Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2016/March

Tech News: 2016-10
 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
 * Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB.
 * Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one.
 * The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this.
 * It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications.  will parse as   instead of   as it used to. Please use   or   instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects.

Problems
 * Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now.
 * The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title.
 * The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource.
 * You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon.
 * Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes.

Changes this week
 * Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
 * Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow  and   tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator.

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 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones.
 * The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016 scholarships
Dear Wikimedians,

As every year, Wikimedia Polska Association is accepting scholarship requests for this year’s Wikimania, to be held at the Italian town of Esino Lario, June 22-28. The scholarship encompasses travel expenses, accomodation, insurance and the possible conference fee. Please submit your requests by email to wikimania@wikimedia.pl from March 14, 00:00:01 (CET) by March 27, 23:59:59 (CET). Up to two international scholarships will be funded. The scholarship request, submitted in English or Polish, ought to contain:
 * short description of your activity within the Wikimedia movement, your real name, your global username or local usernames, Wikimedia activity outside project editing (including local chapter activity), prior input into the Wikimedia conferences, especially international ones;
 * information about your desired participation in the conference: planned or submitted lectures or other activities during Wikimania or its associated events;
 * information about your forecast activity in pre- and post-conference activities, with the justification for participating in these non-core conference activities;
 * declaration of your command of English sufficient to actively participate in the conference;
 * information about the international airport closest to your place of residence;
 * declaration of being 18 years or older; in case of younger applicants, 16-18, a scan of a parent’s or legal guardian’s consent to the participation in the conference;
 * the information on citizenship(s) held;
 * agreement to provide and process your personal data (name, address, bank account details, passport number) if the scholarship is granted. Please, do not provide these personal details in the application itself, apart from your real name.

On the behalf of the Scholarship Commitee, Wpedzich (talk) 19:53, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-11
 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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections.
 * The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated.

Changes this week
 * Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
 * Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
 * The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones.

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 15 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are backlog and thumb API. The meeting will be on 16 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

In Case of difficulty of finding article related to news
In reference to this stickiness I have some problems retaliating to find article fulfilled with information.News are very short and doesn't cover some usefulcontent .I agree that it doesn't cover live news but when they are published ati it should be obtainable.And it also don't cover news of tragedy country.I have asked about recent earthquake in Nepal 2072but it is not showing it results.So please make it easy accessible to all Perot all over the world. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 36.253.255.122 (talk • contribs) 13:38, 20 March 2016

Tech News: 2016-12
 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
 * Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
 * In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs.
 * You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (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 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, a minor correction: The MediaWiki deployment dates are March 22–24, not 21–23. My apologies. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:16, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-13
 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
 * MediaWiki now supports the semantic web standards of Microdata and RDFa 1.0. On Wikimedia projects, a configuration change must be requested in order to enable RDFa 1.0.

Problems
 * Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
 * You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes.

Meetings
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with part of the Architecture committee, which will discuss a few topics. The meeting will be on 30 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Architecture committee has sent a summary of new and ongoing RFC discussions.

Future changes
 * Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections
 * Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)