Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2021/May

Tech News: 2021-18
 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
 * Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.

Problems
 * The content translation tool did not work for many articles for a little while. This was because of a bug.
 * Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes.

Changes later this week
 * Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none.
 * 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
 * Octicons-tools.svg The CSS classes,   and   do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead.

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15:43, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-19
 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 can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.

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15:10, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-20
 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 toolbar in the Reply tool. It works in the wikitext source mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
 * Wikimedia mailing lists are being moved to Mailman 3. This is a newer version. For the character encoding to work it will change from  to.
 * Octicons-tools.svg An earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoid API would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-tools.svg  will be renamed  . The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles.
 * 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).

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13:49, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Who are the Election Volunteers in your community?


Would you like to get more people taking part in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees election?

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the plan for the 2021 Board elections. That plan includes outreach and communication support for the Board elections. The Board election facilitators will:


 * Inform communities of the trustee selection process
 * Invite communities to engage in voting
 * Encourage people representing emerging Wikimedia communities to run as candidates

Voter turnout in prior elections was about 10% globally. It was better in communities with volunteer election support. Some of those communities reached over 20% voter turnout. We know we can get more voters to help assess and promote the best candidates, but to do that, we need your help.

We are looking for volunteers to serve as Election Volunteers. Election Volunteers should have a good understanding of their communities. The facilitation team sees Election Volunteers as doing the following:


 * Promote the election in their communities’ channels
 * Organize discussions about the election in their communities
 * Translate messages for their communities

'''Who are the Election Volunteers to connect your community with this movement effort? Is it you? Or someone you know? Check out more details about Election Volunteers''' and add your name next to the community you will support in this table or get in contact with a facilitator. We aim to have at least one Election Volunteer for Wiki Projects in the top 30 for eligible voters. Even better if there are two or more sharing the work.

Best, JKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:09, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-21
 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 movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.

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).

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17:07, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-22
 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
 * There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday.

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

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17:05, 31 May 2021 (UTC)