Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2017/December

Tech News: 2017-49
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent changes
 * It is now possible to upload MP3 files to Commons. Only users with MP3 file upload rights can upload MP3 files.
 * You can now use live updates for recent changes if you use the new filters. This feature updates the filtered recent changes every three seconds when you activate it.
 * There is an experimental onion service for Wikimedia projects.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).
 * Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. You can vote for wishes on the survey page until 10 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2016 results page.
 * The Community Liaisons team at the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for active tech ambassadors. This is to make sure the Wikimedia communities get all the information they need about new features and can be involved in the technical development.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:50, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Blocking tools consultation
Hello all,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team invites all Wikimedians to discuss new blocking tools and improvements to existing blocking tools in December 2017 for development work in early 2018.

How can you help?
 * 1) Share your ideas on the discussion page or send an email to the Anti-Harassment Tools team.
 * 2) Spread the word that the consultation is happening; this is an important discussion for making decisions about improving the blocking tools.
 * 3) Help with translation.
 * 4) If you know of previous discussions about blocking tools that happened on your wiki, share the links.

We are looking forward to learning your ideas.

For the Anti-Harassment Tools team SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 23:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-50
 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
 * URLs that link to sections on Wikimedia wikis with non-Latin scripts have looked like this:  instead of  . This has now been fixed on all wikis. Old links will still work.
 * A new tag marks edits where a redirect was created or removed. This still works when the editor writes something else in the edit summary. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist.
 * If you use Chrome on Android, you can now use the print to PDF button to create a PDF of an article.
 * Filter by number of edits or filter by time range have been grouped on a same menu on the recent changes page if you use the new filters. The "" link is now more prominent.
 * Some of the web fonts that were provided by the Universal Language Selector extension are being removed. This is to reduce the load time on pages. The web fonts were added many years ago to help users read text in scripts which did not have fonts or had broken fonts. This is not the case any more. You can check the status page for a list of all web fonts and whether they are currently being used and especially for special requirements.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You can discuss new or improved blocking tools with the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-Harassment Tools team. They will work on building better blocking tools. Leave comments on the talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:58, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Interesting read on digital journalism
Of course, there are many of these but maybe someone will find this enlightening: https://traffic.piano.io/2017/12/11/the-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:28, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-51
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News
 * Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2018.

Problems
 * When you import a page from another wiki the usernames of the users who edited the article on the wiki you imported it from are shown in the article history. This should link to the users on the original wiki. A script to fix this caused problems for Wikidata and German Wikipedia. It also created a large number of SUL accounts on wikis where editors had never edited.
 * Some bot owners got email about their bots logging in from a new computer. If this is from one or a couple of wikis, you can turn these messages off in your preferences on those wikis until the problem has been solved. If not, you can report more about the problem in Phabricator.

Changes later this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Files on Commons will have structured metadata in the future. The developers are now looking for examples of different kinds of metadata to make sure they are aware of them when they build prototypes for structured data on Commons. You can read more and help by giving examples of interesting media files.
 * The Structured Commons team are making sure Commons work with structured data. If you regularly contribute to Commons and Wikidata you can answer a survey that helps the team prioritise the tools that are important for the Commons and Wikidata communities. The survey ends on 22 December. You can read more on Commons. You can also help the team decide on better names for "captions" and "descriptions". This ends on 3 January 2018.
 * The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey has now ended. You can see the results. They decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:26, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Knowing how journalism works combats conspiratorial thinking
Original paper, popular article. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:38, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Photo's Russian country houses
Interesting story (Wikidata-item- Russian news article is the original one) about images published with free license. Someone who wants to translate? --Livenws (talk) 15:24, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Um, afaik, on this project only User:Gryllida is an active native speaker of Russian. Without them, I do not think we would be able to do anything. •–• 16:34, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I translated into Dutch with the help of a translate machine, it's not a very complicated story. It would be nice if it were published here! :) --Livenws (talk) 16:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Machine translation -- gives me goosebumps. I don't trust it, and it is better if someone who knows Russian can help. can you find time for that article? The link is ru:Аэрофотосъемка 200 русских усадеб пожертвована Википедии. •–•  16:51, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
 * An anecdote I usually end up telling about how truly dreadful automatic translate is, is a story about some minister (from Turkey, maybe?) missing a meeting somewhere, and a (Turkish?) source automatic translation said he had been decapitated. Which seemed unlikely... though not quite as unlikely as it would be in some countries.  I did quite a lot of digging to deduce the decapitation was brainless translation of a passage saying he had a bad head cold (I suspect it may have involved an idiom similar to "sneezing one's head off").  I've encountered much worse, things that produce no warning signs like a claim of decapitation; like a Spanish source that I didn't realize was a press release because I couldn't pick up on the patterns of writing that only a fluent reader would be able to observe, and it made a big difference to the entire review that I didn't realize it was a press release.  We handle automatic translations with extreme skepticism.  --Pi zero (talk) 17:32, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
 * This is a fairly easy article to understand with translate machine, other articles can be different (like that of Turkey), but you could not miss much in this. --Livenws (talk) 17:53, 30 December 2017 (UTC)