Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2014/August

Media Viewer is now live on this wiki


Greetings,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team is happy to announce that Media Viewer was just released on this site today.

Media Viewer displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, to provide a better viewing experience. Users can now view images faster and more clearly, without having to jump to separate pages — and its user interface is more intuitive, offering easy access to full-resolution images and information, with links to the file repository for editing. The tool has been tested extensively across all Wikimedia wikis over the past six months as a Beta Feature and has been released to the largest Wikipedias, all language Wikisources, and the English Wikivoyage already.

If you do not like this feature, you can easily turn it off by clicking on "Disable Media Viewer" at the bottom of the screen, pulling up the information panel (or in your your preferences) whether you have an account or not. Learn more in this Media Viewer Help page.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about Media Viewer. You are invited to share your feedback in this discussion on MediaWiki.org in any language, to help improve this feature. You are also welcome to take this quick survey in English, en français, o español.

We hope you enjoy Media Viewer. Many thanks to all the community members who helped make it possible. - Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

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 * I want this terrible extension removed from Wikinews. Anyone disagree? &mdash; Gopher65talk 00:01, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * If it were opt-in instead of opt-out, I'd find it harder to object to even though I think it badly thought out. But as it is, I would  its removal.  --Pi zero (talk) 01:53, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I would oppose removal: remember that power users aren't the target audience for Media Viewer, the readers are. If you don't like it, you can turn it off: but it is an improvement for the casual reader, and so should stay. Microchip08 (talk) 01:56, 14 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I think everyone has now seen what happens if you dick with Media Viewer on a wiki-wide basis... Wheel Wars. :P
 * It is an improvement for the likes of my most-recent contribution, a photoessay; I also note, testing on this old thing, that embedded video works more-sanely. So, for now, I think this isn't a fight to get into. --Brian McNeil / talk 09:51, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Global CSS / JS coming soon
I am excited to announce that on Tuesday, August 26, we will be deploying the GlobalCssJs extension, which enables per-user JavaScript and CSS across public Wikimedia wikis. Users will be able to create global.js and global.css subpages on Meta-Wiki and these pages will automatically be loaded across all public Wikimedia wikis.

There is documentation available if you want to load JavaScript on a subset of all wikis (e.g., all Wikisources, all French language projects, etc.).

Some users currently have manually set up global JavaScript/CSS by creating local user subpages (e.g., monobook.js/css subpages) to load their global scripts. For these users, the deployment of the extension will mean that modules will be loaded twice, and they will no longer be included in global scope. A script has been prepared to delete these page if they were created in the standard format. Users can signup at a Meta-Wiki page to have this done on their behalf once the extension is deployed.

Thanks, Microchip08 (talk) 16:34, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions
The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.
 * Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
 * Letter on change.org

-- JurgenNL (talk) 17:35, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Process ideas for software development


Hello,

I am notifying you that a brainstorming session has been started on Meta to help the Wikimedia Foundation increase and better affect community participation in software development across all wiki projects. Basically, how can you be more involved in helping to create features on Wikimedia projects? We are inviting all interested users to voice their ideas on how communities can be more involved and informed in the product development process at the Wikimedia Foundation.

I and the rest of my team welcome you to participate. We hope to see you on Meta.

Kind regards, -- Rdicerb (WMF) talk 22:15, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

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Interproject and interlanguage links via Wikidata
As Wikidata's sisterlinks feature is now available at Wikinews, please read the two discussions. With the interproject one, 2 questions- Their level of Wikidatiness is beyond my understanding.
 * 1) What should a visitor of w:Biology see when he clicks a "Wikinews" link in sidebar — our main namespace article (which redirects), or our category article?
 * 2) How do implement this with Wikidata?

Besides, what strikes me is that I feel we're creating pages like Biology (redirects) only for local links to work. Surely an extension could change how wikilinks behave, and make them try main namespace and then fall back to a category if a page does not exist, for a Biology link? --Gryllida 14:40, 22 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I think it's desirable to have w not go directly to categories. When a category is first created, we aren't ready yet to link articles to it, as it's not populated and sending people there would be unhelpful.  Also, what if we wanted it to go somewhere local other than a category?  The mainspace redirect allows us to do that, without building the assumption of categories into the template.


 * Another issue is the number of expensive operations involved. Each call to w checks to see whether the local target (in mainspace) exists, and that's an expensive check.  The max number of expensive operations per page is 500.  I checked with bawolff before deploying w, and he seemed to think the resource usage wouldn't be a problem; but checking for two different pages would double the number of expensive operations, and while it's fine to say no article is going to have 500 w calls, I squirm a bit when suddenly that number drops to 250.  --Pi zero (talk) 14:51, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The future of skins
If not already, please participate in this RfC and share it at any sister projects you can think of (in any language). Thanks! --Gryllida 13:17, 28 August 2014 (UTC)