Tech News: 2024-44

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

• Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can readthe October project update and see thelatest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now useWikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia.[1]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikis can usethe Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works withdark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also setemitTransitionOnStep totrue to fix an old bug. They can use the new flagallowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want.[2]
• Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use theNuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier.[3]

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Invitation to participate in a research

Tech News: 2024-45

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

• Stewards can now makeglobal account blocks cause globalautoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for theTemporary Accounts project. You can read more about theprogress on key features for temporary accounts.[4]
• Wikis that have theCampaignEvents extension enabled can now use theCollaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part ofthe 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you canfollow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode.[5]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, userscan now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XMLdata dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated.[6]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team forthis work, you can read aboutthe deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled onseven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out toUser:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterlyLanguage and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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Feedback request: Wikipedia proposals request for comment

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

Tech News: 2024-46

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

• On wikis with theTranslate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages.[7]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use theSecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's specialadministrator election was resolved on time.[8]

Updates for technical contributors

• In1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase functiongetAllStatements changed to behave likegetBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable.[9]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newerMediaWiki REST API endpoints. Theimpacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the relatedPhabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projectswhere Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions.This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visitthe documentation page for more information about this work.[10]

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC &16:00 UTC) -Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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Reminder to participate in Wikipedia research

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

The Signpost: 18 November 2024

ArbCom 2024 Elections voter message

Tech News: 2024-47

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

• Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create aredirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects.[11]
• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example,Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge.[12]

Updates for technical contributors

• On wikis that use theFlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this.[13][14]

In depth

• There is a newDiff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

• Technical volunteers can now register for the2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey.Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open fromNovember 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
• Join theWikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take placeNovember 21, 2024,8:00 UTC and16:00 UTC.
• ALanguage community meeting will take placeNovember 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

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Tech News: 2024-48

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

• A new version of the standard wikitext editor-modesyntax highlighter will be available as abeta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support,template folding,autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on thehelp page.
• The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts suchCtrl+B for bold andCtrl+I for italics. A fulllist of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement.[15]
• Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis:bswiki,elwiki,euwiki,fawiki,fiwiki,frwikiquote,frwikisource,frwikiversity,frwikivoyage,idwiki,lvwiki,plwiki,ptwiki,urwiki,viwikisource,zhwikisource. This is done as part ofStructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contactTrizek (WMF).
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected"if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

• TheCodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages,now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressingCtrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
• Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can checkthis dashboard and the list in the Description of thetask T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April.[16]
• TheNew PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities.[17]

Meetings and events

• ALanguage community meeting will take place November 29 at16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track atWiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

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