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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. Images uploaded using Nearby are now automatically added to the associated Wikidata item. You can browse other images on Commons. You can see your achievements and your upload statistics. It has also fixed some bugs. [1]
MediaWiki web requests now have a time limit of 60 seconds for GET requests and 200 seconds for POST requests. [2]
Problems
You could not see the menu on the notifications page on the mobile version. This has now been fixed. [3]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 September. It will be on all wikis from 20 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 September. It will be on all wikis from 27 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 26 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
As the global community of volunteer Wikimedia editors mourns the destruction of this amazing museum, this post pays tribute to all editors who have contributed restlessly to tell the story of the National Museum, our history.
There were three Wikidata-related presentations at the 10th International Conference on Ecological Informatics that took place on 23-28 September in Jena.
Upcoming: German-speaking WikiCon, October 3-5 in St Gallen (Switzerland). Several Wikidata-related talks and workshops in the programme.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Ordinary pages can no longer be loaded as javascript. You could do this using ?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript in the URL. Only fully protected pages in the MediaWiki: namespace or user javascript subpages can be loaded as javascript now. This is for better security. [6][7]
Problems
New and updated translations from translatewiki.net will not reach the wikis for a while. You can still translate messages on translatewiki.net. The Wikimedia wikis will be updated with the new translations later. This is because of work on the translation system. [8][9]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 October. It will be on all wikis from 4 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation Search Platform team. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 UTC. See how to join if you want to know how the search function works or have questions.
Future changes
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
Welcome to the second newsletter for the new Growth team!
The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Our plan for the next quarter is ready
After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:
Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.
Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.
Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.
Learn more about us
You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem when you copied and pasted from a table with the visual editor. It could add href where it shouldn't be. This has now been fixed. [11]
Changes later this week
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.
Because of the data centre test there will be no new version of MediaWiki this week. Changes for this week will come next week instead.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
SPNHC & TDWG Conference 2018 — blog post on a talk (slides, speaker notes) about using Wikimedia projects and materials from the Biodiversity Heritage Library and other sources to collect information regarding New Zealand's biodiversity
A new Wikidata game has been created to suggest corrections for some constraints violations. These corrections are learned from the Wikidata edit history.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some pages, edits and users disappeared for a short while after the server switch. Missing content and users was fixed within a day. Some preferences and other things might take a few more days to fix. [12]
Wikis are updated with new and updated translations from translatewiki.net again. This will happen once a week. The developers are working on fixing the problem so we can have translation updates more often again. [13]
Changes later this week
When you create an abuse filter that prevents edits you can now write a specific error message for it. Before this all abuse filters that prevented edits had the same error message. [14]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 October. It will be on all wikis from 18 October (calendar).
Meetings
There will be no more meetings with the Editing team. This is because not enough Wikimedians were interested. To tell developers which bugs you think are the most important you can use Phabricator as normal. [15]
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
A Wikidata workshop will be led by Shani Evenstein, in collaboration with Wikimedia Israel & and the Israel Internet Association, on 18th & 25th of October in Tel Aviv. The first meeting will be dedicated to an introduction and adding information to WD, and the second meeting will focus on querying & SPARQL.
An Introduction to Wikidata by Harmonia Amanda, an Introduction to Wikibase by Sandra Müllrick and a Wikicite workshop by Miriam Redi at the Wiki Techstorm in the Dutch National Library in the Hague on the 26th & 27th of October
Many events to celebrate Wikidata's birthday around the world. You can check the full list and the map to find one near you
Die vergessene fünfte Partnerstadt (German), Der Landbote, October 18, 2018. Press article about the discoverage of Winterthur's sister city Ontario thanks to Wikidata, which only became official in Ontario in the year 1982, while it got forgotten in Winterthur.
A new academic course featuring Wikidata opened on October 15th at Tel Aviv University. The elective is called "From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, from Wikipedia to Wikidata" and it's the 1st for-credit course in the world to focus on Wikidata! The course is available to all undergraduate students at TAU, from all disciplines, and is led by educator & Wikimedian Shani Evenstein.
Change on QuickStatements: all your new QuickStatements batch job edits will now be done under your own account, rather than QuickStatementsBot (thanks to Lucas)
Wikidata Image Positions, showing the relative position of depicted elements within the images of items (example, documentation)
Latest tech 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
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 October. It will be on all wikis from 25 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Community Wishlist Survey begins on 29 October. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 29 October to 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
The wikis now have a content security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future. [16]
Problems
Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed. [17]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (calendar).
The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed from Special:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the 2010 wikitext editor. [18][19]
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Plenty of Wikidata 6th birthday events happen all around the world. You can check the Commons category and the hashtag #WikidataBirthday on social networks.
The Editing team has begun a design study of visual editing on the mobile website. New editors have trouble doing basic tasks on a smartphone, such as adding links to Wikipedia articles. You can read the report.
The Editing team wants to improve visual editing on the mobile website. Please read their ideas and tell the team what you think would help editors who use the mobile site.
If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now use TemplateWizard to edit templates. This works only with the 2010 wikitext editor and not in the visual editor or the 2017 wikitext editor. If you click on you can enter the information in a pop-up. You can turn on TemplateWizard in your beta feature preferences. [21]
Changes later this week
You can choose to see edit conflicts in a two-column view. This is a beta feature. You can find it in your preferences. The interface for the two-column edit conflict will change. You can read more.
When you edit with the visual editor you can use the "Automatic" citation tab. This helps you generate citations. You will now be able to write plain text citations or the title of a journal article or a book in this tab. This will search the Crossref and WorldCat databases and add the top result. [22]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 November. It will be on all wikis from 8 November (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Welcome to the third newsletter for the new Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks
We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.
Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.
Third Growth team project begins
Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.
Best practices for helping newcomers
We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!
We are still looking for volunteers
Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.
Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!
Learn more about us
You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.
