Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now
globally block accounts. Before
the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out.
Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the
Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of
FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and
Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and
Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to
Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers.
[1]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via
GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed.
[2]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone?
A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the
Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons.
[3]
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened
Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on
Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent
blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the
WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a
ChatGPT plugin and
Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the
project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week.
These errors were mainly due to the addition of new
linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the
IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and
28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can
read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an
update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in
Czech (
voy:cs:)
[4]
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia
Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late
Aaron Liu (
talk)
04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script
here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for
PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on
Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update,
Aaron Liu:
Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Newly maintained scripts
Aaron Liu has created
Duplinks from
Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load?
Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net
Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script
here!
