Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2019/January

How to find obscure stories
https://transom.org/2018/latif-nasser/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:06, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
 * ++. Thank you. -  Amgine | t 22:13, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Glad you liked it. If you end up being able to use these insites in stories, let me know! —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:56, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-02
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News writers, editors and translators wish you a pleasant 2019 year.

Recent changes
 * RelatedSites extension has been undeployed. It was used to create interwiki links on Wikivoyage, now handled by Wikidata.
 * Octicons-tools.svg MediaWiki logstash logging is moving to a new infrastructure. This is an ongoing deployment.
 * Octicons-tools.svg codesearch.wmflabs.org has been updated, with new and updated repositories and a new search options for code.
 * Octicons-tools.svg On several wikis, an account named "" has been created on December 17 to perform some technical maintenance on AbuseFilter. This account has sysop rights but it's a system user and no human can use it. The account already existed on wikis where AbuseFilter can perform blocks, which are issued using this account. See T212268 for more information and future plans.

Problems
 * Octicons-tools.svg In AbuseFilter, the "" action takes three parameters: count, period and groups. They must now strictly respect the requirements listed on mediawiki.org. A list of broken filters is on Phabricator. If you're familiar with AbuseFilter, please take a look and fix them.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from January 9. It will be on all wikis from January 10 (calendar).

Meetings
 * Search Platform Office Hours is rescheduled to January 9. Check the details for time and date.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:29, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-03
 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 use Google Translate in the content translation tool.
 * You can now add captions to files on Commons. Captions are short descriptions of the file. They can be translated to all languages we use. They can't use wikitext markup.
 * Earlier a quoted HTML attribute had to be followed by a space. Now it doesn't. This means that some pages could look different when you save them even if you didn't edit that part of the text.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Templates with   could not show the difference between the live template and the sandbox version when they were tested. This has now been fixed. has a new   parameter now. You can use it for selectors like.

Problems
 * When you see an edit in the recent changes feed or in the history of a page some of them have tags. Some tags are added automatically. You can also add tags manually. Tags for edits that have been added manually can be edited. This didn't work for a little while. This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * You can move files from your wiki to Wikimedia Commons and keep the file history with the new FileExporter. It will be a beta feature on all wikis from 16 January. If you want to test it you activate it and check your wiki's configuration file.
 * Users who could cause more damage to the wikis if someone took over their account have to have more secure passwords. This includes administrators and other user groups. They can't use passwords that are in a list of common passwords. Accounts with common passwords are easy to take over. The list of common passwords was made longer a few weeks ago and has a different error message. Some user groups have been added to those who can't use common passwords. This is to protect all accounts with user rights that could cause damage.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The AbuseFilter variable  has been removed. It was deprecated in 2016. Now you can't use it. You can fix the filters using it. You can find them if you use the search bar on Special:AbuseFilter.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 15  17:54, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

No editing for 30 minutes on 17 January
You will not be able to edit the wikis for up to 30 minutes on 17 January 07:00 UTC. This is because of a database problem that has to be fixed immediately. You can still read the wikis. Some wikis are not affected. They don't get this message. You can see which wikis are not affected on this page. Most wikis are affected. The time you can not edit might be shorter than 30 minutes. /Johan (WMF) 18:38, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

ProPublica on one year of local newsrooms
https://www.propublica.org/article/what-we-learned-from-the-first-year-of-the-local-reporting-network —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:07, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Man who helped define journalism principles says that news is too negative
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/18/johan-galtung-news-principles-journalists-too-negative —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:24, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-04
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News
 * Some people did not get last week's issue of Tech News. This was because of a problem with MassMessage. If you did not get last week's issue, you can read it on Meta.

Recent changes
 * The content translation tool can now use version 2 as the default version for users who turned on the beta feature. For example it adds the tracking category   to translations that might have used machine translations without fixing the problems. This is so others can find them. You can find this category in   on Wikipedias.
 * https://mediawiki2latex-large.wmflabs.org can now convert collects of up to 800 pages to PDF, EPUB or ODT. Previously this was 200 pages.

Problems
 * When a template was edited with the visual editor, it would sometimes put all information on one line. This makes it difficult to read for editors who use the wikitext editor. It also makes it more difficult to see what happened in a diff. This problem affected edits made between 8 and 17 January and is now fixed.
 * MassMessage is used to post a message to many pages. It has not been working reliably. Some messages have not been posted to everyone.
 * Because of a database problem that had to be fixed immediately you could not edit most wikis for a couple of minutes on 17 January (UTC). This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * You will be able to use template styles in the  namespace.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 January. It will be on all wikis from 24 January (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 23 January 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.  20:33, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Does journalism have a future?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:36, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Resource for Chicago and Detroit reporting
https://www.documenters.org/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:21, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Ten tools for journalists
https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2018/the-top-10-tools-for-journalism-in-2018-and-10-other-things-to-bookmark/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:11, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-05
 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 Wikimedia servers use HHVM to run the PHP code. They are going to use PHP7 and stop using HHVM. You can test PHP7 with a new beta feature. That way you can help find and report problems.

Problems
 * When someone moves a page to a name that already exists that page that had the name the article is moved to is deleted. For a couple of months this didn't always work. Some users saw an error message instead. This has now been fixed.

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

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 30 January 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.  18:14, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Accredited reporter letters?
If an accredited reporter needed a letter from their editor, to get accreditation for a sports competition, would someone be able to provide that?

We have a very competent European photographer contacting us about photographing national-level sports competition, but he would need a letter from Wikinews itself. -- Zanimum (talk) 19:56, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Hard to try and figure out what, exactly, to try and do without knowing what, exactly, xe requires their letter to say. BRS  (Talk)   (Contribs) 20:01, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

White House
Just wondering because I am new here, do you think that the White House would let one of us go to a press briefing?
 * In general, the logistics of getting into the White House for a press briefing are pretty complicated and in this particular administration, they are outrite hostile to the media (which--who knows?--may actually be to our advantage!) If you really wanted to attend as a credential Wikinewsie, an outdoor event on the lawn would be a lot more likely. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:23, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Recent studies show that 96% of the Network coverage (NBC, ABC, CBS) of the president was negative last year. You can bet that he does not like the media any more than they like him. If you watched any network lately you could probably see that most shows have a clear bias against conservatives, even in shows that are supposed to be news only! This could be because the networks are a corporate model. The 2 best things about Wikinews is that we are not owned by a for-profit corporation & we do not write editorials (we go to reddit for that) One could argue that that is the reason why we are so good at NPOV writing. Chances are we could convince a Wikinewsie living in DC to ask for a press pass. Honestly, I am a post-millennial, and live nowhere near DC. But our mission is to become a respected and well-known part of the Media family, on par with the likes of the New York Times, and I feel getting our people to more news conferences would be a great way to show how capable we are of doing just that.Billster156234781 (talk) 21:34, 31 January 2019 (UTC)