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

Tech News: 2016-18
 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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9.

Problems
 * There was a security problem with the MobileFrontend extension. It showed information that had been oversighted. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * You can now see which notifications are available on a wiki on Special:DisplayNotificationsConfiguration.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 4. It will be on all wikis from May 5 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "PSR-6 Cache interface in Mediawiki core". The meeting will be on May 4 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:09, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-19
 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
 * Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3.
 * You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages.
 * Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC.
 * You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor).
 * Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore.
 * The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons.
 * Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved.
 * Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org.

Problems
 * MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 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 May 10 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 Overhaul Interwiki map, unify with Sites and WikiMap. The meeting will be on May 11 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * 2017 European hackathon will happen on May 19 - 21, in Vienna (Austria).

Future changes
 * Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  23:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Re science journalism
Thought I'd pass this one along. Posted today on Language Log:. --Pi zero (talk) 16:14, 11 May 2016 (UTC)

Editing another's article
I've had a look, and can't seem to find any guidance on the following matter.

I've seen a few articles recently which have failed review because they are no longer fresh at the time of review, but subsequent developments mean the article could be tweaked, still using at least part of the originals contributors work. What is best in this scenario? To start a new article from scratch, perhaps making use of the originals's sources, or to develop the older one, most likely by changing the headline and lede, before leading into the existing content as background info? --CSJJ104 (talk) 14:18, 15 May 2016 (UTC)
 * It may depend on how confident you are that the article has no other problems lurking in it. If there are other problems lurking, such as copied passages, then you may be better off starting over from scratch.  In the past few days we've had a glut on the review queue, and when an article lost freshness I couldn't afford to then invest in ferreting out other lurking problems (since not having enough time for everything was part of the problem in the first place).  --Pi zero (talk) 16:06, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-20
 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
 * Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth.

Problems
 * Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis.

Changes this week
 * Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later.
 * Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce.
 * A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Requirements for change propagation". The meeting will be on May 18 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Using self-closing tags like  and   to mean   and   will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as   and   instead. This is normal in HTML5.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

A new "Welcome" dialog
Hello everyone. This is a heads-up about a change which has just been announced in Tech News: Add the "welcome" dialog (with button to switch) to the wikitext editor.

In a nutshell, later this week this will provide a one-time "Welcome" message in the wikitext editor which explains that anyone can edit, and every improvement helps. The user can then start editing in the wikitext editor right away, or switch to the visual editor. (This is the equivalent of an already existing welcome message for visual editor users, which suggests the option to switch to the wikitext editor. If you have already seen this dialog in the visual editor, you will not see the new one in the wikitext editor.)


 * I want to make sure that, although users will see this dialog only once, they can read it in their language as much as possible. Please read the instructions if you can help with that.


 * I also want to underline that the dialog does not change in any way current site-wide and personal configurations of the visual editor. Nothing changes permanently for users who chose to hide the visual editor in their Preferences or for those who don't use it anyway, or for wikis where it's still a Beta Feature, or for wikis where certain groups of users don't get the visual editor tab, etc.
 * There is a slight chance that you see a few more questions than usual about the visual editor. Please refer people to the documentation or to the feedback page, and feel free to ping me if you have questions too!
 * Finally, I want to acknowledge that, while not everyone will see that dialog, many of you will; if you're reading this you are likely not the intended recipients of that one-time dialog, so you may be confused or annoyed by it—and if this is the case, I'm truly sorry about that. This message also avoids that you have to explain the same thing over and over again—just point to this section. Please feel free to cross-post this message at other venues on this wiki if you think it will help avoid that users feel caught by surprise by this change.

If you want to learn more, please see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133800; if you have feedback or think you need to report a bug with the dialog, you can post in that task (or at mediawiki.org if you prefer).

Thanks for your attention and happy editing, Elitre (WMF)  16:51, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-21
 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 now see a warning message on pages that try to use but it doesn't work because it doesn't match the page's actual title.

Problems
 * Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (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 May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-22
 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
 * Octicons-tools.svg There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module.

Problems
 * A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review.
 * CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place.
 * The Translate extension will get an edit summary field.
 * A change to the  feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki.
 * Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (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 31 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:18, 30 May 2016 (UTC)