Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2018/February

Google News
I noticed in Google News there doesn't seem to be any recent Wikinews stories, the latest one I found (search term: "wikinews") is from January 8th: Saudi Arabia: Princes arrested after protesting austerity. I don't know if this is an issue with Google or Wikinews, or on my own end, so I figured I'd bring it up. —mikemoral (talk) 07:03, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I see the same, alongside Mysterious dimming of Tabby's star likely due to space dust, not alien superstructures, say scientists (not logged into Google). —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:10, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I observe the same problem, regardless of whether I'm logged into google. --Pi zero (talk) 17:13, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I suppose someone should inquire of them? --Pi zero (talk) 20:24, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Who got in contact with Google to get Wikinews listed? I come across their how to guide for getting listed in the first place, but I would imagine this process was done already. —mikemoral (talk) 20:57, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I think that was brianmc. --Pi zero (talk) 20:58, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps we could ask Brian about it, or someone can perhaps try getting in touch directly with Google, setting it up again if needed. Some searching indicates Google recently delisted many publishers, perhaps on accident, on the 8th, which is the date of the Saudi prince article (Google forum link). Perhaps this is an issue that stems from that. It might be the case we got accidentally delisted, but were never put back up. —mikemoral (talk) 07:52, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * As an alternative to the accidental explanation for such large-scale delisting, Google may have been trying to tighten up on "fake news". Either way, they may be waiting to see if someone misses it and inquires.  Brian could tell us either who he talked to, or (less likely I'd guess) who of us talked to them.  When Brian came by a few months back I think he told me what email is mostly likely to reach him; I could look it up if you think it would be useful, though lately I've not been having much luck getting a response from him via email.  As I recall, the contact that roused him to that activity was a phone call from one of us (not me).  --Pi zero (talk) 11:53, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-06
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to.
 * The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language.
 * Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded.

Problems
 * Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this.

Changes later this week
 * When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users.
 * When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like . You could use   or   instead of   but it would make no difference. You can now only use   or nothing . If you write something else, instead of treating it like , it will not work.
 * The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of  or   it will say   and  . It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public.
 * Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (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 6 February 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 7 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The Education Program extension will be removed on 30 June. It is replaced by the Programs and Events Dashboard.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:51, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-07
 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
 * TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator.
 * Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.

Changes later this week
 * You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages.
 * The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates.
 * The abuse filter extension has a new feature  that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (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 13 February at 18:30 (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 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The settings page and beta options for the mobile website are being improved.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:59, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-08
 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 explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed.
 * You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table.

Problems
 * Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed.
 * Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like   are not visible in the references list whilst editing.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (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 20 February 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 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The way edit summaries and log comments are stored in the database is being changed. In the future this will make longer comments possible.
 * Edit conflicts could be solved in a different way in the future. You can test a new prototype.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  22:54, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

On non-profit news
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/02/12/nonprofits-increasingly-central-future-news/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:55, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

When is a news story ready to publish?
https://www.propublica.org/article/ask-ppil-how-do-journalists-know-when-a-story-is-ready#140384 —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:21, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I wrote about a criminal. Can the information be included here?
I wrote about a criminal who was tried back in 2008, though the article is being considered for deletion due to lack of notability. On the other hand, I understand that this isn’t a depository for rejected articles, particularly ones that ‘had nothing to do with current affairs’. I don’t know if you lot have some sort of expiration date for news stories.

Could some of the content be salvaged and migrated here, or is it entirely unsuitable for inclusion? — Romanophile (talk) 15:24, 26 February 2018 (UTC)


 * It looks as if that would be historical information (unless I've missed something; see below). Our inclusion criteria here say that at the time of publication a news article has to be about a current event, something that just happened within the past day or two (three days at the outside); our term-of-art is freshness.  We describe a news article as a "snapshot in time"; our archives, going back well over a decade, are a sort of photo album of snapshots in time, and we greatly value them, but still, each new photo added to the album has to be fresh at the moment it is added. If something new were to happen in the case, meeting our freshness criterion, there's a good chance it would clear our relevance criterion which is more tolerant than Wikipedia's notability.  --Pi zero (talk) 15:57, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-09
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. Recent changes
 * Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly.

Problems
 * Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug.
 * Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed.
 * Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated.

Changes later this week
 * Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. 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.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (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 27 February 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 28 February 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.  19:52, 26 February 2018 (UTC)