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

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [1][2]
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [3][4][5]
• The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [6]

Future changes

• There is an update on re-enabling the Graph Extension. To speed up the process, Vega 2 will not be supported and only some protocols will be available at launch. You can help by sharing what you think about the plan.

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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.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [7][8]
• MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [9]
• The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.

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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

• The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [10]
• The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit ((DEFAULTSORT:...)) keywords. [11]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [12][13]
• On 6 December, people who have the enabled the preference for "Show discussion activity" will notice the talk page usability improvements appear on pages that include the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word. If you notice any issues, please share them with the team on Phabricator.

Future changes

• The Toolforge Grid Engine shutdown process will start on December 14. Maintainers of tools that still use this old system should plan to migrate to Kubernetes, or tell the team your plans on Phabricator in the task about your tool, before that date. [14]
• Communities using Structured Discussions are being contacted regarding the upcoming deprecation of Structured Discussions. You can read more about this project, and share your comments, on the project's page.

Events

• Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.

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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

• On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [15][16]

Problems

• There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [17][18]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [19][20]

Future changes

• The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.

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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.

Tech News

• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [21][22]
• Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [23]
• There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [24]

Future changes

• The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
• The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.

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New year, new scripts. Welcome to the 23rd issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering around 39% of our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. That’s right, we haven’t published in two years! Can you believe it? Did you miss us?

Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!

Featured script

RefRenamer by Nardog is this issue's featured script. For whatever reason, the foundation will only give us better reference names in VisualEditor if we wish for it in the next survey. Nardog to the rescue! This script has a ton of options to satisfy almost anyone who wishes to use better refnames than ":0" and ":418".

Updated scripts

• Nardog: MoveHistory can now look up the move history of any page from anywhere on the site.
• User:Enterprisey/diff-permalink now has a version that copies the Special:Diff link with square brackets.
• User:GhostInTheMachine/WatchlistTidy now moves the Active Filters panel to the right so that the Show/Hide button doesn't constantly jump.
• User:Alexander Davronov/HistoryHelper has now become stable with some bugfixes and features such as automatically highlighting potentially uncivil edit summaries and automatically pinging all the users selected.
• Wikipedia:AutoEd/unicodehex.js will no longer replace legacy MediaWiki dot-entities (dot followed by two uppercase alphanumeric characters) in article links, which caused several links to become broken.

Improve a script

• Many of our favorite scripts such as User:Fred Gandt/userResourceManager, User:Guarapiranga/search-shortcuts and User:Bradv/Scripts/Superlinks haven't been updated for Vector 2022. You could be the one to change that!
• User:Elominius/gadget/media timer works, but its UI looks alien. Someone could improve it...
• To a lesser extent, the same goes for User:PrimeHunter/Search sort.js. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
• We want...

• ...a mark-as-read button for Watchlyst Greybar Unsin
• ...a tool to automatically fix CAT:BROKENREFs, preferably a fork/addition to User:TheJJJunk/ARA
• ...a fix/fork of User:DannyS712/SectionRemover.js to make it work

Requested scripts

• A WP:3O requesting and responding tool, similar to Terasil's classic edit request tool
• A "bytes removed"/"added" filter on the user contribs page
• A review tool for WP:proposed deletions
• Mass patrol new pages by a user for use in WP:RFP/A
• ...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests

New scripts

• Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin is a rewrite of Ais's Watchlist Notifier with modern APIs and several new features such as not displaying watchlist items marked as seen (hence the name), not bolding diffs of unseen watchlist elements which doesn’t work properly anyways, displaying the rendered edit summary, proper display of log and creation actions and more links.
• Alexis Jazz: Factotum is a spiritual successor to reply-link with a host of extra features like section adding, link rewriting, regular expressions and more.
• User:Aveaoz/AutoMobileRedirect: This script will automatically redirect MobileFrontend (en.m.wikipedia) to normal Wikipedia. Unlike existing scripts, this one will actually check if your browser is mobile or not through its secret agent string, so you can stay logged in on mobile! Hooray screen estate!
• Chlod:
  • Deputy is a first-of-its-kind copyright cleanup toolkit. It overrides the interface for Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations for easy case processing. It also includes the functionality of the following (also new) scripts:
    • Attribution Notice Template Editor (ANTE) graphically modifies content attribution notices. It is the successor to User:Chlod/Scripts/CopiedTemplateEditor and supports more templates than ((copied)) ones.
    • Infringement Assistant allows a user to hide sections of a page for suspected copyright violations and report the page to the appropriate Wikipedia:Copyright problems noticeboard.
• User:Elominius/gadget/diff arrow keys allows navigation between diffs with the arrow keys. It also has a version that requires holding Ctrl with the arrow key.
• Enterprisey
  • diff-permalink-2 allows quickly copying wikilinks to diff and permalink pages from those pages, a variation of existing script User:Enterprisey/diff-permalink
  • archiver is a fork of Σ's Archiver with several bugfixes.
  • /parent-cats highlights categories that are a subcategory of a category already included in a page's categories.
• User:Guarapiranga/accessKeysCheatSheet adds an access key shortcut to display all shortcuts based on code provided by Nardog and NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh.
• User:HungKhanh0106/ProperDisplay loads a bunch of fonts to add correct rendering supports for "esoteric" languages.
• User:Jeeputer/highlightPiped will make piped links irresistible (or else).
• User:Jerome Frank Disciple/curlyfixer.js adds an WP:AutoEd function that straightens curly quotes per MOS. That's right! Such a module was only made in the 14th year of AutoEd's existence! Configure away!
• Frequently link to Wikipedia on your websites yet find generating CC-BY credits to be such a hassle? Say no more! User:Luke10.27/attribute will automatically do it for ya and copy the credit to yer clipboard.
• User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft, a spiritual successor (i.e. fork) to Evad37's script, with a few bugs solved, and a host of extra features like check-boxes for choosing draftification reasons, multi-contributor notification, and appropriate warnings based on last edit time.
• Nardog
  • /CopyCodeBlock: one of the most important operations for any scripter and script-user is to copy and paste. This script adds a copy button in the top right of every code block (not to be confused with <code>) that will, well, copy it to your clipboard!
  • /RCMuter: Hide specific users, perhaps User:MediaWiki message delivery, from the Watchlist and Recent Changes.
  • /VitalTopicon makes you see the vital article topicon on WP:vital articles.
• m:User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AceForLuaDebugConsole.js adds the Ace editor (a.k.a. the editor you see when editing JS, CSS and Lua on Wikimedia wikis) to the Lua debug console. "In my opinion, whoever designed it to be a plain <textarea> needs to seriously reconsider their decision."
• Novem Linguae
  • DraftCleaner fixes formatting of new articles.
  • GANReviewTool quickly and easily closes good article nominations.
  • ReviewStatus displays whether or not a mainspace page is marked as reviewed.
  • SpeciesHelper tries to add the correct speciesbox, category, taxonbar, and stub template to species articles.
• User:Opencooper/svgReplace and Tol's fork replaces all rasterized SVGs with their original SVG codes for your loading pleasures. Tell us which one is better!
• User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages adds a button to highlight all unreferenced paragraphs in reds, and can even do it automatically.
• Still hate Vector 2022's floating TOC? User:Phlsph7/UnfoldedNumberedTOC(Vector2022) might make you give it a try.
• Quite a bit of pages at Special:WantedCategories either exist now or got removed. User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/hideUnwantedCategories automatically hides those.
• User:SuperHamster's Wikipedia:Tools/View it! generates a gallery of images for a given subject on any Wikimedia project utilizing Structured Data on Commons. Images can then be added as needed.
• Terasail
  • ArticleInfo displays page information at the top of the page, directly below the title.
  • /HeaderIcons takes away the Vector 2022 user dropdown and replaces it with all of the icons within, top level, right next to the Watchlist. One less click away! There's also an alternate version that uses text links instead of icons.
• ...and any more, all available at WP:US/L.

Due to budget and procrastination limitations, we've only had time to review the first ~39% of the scripts since last issue. Help us out here! Aaron Liu (talk) 13:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)