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

Tech News: 2018-40
 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
 * Ordinary pages can no longer be loaded as javascript. You could do this using  in the URL. Only fully protected pages in the MediaWiki: namespace or user javascript subpages can be loaded as javascript now. This is for better security.

Problems
 * New and updated translations from translatewiki.net will not reach the wikis for a while. You can still translate messages on translatewiki.net. The Wikimedia wikis will be updated with the new translations later. This is because of work on the translation system.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 October. It will be on all wikis from 4 October (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 3 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * You can join the meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation Search Platform team. The meeting will be on 3 October at 15:00 UTC. See how to join if you want to know how the search function works or have questions.

Future changes
 * Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for up to an hour on 10 October. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. The time when you can't edit might be shorter than an hour. You can read more about this.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:34, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-43
 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
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 October. It will be on all wikis from 25 October (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 24 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The Community Wishlist Survey begins on 29 October. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals from 29 October to 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  23:11, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Wikitribune just fired almost all its journalists
I was going to do an article on it, but turns out it happened before Sunday, so nertz to that.

I have wondered what the existence of Wikinews and of WikiTribune together would mean. WikiTribune's for-profit, which has earned its participants the mockery of Project Wiki's critics. I haven't been over there much since it started last year. Darkfrog24 (talk) 23:30, 24 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Hm. I think WikiTribune had at least two strikes against it to start with: one, it was trying to address weaknesses of traditional journalism with a mix of wiki crowd-sourcing, which needs an aggressively neutral stance, with for-profit, which is a major cause of problems of traditional journalism and particularly destabilizes the journalistic neutrality that needs to be stable for wiki crowd-sourcing to work; and two, it was being steered by Jimmy Wales, who has for over a decade consistently failed to comprehend the challenges involved in meshing wikis with journalism at Wikinews.  One suspects writing a neutral Wikinews article about WikiTribune would be... challenging. --Pi zero (talk) 00:21, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * This may result into something similar to what I observed at Russian Wikinews two years ago:
 * no leadership for fact-check or NPOV;
 * a few people do it but it is rather chaotic;
 * sometimes self-publish;
 * a crowd of people gathers to write stories, but does not learn anything sufficiently motivating from this process and leaves;
 * much of the output is copied from freely licensed sources...
 * or biased;
 * I think the one positive thing that I can recall from that experience was people participating in photo essays reports first-hand about library meetings and things like cowsay report put here recently. Incidentally, those are relatively easy to make if the reporter knows the event well, a bit easier to translate, and are generally nice, but they still need effort to write the text (something that may have been overlooked in the reports that I was able to read at that time).
 * --Gryllida (chat) 00:43, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Also under the general heading of meta-news stories that are too old to be fresh,. --Pi zero (talk) 04:59, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Could interview Jimmy Wales and publish his interview here but then it would probably be more complete if several different people provide responses. Is he the only person in charge of the WikiTribune site or there are several?
 * Speaking of news it could be interesting to interview several other citizen journalism news groups to see what techniques and what software they are using for 1) news identification 2) keeping track of the drafts status 3) plagiarism check 4) fact check 5) review, some of it could be transferable to Wikinews. Could be a more entertaining and relevant information. --Gryllida (chat) 06:27, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think we should touch interviewing-Jimmy-Wales with a stick. --Pi zero (talk) 21:41, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Sounds like someone got burned on a previous attempt. Still, there might be someone else over at WikiTribune who'd suit. Darkfrog24 (talk) 00:36, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not sanguine about this whole line of inquiry. It's navel-gazing, and in essence it's free publicity for a commercial venture (and a competing one at that).  I don't think we should pursue it. --Pi zero (talk) 00:51, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I've been thinking about this for a while. We could use more people.  If it were the volunteers who were being sent away, we could be going "Hey!  Another spot for you right here!" Darkfrog24 (talk) 13:41, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

EFF: The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill-open-access-and-creative-commons-news —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:41, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for sharing. I find it difficult to grasp. I would they don't want others to copy headlines?
 * So we can reword them. For example The geese won. In this example I don't care about having copied the original headline in the URL because the users won't see the URL anyway.
 * If I want to share the original URL via a plain-text medium such as a plain-text email then it becomes a problem. HOWEVER I doubt the law was designed to punish that... Gryllida (chat) 06:02, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
 * If titles can't be reproduced, websites would be prohibited to cite an article, as is done ubiquitously on the wikimedia sisterhood, including Wikinews and Wikipedia. It sounded to me as if they want to ban the common practice of citing an article and quoting a passage from its text, which is routine on blogs.  This recent Language Log entry contains a whole bunch of block quotes: .  An additional problem with this seems to be the specific provision to include search engines in the prohibition against quoting passages; search engines rather universally give a short passage from each matching page, to show the context in which the search keywords occur.  This provision would apparently make it illegal for any search engine to provide such a match to any site that it hadn't previously negotiated a contract with, which, at its most insane interpretation, seems like it could legally prohibit search engines from providing matches to non-commercial sites. I thought Doctorow's larger point was that nobody is sure what the heck the new wording means, and it's a bad idea to enact legislation that nobody, not even the enacting legislators, understands.  (I vividly recall, btw, a Town Meeting in which the local Planning Board proposed to make a zoning change that nobody, not even the Planning Board, could understand.  I stood up to speak at that meeting (!) and raised that specific objection.  And the change was enacted anyway; afaik, the incomprehensible provision is in the zoning bylaw to this day.) --Pi zero (talk) 12:14, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-44
 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 post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 16 November to 30 November.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The wikis now have a content security policy report. This means that you might get a warning in your javascript console when you load external resources in your user scripts. For security reasons it is recommended that you don't do this. It might not be possible to load external resources in your scripts in the future.

Problems
 * Your watchlist can show which changes you have already seen. This did not work for a few days. It has been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 October. It will be on all wikis from 1 November (calendar).
 * The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer available. It will be removed from Special:Preferences. It has not been the standard editor for a long time. It was replaced by the 2010 wikitext editor.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 31 October at 15:00 (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.  20:08, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey
The Community Wishlist Survey. .

Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can post technical proposals from now until 11 November. The communities will vote on the proposals between 16 November and 30 November. You can read more on the wishlist survey page.

/User:Johan (WMF)  11:05, 30 October 2018 (UTC)