug to me on IRC a little while back and it sparked my interest. Anything in particular I can do to help out - I'm alright at js so I'd be more than happy to help out with bugs! Would it also be worth throwing up on GitHub or something? -- samtar ^whisper 18:42, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 January 2016

News and notes: The WMF's age of discontent

In the media: Impenetrable science; Jimmy Wales back in the UAE

Arbitration report: Catflap08 and Hijiri88 case been decided

Featured content: Featured menagerie

Recent research: Teaching Wikipedia, Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?

WikiProject report: Try-ing to become informed - WikiProject Rugby League

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Tech News: 2016-02

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

Wikimedia no longer uses visitor statistics from comScore. [89]
You can make interactive graphs with the Graph extension. There is now a tutorial for how to do this. [90]

Problems

Some pages do not turn in up in categories where they should be. This is because link tables are sometimes not populated. [91]

Changes this week

The Nuke extension will work with Flow. This will make it easier to handle spam in Flow. [92]
New file uploads will now be patrollable. [93]
Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia if you use Internet Explorer 8, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. [94][95]

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 12 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. [96]
The edit tabs for the wikitext editor and the visual editor will be combined to one single edit tab. You will be able to choose which one you prefer. If you are not logged in, your choice will be saved as a cookie in your browser. You can test the single edit tab. [97][98]
There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. This works much like the links to for example Wikipedia articles in other languages. It will go out of beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [99][100]
The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better. You can give feedback in your language if you can't write in English.

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

16:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2015

This Month in GLAM – Volume V, Issue XII, December 2015
Headlines
Argentina report: Edit-a-thons and Editing Challenges Basque Country report: Local Library weaves a community at Iurretapedia Bulgaria report: Archives Challenge; 100 ancient coins from Philippopolis Germany report: Wallraf Art and Focus on Zeiss Italy report: Fondazione Giorgio Cini donation and a new education project Macedonia report: Physics experiments in glorious HD! Netherlands report: Donation of videos; about Wikimedia during 3 conferences; image donation from Dutch Parliament; workshop at City Archive Rotterdam Spain report: GLAMing Madrid and Wiki Loves contests Sweden report: Riksutställningar UK report: National Library of Wales; Bodleian Libraries of Oxford Open Access report: Open Access stats; recent uploads Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes Wikidata report: Wikidata this month Calendar: January's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 17:57, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 January 2016

In the media: War and peace; WMF board changes; Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias

Community view: Battle for the soul of the WMF

Editorial: We need a culture of verification

In focus: The Crisis at New Montgomery Street

Op-ed: Transparency

Traffic report: Pattern recognition: Third annual Traffic Report

Special report: Wikipedia community celebrates Public Domain Day 2016

News and notes: Community objections to new Board trustee

Blog: Inside the game of sports vandalism on Wikipedia

Featured content: This Week's Featured Content

Arbitration report: Interview: outgoing and incumbent arbitrators 2016

Technology report: Tech news in brief

MfD nomination of User:Paul Stephen Milana/draft

User:Paul Stephen Milana/draft, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Paul Stephen Milana/draft and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:Paul Stephen Milana/draft during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 10:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-03

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 will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [101]
Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [102]

Changes this week

The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [103]
MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [104]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).

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 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

17:56, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Fork of TWA

Hi Ocaasi, here is Spring Roll Conan, a Chinese Wikipedian. I just started works on the fork of TWA in Chinese Wikipedia, and some of my fellows support my works as they feel about Chinese version's increasing hostility to newbies, though it just serves as a beginner's course as I see it. Can I just work ahead alone (with some help of local sysops) or do I have to listen to your advices first? I am also doubt that if someone runs on those "fictional Wikipedia users" appeared in TWA, or if they're just left behind after all. Hope that I wouldn't bother you. Thanks, --Spring Roll Conan ( Talk · Contributions ) 14:37, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Spring Roll Conan, of course you are free to adapt the game as several other Wikipedias have! No permission needed, at all. Here is an overview of the project with other community versions: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Adventure, and here is the page index which includes all the components in the English version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TWA/Index. Best of luck!! Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 6

Newsletter • January 2016

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

What comes next

Some good news: the Wikimedia Foundation has renewed WikiProject X. This means we can continue focusing on making WikiProjects better.

During our first round of work, we created a prototype WikiProject based on two ideas: (1) WikiProjects should clearly present things for people to do, and (2) The content of WikiProjects should be automated as much as possible. We launched pilots, and for the most part it works. But this approach will not work for the long term. While it makes certain aspects of running a WikiProject easier, it makes the maintenance aspects harder.

We are working on a major overhaul that will address these issues. New features will include:

Creating WikiProjects by simply filling out a form, choosing which reports you want to generate for your project. This will work with existing bots in addition to the Reports Bot reports. (Of course, you can also have sections curated by humans.)
One-click button to join a WikiProject, with optional notifications.
Be able to define your WikiProject's scope within the WikiProject itself by listing relevant pages and categories, eliminating the need to tag every talk page with a banner. (You will still be allowed to do that, of course. It just won't be required.)

The end goal is a collaboration tool that can be used by WikiProjects but also by any edit-a-thon or group of people that want to coordinate on improving articles. Though implemented as an extension, the underlying content will be wikitext, meaning that you can continue to use categories, templates, and other features as you normally would.

This will take a lot of work, and we are just getting started. What would you like to see? I invite you to discuss on our talk page.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 January 2016

News and notes: Vote of no confidence; WMF trustee speaks out

Op-ed: Not a pretty picture: Thoughts on the "monkey selfie" debacle

In the media: 15th anniversary news round-up

Traffic report: Danse Macabre

Featured content: This week's featured content

Blog: Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different place

Down the rabbit hole...

Utterly fantastical question I know...How many ISBN's are there? Is there a rough estimate somewhere? How many have we on Wikipedia? I love adding them! Gareth E. Kegg (talk) 20:56, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

As of 2011, there were 1,105,000 ISBNs on English Wikipedia. Total number of ISBNs in the world is trickier to pin down, but see this. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:53, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, fascinating stuff! I'm sure the number has swelled in the last 5 years. I'm still in two minds on the aesthetics of dehyphenating ISBNs though. Gareth E. Kegg (talk) 09:05, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-04

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 follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [105][106]
Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [107]

Changes this week

You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [108]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).

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 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [109]
The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [110]
Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [111]

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

16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 January 2016

Op-ed: Lila Tretikov: the WMF needs your input in developing our strategy

News and notes: Geshuri steps down from the Board

In the media: Media coverage of the Arnnon Geshuri no-confidence vote

Recent research: Bursty edits; how politics beat religion but then lost to sports; notability as a glass ceiling

Traffic report: Death and taxes

Featured content: This week's featured content

Tech News: 2016-05

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

Sites with a wikimedia.org address were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [112]
Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [113][114]
Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [115]

Changes this week

The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [116]
Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [117][118]
The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [119]
The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [120][121][122]
The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [123][124]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).

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 2 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is expiring watch list entries. The meeting will be on 3 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The rest.wikimedia.org domain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use /api/rest_v1/ at each individual project domain instead. [125]

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

21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-06

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

Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [126]
When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [127]
RESTBase is now using scrub_wikitext instead of scrubWikitext. [128]

Changes this week

Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [129][130]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).

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 9 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is per-language URLs for pages of multilingual wikis. The meeting will be on 10 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [131][132]
Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [133][134][135]

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

18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

From the editors: Help wanted

Special report: Board chair and new trustee speak with the Signpost

In focus: The Knight Foundation grant: a timeline and an email to the board

Op-ed: So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?

News and notes: Harassment survey 2015; Luis Villa to leave WMF; knowledge engine background

Arbitration report: Catching up on arbitration

Traffic report: Bowled

Featured content: This week's featured content

This Month in GLAM: January 2016

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue I, January 2016
Headlines
Africa report: #OpenAfrica15 Argentina report: New Editing Challenges and Design the guidelines for cultural institutions Australia and New Zealand report: WiR at State Library of Queensland Belgium report: Heroines Wikipedia workshop addressing the Gender Bias; Public Domain Day Celebration; Wikidata meeting & workshop; FOSDEM: MediaWiki, Wikidata and more France report: New year, new start Germany report: GLAM on Tour at Technische Sammlungen & Verkehrsmuseum Dresden Italy report: BEIC Library Project goes on, and Wikipedia for Press and Media Freedom in Europe Macedonia report: Wikipedia 15 Netherlands report: Wiki loves artists - We need your help; Two Wikipedia edit-a-thons Spain report: GLAMing Madrid, Wiki Loves Folk & Gobernantes de Chile Sweden report: New year, new projects UK report: Audio-describing London Landmarks, celebrating Wikipedia 15 Special story: Pre-production starts for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons tutorial videos Open Access report: Open Access stats; data citation, dino jaw, dozens of beetles Wikidata report: Wikidata this month Calendar: February's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:59, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 February 2016

Special report: New internal documents raise questions about the origins of the Knowledge Engine

In focus: An in-depth look at the special report's newly revealed documents

News and notes: Another WMF departure

In the media: Jeb Bush swings at Wikipedia and connects

Featured content: This week's featured content

Traffic report: A river of revilement

Blog: Wikimedia Foundation removes The Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law requirements

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-07

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 edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [136]
You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [137]

Problems

A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [138][139]

Changes this week

There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [140][141]
Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [142]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).

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 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [143]

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

16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 15

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 15, December-January 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs), Nikkimaria (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs)

New donations - Ships, medical resources, plus Arabic and Farsi resources
#1lib1ref campaign summary and highlights
New branches and coordinators

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:20, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 February 2016

Special report: Search and destroy: the Knowledge Engine and the undoing of Lila Tretikov

Op-ed: Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month

Featured content: This week's featured content

Traffic report: Super Bowling

Technology report: Tech news in brief

Blog: Antonin Scalia and the editor tracking his legacy

Tech News: 2016-08

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

Phabricator has been upgraded. [144][145]

Problems

There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [146][147]

Changes this week

After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [148]

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 23 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is Assign RFCs to ArchCom shepherds. The meeting will be on 24 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 7

Newsletter • February 2016

This month:

One database for Wikipedia requests

Development of the extension for setting up WikiProjects, as described in the last issue of this newsletter, is currently underway. No terribly exciting news on this front.

In the meantime, we are working on a prototype for a new service we hope to announce soon. The problem: there are requests scattered all across Wikipedia, including requests for new articles and requests for improvements to existing articles. We Wikipedians are very good at coming up with lists of things to do. But once we write these lists, where do they end up? How can we make them useful for all editors—even those who do not browse the missing articles lists, or the particular WikiProjects that have lists?

Introducing Wikipedia Requests, a new tool to centralize the various lists of requests around Wikipedia. Requests will be tagged by category and WikiProject, making it easier to find requests based on what your interests are. Accompanying this service will be a bot that will let you generate reports from this database on any wiki page, including WikiProjects. This means that once a request is filed centrally, it can syndicated all throughout Wikipedia, and once it is fulfilled, it will be marked as "complete" throughout Wikipedia. The idea for this service came about when I saw that it was easy to put together to-do lists based on database queries, but it was harder to do this for human-generated requests when those requests are scattered throughout the wiki, siloed throughout several pages. This should especially be useful for WikiProjects that have overlapping interests.

The newsletter this month is fairly brief; not a lot of news, just checking in to say that we are hard at work and hope to have more for you soon.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 February 2016

Special report: WMF in limbo as decision on Tretikov nears

Op-ed: Backward the Foundation

Traffic report: Of Dead Pools and Dead Judges

Blog: Wiki Loves Africa brings the continent’s fashion to the world

Arbitration report: Arbitration motion regarding CheckUser & Oversight inactivity

Featured content: This week's featured content

Technology report: Tech news in brief

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:05, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #1—2016

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

Among experienced editors, the visual editor's table editing is one of the most popular features.

If you select the top of a column or the end of a row, you can quickly insert and remove columns and rows.

Now, you can also rearrange columns and rows. Click "Move before" or "Move after" to swap the column or row with its neighbor.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.

Recent changes

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.

Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.

The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:

Remember my last editor,
Always give me the visual editor if possible,
Always give me the source editor, and
Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)

The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers would like to know how well the visual editor works in your language. They particularly want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect the following languages: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic and others.

Let's work together

Please try out the newest version of the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You may need to restore the default preferences (at the bottom of test2wiki:Special:Preferences) to see the initial prompt for options. Were you able to find a preference setting that will work for your own editing? Did you see the large preferences dialog box when you started editing an article there?
Can you read and type in Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic, or Han scripts? Language engineer David Chan needs help from people who often type in these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help. Report your results on wiki (Korean – Japanese – all languages).
Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Join the Tech Talk about "Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it" with Sebastian Karcher on 29 February 2016.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thanks!

– Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:47, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-09

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

Thanks to the Graph extension and Pageview API, we now have {{Graph:PageViews}} templates that can show pageviews for any wiki page for any of the wikis. See the examples.
The Capiunto extension is installed on test wiki. Capiunto provides flexible infobox functionality for Scribunto and generates HTML for infobox features such as headers and rows. It is designed for clean and modern infoboxes that are driven by data from Wikidata, easily usable across different language versions, and easily extensible.
The visual editor now follows the TemplateData format setting announced in November. When you edit or add a use of a template, the wikitext will be laid out in one of the two ways. [149][150]
The order of parameters and format defined in a template's TemplateData will be now respected. [151][152]

Changes this week

On wikis where the visual editor is available in single edit tab mode, red links may open the visual editor instead of the wikitext editor, depending on user preferences. [153]
Anonymous editor warning is now displayed as a warningbox for consistency in both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. [154]
Parsoid has been updated to fit some HTML 5 specifications. [155]

Meetings

Resigning executive director Lila Tretikov is taking questions at Knowledge Engine FAQ regarding the much talked about project. [156]
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 1 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:12, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	Thank you for creating TWA! 333 -blue 23:25, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-10

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

Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [157]
Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [158]
The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [159]
It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [160]
Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [161]

Problems

Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [162]
The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [163]
The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [164]
You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [165]
Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [166]

Changes this week

Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [167]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [168]

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 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [169]
The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [170]

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

20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

News and notes: Tretikov resigns, WMF in transition

Featured content: This week's featured content

Traffic report: Brawling

Recent research: Wikipedia and paid labour; Swedish gender gap; how verifiable is "verifiable"?

Blog: Wikimedia Foundation details requests to alter or remove content in new transparency report

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:01, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2016

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue II, February 2016
Headlines
Australia and New Zealand report: Wikidata Tour Down Under Austria report: GLAM activities for libraries and archives in the DACH region Belgium report: Gender Redirect Wikipedia workshop addressing the Gender Bias; Open Belgium 2016 France report: Getting technical...! Germany report: 30 GLAM volunteers in museums and libraries Italy report: Four new Wikipedians in Residence, and Food! Macedonia report: Theatre actors of Macedonia Mexico report: Towards to our first Art and Feminism 2016 Netherlands report: Naturalis' Wikipedia project; Open Culture Data Spain report: Free pictures, classical music & libraries Sweden report: Maps, planes and metadata on artists UK report: Wales Report; Wikidata Tour Down Under; Museums Galleries Scotland report; Oxford USA report: One month, dozens of events: Black History Month, Art+Feminism and more Special story: Lightning talk overview of upcoming video series Open Access report: Gravitational wave detection; viral biomechanics, anglerfish, smart dining table Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes: A Wikipedia Library Newsletter Wikidata report: Wikidata Tour Down Under Calendar: March's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 21:05, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 March 2016

News and notes: Katherine Maher named interim head of WMF; Wales email re-sparks Heilman controversy; draft WMF strategy posted

In the media: Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day; dinosaur art; Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share

Op-ed: A modest proposal for Wikimedia’s future

Featured content: Five articles, four lists, a topic, and five images were promoted this week.

Technology report: Wikimedia wikis will temporarily go into read-only mode on several occasions in the coming weeks

WikiCup report: First round of the WikiCup finishes

Blog: The new alchemy: turning online harassment into Wikipedia articles on women scientists

Systemic bias: Revenge of "I can’t believe we didn’t have an article on ..."

Traffic report: All business like show business

Tech News: 2016-11

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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections. [171]
The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated. [172]

Changes this week

Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [173]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [174]

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 15 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are backlog and thumb API. The meeting will be on 16 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Overflow at your user page

Dear User:Ocaasi. Your user page has turned to overflow and appears now at Category_talk:Pages_where_template_include_size_is_exceeded. This is probably due to the fact that you are transcluding here your User:Ocaasi/dashboard page instead of linking to it. You can also transclude {{Admin dashboard/light}} that provides the same functionalities while being less resources consuming (and also remains inside it's box when minimized). Best regards. Pldx1 (talk) 13:43, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

News and notes: Wikipedia Zero: Orange mobile partnership in Africa ends; the evolution of privacy loss in Wikipedia

In the media: Wales at SXSW; lawsuit over Wikipedia PR editing

Op-ed: Hard work needed to address Wikimedia’s leadership challenges

Discussion report: Is an interim WMF executive director inherently notable?

Featured content: This week's featured content

Technology report: Watchlists, watchlists, watchlists!

Traffic report: Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States

Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #119: The Foundation and the departure of Lila Tretikov

Blog: It “revolutionized the way German-speaking people inform themselves about the world”: Fifteen years of the German Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:14, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-12

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

Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [175]

Changes this week

It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [176]
You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [177]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).

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 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [178]

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

16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Yellowhead Tribal College Logo.png

⚠

Thanks for uploading File:Yellowhead Tribal College Logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 02:39, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

Interview: Exclusive: interview with interim ED Katherine Maher

News and notes: Lila Tretikov a Young Global Leader; Wikipediocracy blog post sparks indefinite blocks

In the media: Angolan file sharers cause trouble for Wikipedia Zero; the 3D printer edit war; a culture based on change and turmoil

Traffic report: Be weary on the Ides of March

Editorial: "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Featured content: Watch out! A slave trader, a live mascot and a crested serpent awaits!

Arbitration report: Palestine-Israel article 3 case amended

Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #120: Status of Wikimania 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-13

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

MediaWiki now supports the semantic web standards of Microdata and RDFa 1.0. On Wikimedia projects, a configuration change must be requested in order to enable RDFa 1.0. [179] [180]

Problems

Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [181]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [182]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with part of the Architecture committee, which will discuss a few topics. The meeting will be on 30 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The Architecture committee has sent a summary of new and ongoing RFC discussions.

Future changes

Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [183]
Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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

19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

News and notes: Trump/Wales 2016

In the media: Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

WikiProject report: Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music

Traffic report: Donald v Daredevil

Featured content: A slow, slow week

Technology report: Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!

Recent research: "Employing Wikipedia for good not evil" in education; using eyetracking to find out how readers read articles

Wikipedia Weekly: Podcast #121: How April Fools went down

Blog: Growing hashtags: Expanding outreach on Wikipedia

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

TWA image deleted

I noticed that one of the pictures used in TWA's Earth page (commons:File:Bachalpseeflowers.jpg) has been deleted from Commons due to copyright violation. -Hypree (Ͳ · ∆ · @) 17:08, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-14

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

You can filter Special:Log in more detail. [184]
Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [185]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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

22:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Do you want one Edit tab, or two? It's your choice

How to switch between editing environments

Click the [[ ]] to switch to the wikitext editor.

Click the pencil icon to switch to the visual editor.

The editing interface will be changed soon. When that happens, editors who currently see two editing tabs – "Edit" and "Edit source" – will start seeing one edit tab instead. The single edit tab has been popular at other Wikipedias. When this is deployed here, you may be offered the opportunity to choose your preferred appearance and behavior the next time you click the Edit button. You will also be able to change your settings in the Editing section of Special:Preferences.

You can choose one or two edit tabs. If you chose one edit tab, then you can switch between the two editing environments by clicking the buttons in the toolbar (shown in the screenshots). See Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Switching between the visual and wikitext editors for more information and screenshots.

There is more information about this interface change at mw:VisualEditor/Single edit tab. If you have questions, suggestions, or problems to report, then please leave a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Whatamidoing (WMF) 19:22, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-15

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

The visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [186][187]
Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [188][189]
ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [190]
The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [191]

Problems

There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [192]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [193]

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 12 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are improving transclusion of templates for Parsoid and balanced templates. The meeting will be on 13 April at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [194]

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

20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2016

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue III, March 2016
Headlines
Argentina report: Edit-a-thons in Buenos Aires Asia report: Wikidata tour visits Jakarta Belgium report: Just For The Record: March France report: Zoology, feminism and contemporary art Germany report: Wiki loves librarians Greece report: Edit-a-thon in Athens Italy report: Biggest donation of photos from an Italian institution Latvia report: Edit-a-thon in Riga Macedonia report: Editing competition about the villages in Aegean Macedonia Netherlands report: Open Culture Data Lab Republic of Srpska report: First GLAM project in the Republic of Srpska Serbia report: GLAMers opened their doors to Wikimedia Serbia Spain report: Libraries, free pictures and audios & new partners UK report: GLAM Marches on in the UK Open Access report: BartBotje; Rats as dino models; Auditory illusion; Crab-hunting octopus Wikipedia Library report: Hashtags, Campaigns and New Access donations Wikidata report: A really busy month all round Calendar: April's GLAM events
Read this edition in full • Single-page
To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 12:31, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

Op-ed: Should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?

News and notes: Denny Vrandečić resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board

In the media: Wikimedia Sweden loses copyright case; Tex Watson; AI assistants; David Jolly biography

Featured content: This week's featured content

Traffic report: A welcome return to pop culture and death

Arbitration report: The first case of 2016—Wikicology

Gallery: A history lesson

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:47, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 16

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 16, February-March 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs)

New donations - science, humanities, and video resources
Using hashtags in edit summaries - a great way to track a project
A new cite archive template, a new coordinator, plus conference and Visiting Scholar updates
Metrics for the Wikipedia Library's last three months

Read the full newsletter

The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

That ... that

“I still finding it striking, and touching, and even inspiring that of all the things one could theoretically choose to try and become, even under potentially false pretenses, that they chose to become one of us.” Maybe kill the second 'that'? Peter Damian (talk) 19:07, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #205

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Discussion
- Closed request for comments: Reforming the property creation process, Improve bot policy for data import and data modification
Events/Blogs/Press
- Past: office hour on IRC (log)
- Past: ISB2016 (slides)
- Past: WWW2016 - Freebase to Wikidata migration (slides)
- Past: CUNY Wikidata intro (slides)
- National Library of Wales: Our Wikidata Visiting Scholar
- New TSRI Project Helps Researchers Build a Biomedical Knowledgebase
- Yle <3 Wikidata - using Wikidata for concept tagging
Other noteworthy stuff
- ArticlePlaceholder is going live on the first small Wikipedias on May 11th and could use your help
- Wikimedia Commons will get the arbitrary access feature on April 26th
- The Europeana Art History Challenge has started
- Magnus made a handy user-script for duplicating items, for when a new item has similar property values to an existing one. See for instance, this set of edits for a second version of an artwork.
- Listeria now has a status page
- PetScan has now the option "Has no statements" to find items without statements for a category at Wikipedia (sample: en:Category:United States geography stubs) or an entire language version (sample: "sowiki").
Did you know?
Development
- Query results for the query service are now cached by default for 60 seconds (phabricator:T126730)
- Finishing touches on easier input of geocoordinates and dates (sneak peek)
- Finishing touches on easier manipulation of SPARQL queries (sneak peel - should go live later today)
- Significantly reduced the write access to the database to make sure we're not frying the poor servers unnecessarily
- Getting ArticlePlaceholder ready for first deployment
- More work on first prototype for structured data support for Wikimedia Commons
- Cleaned up icons for selecting rank and value type
Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:19, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-16

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

Recent changes

You can filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [195][196]
You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [197]
MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [198]

Changes this week

Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [199]
There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

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 April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is shadow namespaces. The meeting will be on 20 April at 21:30 (UTC). See how to join.

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

20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8

Newsletter • March / April 2016

This month:

Transclude article requests anywhere on Wikipedia

In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.

Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)

With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: {{Wikipedia Requests}}. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying article=, category=, or wikiproject=, and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do {{Wikipedia Requests|category=Living people}}. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!

Help us build our list!

The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.

If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Requests#Transition project and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.

An open database means new tools

WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.

And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.

Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name s52475__wpx_p. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called projectindex. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!

On the horizon

The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
The WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

News and notes: Lunar project; steering group formed to search for next executive director

Op-ed: Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

Special report: Update on EranBot, our new copyright violation detection bot

Traffic report: Two for the price of one

Featured content: The double-sized edition

Arbitration report: Amendments made to the Race and intelligence case

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:42, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #206

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Events/Blogs/Press
Other noteworthy stuff
- SQUID: a new class and property browser for Wikidata (background info)
- Wikidata Graph Builder now can visualize graphs with different node sizes. See for instance, types of artists with number of people, occupied with each subclass item
- List of items that have English, German, and French sitselinks, but no statements
- List of articles on English Wikipedia with a video where the corresponding item has no video
- Listeria bot (the one generating lists on Wikipedia based on Wikidata data) will now begin auto-replacing simple WDQ queries with SPARQL ones
- Magnus is looking for a designer to help with a logo for PetScan
- Arbitrary access for Wikimedia Commons is coming as planned on the 26th
- Wikidata surpassed English Wikipedia in items/articles using files from Wikimedia Commons
Did you know?
Development
- There will be some maintenance on the query service in a few hours
- Redesigned the rank selector as well as snak type selector icons (phab:T129033#2217402, gerrit:283968)
- The snak type selector icon also has a tooltip now (gerrit:283945)
- The term table header row as well as language column will now be marked as <th> instead of <td> (gerrit:283395)
- Fixed an issue with newline characters in quantity values (phab:T110728)
- Fixed the month-precision time parser ignoring the minus in "January -150" (phab:T132441)
- Continued working on diffing and patching support for new entity types (phab:T132442)
- Continued working on support for creating entities of new types as part of the work for Wikimedia Commons support (phab:T132964)
- Rolled out a little query explanation field to query.wikidata.org to help you better understand a query if you don't understand SPARQL well
- Fixed a bug where the map wouldn't show in the visualization of a query result (phabricator:T132669)
- Fixed issues with the duplicate references gadget (phabricator:T131920)
- Added basic support for more languages to the query service (phabricator:T132756)
Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:42, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-17

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

Problems

Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [200]
When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [201]

Changes this week

Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [202]
It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [203]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (calendar).

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 April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [204]

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

21:02, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

On TWA

Hi Ocaasi, I'm there again. I faced some difficulties while continuing works on the fork of TWA in Chinese Wikipedia. With my colleague's help some problems are solved, but some aren't. Thus I like to ask for these problems:

In the English version of TWA there are accounts which are set up for the game. So is it necessary to create userpages for "them"? (I always think that in Chinese Wikipedia users with userpage have a better standing)
When I import scripts (with help from sysops), I notice a problem: some self-defined button titles are not shown. E.g. in the first scene of mission 1, "Welcome to Wikipedia!", the words "Get equipped for the trip" should be shown on the blue button. But it turned as a white arrow pointed to the right. I found that it is probably due to duplicated "buttons" appeared in two steps. So is it a bug or do I have to ignore it? CC: Samtar.
Does WP:Flow really has something to do with the "Hello World" automatic message on the TWA? Reports from users testing the TWA who also deployed Flow on their talk pages reported this problem. (Though this is not a big question, assume that new users will not know how to use Flow, but they may do so if they are fascinated by others when they hang around Wikipedia between missions.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 春卷柯南 (talk • contribs) 14:03, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, --Spring Roll Conan ( Talk · Contributions ) 14:24, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

News and notes: Wikimedia Switzerland's board and paid-editing firm; passing of Ed Dravecky

In the media: Wikipedia Zero piracy in Bangladesh; bureaucracy; chilling effects; too few cooks; translation gaps

Traffic report: Purple

Featured content: The best ... from the past two weeks

Arbitration report: Two editors unbanned; Wikicology case enters workshop phase; Gamaliel restricted from Gamergate at his own request

Recent research: The eight roles of Wikipedians; do edit histories expose social relations among editors?

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:10, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #207

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Discussions
- Wikidata, a stable source for disambiguation items?
Events/Blogs/Press
- Find, Prioritize, and Recommend: An article recommendation system to fill knowledge gaps across Wikipedia
- Upcoming: CSVconf
- Upcoming: Open Tech Summit
Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Commons now has arbitrary access
- Work on ORES to make vandalism fighting easier is progressing well. "Damaging" and "goodfaith" models for Wikidata are now online.
- Wikimind
- New coverage maps have been created (see thumbnails)
- We have new images you can use to indicate your website/app/service is using data from Wikidata. (2 of the files have a problem still. We're working on a fix and will reupload.)
  Show the rest of the world you're using data from Wikidata!
Did you know?
- Newest properties: Loop ID, sound power, 3DMet ID, locality or place, Index Hepaticarum ID, clearance, ASF KID Cave Tag Number, power consumed, net tonnage, connects with, Czech neighbourhood ID code, longest span, aerodrome reference point, Mercalli intensity scale
- Category reports on without claims by site now link to PetScan's fast "has no statements"-option. A report for your preferred Wikipedia can be added.
- Query examples: software with most versions (source), oldest software (source), map of U1 stations in Berlin (source)
Development
- Created the first MediaInfo entity through the API (screenshot, a bit more background)
- Substantially reduced server load for item and property displaying (phab:T132662)
- There are currently some issues with the order of latitude/longitude inn coordinates in the query service map visualization. It will be fixed tonight.
- Removed unsupported sort and dir parameters from the wikibase.api.RepoApi JavaScript module. This may break user JavaScript calling getEntitiesByPage (phab:T119856).
- Worked on new flyers for institutions that want to cooperate with Wikidata and developers wanting to use our data (will be published on Commons once they're done)
- Moved forward with internationalization of the query service interface (not on translatewiki.net yet but being worked on)
- Worked on making it possible to extend SPARQL queries in simplified natural language version. It will also no longer add query prefixes when editing the query. Those are not live yet.
- Fixed a bug where admins got a blank page when trying to view deleted revisions (phabricator:T132645)
- Investigating issues with bad suggestions for properties when adding new statements (phabricator:T132839)
Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
- Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 15:03, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-18

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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [205]

Problems

There was a security problem with the MobileFrontend extension. It showed information that had been oversighted. This has now been fixed. [206]

Changes this week

You can now see which notifications are available on a wiki on Special:DisplayNotificationsConfiguration. [207]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 4. It will be on all wikis from May 5 (calendar).

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "PSR-6 Cache interface in Mediawiki core". The meeting will be on May 4 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [208]

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

20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)