Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2020/August

Tech News: 2020-32
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * All queries to the Wikidata Query Service failed between 17:50 and 17:59 UTC on Thursday 23 July. Some queries failed during a longer period.
 * Interlanguage links were ordered incorrectly for the past few weeks. This problem was also mentioned in Tech News two weeks ago. The problem is now fixed.
 * There is a problem with the global preferences for the "" option. Developers are working on fixing it.
 * A bug in the Wikibase extension had disabled the "move" and "create" types of protection in the main (Gallery) namespace on Wikimedia Commons. New protections could not be added, and existing protections were not enforced, allowing some page moves and page creations that should not have been possible. This has now been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed.
 * Users'  and   pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin.
 * Octicons-tools.svg In the MonoBook skin, the  identifier is now  . This may affect CSS and JS gadgets. Migration instructions can be found in T255953. This was previously mentioned in issue 27.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Bot operators can use Pywikibot to regularly archive discussions. The behavior when the bot uses  to prevent large archives was changed.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 5. It will be on all wikis from August 6 (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33
 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
 * FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact.

Problems
 * The mobile skin displays a message at the bottom of the page about who edited last. This message showed raw wikitext. This has now been fixed. Some messages in Structured Discussions and content translation may still appear as raw wikitext. Developers are working on it.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 12. It will be on all wikis from August 13 (calendar).

Future changes
 * All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-34
 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 revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an  tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else.
 * The new OOUI version will not work with Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (calendar).

Future changes
 * All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by translating the announcement message.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35
 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 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st
Read this message in another language •  m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server switch 2020

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.


 * You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
 * If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it.  If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal.  Then you should be able to save your edit.  But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:


 * Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
 * There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-36
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * This is a reminder. All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC. Please check on the details on the announcement message.

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

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:11, 31 August 2020 (UTC)