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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
If you revert an edit using the undo link your edit is marked with an undo tag. This will now only happen if you don't change anything in the edit window before publishing the undo. This is to keep users from marking edits as undos when they actually do something else.
[1]
The new
OOUI version will not work with
Internet Explorer 8. This means the wikis will look strange and not work well in Internet Explorer 8. This was reported in
Tech/News/2020/17. This is because keeping the wikis working with very old browsers creates other problems.
[2]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 August. It will be on all wikis from 20 August (
calendar).
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 1. This is planned between 13:30 and 15:30 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis next week. This is a reminder. You can help by
translating the announcement message.
[3][4]
Sarasua, Cristina, & Mietchen, Daniel. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Community Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994272
Mietchen, Daniel, & Sarasua, Cristina. (2020, August). Multilingual Structured Climate Research Data in Wikidata - The Data Perspective. Zenodo.
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994266 (also
on YouTube)
Video: How to add missing descriptions to Wikidata using QuickStatments tool (in Arabic) -
YouTube
Video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #16
Facebook,
YouTube
Video: Introduction to Wikidata (in Malayalam) -
YouTube
Video: Wikidata editing basics (in Chinese) -
YouTube
Tool of the week
Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Two new grant programs from
WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (
phabricator: T259340)
Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (
phabricator:T258558)
Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
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
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 August. It will be on all wikis from 27 August (
calendar).
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
In the early history of cinema, trick films were short silent films designed to feature innovative special effects
(Please update the interwiki links on
Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
Upcoming:
live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 1 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, September 2nd at 17:00 CEST (15:00 GMT).
Etherpad,
Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
Upcoming video: Wikipedia Weekly Network - LIVE Wikidata editing #18
Facebook,
YouTube, September 5 at 19.00 UTC
Upcoming:
Onam label-a-thon (September 1st and 2nd): Online label-a-thon to improve Wikidata items related to Kerala and Malayalam on this Onam holidays.
Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
More than 300 editors used the Reply tool at these four Wikipedias. They posted more than 7,400 replies during the study period.
Of the people who posted a comment with the Reply tool, about 70% of them used the tool multiple times. About 60% of them used it on multiple days.
Comments from Wikipedia editors are positive. One said, أعتقد أن الأداة تقدم فائدة ملحوظة؛ فهي تختصر الوقت لتقديم رد بدلًا من التنقل بالفأرة إلى وصلة تعديل القسم أو الصفحة، التي تكون بعيدة عن التعليق الأخير في الغالب، ويصل المساهم لصندوق التعديل بسرعة باستخدام الأداة. ("I think the tool has a significant impact; it saves time to reply while the classic way is to move with a mouse to the Edit link to edit the section or the page which is generally far away from the comment. And the user reaches to the edit box so quickly to use the Reply tool.")
[5]
The Editing team released the Reply tool as a Beta Feature at eight other Wikipedias in early August. Those Wikipedias are in the Chinese, Czech, Georgian, Serbian, Sorani Kurdish, Swedish, Catalan, and Korean languages. If you would like to use the Reply tool at your wiki, please tell
User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF).
The Reply tool is still in active development. Per request from the Dutch Wikipedia and other editors, you will be able to
customize the edit summary. (The default edit summary is "Reply".) A "ping" feature is available in the Reply tool's visual editing mode. This feature searches for usernames. Per request from the Arabic Wikipedia, each wiki will be able to
set its own preferred symbol for pinging editors. Per request from editors at the Japanese and Hungarian Wikipedias, each wiki can
define a preferred signature prefix in the page
MediaWiki:Discussiontools-signature-prefix. For example, some languages omit spaces before signatures. Other communities want to add a dash or a non-breaking space.
New requirements for user signatures
The
new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
Existing custom signatures that do not meet the new requirements will be unaffected temporarily. Eventually, all custom signatures will need to meet the new requirements. You can
check your signature and see lists of active editors whose custom signatures need to be corrected. Volunteers have been contacting editors who need to change their custom signatures. If you need to change your custom signature, then please
read the help page.
Next: New discussion tool
Next, the team will be working on a tool for quickly and easily starting a new discussion section to a talk page. To follow the development of this new tool, please put the
New Discussion Tool project page on your watchlist.