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

Problems

• On March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed.[1]

Changes later this week

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).

Meetings

• There is no Editing team meeting this week.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on21 March at 16:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days.[2][3]
• In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity.Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments onthe project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.

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.

Changes later this week

• Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change.[4][5]
• The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate.[6]
• TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018.[7]
• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (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 on27 March at 18:30 (UTC). Seehow to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on28 March at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Readmore details.[8]
• Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki inSerbian orEnglish.

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

• Op-ed:Death knell forThe Signpost?

• News and notes:Wiki Conference roundup and new appointments.

• Arbitration report:Ironing out issues in infoboxes; not sure yet about New Jersey; and an administrator who probably wasn't uncivil to a sockpuppet.

• In the media:The media on Wikipedia's workings: the good and not-so-good

• Traffic report:Real sports, real women and an imaginary country: what's on top for Wikipedia readers

• Featured content:Animals, Ships, and Songs

• Technology report:Timeless skin review by Force Radical.

• Special report:ACTRIAL wrap-up.

• Humour:WikiWorld Reruns

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

• Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.
• The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools,please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.

Problems

• MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week.[9][10][11]
• The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed.[12]

Changes later this week

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).
• User subpages ending in.json will now be protected from other people editing them, like.js and.css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage likeUser:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns.[13]
• Tidy will be replaced by RemexHtml on the next set of wikis. On April 4, we plan to turn off Tidy on all Wikiquotes (except frwikiquote) and Wikimedia chapters and user groups wikis. 23 wikis will have Tidy replaced this time.[14][15][16]
• AbuseFilter will transition to useOOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks.[17][18]
• In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist.[19]
• You can see names of individual abuse filters inSpecial:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed.[20]
• You can now search through filter patterns atSpecial:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or aregular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted.[21]

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 on3 April at 18:30 (UTC). Seehow to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on4 April at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you cangive your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.
• On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please followT175706 to monitor progress ofTidy replacement.[22][23]

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

• Some pages have templates that describe problems with that article. There is now more information for mobile readers and what is wrong with the article and how they could help fix it.[24]
• You can now thank users for many more actions than edits to a page. This wasone of the top ten requests in the Wishlist Survey last year.[25]
• The sort order of categories will have errors for a short time starting Monday 9 April (UTC). We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a script to update the database. This will take between a few hours and a few days depending on wiki size. You canread more details.[26]
• Tag filter titles will now work better on wikis where the tag filter title is in a language that is written in another direction than the language of that wiki. This could for example be an English title (written from left to right) on a Hebrew or an Arabic wiki (written from right to left).[27]

Problems

• The bookmark icon for saved filters on the recent changes page disappeared because of new icon changes. This has now been fixed.[28]
• For a week in March rollbacks got both therollback and theundo tag on the recent changes page and other pages where you see tags. This has now been fixed.[29]

Changes later this week

• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 April. It will be on all wikis from 12 April (calendar).
• Patrolled edits now have three states instead of two. Recent changes filters are updated to show unpatrolled, autopatrolled and manually patrolled edits.[30]

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 on10 April at 18:30 (UTC). Seehow to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on11 April at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• The iOS and Android apps will getsynced reading lists later in April.

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.

Changes later this week

• Profiling statistics for anabuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They canfile a phabricator task to do so.[31]
• Abuse filters will now treat integers andfloats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and!==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged.[32][33]
• Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (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 on17 April at 18:30 (UTC). Seehow to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on18 April at 15:00 (UTC). Seehow to join.

Future changes

• Thenew PDF renderer could not create PDFs frombooks. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki.PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function.[34]
• Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3.[35]
• Volunteer developers can fill out theWikimedia Communities and Contributors survey. The last day is April 22 (UTC). This is a third-party service survey. Seethe privacy statement.

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