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You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g. World map showing population of each country.
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 MonoBook skin has been optimised for mobile devices. It now looks different. [1]
Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again. [4]
Problems
You will not be able to edit some wikis between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 13 June. You can see if your wiki is one of them.
MassMessage did not work 24–28 May. This is also why last week's Tech News was late. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 June. It will be on all wikis from 7 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
We are preparing a list of tools and technical support for Women in Red. I have tentatively added your name as you have provided assistance in connection with Wikidata and on article boxes. Please let me know whether you agree to be listed. You are of course welcome to make any additions or corrections.--Ipigott (talk) 07:25, 8 June 2018 (UTC)
Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
Started planning for support for Senses
Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
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
In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome. [8]
There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis. [9]
Problems
The MonoBook skin was changed to make it work better for mobile users. This caused some problems. The change was rolled back to fix them. The new version is now back on the wikis. MonoBook users can opt out from the new responsive design. [10]
Changes later this week
The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. For most wikis this will happen on 18 June. For the rest it will happen on 25 June. [11][12]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 June. It will be on all wikis from 14 June (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the Readers Web team IRC office hour. There you can discuss tools to contribute on the mobile web for the existing MediaWiki skins. The meeting will be on 18 June at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Hello. Is there a template for a list of an author's notable/recent publications, such as that at Eric Scerri? I can't seem to find one. Msuxg (talk) 16:11, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
(talk page stalker) Many people use the CS1 family of templates, including ((cite book)) and ((cite journal)), for this purpose. They take a bit of work to learn, but they have some error-checking built in and help ensure a consistent format. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:48, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
Ah, so a bibliography has no separate template of its own, people just list appropriate articles using the CS1 templates? Msuxg (talk) 16:52, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
NPP Backlog Elimination Drive
Hello Pigsonthewing, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!
We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.
Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive!
As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: . Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: , , , .
Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect A. Since you had some involvement with the A redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. ((3x|p))ery (talk) 20:35, 16 June 2018 (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.
Recent changes
Syntax highlighting has been a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It is now a normal feature. It is based on CodeMirror. [13]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 June at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Some old web browsers will not be able to read the Wikimedia wikis. This is because they use an insecure way to connect to them. This means that we get less security for everyone else too. This affects about 0.08% of all traffic to the Wikimedia wikis. This affects for example those who read Wikipedia on a PlayStation 3. [14][15]
The new filters for edit review tools and interface for watchlists will leave beta. Because there is no new MediaWiki version this week it will happen on 25 June for most wikis. For the rest it will happen in early July. [16][17]