Latesttech 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

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
• There will be a<div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitextparser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You canreport new problems you think are related to this.[1]

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

Problems

• Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen.[2]

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 on30 May at 19:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to control who can notify you on the Wikimedia wikis. You will have a user blacklist. When you add a user to the blacklist you will not get anotification when they mention you. You cantest this on Beta Wikipedia. You canread more and give feedback on Meta.[3]

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

Recent changes

• You can see new files onSpecial:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from.[4]
• When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox.[5]
• You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article.[6]
• New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June.[7]

Problems

• TheMediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen.[8]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use thecompact language links will see languages they have in theirBabel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on inyour preferences.[9]
• You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions.[10]
• When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead.[11]
• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
• String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules.[12]

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 on6 June at 19:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• The2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can seea picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all.[13][14]
• Wikimedia wikis useOCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative isElectron. You cantell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too.[15]
• TheArchitecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on thedraft that describes the new committee.

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• From the editors:Signpost status: On reserve power, help wanted!

• News and notes:Global Elections

• Arbitration report:Cases closed in the Pacific and with Magioladitis

• Op-ed:Wikipedia's lead sentence problem

• Featured content:Three months in the land of the featured

• In the media:Did Wikipedia just assume Garfield's gender?

• Recent research:Wikipedia bot wars capture the imagination of the popular press

• Technology report:Tech news catch-up

• Traffic report:Film on Top: Sampling the weekly top 10

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

Recent changes

• Some wikis have the larger and brighterOOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long.[16]
• When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results.[17]

Changes this week

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on13 June at 19:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on thetest wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account.[18]
• Wikimedia wikis useOCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative isElectron. You cantell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects.[19]
• Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding&fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking atSpecial:Undelete.[20][21]

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

Problems

• ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40UTC. It has now been fixed.[22]

Changes this week

• irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down.[23]
• Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data.[24]
• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on20 June at 19:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how theTemplateStyles extension works onBeta Labs.

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• News and notes:Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

• In the media:Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 ofDrama on the Hill

• Op-ed:Facto Post: a fresh take

• Featured content:Will there ever be a break? The slew of featured content continues

• Traffic report:Wonder Woman beats Batman, The Mummy, Darth Vader and the Earth

• Recent research:Utopian bubbles: Can Wikipedians create value outside of the capitalist system?

• Technology report:Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

Latesttech 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 <inputbox> has a newsearchfilter parameter. You can add values likesearchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query.[25]

Changes this week

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
• Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone.[26]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on27 June at 19:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.
• You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on27 June at 13:00 UTC.[27]

Tech news prepared byTech News writers and posted bybot •Contribute •Translate •Get help •Give feedback •Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Latesttech 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 was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed.[28]

Changes this week

• Very old and inactive unpublished translations in theContent Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
• There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
• EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replaceRCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the2017/07 issue.[29]

Tech news prepared byTech News writers and posted bybot •Contribute •Translate •Get help •Give feedback •Subscribe or unsubscribe.