Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2015/November

Tech News: 2015-45
 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
 * You can now see how many editors are using a gadget on a wiki on Special:GadgetUsage.
 * If you are using the mobile version of Wikipedia, you can now see Wikidata descriptions under article titles in search results.
 * Editing conflicts are now detected when you edit on a mobile device. Before, this did not work properly on mobile.

Problems
 * On October 26 the Wikimedia sites went down for ten minutes.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join. You can also read the latest VisualEditor newsletter.

Future changes Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:42, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg A help link will be added to Special:Search. Administrators might have to update the MediaWiki:Search-summary message to avoid two help links.
 * Empty list items could be allowed in the future. If so, this could affect some templates.

Tech News: 2015-46
 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
 * Superprotect has been removed.
 * You can now switch between the wikitext editor and the visual editor without saving. You will not lose the changes you have made.
 * VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg JSON dumps of the production search indexes are now available. They can be imported to Elasticsearch.

Problems
 * Some translations for the Thanks and Echo extensions were missing. Translators have been asked to help and this should be solved soon.

Changes this week


 * Thumbnails of 16-bit TIFF files will be displayed properly. Before, this didn't work.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 10 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:18, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
 * A new tool to navigate through diff pages is being developed. You can test it out and give feedback.
 * The options on Special:Watchlist will look slightly different.

Tech News: 2015-47
 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 this week
 * You can use TemplateData to indicate how you want a template to be displayed in wikitext. Tools like VisualEditor that edit templates will soon use this information.
 * Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme.
 * The Community Tech team is doing a community wishlist survey to understand what they should be working on. They are now accepting proposals in all languages. You can create your proposal in the small box above the blue button and click it when you're done.
 * Wikis can make the welcome notification link to a specific page.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18. It will be on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Internet Explorer 8 will no longer have JavaScript support. You will still be able to browse and edit Wikipedia, but will not be able to use some features. This can be solved by upgrading to a newer version or switching to a different browser. The change will happen in January 2016.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:39, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48
 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
 * VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week
 * There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Language Engineering team. The topic is: Content Translation updates and Questions & Answers. The meeting will be on 25 November at 13:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: Raise MediaWiki's PHP version requirement and update coding standards". The meeting will be on 25 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Advanced.svg From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes (or is it 'oh noes!') I'm back
Well, I'm going to try and be back as much as I can. A few things have prompted this, including the FDC giving the WMF a proper slap on the wrist over demanding transparency from others where they don't seem to reciprocate. I'm not 100% over the particularly painful bout of pleurisy that's now been plaguing me for about three months, but am well-enough to start trying to take on some of the review load and comment on other discussions.

But, the sixty-four-trillion Dunning-Krugerrand (adjusted for hyperbolic inflation) question is: What've I missed?? --Brian McNeil / talk 16:48, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi, brianmc. Well, for one thing, we've had some new folks about the place. Green Giant has got the review bit; a few weeks back when we had a flurry of UoW student submissions GG was quite helpful with not-ready's, and iirc passed an article to publication. I've got a little essay I wrote about how I see the big picture of dialog tools and wiki markup and whatnot, User:Pi zero/essays/vision/sisters, which I occasionally provide relevant links to in discssions at meta and/or wikipedia.  Just lately Peteforsyth suggested I put it on meta for greater visibility.  --Pi zero (talk) 18:10, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I did write a short item &mdash; that I'm not altogether satisfied with, yet &mdash; WN:Attribution. --Pi zero (talk) 15:04, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49
 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 symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this:. You can give feedback on this change.

Problems
 * On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015.
 * Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata.
 * There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is using the  tag for media. The meeting will be on 2 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January.
 * Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)