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Tech News: 2024-39
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
All wikis will beread-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.
Updates for editors
A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see theAlt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback onthe discussion page.
The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. Themost noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within<syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax{{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.[1]
Two bugs were fixed in theGlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message.[2][3]
The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained onthe project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.
In depth
The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of theWDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. Thequery.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please seethe announcement on Wikidata.
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Readers of42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use thenight-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. Therecommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set inyour preferences.[4]
For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin.Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences.[5]
The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has beenenabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki.Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progresson Spanish Wikipedia andon Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visitthe CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki shouldcheck if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.
In depth
Theserver switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time ofonly 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes.[6]
Hey, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to please ask for some advice regardingGennie Walker. For years, this article was not edited much, however for the past 3 or so week it has been edited almost daily by new users or even users making their first edit(s). Usually I would welcome this, however I have had to revert many of these edits as they have made the article worse by adding incorrect tags, making the wording worse/awkward, making it in-universe, changing "storylines" to "story-lines" and other unconstructive changes. All of the edits have gone towards the lead and none have gone towards expanding the article or putting more real world info (which I am hoping to do at some point before the end of 2024). I hence wanted to ask if you know why this article is getting so many new editors - is it being recommended to new editors to copy-edit or something? Because if so, this is making the article (which in my opinion looks pretty okay grammar and wording wise) worse (and not stable). Again, I am not saying that I do not want new editors to edit it (as any contributions to make the article better would be amazing!!!!) but I think that if this is being advertised as an article to copy-edit then it would make new users believe that the current wording is wrong and needs to be changed. I hence wanted to ask your opinion please? :)DaniloDaysOfOurLives (talk)13:45, 3 October 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-41
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
Communities can now request installation ofAutomoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You canread details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration.[7]
Updates for editors
Translators in wikis wherethe mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You cantry it with your mobile device.[8]
It is now possible for<syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if thecopy=1 attribute isset on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements.[9]
Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML.[10]
Later this month,temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets onthese 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts.Guidance on how to update the code is available.
Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review toolsGerrit andGitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed throughnftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages onFirewall,GitLab limits andGerrit operations.
Hi there! I’ve written an article, but it’s not being indexed by search engines like Google, Bing, or any others. Indexing is enabled in the article settings. Could you please take a look at this article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Arzumanyan? I’d like to see if the indexing status changes. Thank you!Sphaeral (talk)12:55, 11 October 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-42
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Updates for editors
The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced byDiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page.A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode.[16][17]
WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. Achange last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as thehastemplate andincategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available.[18]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.
Updates for technical contributors
Editors who use the Toolforge toolEarwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements.[19]
Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a<bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface isnot recommended and might break at any time.[21]
In depth
The latest monthlyMediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
The latest quarterlyTechnical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.
The Bill has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to thereassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article.Z1720 (talk)21:17, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
Tech News: 2024-43
Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Weekly highlight
The Mobile Apps team has released anupdate to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger plannednavigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents
Updates for editors
Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team'sContent Discovery Experiments page andsubscribe to their newsletter.
Later this month, logged-out editors ofthese 12 wikis will start to havetemporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a newtype of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts.Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about thedeployment plan across all wikis.
It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the newWikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this inthe latest Wikifunctions newsletter.
Updates for technical contributors
Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new{{#timef:…}} parser function. For example,{{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "15 July 2025". Previously,{{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation.#timef (or#timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta.[27][28]
TheProduct and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address theMovement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform.[30]
In depth
The latest quarterlyGrowth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
The Wikimedia Foundation isnow an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publishcommon vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
TheCommunity Wishlist is nowtesting machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.
20–22 December 2024 -Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.
It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within
