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

Tech News: 2017-06
 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
 * The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (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 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:45, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Mozilla's OpenNews now independent
See here Just an FYI for the community. For more background: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/09/launching-an-independent-opennews-program/. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:46, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-07
 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 EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July.

Problems
 * The Firefox add-on Firefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg.
 * Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this.

Changes this week
 * The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (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 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Developer Wishlist is a list where developers prioritize tools they need. The voting closes at 14 February 23:59 (UTC). This process is only for developers.

Review
 * You can read the 2016 product summary from the Wikimedia Foundation Product group to see what they did with things they said they would work on in the annual plan.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:06, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-08
 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 edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the Wikimedia design guide.

Changes this week
 * Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the Beta Feature called Hovercards.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options:  and  . The   option solves this problem. You can use   to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers.
 * Octicons-tools.svg OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (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 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:25, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Interview request from student
Hi all, we have a request via Facebook private message from a university student to interview about Wikinews and crowd sourced journalism, for their Journalism Ethics class. Takers? -- Zanimum (talk) 10:30, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * There was some discussion on IRC about half a day ago; if it's the same student (very likely), I think they're taken care of. --Pi zero (talk) 12:15, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-09
 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
 * On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file.

Changes this week
 * You will be able to use  to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 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 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later.
 * The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:55, 27 February 2017 (UTC)