This is an archive of past discussions with User:Josve05a. 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.
Following a successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the "event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the "account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at the talk page.
It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
Arbitration
A recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e. Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.
You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g. World map showing population of each country.
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 MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different. [1]
Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [4]
Problems
You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
Started planning for support for Senses
Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
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
In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [8]
There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [9]
Problems
The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [10]
Changes later this week
The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. For most wikis this will happen on 18 June. For the rest it will happen on 25 June. [11][12]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June 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.
Recent changes
Syntax highlighting has been a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It is now a normal feature. It is based on CodeMirror. [13]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [14][15]
The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [16][17]
There will be an IRC Office Hour for Structured Data on Commons on Tuesday, 26 June from 18:00-19:00 UTC. More information, including time and date conversion, is available on Meta. There is no set topic, you are welcome to bring any discussion that you would like to the office hour.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [19][20]
Changes later this week
Content translation users who translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles. [21]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 June. It will be on all wikis from 28 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Major grants announced, a new milestone for Afrikaans Wikipedia, a new WMF technical engagement team, an effort to start up a new library, two new admins – or maybe three fewer depending on your math.
Several online battles are juxtaposed with stories about cooperation and good deeds, Arbcom hovering over it all; notwithstanding, a good action movie script is not necessarily found here.
Community discussions include style updates to project-wide icons and the main page, procedural questions on royal names and jettisoning unsuitable drafts, and deeper questions of compliance with European privacy laws and the perennial issue of shrinking admin corps.
WMF appeals to Turkish Minister of Transport, Maritime, and Communications Ahmet Arslan to lift the block of all language versions of Wikipedia for over a year.
