Books & Bytes – Issue 67

Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter #194 is out: Wikidata-based simple enumerations

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

LTA

This week'sarticle for improvement (week 13, 2025)

Tech News: 2025-13

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 Wikimedia Foundation is seeking your feedback on thedrafts of the objectives and key results that will shape the Foundation's Product and Technology priorities for the next fiscal year (starting in July). The objectives are broad high-level areas, and the key-results are measurable ways to track the success of their objectives. Please share your feedback on the talkpage, in any language, ideally before the end of April.

Updates for editors

• TheCampaignEvents extension will be released to multiple wikis (seedeployment plan for details) in April 2025, and the team has begun the process of engaging communities on the identified wikis. The extension provides tools to organize, manage, and promote collaborative activities (like events, edit-a-thons, and WikiProjects) on the wikis. The extension has three tools:Event Registration,Collaboration List, andInvitation Lists. It is currently on 13 Wikipedias, including English Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata. Questions or requests can be directed to theextension talk page or in Phabricator (with#campaigns-product-team tag).
• Starting the week of March 31st, wikis will be able to set which user groups can view private registrants inEvent Registration, as part of theCampaignEvents extension. By default, event organizers and the local wiki admins will be able to see private registrants. This is a change from the current behavior, in which only event organizers can see private registrants. Wikis can change the default setup byrequesting a configuration change in Phabricator (and adding the#campaigns-product-team tag). Participants of past events can cancel their registration at any time.
• Administrators at wikis that have a customizedMediaWiki:Sidebar should check that it contains an entry for the Special pages listing. If it does not, they should add it using* specialpages-url|specialpages. Wikis with a default sidebar will see the link moved from the page toolbox into the sidebar menu in April.[1]
• The Minerva skin (mobile web) combines both Notice and Alert notifications within the bell icon (). There was a long-standing bug where an indication for new notifications was only shown if you had unseen Alerts. This bug is now fixed. In the future, Minerva users will notice a counter atop the bell icon when you have 1 or more unseen Notices and/or Alerts.[2]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that wereresolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• VisualEditor has introduced anew client-side hook for developers to use when integrating with the VisualEditor target lifecycle. This hook should replace the existing lifecycle-related hooks, and be more consistent between different platforms. In addition, the new hook will apply to uses of VisualEditor outside of just full article editing, allowing gadgets to interact with the editor in DiscussionTools as well. The Editing Team intends to deprecate and eventually remove the old lifecycle hooks, so any use cases that this new hook does not cover would be of interest to them and can beshared in the task.
• Developers who use themw.Api JavaScript library, can now identify the tool using it with theuserAgent parameter:var api = new mw.Api( { userAgent: 'GadgetNameHere/1.0.1' } );. If you maintain a gadget or user script, please set a user agent, because it helps with library and server maintenance and with differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate traffic.[3][4]
• Detailed code updates later this week:MediaWiki

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