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

Labs is causing me to Grinch out!
I'm griping more than 'asking'.......I read over on WP technical that the whole WMF Labs (and most of its wonderful tools) is royally janked up right now! Grrrrrrrr.......!!! The ability to check peoples' edit counts (and loads of other things) leads to the ability to 'reward' them for their efforts easily. The rewards serve as behavioral reinforcement. Behavioral reinforcement leads to warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies makes people want to come back here (for free, mind you) and continue their work. I know the whole WMF is expensive but there just has to be a way for them to keep some fundamental tools working!! --Bddpaux (talk) 16:38, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
 * It's not that expensive. They spend lots of money on things that do harm to the projects and the communities.  The problem is a severe one; it seems that they not only have wrong priorities, they have some sort of completely wrong-headed notion of the nature of wiki projects.  I try sincerely to work with them and give them useful feedback, but all the while I have this strong suspicion that it's simply not possible for them to do anything useful with the kind of organizational structure they've created.  They've got an apparently facebook-like model of how wikis work, and they're trying to use centralized top-down programming teams to create software for an inherently bottom-up culture.  --Pi zero (talk) 18:08, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #10—2014
 Did you know? Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is now available. You can add and delete tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid  and   elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing +  or  +.

You can now create and edit simple  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "" into a "".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing " " will make the line a bullet list; " " or " " will make it a numbered list; " " will make it a section heading; " " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change.

There are also two other keyboard sequences: " " for opening the link tool, and " " for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like +  to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead
The current VisualEditor design will be replaced with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at mediawiki.org in late December and on other sites in early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January.

Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Translations of the user guide for most languages are outdated. Only Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translations are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
 * If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF) 18:59, 26 December 2014 (UTC)