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

Tech update
Some news from the Foundation: Microchip08 (talk) 09:31, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
 * On Monday, bureaucrats on English Wikinews will lose the ability to rename users, as the next step on the long, long road (since 2006!) to migrate to SUL accounts only. Renames will now only be done by "global renamers" on meta: you can request the ght at the usual location on meta: SRGP. There's more information in the section above.
 * On Tuesday, Wikinews will get bumped to a new MediaWiki version (1.24wmf21)
 * On Thursday there will be a new beta feature, HHVM, that you can opt in through your preferences: it is a higher performance version of the software MediaWiki runs on. There shouldn't be any problems with HHVM, but if there are it will automatically fall back to "normal" PHP. As such, opting in will at best "increase performance… by a lot", and worst-case should just be the same as your normal editing experience.
 * Busy week! I'll opt in for HHVM as soon as I remember. How long are they estimating until HHVM is on by default? &mdash; Gopher65talk 20:17, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll expect everything to break on Tuesday, then.
 * And I'll opt in for HHVM at earliest, so I can see which essential tooks it breaks and how to work around those problems.  --Pi zero (talk) 20:49, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
 * They're not sure. You can take a look at the roadmap at HHVM, but it's hard to estimate a completion time because they're not sure how many bugs they'll uncover at each stage. Microchip08 (talk) 09:36, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
 * HHVM is now available: you can opt in at the usual place. Microchip08 (talk) 09:34, 23 September 2014 (UTC)
 * This week's update: Tuesday we'll get bumped to 1.25wmf1 (woo! new version!). On Monday, HHVM will be serving 1% of traffic. Microchip08 (talk) 22:02, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech update 2
Here's this week's update: Microchip08 (talk) 13:15, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
 * will now link to Phabricator, the tool we're migrating to from Bugzilla and friends. fab: was already taken :-).
 * Special:MediaStatistics is now a thing.
 * MediaViewer's been improved! (honest)
 * New MediaWiki update (1.25wmf2) will hit English Wikinews on 7 October 2014.
 * Lua (i.e. the Module: namespace) pages won't be able to be saved if they contain errors, which should help prevent things breaking.
 * TemplateData's GUI tool is being rolled out to twenty more wikis (not us). Might be worth taking a look at; maybe we should opt in if it's useful.
 * HHVM now serves 5% of logged-out users. 1.25wmf3 will be deployed on English Wikinews on 14 October. There's a IRC office hour about Visual Editor on 18 October at 1800UTC in #wikimedia-office, which you should join if you have any questions about it. There's also one about using structured data (similar to Wikidata) for file pages on Commons: that one's at 1800UTC on the 16th. Microchip08 (talk) 10:55, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

2009?
Has anyone else noted this page stops at 2009? --Bddpaux (talk) 19:22, 22 October 2014 (UTC)


 * SVTCobra is gone. (let rest of 2009 display (we will forget to update this each month)) -  Amgine | t 23:14, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Template:Weather
I'm about to rename this template, to clear the way so I can use the simpler name for the weather infobox (as I've done for a number of other infoboxen, such as culture and entertainment, on the theory that an infobox should always get the simple unadorned name). Does anyone anticipate any problems arising from this? --Pi zero (talk) 20:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The deed has been do'd. Infobox at weather, map at Weather World.  --Pi zero (talk) 23:08, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Just a comment that weather, as a name, more strongly suggests current wither information, while an infobox might better be titled weatherbox or perhaps infoweather or similar. Just in case some poor soul were to make the ultimate sacrifice and set up a weather-updating bot at some point. (Actually, thinking eversoslightly on this, the weather template would be a good name for a somewhat complex template which self-modifies content and might possibly be entirely coded in Lua without recourse to bottage...) -  Amgine | t 04:10, 24 October 2014 (UTC) 04:07, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Hmm. It's imaginable that someone might want to set up a bot or something.  My thinking, though, is that by far the more common operation is adding an infobox to an article, and having trouble figuring out what the infobox is called is a very common problem.  People would try to put up a culture and entertainment box and get this, science and technology and get this, sports and this, United States and this, weather and this.  These problems were chronic; even I kept getting caught out by them.  The problem of a weather bot comes up, what, once a decade?  --Pi zero (talk) 11:46, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds like naming conventions issues vs. people actually doing. &lt;considers&gt; Perhaps dynamic content templates and infoboxen should indicate this in their titles, e.g. Champion's League current (dynamic Champion's League standings) and Champion's League infobox, with Champion's League being redirected to a disambig template saying something like "This is not the template you were looking for. Standard naming convention is Template:[Subject] infobox, Template:[Subject] menu, and Template:[Subject] current." But meh, it is all hidden by a SEP field for me... -  Amgine | t 17:12, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Meta RfCs on two new global groups
Hello all,

There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would not contain any additional user rights. That proposal can be found at Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.

We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.

It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at Stewards' noticeboard.

Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 18:04, 26 October 2014 (UTC)