This 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.
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This
would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first.
[1]
<slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should
ask for it as soon as possible.
[2]
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
You can show
Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}.
[3]
The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one.
[4]
Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them
easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight.
[5]
Changes this week
Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. -->[6]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
11 October at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian.
[7]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's
security certificate last week. This was because of a problem
GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning.
[8]
Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the
Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version.
[9]
Changes this week
There will be no new MediaWiki version this week.
[10]
Future changes
The
Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can
read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.
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
The
abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed.
[11]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (
calendar).
The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia".
[12]
Some wikis that want
numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use
UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with
diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are
listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA
are listed on MediaWiki.org. You
can test it.
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
Now you can include Commons video films with
subtitles in your wiki language. Before you could see translated videos on file page at Commons only.
[14]
The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script.
[16]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3rd (
calendar).
Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "Preview page with this template (
what's this?)" field when editing templates.
[17]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 8th. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 9th. It will be on all wikis from November 10th (
calendar).
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on
9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
RevisionSlider will be enabled by default on all beta wikis, on testwiki, testwiki2, mediawikiwiki and de.wikipedia.org.
[25][26][27]
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
When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key.
[28]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (
calendar).
In
Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of
fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation.
[29]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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
Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use
two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in
Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone.
[31]
You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has.
[32]
A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on
two-factor authentication.
[33]
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later.
[34][35][36]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this.
[37]
Hovercards will leave the
beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation
Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the
Hovercards talk page.
[38]
Hello, Reach Out to the Truth. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
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 this week
When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a
cookie. This means their
browser will be blocked even if they change their
IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals.
[39]
When you use
Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon.
[40]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (
calendar).
Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden].
[41][42]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Everyone can now see
Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message.
[44]
ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have
trained ORES to recognize damaging edits.
[45]
Changes this week
You will now see categories with 0 pages in
Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there.
[46]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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
Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use
Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it.
[47]
You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in
Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention.
[48]
Because of work on
cross-wiki watchlistsglobal renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well.
[50]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the
holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.
The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late?
Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!
Recent changes
Administrators and translation administrators can now use
Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the
Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English.
[51]
Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You
can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua.
[52]
Problems
Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November.
[53]
Changes this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.
Meetings
The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on
3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See
how to join.
@
ThePlatypusofDoom: As the previous IP editor pointed out,
http://therealstanlee.com does not work. It has been hijacked by a website selling unrelated junk. The IP address replaced it with a link to Stan Lee's new subscription box service. I decided a link to his company would be better than promoting a specific product or service, so I changed it. Do you have a preference?
Reach Out to the Truth19:41, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
When you update a page with translations on wikis with the
Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed.
[55]
The
new version of MediaWiki was released to all wikis last week (
calendar).
MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis.
[56]
The live option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated.
[57]
Problems
Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox.
[58]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up.
[60]
Changes this week
There is a new
magic word called {{PAGELANGUAGE}}. It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators.
[61]
When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu.
[62]
You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>.
[63]
The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to
your personal CSS: #wpTextbox1 { height: 50em; } You can change the number 50 to make it look like you want to.
[65]
Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as
127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from
MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on
Wikimedia Labs, including
Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in.
[66]
When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu.
[67]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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
You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor.
[68]
Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (
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
OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different.
[69]
Changes this week
ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later.
[70]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (
calendar).
Future changes
The
Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools.
[71][72]
The Wikimedia technical community is doing a
Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January
23:59 UTC. This is soon.
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
The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed.
[73]
Changes this week
Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of
before and
after.
[74]
There are some changes to the
OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change.
[75]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This
will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix
here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about
more problems.
[76][77]
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
EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace
RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July.
[78]
Problems
The
Firefox add-onFirefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg.
[79]
Tool Labs and
Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at
17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this.
[80]
Changes this week
The
TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later.
[81]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring.
[82]
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 edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the
Wikimedia design guide.
[83]
Changes this week
Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the
Beta Feature called Hovercards.
[84]
There has been a problem where the
CSS of
gadgets has been loading twice. The
Gadgets extension has two new options: type and peers. The type option solves this problem. You can use peers to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about
type and
peers.
[85]
OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way.
[86]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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
On 22 February the
wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file.
[87]
Changes this week
You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor.
[88]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are
AMF and
STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later.
[89]
The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia.
[90][91]
Incorrect Edits via note from Reach Out to the Truth
Hi. I'm not even sure if I'm doing this correctly in response to your note about wiki changes under
our ISP. I, dyslexix, rarely edit wiki any longer. It's gotten too complicated. The edits to which you refer
were made by an autistic spectrum member of the household who has very precise notions of things
like locations, older versions of titles, etc. I will have this individual set up their own account ,
plus work in the sandbox.
Frankly, I don't edit any longer because it gives me an anxiety attack.
I'm related to a person of renown, and there are egregious errors contained within the page that alter history ...
or, more correctly, will alter history of a certain well-known event. Anyway, that's beside the point.
More to the point is: The level of editing or contributing has become too complex for me to double-check
this family member's edits. He:She was shown the note from you: So.....
1. He/She will establish his/her own Wikipedia account.
2. Sandbox will be used
3. Another family member will review.
I will attempt this the best I can.
Thanks in advance.
Forgive me if I mess up on the tilde rule. It's been too long.
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
You can now search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the
diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't.
[92]
When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view.
[93]
Problems
Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed.
[94]
Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's
Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately.
[95]
Changes this week
The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view.
[96]
The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the
abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log.
[97]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Clarification
The
2017/09 issue of Tech News mentioned 3D file formats you can soon upload to Commons. The
AMF format will be available later.
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 this week
You will be able to show references from <references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists.
[98][99]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Some old
web browsers will not be able to use
JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version.
[100]
CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future.
[101][102]
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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page.
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You can see monthly page views when you click on Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API.
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The
Linter extension is now on
smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later.
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The
MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use
Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers.
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Problems
On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please
report it.
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Changes this week
When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs.
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The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
21 March at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
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
When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes.
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Problems
Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed.
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The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (
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 Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page.
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The tracking category
Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template.
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English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a
cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new
IP address the cookie will block them again.
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Problems
Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed.
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Changes this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Some older
web browsers will not be able to use
JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version.
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New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the
user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis
will get it later.
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The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters.
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The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on
11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at
14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time.
You can read more about this.
RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on
the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and
give feedback.