This page is an
archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the
current talk page.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
There was an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday.
[1]
FoldArchives collapses archived talk page threads in order to reduce screen space
GoToTitle converts the page title into an input field for navigating to other pages
UserHighlighter adds highlighting to links to the userpages, talk pages, and contributions of administrators and other user groups as well as tooltips to indicate which groups a user is in
filterDiff: Adds a "Show changes" button to the filter editor.
filterNotes: Parses filter notes as wikitext (so links are clickable), and signs and dates new comments for you.
filterTest: Adds a "Test changes" button. Opens
Special:AbuseFilter/test with what's currently in the edit form, not with what's saved in the database, so you don't have to copy-paste your changes.
Twinkle has a number of improvements, including that most watchlist defaults now make use of the new
temporary watchlist feature. Other changes include rollbacks treating consecutive IPv6 editors in the same /64 range as the same user, adding a preview for shared IP tagging, a preference for watching users after CSD notification, and for sysops, the ability to
block the /64 and link to a
WP:RfPP request, and new copyright blocks default to indefinite.
Wikipedia:Shortdesc helper now v3.4.17, changes include minor fixes and preventing edits that don't change the description.
Joeytje50's JWB now version 4.1.0, includes the ability to generate page lists from the search tool, major updates to the handling of regular expressions, the storing of user settings, the addition of upload protection, and an option to skip pages that belong to a specific category, among other changes. See
User:Joeytje50/JWB/Changelog for a full list of recent changes.
Wikipedia:User scripts/List has been revamped to make it easier to find scripts suited for your needs. If you know of a cool script that is missing on the list, or a script on the list that is no longer working, please edit the list or let us know on
the talk page.
My apologies for this long-overdue issue, and if I missed any scripts. Hopefully going forward we can go back to monthly releases - any help would be appreciated. Thanks, --
DannyS712 (
talk)
13:04, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
A breakthrough infection is a case of illness in which a vaccinated individual becomes sick from the same illness that the vaccine is meant to prevent. Simply, they occur when vaccines fail to provide immunity against the pathogen they are designed to target. In April 2021, the CDC reported that in the United States there were 5,814 COVID-19 breakthrough infections, and 74 deaths, among the more than 75 million people fully vaccinated for the COVID-19 virus.
(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.)
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 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (
calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses
Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future.
[2][3][4]
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct
diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages.
[5]
The
CSRF token parameters in the
action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters.
[6][7]
Hi Donald, thanks for erasing the offensive content on my user talk page in Catalan Wikipedia. It is an IP of a banned sockpuppet on Vietnamese Wikipedia. He's been using IP to write many articles, some of whose name do not comply with the policy. Me trying to correct those names probably drove him mad, that's why I received those offensive insults. Anyways, thanks again. Hope you have a nice day.
Băng Tỏa11:29, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
@
Băng Tỏa:, I am familiar with the person, they are a prolific Flickr user (that are unfortunately blacklisted on Wikimedia Commons because of dishonest attribution and licensing), they are very active on Wikimedia Commons and I am currently monitoring three (3) active socks by them (generally good edits and have reverted some bad ones), usually he only gets foul as an IP and not with his logged accounts. I saw him vandalise the page "
User talk:Lệ Xuân" on this Wikipedia, but noticed that his insults on the Catalan-language Wikipedia weren't removed so I did it as I hoped that you wouldn't have to read it.
Anyhow, he has a lot of good edits and I hope that he can return to Wikipedia one day if he learns his mistakes, but he simply refuses to listen to others and collaborate properly with fellow volunteers. :-( --
Donald Trung (
talk)
22:32, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
Sweden report: Working with UN Human Rights; Aftermath to the fiddler competition; Music manuscripts from the 18th century; Digital visions; Should museums work with Wikipedia?; Wikidata project with museums has results
SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this
example notebook.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been
published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
The
call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (
phab:T176312)
Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (
phab:T284538)
Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...
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
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the
advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile.
[8]
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC.
[10]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks.
[11][12]
When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (
Source)
Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of
the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped
newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were
more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also
less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
@
Alexis Jazz:, but why? There is nothing inherently special about admins as they also come in different levels (Checkusers, Bureaucrats, Stewards, Etc.), technically elections like these can also be held for "Page viewers" and they can also be "confirmed by the WMF". Admins simply have more tools, they are not an anointed special race that are above others and your proposal for "Maintainers" also would've delegated a lot of admin powers to a new user group. Note that it's not the ability to undelete, only to view deleted items. --
Donald Trung (
talk)
07:59, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
Checkuser and Bureaucrat are roles that technically can be given to someone who is not an admin. And this is exactly why "maintainers" wouldn't have had undelete. It's due to copyright. People who patrol and clean up copyright violations get undelete because they need it. Nobody else. It's just a legal issue. Access to copyright violations has to be very strictly controlled. — Alexis Jazz (
talk or ping me)
11:46, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
@
Alexis Jazz:, but Page viewers also wouldn't have undelete, at most they can nominate a page for undeletion like how a new user could nominate an existing page for deletion, but they can't share copyright violations anymore than any other user can, just view them. Page viewers can't restore anything, just see what's deleted.
"People who patrol and clean up copyright violations get undelete because they need it." This is for people that need access to currently deleted items but can't undelete them themselves, that would still be up to admins. --
Donald Trung (
talk)
11:59, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
It's not about sharing. They are not allowed to have access to copyright violations. Who can undelete doesn't matter, non-admins are not allowed to have access to deleted content or Wikimedia could legally be judged as a private file sharing site. This is a legal limitation, not a consensus issue. Just forget this. — Alexis Jazz (
talk or ping me)
12:07, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
@
Alexis Jazz:, ah, I am somewhat genuinely surprised that there is a legal distinction between admins and non-admins as we usually hear that "admins are just users with extra tools" but this is apparently untrue? What qualifies admins to be different in the eyes of the law? Is it their ability to delete content? --
Donald Trung (
talk)
12:17, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
I'm not really sure what the law says, but I roughly know the WMF guidelines. (no idea if/where they are written down) Compare fair use law and
WP:NFCC. People with undelete have to be thoroughly vetted and they have to actively help maintain the site. — Alexis Jazz (
talk or ping me)
12:35, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
Going over it again I think that I misworded the proposal, largely because it started as "an afterthought", these users can only see deleted pages but not edit or undelete them, they have a "Request undeletion" button that opens an undeletion request like a "Nominate for deletion" button does the opposite. The pages won't be visible to anyone other than users with this right until a page has been undeleted by an admin. --
Donald Trung (
talk)
08:06, 21 June 2021 (UTC)