This is an archive of past discussions with User:GeneralNotability. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Tech News: 2023-18
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 Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [4]
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects. Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and Sciencestories.io.
A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
Volunteer information on the Holocaust in Poland case
I am putting this on your talk page as someone higher up involved in this case and because I am not versed in Wikipedia protocols at all.
Disclaimer: I am not involved in this dispute. I am a lowly editor mainly for vegetables, translations, and a WikiGnome. I am of Eastern European descent (Romanian) with an average (for EU) history knowledge and with two grandfathers that fought in WWII on different fronts, and they never shut up about the war stories. Aim: I am here, unfortunately, to add more pressure on you, the arbitrators, by telling you, with evidence, that the attempt to reduce the involvement of Poles in the Holocaust is much more serious, dangerous, and systematic than the Wikipedia TA. But because Wikipedia is, by and large, where most young people go for information when their own government suppresses it, Wikipedia has a far larger role and, consequently, it makes your job in this case much more difficult as it carries, unfortunately, a much more responsibility than the banning of certain editors or admins.
Evidence 1: the diminishing of the involvement of Poles in Holocaust is a Polish official, governmental stance, so much so, that they recently passed and signed laws that makes it illegal to suggest that Poland played any part in the Nazi Holocaust:
Evidence 2. The EU government websites are enormous, more so than any government's. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to police them for infiltration of Polish nationalists who promote Poland as the "only blameless country" in the WWII. There have been cases of historical rewriting, infographs, pamphlets, and so on that bore the symbol of EU but were nevertheless written by these history revisionists and, as such, the EU Parliament, a huge behemoth, passed (adopted) the following: European Parliament resolution of 19 September 2019 on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe.
Bear in mind that your decision in this case will both set a precedent for Wikipedia policy and have far-reaching consequences on the scale of influencing at least a whole generation of youths for whom en-Wikipedia may very well be their only neutral POV source. I am not so arrogant as to not realize that at least some of you are aware of the gravity of these implications. I am just stressing the point. I do not envy your job. I wish you my most sincerest good luck, as you (we) all are going to need it. ♦ WikiUser70176 ♦(My talk page)14:23, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
Alright, I hadn't seen that before. I also didn't see it might only be page-specific until just after I posted here. Thanks for clarifying. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 22:20, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
The second article in a series describing the priorities and work of the Wikimedia Foundation. The article invites Wikimedians to collaborate with the Foundation.
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
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [6]
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [7]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [9]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [10]
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [12][13]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [14]
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (phab:T330193, phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (phab:T332739).
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
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [15]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [16]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [17]
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work. WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [19]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
Considering your (and others') words over at the TCG SPI, what would you say if I voluntarily bind myself to refrain from adding new entries to the TCG SPI for one week, just to see how it goes? NotReallySoroka (talk) 03:25, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries. Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata. Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see https://replag.toolforge.org/ & Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
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
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [20]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [22]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [23]
Not sure if I fit the description of making a blatantly obvious and useless observation on the merits of the case? Maybe I should've told her on her talk page that she is misbehaving and that she should withdraw the request? The request itself seemed like the place to get her attention (if possible). —DIYeditor (talk) 17:28, 30 May 2023 (UTC)