Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2014/June

LGBT-related Wikinews collaboration as part of Wiki Loves Pride?
Greetings! I was wondering about the possibility of having a Wiknews collaboration related to LGBT culture and history, as part of. This would be for the month (or part of the month) of June, when pride celebrations often take place. Thoughts? Or, is there another avenue in which this discussion should take place? I'd be more than happy to update the Wiki Loves Pride page with details about the Wikinews project, if one comes to fruition. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for your consideration. --Another Believer (talk) 18:48, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi! I'm trying to imagine what a news collaboration related to LGBT culture and history might look like? Wikinews is happy to collaborate on news coverage, but usually that means covering actual news events. It is possible to do over-view coverage of observations of something, for example the events happening to celebrate Gay Pride. (Keep in mind Pride is not celebrated solely on the last weekend in June; that's a US thing.) -  Amgine | t 19:22, 13 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Sure, so examples of stories could be about pride events, or like the recent overturning of the gay marriage ban in Idaho (among several other states). Essentially, just more conscious coverage of LGBT news during the month of June. I understand your point about pride in the US during June. We hope to do another push in October, but we had to start somewhere! :) Thanks again for your consideration. Wikimedia Commons will be hosting an LGBT photo challenge in June, and I have also submitted collaboration requests for Wikibooks, Wikivoyage and Wikisource, hoping to increase interwiki collaboration. --Another Believer (talk) 15:31, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * This is a topic we cover fairly often. Category:LGBT.  --Pi zero (talk) 15:49, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Which is very much appreciated. If there is not interest in focusing on LGBT-related content more than usual, perhaps I will just try to keep an eye on the link you provided during the month of June and linking them at the Wikipedia page for Wiki Loves Pride. One of my goals is actually to shine the spotlight on some of the Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia, so having some LGBT content created here in June could catch the attention of new and establish Wikipedians participating in Wiki Loves Pride. Thanks again. --Another Believer (talk) 21:34, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
 * If people are attending LGBT events and taking lots of photos, that can very easily be converted into photoessay articles. Original reporting is usually considered an advanced technique here, but photoessays can actually be fairly simply constructed and quite valuable records of the events. BRS  (Talk)   (Contribs) 00:49, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Another Believer]] For example, Pride in London 2013: in pictures. You can see on the talk page of that article, reporter's notes are required; but that doesn't have to be burdensome.  --Pi zero (talk) 11:23, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Just sharing the link to the Results page, now that we are half way through the Wiki Loves Pride campaign. If someone is interested in creating a "Pride in pictures" gallery, you might take a look at the photography section, as pictures have been uploaded of Portland Pride (Oregon) and the Korea Queer Culture Festival (Seoul). --Another Believer (talk) 05:23, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
 * The Seoul event is now too old to be considered news. The Portland event is right on the outer-edge of staleness. News has to be new, and has to be presented in a timely manner.
 * I think we'd all like to see someone have a go at a photoessay as a part of Wiki Loves Pride, but that name (Wiki Loves Pride) should be a footnote/aside within the text. The catch, though, is that someone who attended the event would need to caption the photos, provide some original reporting notes on the talk page, and at least a paragraph of text to introduce the photos.
 * There's usually people lurking in #wikinews or #wikinews-en who can provide some help and advice on that; getting a few pointers before an event is strongly recommended, primarily due to the narrow 'window of opportunity' during which their photos would be newsworthy. --Brian McNeil / talk 08:48, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-23
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
 * CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30.

VisualEditor news
 * Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target.
 * The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor.
 * VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons.
 * There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters:  for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format.

Future software changes
 * MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
 * You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist.
 * The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on [ Special:Search].
 * You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot).

Problems Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  08:07, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
 * For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error.

Tech News: 2014-24
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
 * You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to [//translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-guidedtour&filter=&action=translate translate it] and ask in [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org Bugzilla].

VisualEditor news
 * You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor.
 * The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content.
 * You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor.

Future software changes
 * MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome.
 * You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10.
 * On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system.
 * You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly.
 * Templates containing  or   tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching.
 * You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it.
 * Hovercards will no longer flicker.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Leaflet For Wikinews At Wikimania 2014
Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to: Project leaflets Adikhajuria (talk) 17:38, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Reminder
 * You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
 * You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news
 * You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu.
 * When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference.
 * You can now add and edit  and   in the page settings menu.
 * The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct.

Future software changes
 * Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome.
 * You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time.
 * You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis.
 * It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL ) users.
 * Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17.
 * The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to.
 * An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
 * You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-26
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).

VisualEditor news
 * You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates.
 * When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it.
 * You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it.
 * You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references.

Future software changes
 * You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags.
 * CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week.
 * CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis.
 * You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator.
 * An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion).

Problems
 * On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
 * Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Votes??
I was going to take action on our pending Requests for Accreditation, but didn't feel it ethically proper for me to do so being the only person who'd voted. Can we get a few more votes, maybe......anyone......anyone?? --Bddpaux (talk) 14:41, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-27
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news
 * Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc.
 * A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week.
 * VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page.
 * Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly.

Future software changes
 * You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags.
 * Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets [ that link to the Toolserver] to point to Tool Labs instead.
 * CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias.
 * All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it.
 * Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL ) users.
 * You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block.
 * You will soon be able to use  as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)