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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
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since
Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed.
[1]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource.
[2]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background.
[3][4]
Wikis use
abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges.
[5]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (
calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update
MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can
read more.
[6][7]
Cloud VPS and
Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can
read more.
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
The
Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app.
[8]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on
Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The
GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on
Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on
Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis.
[9]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (
calendar).
Future changes
When admins
protect pages the form will use the
OOUI look.
Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones.
[10][11]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new
short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your
reading lists or recording
email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
[12]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address
Cloud VPS and
Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead.
[13]
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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned.
[14][15]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new
short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your
reading lists or recording
email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
[16]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (
calendar).
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
The visual editor will now use
MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images.
[17]
Editing a
timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly.
[19]
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (
calendar).
Future changes
There is a
user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the
Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.