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

Tech News: 2017-10
 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
 * You can now search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't.
 * When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view.

Problems
 * Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed.
 * Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately.

Changes this week
 * The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view.
 * The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 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 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Clarification
 * The 2017/09 issue of Tech News mentioned 3D file formats you can soon upload to Commons. The AMF format will be available later.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  23:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Professor Robert Kelly goes viral!
It was great to see former Wikinews interviewee Professor Robert E Kelly go viral today! --Computron (talk) 23:11, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
 * :-D --Pi zero (talk) 23:58, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week
 * You will be able to show references from  tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use   tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 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 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version.
 * Octicons-tools.svg CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Upcoming changes
There are a lot of small changes happening in the next couple of weeks, and I wanted to give you all a quick heads-up about them. Please share this information with other people/languages/projects that will be interested:


 * There's a change to how columns in reference lists are handled, at the request of the German Wikipedia. This change will improve accessibility by automatically formatting long lists of  s into columns, based on each reader's screen width.
 * What you need to do: Nothing visible is happening now.  If your project uses the normal   tag (or doesn't really use refs at all), then file a Phabricator task or just tell me, and I'll get your wiki on the list for the next config change.  If your project uses a "reflist" template to create columns, then please consider deprecating it, or update the template to work with the new feature.
 * The label on the " " button will change on most projects (but not the Wikinewses) tomorrow (Wednesday) to say "  ".  This has been discussed for years, is supported by user research, and is meant to be clearer for new contributors.  (Most of us who have been editing for years don't even look at the button any more, and we all already know that all of our changes can be seen by anyone on the internet, so this doesn't really affect us.)
 * If you have questions or encounter problems (e.g., a bad translation, problems fixing the documentation, etc.), then please tell me as soon as possible.
 * It is critical that every Wikinews maintain this kind of language in the user interface.
 * As part of the ongoing, years-long user-interface standardization project, the color and shape of the " " (or now "  "), "  " and "  " buttons on some desktop wikitext editors will change.  The buttons will be bigger and easier to find, and the "Save" button will be bright blue.  (T111088)  Unfortunately, it is not technically possible to completely override this change and restore the appearance of the old buttons for either your account or an entire site.   So if you don't like it, then I'm sorry; the best I can tell you is that, in the past, most people have gotten used to similar changes after about a week or two of regular use, so there's hope that it won't continue stand out.
 * Do you remember last April, when nobody could edit for about 30 minutes twice, because of some work that Technical Ops was doing on the servers? The same kind of planned maintenance is happening again.  It's currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 19th and Wednesday, May 3rd.  The time of day is unknown, but it will probably afternoon in Europe and morning in North America.  This will be announced repeatedly, but please mark your calendars now.

That's everything on my mind at the moment, but I may have forgotten something. If you have questions (about this or any other WMF work), then please ping me, and I'll see what I can find out for you. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Growing number of articles in the Newsroom
What to do about growing number of written news articles under development, submitted for review, and "disputed"? Besides asking for more admins, what are alternatives? About me... I don't think I am capable of being a reviewer or admin of Wikinews. --George Ho (talk) 07:26, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
 * It doesn't ordinarily become a problem; the only reason it's piling up right now is that I'd let it slip off my agenda since some other folks were helping out with those overhead tasks for a while, and then they weren't doing it and I haven't gotten back into the habit. (I'm hoping to have semi-automated assistance with remembering stuff like that, down the road.)  I'll do some of that sort of maintenance this morning.  --Pi zero (talk) 12:25, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Is there a school project going on? A lot of the articles seem to be coming from newbies. --  Zanimum (talk) 19:13, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, yes. If you notice, the username contains UoW (University of Wollongong). acagastya 19:24, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I think I remember these sprees other years from them. (The ones I helped cleanup this afternoon were written by Miorfino, Ferngirl, Meekyd.) --  Zanimum (talk) 01:20, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-12
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * The  button now says   or   on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately.   is when you save a new page and   when you edit an existing page.
 * DMOZ no longer works. Templates that use DMOZ can be redirected to archive.org or another mirror. DMOZ has been removed from the RelatedSites extension on Wikivoyage.
 * You can see monthly page views when you click on  in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API.
 * The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers.

Problems
 * On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it.

Changes this week
 * When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut + +  on PCs or  + +  on Macs.
 * 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 at 19:00 (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.  22:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

 * This message, "We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)", was sent through multiple channels by Gregory Varnum on 15 and 16 of March 2017 to village pumps, affiliate talk pages, movement mailing lists, and MassMessage groups. A similar message was sent by Nicole Ebber to organized groups and their mailing lists on 15 of March 2017. This version of the message is available for translation and documentation purposes

Dear Wikimedians/Wikipedians:

Today we are starting a broad discussion to define Wikimedia's future role in the world and develop a collaborative strategy to fulfill that role. You are warmly invited to join the conversation.

There are many ways to participate, by joining an existing conversation or starting your own:

Track A (organized groups): Discussions with your affiliate, committee or other organized group (these are groups that support the Wikimedia movement).

Track B (individual contributors): On Meta or your local language or project wiki.

This is the first of three conversations, and it will run between now and April 15. The purpose of cycle 1 is to discuss the future of the movement and generate major themes around potential directions. What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?

We welcome you, as we create this conversation together, and look forward to broad and diverse participation from all parts of our movement.


 * Find out more about the movement strategy process
 * Learn more about volunteering to be a Discussion Coordinator

Sincerely,

Nicole Ebber (Track A Lead), Jaime Anstee (Track B Lead), & the engagement support teams 05:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)


 * A local page for this at Wikimedia Strategy 2017 has been created, if you'd prefer to participate here instead of on Metawiki. Please let your fellow editors know, in the optimum locations for you. Looking forward to your input! :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:20, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-13
 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
 * When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes.

Problems
 * Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed.

Changes this week
 * New filters for Recent changes will be released on Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias and MediaWikiwiki on March 28. Other wikis will get it progressively. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and, on certain wikis, user intent prediction.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  14:46, 27 March 2017 (UTC)