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Congratulations to Siobhan Leachman (d:User:Ambrosia10), awarded the "Companion of the Auckland War Memorial Museum" medal for her volunteer work, including contributions to Wikidata: [1].
Creative Commons has a proposal for tool development with Wikidata's copyright metadata for the 2019 edition of Google Summer of Code. Interested student developers are invited to apply.
A new beta version of the Daty Wikidata Editor has been released, check out the changelog. You can also show your endorsement to the project over here.
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 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (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 6 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The mobile website will use the standard fonts on your computer or phone instead of a generic font. This will make it easier to read text in many scripts. [2][3]
Client wikis calling geocoordinate statements from Wikidata using mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatements or the #statements parser function will now have it displayed using a Kartographer <maplink> if available. In case of bug or question, feel free to ask in phab:T210926. Thanks to Tpt for the change!
A Google Summer of Code/Outreachy project seeks to add structure to the Commons app. Photographers will be able to pick Wikidata items that are depicted by the picture they upload.
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
Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatementsLua function or the #statementsparser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer <maplink> if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator.
Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [4]
Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [5][6]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (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 13 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Welcome to the sixth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Plans for the next three months
The Growth team has been working on features to increase new editor retention for the last seven months. We have made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and we've just finished planning for our next three months. During the next three months, we're going to focus on iterations of the help panel and the newcomer homepage. We have decided not to start the engagement emails project, because we think that we will be able to do better work by improving the projects we have already started. Specifically, these are our team goals:
Deploy and iterate on newcomer homepage
Continued iteration on help panel
Make the help panel available to more wikis
Add a fourth Wikipedia to our set of target wikis
Publish in-depth quantitative reporting on the data from this year
Assemble a report on what our team has learned so far about newcomers
Newcomer homepage
Mockup of potential design for newcomer homepage The newcomer homepage is our current major project. We hope that community members can read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. You can see in the accompanying mockup how we are thinking about the homepage.
We have recently decided on the specifications for an initial version that we can deploy and iterate on:
Shown in the User space
Desktop only (mobile comes next)
Four modules
Help module: help links and ability to ask help desk questions
Mentorship module: all newcomers assigned a mentor to whom they can ask questions
Impact module: shows the number of pageviews for pages the newcomer edited
Account completion module: gives some very simple recommendations of how to get started (add an email, start your user page)
Layout not yet personalized for each user
We're currently running live user tests on this configuration. Future work will include adapting the homepage for mobile, working on a task recommendation module, and considering how to encourage newcomers to visit their homepage.
Help panel
Screenshot from Vietnamese Wikipedia showing the help panel open on the Community Portal, including the "search" bar.
During the last month, the help panel was deployed on Vietnamese Wikipedia, adding it to Czech and Korean Wikipedias.As of 2019-03-14:
2,425 newcomers have seen the help panel
422 of them have opened it
175 have clicked links
27 have run searches
40 have asked questions
We have been analyzing the data around usage, and we'll be publishing numbers in the coming weeks. At a high level, we see at least some users are being helped by the panel, with many clicking on links, running searches, and asking questions. We do not yet see any problems that have arisen from the help panel. Therefore, we think that the help panel is generally a positive feature – though data is still coming that will allow us to see its numerical impact. If other wikis are interested in using the help panel, please contact us on our team's talk page, in the language of your choice.
Over the past month, we have iterated on the help panel to take into account the usage patterns we are seeing. You can see in the accompanying image how the help panel currently looks.
We added a search capability, in which users can search the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.
The help panel was previously available whenever a newcomer was in "edit" mode. We are now also showing the help panel when a newcomer is in "read" mode on a page in the Help, Wikipedia, or User namespaces.
We want to see whether users find the "search" useful. If so, we may spend time on improving search results. We're also looking forward to learning whether exposing the help panel in "read" mode in more namespaces will increase usage.
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
When you use rollback you will be able to get a confirmation prompt on most wikis. It asks you if you wanted to do the rollback. This is to avoid misclicks. You will have to opt in to get it. On German Wikipedia it will be an opt-out feature from 28 March. [7][8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (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 20 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Admins will be able to block someone from editing a page or a namespace. This already works on a few Wikimedia wikis. You can read more. If your wiki wants to be an early tester of this, you can tell the developers. [9]
Toolforge will shut down the Ubuntu Trusty job grid. This will happen the week of 25 March. Tools that use this grid needs to be moved to the new Debian Stretch job grid. If they haven't, they will be taken offline. Maintainers can restart the tools later. Users may not be able to use them in the meanwhile. You can see a list of affected tools.
Hello and welcome to the March newsletter, a brief update of Guild activities since December 2018. All being well, we're planning to issue these quarterly in 2019, balancing the need to communicate widely with the avoidance of filling up talk pages. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.
January Drive: Thanks to everyone for the splendid work in January's Backlog Elimination Drive. We removed copyedit tags from all of the articles tagged in our original target months of June, July and August 2018, and by 24 January we ran out of articles. After adding September, we finished the month with 8 target articles remaining and 842 left in the backlog. GOCE copyeditors also completed 48 requests for copyedit in January. Of the 31 people who signed up for this drive, 24 copyedited at least one article. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Blitz: Thanks to everyone who participated in the February Blitz. Of the 15 people who signed up, 13 copyedited at least one article. Participants claimed 32 copyedits, including 15 requests. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are available here.
Progress report: As of 23:39, 18 March 2019 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have completed 108 requests since 1 January and the backlog stands at 851 articles.
March Drive: The month-long March drive is now underway; the target months are October and November 2018. Awards will be given to everyone who copyedits at least one article from the backlog. Sign up here!
Election reminder: It may only be March but don't forget our mid-year Election of Coordinators opens for nominations on 1 June. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.
Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Miniapolis, Baffle gab1978, Jonesey95, Reidgreg and Tdslk.
To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.
On Wikimedia Research from March 2019: Learning How to Correct a Knowledge Base from the Edit History, by Thomas Pellissier Tanon, Camille Bourgaux and Fabian Suchanek (slides, video)
The panEuropean Research Infrastructure "Mobilising Data, Experts and Policies in Scientific Collections" initiative's kick-off meeting had a workshop on the "Authority Management of People Names". Wikidata featured strongly - and was highly praised: Twitter thread
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 new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [10]
Problems
There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [11]
The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [12]
Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (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 27 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
While editing OpenStreetMap from the iD editor, it will now be possible to match map data with Wikidata by typing in names and getting an autocompleted label.
OpenStreetMap is participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, and quite a few of the project ideas involve Wikidata integration.
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
Notifications tell you about things that happen on the wiki. You can turn on notifications about new links to pages you created. For performance reasons you can no longer get e-mails about this. [14]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (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 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The Wikimedia URL shortener will be launched on 11 April; see Wikidata:URLShortener. It will not be immediately incorporated into the Query Service but the feature is planned.
The Library of the African Studies Centre in Leiden compiled an experimental web dossier which combines the components of a classical ASCL web dossier with features offered by Wikidata.
The gender gap tool Delenezh is online again and now hosted by Wikimedia France
More work on documenting and preparing the announcement for the Wikidata External Landscape dashboard (phab:T204440)
Improved the documentation of WMDE analytic documents (phab:T219844)
Set up translatable schema edit summaries using the FormatAutocomments hook (phab:T218893)
Improved right-to-left support on schema pages (phab:T219298)
Protected schemas against imports (phab:T218181) and page moves (phab:T219313) and disabled the useless “move” and “create” protections for them (phab:T219980)
Improved schema edit conflict detection to allow merging of non-conflicting edits (phab:T218300, phab:T219173)
Improved the Extension:WikibaseSchema documentation on mediawiki.org (phab:T219979)
Fixed a bug on Lexicographical Data when editing existing grammatical features (phab:T219318)
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
More wikis are now testing visual editor section editing for mobile users. You can read more.
A map update caused some problems on 29 March and 30 March. It was rolled back. [18]
Pages on some Wikivoyages had problems with the top headline. This has been fixed. [19]
Changes later this week
When you add an edit summary the VisualEditor will search your recent edit summaries in case you want to re-use one. This works in both the visual and wikitext modes on desktop. It also works on the mobile site. [20]
The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it will return "" (empty string). When you read a page it will return "-" (dash). For now this will only affect content namespaces. [22]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (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 10 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
You will be able to preview references. This means that when you hover over the link you will get a popup that shows you a preview of the reference. It will work much like page previews. This is so you don't have to go to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will now be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. [23][24]
The Wikidata JSON output will change. Empty containers will be serialised as empty objects. This is a breaking change that will affect tools that use JSON outputs and APIs. It will happen on 30 April. You can read more and see how to test your code.
The page Wikidata:Wikimania 2019 is here to help you coordinating with other people regarding your submissions for Wikimania 2019. The opening of submissions is planned for late April.
Reminder: you can apply to participate to the WikidataCon 2019 before April 29th
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
All wikis now have the TemplateWizard for the wikitext editor.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (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 17 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikidata will get a new constraint status called suggestion. This will change how the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API works. [25][26]
You can test the depicts property for structured data on Commons.
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 advanced search function URL now shows which namespaces you search in. The namespace field is collapsed by default on the search page. You can also add new fields to the search interface through a hook. [27][28][29]
The wikis now look slightly different in the mobile web version. [30]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikipedia articles will have the sameAsmeta property. It adds structured data. This makes it easier for search engines to find Wikipedia articles. It also makes it easier to reuse content. There will an A/B test. [31][32]
