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

Tech News: 2020-41
 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
 * There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
 * You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page.

Problems
 * There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late.
 * Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
 * Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in  is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis.

Future changes
 * You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:25, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Call for feedback about Wikimedia Foundation Bylaws changes and Board candidate rubric
. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. .

Today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees starts two calls for feedback. One is about changes to the Bylaws mainly to increase the Board size from 10 to 16 members. The other one is about a trustee candidate rubric to introduce new, more effective ways to evaluate new Board candidates. The Board welcomes your comments through 26 October. For more details, check the full announcement.

Qgil-WMF (talk) 17:09, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-42
 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
 * Because of the problems with the MediaWiki version two weeks ago last week's updates are also late.

Changes later this week
 * Live previews didn't show the templates used in the preview if you just edited a section. This has now been fixed. You can also test CSS and JavaScript pages even if you have the live preview enabled. Previously this didn't work well.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 October. It will be on all wikis from 15 October (calendar).

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg A new stable version of Pywikibot is coming soon.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:24, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-43
 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 . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).

Future changes
 * You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
 * Octicons-tools.svg In the AbuseFilter extension, the  function will be updated soon so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of   with   wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage.
 * Some gadgets and user-scripts use the HTML div with the ID . This div will be removed soon. Maintainers should replace these uses with either   or  . A list of affected scripts is at the top of T265373.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:31, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on October 27
Read this message in another language •

The Wikimedia Foundation tests the switch between its first and secondary data centers. 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 back to the primary data center on Tuesday, October 27 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, October 27. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (14:00 WET, 15:00 CET, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 03:00 NZDT on Wednesday October 28).
 * 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 October 26, 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. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community. -- Trizek (WMF) (talk)  17:10, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-44
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour.
 * Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed.

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

Future changes
 * Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can.
 * There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits.
 * The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:38, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Glenn Greenwald resigns from The Intercept
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:53, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Fascinating. To really understand what's going on there one would need to know more about the context.  Censorship and freedom-of-the-press in a disinformation-rich environment. --Pi zero (talk) 20:05, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, seeing the article he publishes will be interesting. I've never been on the side that he's a tool for Russian disinformation or a useful idiot but I am very skeptical of all these October Surprise Bombshells About China and Ukraine since so far, they are all BS. See also Tucker Carlson "losing" the "only copy" of some "damning" documents about Joe Biden. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:09, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The publication responds: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-the-intercept/ —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:37, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And now the article itself: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:43, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I have lately concluded that being thoroughly gulled, in the current environment, does not require an idiot. It can happen to people of well-above average intelligence, if they get off on the wrong foot with their information sources.  Once you lose your way, it can be incredibly hard to re-acquire your bearings. --Pi zero (talk) 23:18, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Precisely. You don't have to be some gullible idiot or a vicious bigot to fall for a crock. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:25, 29 October 2020 (UTC)