Tech News: 2024-49

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

• Two new parser functions were added this week. The{{#interwikilink}} function adds aninterwiki link and the{{#interlanguagelink}} function adds aninterlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning withMOS: on English Wikipediaconflict with themos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
• Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See theHTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects.[1]
• Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis:arwiki,cawiki,frwiki,mediawikiwiki,orwiki,wawiki,wawiktionary,wikidatawiki,zhwiki. This is done as part ofStructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contactTrizek (WMF).[2]
• This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working versionon Testwiki and readthe November project update for more details.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed.[3]

Updates for technical contributors

• In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them tothis list. In addition, review theupdated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on theproject talk page or in thededicated thread on theWikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

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Guild of Copy Editors December 2024 Newsletter

Tech News: 2024-50

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

• Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at theDocumentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new#wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, pleasecontact the Technical Documentation Team.

Updates for editors

• Later this week,Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people withnew Checks that appearwhile they are typing. Theinitial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
• The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working exampleson Testwiki and readthe November project update for more details.
• Translators in wikis where themobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the<page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer tothe step-by-step guide.[4]
• TheNuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has amultiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
• The Nuke feature also nowprovides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements.[5]
• The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using theCitoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively,archiveUrl andarchiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see anexample of a change in a template, and alist of all relevant templates.[6]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage inIndonesian (voy:id:)[7]
• Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing.[8]
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug in theAdd Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases.[9][10]

Updates for technical contributors

• Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stageimplementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps throughComposer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available inthe documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library.[11]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints ontestwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the relatedPhabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdatedRESTBase system.
• The2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associatedprivacy statement.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.[12]

Meetings and events

• The next meeting in the series ofWikimedia Foundation discussions with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place onDecember 12 at 8:00 UTC andat 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is new media and new contributors. Contributors from all wikis are welcome to attend.

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The Signpost: 12 December 2024

Tech News: 2024-51

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

• Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? TheCampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit thedeployment status page.

Updates for editors

• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see apersonalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
• Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the newRabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
• Theglobal reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. Seethe technical details page for more information.
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, a bug wasfixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.

Updates for technical contributors

• There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January.[13]

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Feedback request: Miscellaneous Good Article nomination

Happy Holidays!

The Signpost: 24 December 2024

Feedback request: Wikipedia technical issues and templates request for comment

Tech News: 2025-03

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 Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. Seethe SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.

Updates for editors

• On wikis withPageAssessments installed, you can nowfilter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using theinproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia)[14]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia inTigre (w:tig:)[15]
• View all 35 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed.[16]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin reroutingsome page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to theMediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
• Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs.Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
• For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used forOAuth 1 andOAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in itssub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13.[17]
• Many wikis currently useCite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you tonot clean up yourMediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output.[18]

Meetings and events

• The next meeting in the series ofWikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place onJanuary 15 at 8:00 UTC andat 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.

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The Signpost: 15 January 2025