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

Participate in Dispute Resolution Focus Group
The Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program is working with the Wikimedia Foundation to help communities develop tools to resolve disputes. You are invited to participate in a focus group aimed at identifying needs and developing possible solutions through collaborative design thinking.

If you are interested in participating, please add your name to the signup list on the Meta-Wiki page.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn from the Wikimedia community. We value all of your opinions and look forward to hearing from you. JosephNegotiation (talk) 16:22, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-45
 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 will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it.

Changes later this week
 * The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 6 November. You can post proposals from 19:00 UTC and until November 19.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

Meetings
 * 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 8 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * URLs that link to sections on Wikimedia wikis with non-Latin scripts have looked like this:  instead of  . This will soon be fixed. Old links will still work.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:44, 6 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Post-dated? -  Amgine | t 17:36, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-46
 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 later this week
 * The diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator.
 * A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November.
 * Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings
 * 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 15 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Support for uploading and viewing 3D models is coming soon to Wikimedia Commons. The feature will support the .STL file format. You can see an example on the test wiki.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

mistrust misuse and abuse of the authority to exploite, minorities. Women with..RH'- blood (vessel's )
Who gives anyone the right to exploit others who are different by race, color, or sex!!! But to learn that our own government is exploiting Rh Negitive blood types is morally wrong and unethical. What can i do to stop this kind of exploiting. Is this abuse.of the law? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Las law (talk • contribs) 16:28, 20 November 2017‎ (UTC)
 * Well, here on Wikinews we seek to encourage a fact-based worldview, learning about reality by looking for facts first to provide a foundation of understanding on which to later form opinions. That's one way to start: providing a foundation on which to build.  --Pi zero (talk) 16:41, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47
 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
 * If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The abuse filter now has a function called . You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems
 * Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November.

Changes later this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

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 21 November 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 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like  must be replaced. You will have to write   instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:18, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers
New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website.

Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas from the research done by the New Readers team in Mexico, Nigeria, and India. The teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated by user research and community feedback. The prototype evaluation received positive feedback and results, so development continued.

For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome browsers on Android. Support for other mobile browsers to come in the future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print functionality. Users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF. Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal readability for smaller screens.

The feature is available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org.

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-48
 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 test the new advanced search function beta feature on mediawiki.org. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It will come to German and Arabic Wikipedia this week. It will come to more wikis later.
 * You can now upload large files with the Internet Archive upload tool. Previously you could not upload files larger than 100 MB.
 * You can now use the Timeless skin on all wikis. You can choose skins in Special:Preferences#Appearance.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (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 28 November 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 29 November at 16:00 (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.  20:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Discussion on en.wp
See w:en:Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals). —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:22, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
 * At a quick glance, that thread looks to contain about the mishmash of good faith, bad faith, truth and falsehoods, misapprehensions about news and Wikinews, etc. I would expect from Wikipedia. For a Wikinewsie (certainly this Wikinewsie) to get involved in it would seem to be an unsupportable time sink.  But it's interesting to know about; thank you, Koavf, for mentioning it here.  --Pi zero (talk) 13:34, 28 November 2017 (UTC)