Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2018/March

Editing News #1—2018
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter Did you know? Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?



Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.

If you enable the Beta Feature for "", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.



This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode, which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and improving the visual diff tool. Their work board is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

 * The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools.  The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments.  They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing.  The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January.  Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor.  Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits.  More information will be posted at Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
 * The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor.  When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs.  You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs".  The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges.
 * Wikitext syntax highlighting is available as a Beta Feature for both the 2017 wikitext editor and the 2010 wikitext editor.
 * The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be a bit tricky to set up.  Your wiki can have this service.  Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.

Let's work together

 * The team will talk about editing tools at an upcoming Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting.
 * Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
 * The  block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens.  This makes footnotes easier to read.  You can request multi-column support for your wiki.
 * If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation.

—Elitre (WMF) 20:56, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

NOTICE: EducationProgram extension is being deprecated


Over the years many issues have been discovered from our engineering colleagues regarding the Education Extension, including security concerns. For this reason, and with a viable alternative platform available, we are starting the process to deprecate the extension and having it uninstalled where it has been activated. This includes this wiki Special:Courses.

This means that the following steps will be taken:


 * 1) New programs are discouraged from using the extension and encouraged to use the Programs and Events Dashboard.
 * 2) Current ongoing programs will be supported, until the month of June, 2018.
 * 3) On June 30, 2018, the Education Extension will be shut down.
 * 4) If you are still running an education program that uses the Education Extension, please take the appropriate measures and also reach out to your colleagues and communities so they are also aware.

It should be noted that data of previous programs that ran on the Education Extension will remain safe, and we are working on documenting how to access that data.

Thus, we invite all Education Program Leaders (and users of the Education Extension) to take the online training for the dashboard so that you can benefit from this tool and make your work easier.

Did you know you can also use the P&E Dashboard at edit-a-thons, writing competitions, and other Wiki-based activities? More training courses for the dashboard are available here, so take a look!

Do you need to communicate with us about this?


 * If you have comments or questions, please reach out to the Education Team at educationAt sign.svgedia.org, or the Programs and Events Dashboard group at dashboardAt sign.svgedia.org.
 * If you use Phabricator, you can also go to: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T125618.
 * You are also welcome to share questions and comments on outreach.wikimedia.org.

-- On behalf of the Education Team 19:56, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Please test pings in edit summary
1. Read this:
 * "You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. phab:T32750"-- meta:Tech/News/2018/10

2. Sign up at https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/ using a different user name and password (not the one you use here). You may create multiple accounts if you like, just put a note on their user pages.

3. Edit a page and put a username link in edit summary. Confirm that you are receiving the notification correctly.

4. Test at different pages and in different ways.

5. Report bugs to Phabricator.

6. Share this comment with other people on other wikis, in different languages.

--Gryllida (talk) 23:42, 8 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Pi zero said he didn't get a ping when I put his username in edit summary on a user talk page (my own). --SVTCobra 17:33, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
 * And when Pi zero tried it in reply on the HotCat topic below, I did not get a ping or notification. Cheers, --SVTCobra 19:42, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Notification from edit summary
Greetings,

The ability to notify other users in edit summaries will be available later this week, on 15 March 2018. Other users can be notified if a link to their user page is provided in an edit summary. Some user-made gadgets and scripts that automatically put user names in edit summaries may need to be changed to put a colon in the link, such as User:Example. You can change how you receive these mention notifications in your preferences. This feature was highly requested in the 2017 Community Wishlist survey, and feedback is welcome.

Thanks, happy editing to you. -Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 12 March 2018 (UTC)


 * We heard the same thing a while back in Tech News: 2018-10. Hope it happens this time. Cheers, --SVTCobra 01:04, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

We need your feedback to improve Lua functions
Hello,

If you’re regularly using Lua modules, creating and improving some of them, we need your feedback! The Wikidata development team would like to provide more Lua functions, in order to improve the experience of people who write Lua scripts to reuse Wikidata's data on the Wikimedia projects. Our goals are to help harmonizing the existing modules across the Wikimedia projects, to make coding in Lua easier for the communities, and to improve the performance of the modules.

We would like to know more about your habits, your needs, and what could help you. We have a few questions for you on this page.

Thanks a lot for your help, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 08:52, 27 March 2018 (UTC)