Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2013/November

Tech News: 2013-44
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features
 * The style and colors for warning boxes, error messages, and success messages in all skins of MediaWiki has been changed.

VisualEditor news
 * You will soon be able to switch from editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext directly without having to save the page. You can't yet switch from wikitext to VisualEditor but developers hope to make it possible in the future.

Problems
 * There was a problem on October 31 during the activation of MediaWiki 1.22wmf2 on test wikis. mediawiki.org was also broken, and if you had problems logging in, it was probably because of this as well.

Future
 * Because of the problem with MediaWiki 1.22wmf2, the calendar has changed. It will be added to mediawiki.org and non-Wikipedia sites on November 4, and all Wikipedia sites on November 7.

JavaScript / Gadget developers
 * Due to a recent change, gadgets and user scripts that use jQuery UI should explicitly load the appropriate modules, as they may not be loaded by default.
 * Developers have started to remove long-deprecated methods. You should check the JavaScript console (in  mode) and look for deprecation warnings and their stack trace.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 14:45, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-45
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features
 * You can now use the "Autonym" font of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) to display the name of languages (for example in navigation templates) in their correct script. To do this, add the CSS class  to the elements that include language names. Note that this font only works for the name of languages, not for any other text.

Problems
 * There was a problem with Parsoid (the program used by VisualEditor to convert wikitext to annotated HTML) on November 4, between 19:40 and 20:40 (UTC). Encoding issues caused non-ASCII characters (including those with diacritics, like "é") to be broken when converted to wikitext and saved to the page.

Future
 * The Beta Features tool is now available on Commons and Meta-Wiki. With it, you can test new features before they're added for everyone. The plan is to add this tool to all wikis on November 21.
 * MediaWiki 1.23wmf3 was added to test wikis on November 7. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on November 12 and all Wikipedia wikis on November 14 (calendar).
 * The MassMessage tool will be added to all wikis on November 14. It will make it simpler to send messages across wikis.
 * The button of the Search page will soon be changed to be blue and bigger (see the difference).
 * You will soon be able to add a page name as parameter for,   and   and similar functions, by writing for example.
 * In the future, when you hide a CentralNotice banner on a wiki, it will also be hidden on other Wikimedia sites.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. 16:52, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Reviewers?
This is sort of the Never Ending Sermon 'round here, but reviewing turnaround has dropped to near-basement levels of-late. God knows print journalism isn't sexy (technically, it never was).....but we could really use a jolt of life!! Any ideas?? --Bddpaux (talk) 20:22, 17 November 2013 (UTC)


 * (Sorry I haven't gotten to your article, yet; I hope to do that next.)


 * My perspective, fwiw: I worked out some years ago that the first step in long-term mitigation of the review gap had to be tools to aid reviewers, because doing a full review is such a massive task that even those capable of it aren't often able to donate the big solid lump of labor to do it.  And that somebody had to fill the gap while longer-term measures were pursued.  I reckoned further measures, beyond semi-automated review assistance, would have to wait until we had the semi-automation so we could see where we were then.  The filling-the-gap has made the tool-development difficult, but I sense I really am close to getting the first layer of tools operational.  The first layer aren't the actual review assistance tools, but building blocks from which to build review assistance tools.  Once the first layer is operational, building stuff on top of it will be a big challenge too.  And I've always known the semi-automated assistance wouldn't magically solve all our problems; it was always to be a necessary first step.  --Pi zero (talk) 22:30, 17 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Not sure how to specifically address this problem at the moment. I have some ideas, but none of them are easy fixes.  It would be good if we could get some of our existing reviewers to be more active, or even create some sort of alert for Twitter or Facebook or a mailing list that says when an article needs reviewing that reviewers can subscribe to in order to increase awareness of materials needing to be reviewed. --LauraHale (talk) 10:22, 19 November 2013 (UTC)