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

• Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [1]
• Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [2]
• The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [3]
• It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [4]
• Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1> will parse as <pages from="to=" section="1"> instead of <pages from="" to="" section="1"> as it used to. Please use <pages from="" to="" section=1> or <pages section=1> instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [5]

Problems

• Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [6]
• The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [7]
• The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [8]
• You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [9]
• Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [10]

Changes this week

• Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [11]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
• Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow <mapframe> and <maplink> tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [12]

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 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [13]
• The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [14]

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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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections. [15]
• The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated. [16]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
• Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [17]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
• The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [18]

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 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are backlog and thumb API. The meeting will be on 16 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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.

Problems

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
• In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [19]

Changes this week

• It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [20]
• You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [21]
• 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 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [22]

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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

• MediaWiki now supports the semantic web standards of Microdata and RDFa 1.0. On Wikimedia projects, a configuration change must be requested in order to enable RDFa 1.0. [23] [24]

Problems

• Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [25]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
• You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [26]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with part of the Architecture committee, which will discuss a few topics. The meeting will be on 30 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• The Architecture committee has sent a summary of new and ongoing RFC discussions.

Future changes

• Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [27]
• Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.

Corrections

• Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.

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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

• You can filter Special:Log in more detail. [28]
• Wikimedia wikis have a new way of counting visitors. [29]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 6. It will be on all wikis from April 7 (calendar).

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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 visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [30][31]
• Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [32][33]
• ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [34]
• The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [35]

Problems

• There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [36]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
• The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [37]

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 12 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are improving transclusion of templates for Parsoid and balanced templates. The meeting will be on 13 April at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [38]

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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

• You can filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [39][40]
• You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [41]
• MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [42]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [43]
• There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.

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 April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is shadow namespaces. The meeting will be on 20 April at 21:30 (UTC). See how to join.

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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.

Problems

• Wikimedia tested a new data center last week. This meant that the wikis could be read but not edited for 45 minutes on April 19 and for 20 minutes on April 21. [44]
• When the data center was tested, new edits were not shown in the recent changes log for 20 minutes. They are in the logs now. You can read more about how to find the edits.
• Unread notifications were sometimes counted incorrectly. This has now been fixed. [45]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia Commons will have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Commons. This will happen on April 26. [46]
• It will be easier to choose if you want to watch files you have uploaded with the upload wizard. [47]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from April 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from April 27. It will be on all wikis from April 28 (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 April 26 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Save page" button when you edit will be called "Publish" instead. This is to help new editors understand what it does. It already works like this on some wikis. [48]

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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 visual editor now works when you use Internet Explorer 9. [49]

Problems

• There was a security problem with the MobileFrontend extension. It showed information that had been oversighted. This has now been fixed. [50]

Changes this week

• You can now see which notifications are available on a wiki on Special:DisplayNotificationsConfiguration. [51]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 4. It will be on all wikis from May 5 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "PSR-6 Cache interface in Mediawiki core". The meeting will be on May 4 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Pages could be added to new users' watchlists by default when they edit them. New users could also by default get email notifications when pages they watch are edited. This is discussed on Meta. [52]

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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

• Wikiversities now have better access to Wikidata. They can use data from any page on Wikidata on any page on Wikiversity. This happened on May 3. [53]
• You can use Wikipedia GapFinder to find missing articles between languages. [54]
• Users are invited to try Cross-wiki Notifications on all wikis. This is the last test session before the release by default, scheduled for May 12th at 23:00 UTC. [55][56]
• You can use keyboard shortcuts to open the visual editor (meta+V) or the wikitext editor (meta+E) (on certain wikis, even if you have chosen a favorite editor). [57]
• Uploading files bigger than 100 megabytes on Wikimedia Commons required to opt-in in your preferences. This is not necessary anymore. [58]
• The UploadsLink extension is now available on Wikimedia Commons. [59]
• Deleting a translation unit page didn't remove the corresponding content from the translation page. This is now solved. [60]
• Translation suggestions based on Apertium are now available on Mediawiki.org. [61]

Problems

• MediaWiki 1.27.0-wmf.23 has been rolled back from Wikimedia wikis, due to a performance issue. [62]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 11. It will be on all wikis from May 12 (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 May 10 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Overhaul Interwiki map, unify with Sites and WikiMap. The meeting will be on May 11 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• 2017 European hackathon will happen on May 19 - 21, in Vienna (Austria).

Future changes

• Today, in categories, a page titled "11" comes before "2". We plan to reorder that: "2" will come before "11". Please tell the developers if the change will cause problems. [63]

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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

• Some image thumbnails now load faster on mobile. They also take up less bandwidth. [64]

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki version was late on some wikis. [65]

Changes this week

• Special:Notifications will have "mark as read" buttons for each day. The non-JavaScript version will get it this week. A JavaScript version will come later. [66]
• Wikis can now locally decide what wikitext they want the signature button to produce. [67]
• A one-time welcome message for users will now be shown in the wikitext editor. This will include existing users. [68]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 17. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 18. It will be on all wikis from May 19 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Requirements for change propagation". The meeting will be on May 18 at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Using self-closing tags like <div/> and <span/> to mean <div></div> and <span></span> will not work in the future. Templates and pages that use these tags should be fixed. When Phabricator ticket T134423 is fixed these tags will parse as <div> and <span> instead. This is normal in HTML5. [69]

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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

• You now see a warning message on pages that try to use ((DISPLAYTITLE)) but it doesn't work because it doesn't match the page's actual title. [70]

Problems

• Commons had problems with server lag. This meant that it took longer time for files to turn up in categories. [71]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (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 May 24 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• All HTTP access to Wikimedia sites and APIs will stop working. Some bots still use HTTP. They will need to use HTTPS instead. This will happen on June 12. [72]

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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

• There is now a standard way to get the target of a redirect page from a Lua module. [73]

Problems

• A new way to handle rollback was introduced. It broke some tools and scripts and was reverted. This will be re-planned after review. [74][75]
• CentralNotice didn't work in some older browsers. This has now been fixed. [76]

Changes this week

• When you edit a file or category page with the visual editor the rest of the page will be shown in its normal place. [77]
• The Translate extension will get an edit summary field. [78]
• A change to the <charinsert> feature could break some user scripts. Contact Bawolff if the "click to insert special characters" links in the edit window break on your wiki. [79][80]
• Elasticsearch will be upgraded on Wikimedia wikis this week. This should not affect you, but if you have problems with the search function this is probably the reason. [81]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (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 31 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• MathML/SVG is now the default <math> rendering mode on Wikimedia projects. [82][83]

Changes this week

• The history page can tell you if a page on your watchlist was updated since you last visited it. This now works the same way in Vector as in other skins. The change broke local designs on some wikis. This will be fixed this week. [84]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).

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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

• Wikimedia wikis now use AuthManager. If you have new problems related to logging in or being logged in, report them. [85]
• Visiting Special:Notifications doesn't automatically mark notifications as read anymore. You can go between read, unread or all notifications on Special:Notifications. Notifications on Special:Notifications are grouped by day. You can mark every daily group as read individually. Notifications are displayed by groups of 50 on Special:Notifications and you can find former notifications by using navigation arrows. [86][87][88][89]

Changes this week

• You can filter user contributions to hide minor edits. [90]
• It will be easier to edit galleries with the visual editor. [91]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).

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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

• Notifications were not always marked as read when you followed a link from an email notification. This will now happen. [92]

Changes this week

• The list of other languages an article is available in will be shorter on small Wikipedias and non-Wikipedia projects. This is to make it easier to find the most relevant languages for each user. You will still be able to see the other languages. [93][94]
• Alerts (the red badge) will not be automatically marked as read when you open the Notifications popup. [95]
• When you get several thanks you can see them as one notification. This is instead of one notification for each thanks. [96]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is develop Markdown support strategy for MediaWiki. The meeting will be on 22 June at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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 ORES service has now moved to a new location. This should make it easier to use ORES. The ORES review service is now available as a beta feature on Wikidata and Persian Wikipedia. ORES is an artificial intelligence system for Wikimedia wikis to help editors. [97]
• The order of wikis in collapsed cross-wiki notifications was different than when the list was expanded. This is now fixed. [98]
• A new category for tracking pages with math errors was added: Category:Pages with math errors. [99]

Problems

• The Wikimedia Etherpad crashed on June 23. Some edits done that day have been lost. They can be found at etherpad-restore.wikimedia.org for another few days. [100][101]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
• The way to mark notifications as read or unread will be changed to be more clear. [102]

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 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation will look at developing better tools for edit review. This is because research suggests we scare away newcomers who want to help. [103]
• An e-mail from the Editing Department explains the technical work that is planned and being researched for the future. Items include better wikitext and visual editing, prompts for edits, language improvements, annotations, and meta-data separation. [104]
• The sorting of Notifications into the two fly-out menus is going to change on July 5 to 7. Bundled notifications should be easier to explore and mark as read individually. [105][106][107]
• From 29 June git.wikimedia.org (running Gitblit) will redirect all requests to Phabricator. The vast majority of requests should be correctly redirected. [108]
• Catalan and Polish Wikipedias will have Wikidata descriptions added to articles in the mobile view by default. This is currently a beta option for the mobile versions. This might come to other wikis later. [109]

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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

• A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity. [110]

Changes this week

• The "⧼citoid-citefromidtool-title⧽" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "Insert" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much. [111]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up. [112][113][114]
• Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first. [115][116][117]
• Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed. [118][119][120]

Problems

• On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too. [121]
• Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 July. It will be on all wikis from 14 July (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 12 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• Due to the rollback, new sorting of Notifications on the Fly-Out Menus has been deployed with a delay. [122]
• Due to the rollback, the daily special patch deployment process has been changed. [123]
• In notifications, "Messages" are now called "Notices". [124]

Problems

• On July 12 all wikis were rolled back to MediaWiki 1.28.0-wmf.8 due to a problem in the log-in system. [125][126]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
• Special:Log now has a help link. [127]
• The RevisionSlider can be tested on the beta cluster. From 22 July, it will be available as a beta feature at: German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia

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 19 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end". The meeting will be on 20 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [128]

Future changes

• User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages. [129][130]
• Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it. [131]

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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

• Interactive maps have been enabled for Meta wiki and the Catalan, Hebrew, and Macedonian Wikipedias. Learn how to add interactive maps to wiki pages.
• Last week's rollback is now documented. [132]

Problems

• Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed. [133]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
• It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon. [134]
• Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages. [135]

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 26 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join. [136]

Future changes

• The current icon for Notifications "Notices" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency. [137]
• Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly. [138]

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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

• A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [139]
• The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.

Problems

• Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [140]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (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 2 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• The next CREDIT showcase will be on 3 August at 18:00 (UTC). This is to present and comment on new gadgets, small projects and works in progress. See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "notifications in core". The meeting will be on 3 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• In notifications, the icon for Notices has been changed from a speech-bubble icon () to a tray icon () for consistency. The Alerts icon has been redesigned too. The colors have been changed for accessibility. [141]

Problems

• If you use the wikEd gadget, changes you made were not kept when you switched from the wikitext editor to the visual editor while you were editing. This has now been fixed. [142]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia search will now ignore question marks at the end of the sentences or words you use when you search. Until now the question mark was just a wildcard. [143]
• On Commons, UploadWizard will now be available on mobile, rather than just the old upload form. This should reduce the workload for the community in reviewing images. [144]
• When you edit with the visual editor a puzzle symbol tells you there is an invisible template in the article. It will now mention the name of the template. [145]
• The button to read something in another language will move for mobile users. This will happen on 9 August. [146]
• When someone mentions you and links to your user page you get a notification. You will now get a notification when you mention yourself this way. [147]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 August. It will be on all wikis from 11 August (calendar).
• A message on Notifications panel will invite users to try Special:Notifications page. [148]

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 August 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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Problems

• Last week Tech News announced you will get a notification when you mention yourself the same way as if someone else had mentioned you. This caused some problems and will happen later instead. [149]
• Creating and editing links to sections on other pages on the wiki now works again in the visual editor. [150]
• For some users, cross-wiki notifications haven't been working properly. The count has been wrong when only cross-wiki notifications were present. The cross-wiki bundle has been showing only the names of wikis and not the actual notifications. This will be fixed soon. [151][152]

Changes this week

• The login session when you choose "Keep me logged in" will now last a year. Previously it was 30 days. This will happen on August 16. [153]
• Some abuse filters will have to be updated during the week. This is because a bug will be fixed. [154]
• In compact language links, two new kinds of languages will be shown in the shorter language list: Languages that are used in the article's text, and languages where the article has a badge like "featured article" or "good article". [155][156]
• The visual editor will be available by default for logged-out editors on Wikipedias that use the Arabic script. It is already default for logged-in editors. [157]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (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 August 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Starting the week of August 22 there will be three software deployment windows. They will be at 13:00, 18:00, and 23:00 UTC. This is to have more times when software of the wikis can be updated and make it easier for developers in different parts of the world. [158]

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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 ORES review tool is now available on Special:Contributions as a beta feature. It can make it easier to find contributions that are probably damaging the wikis. The ORES review tool is available on Wikidata and Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Russian Wikipedia. [159]
• The norm and ccnorm functions have been updated to make it easier to write abuse filters. This also affects the TitleBlacklist extension. You don't have to transform "I" and "L" to "1", "O" to "0" and "S" to "5" anymore. [160]
• The old pageview data in the "pagecounts-raw" and "pagecounts-all-sites" files is no longer being updated. You can find the new pageview data here. This happened on August 5. [161]

Problems

• Some big image files could not be thumbnailed. This has now been fixed. [162]
• When you moved a page over a redirect it would delete the redirect without saving it in the logs. This has now been fixed. [163]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 August. It will be on all wikis from 25 August (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 23 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully sent out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. You can test this on the test wiki. [164][165]
• How you add text after an edit conflict might work in a different way in the future. You can test the prototype. [166]

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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

• Wikimedia mobile sites now don't load images if the user doesn't see them. This is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster. [167]
• When you edit a table with the visual editor, pressing Tab in the last cell of a row will take you to the first cell in the next row. Pressing Shift and Tab in the first cell of a row will take you to the last cell in the previous row. [168]

Changes this week

• The name of the "Save page" button will change. The button will say "Publish page" when you create a new page. It will say "Publish changes" when you change an existing page. [169][170]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (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 30 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "RfC: image and oldimage tables". The meeting will be on 31 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [171]
• Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [172]
• When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show a validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [173]

Changes this week

• You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [174][175]
• Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [176][177]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (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 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The CheckUser extension could work differently in the future. There is a Request for Comments to figure out how. [178]

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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 Wikimedia Commons app for Android can now show nearby places that need photos. [179]
• <maplink> and <mapframe> can now use geodata from Open Street Map if Open Street Map has defined a region and given it an ID in Wikidata. You can use this to draw on the map and add information. [180][181]

Changes this week

• The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [182]
• A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [183][184]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (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 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• When you search on the Wikimedia wikis in the future you could see results from sister projects in your language. You can read more and discuss how this could work.

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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.

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back because of bugs. Creating new accounts did not work between 15 September 19:10 UTC and 16 September 12:50 UTC. [185][186]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.

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 20 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is multi-content revisions. The meeting will be on 21 September at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [187]

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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

• If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can request it after a community decision. See how to request it. [188]
• When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [189]
• Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [190]

Problems

• The MediaWiki version that was supposed to come to the wikis two weeks ago was put on hold again because of new problems. The MediaWiki version after it is now on all wikis. [191][192]

Changes this week

• There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [193]

Meetings

• You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on September 27 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [194]

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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 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. [195]

• <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. [196]

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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

• You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using ((Special:RecentChanges)). You can now use tag filters by using ((Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname)). [197]
• 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. [198]
• 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. [199]

Changes this week

• Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [200]
• 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.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week is CREDITS files. The meeting will be on 12 October at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• 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. [201]

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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

• There is a new newsletter from the Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation. It will have more details about for example Flow and notifications. You can read the first issue.

Problems

• 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. [202]
• Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [203]

Changes this week

• There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [204]

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.

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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.

Problems

• The abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed. [205]

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". [206]
• About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [207]
• 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.

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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

• 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. [208]
• Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. [209]
• The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script. [210]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1^st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2^nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3^rd (calendar).
• Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" field when editing templates. [211]
• Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. [212]

Future changes

• New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29. [213]

Miscellaneous

• The Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Collaboration Guideline is available for community review. Any feedback welcome, in any language.

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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

• Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. [214]
• First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [215]
• .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [216]
• Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [217]

Changes this week

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 7 November.
• 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).
• Special:ActiveUsers will allow users groups selection. [218]

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 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. [219][220][221]
• Upcoming holidays will impact deployments. The schedule has been published.

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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

• 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. [222]

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. [223]

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.

Future changes

• Magic links might not work in the future. [224]

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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

• 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. [225]
• 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. [226]
• The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems

• 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. [227]

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. [228][229][230]

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. [231]
• 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. [232]

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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 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. [233]
• 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. [234]
• 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]. [235][236]

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.

Future changes

• Tool Labs could get two new policies. One would be to be able to adopt tools without an active developer. The other would be a right to fork. There is a request for comment on Meta.

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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

• You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [237]
• Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [238]
• 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. [239]

Changes this week

• You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [240]
• 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.

Future changes

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. You vote for wishes on the survey page until 12 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2015 results page.

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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

• 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. [241]
• 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. [242]
• Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. [243]

Problems

• Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global 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. [244]

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.

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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

• 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. [245]
• 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. [246]

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. [247]

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.

Future changes

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey is done. It decides what the Community Tech team will work on during 2017. You can see the results.

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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

• You can now use datasets on Commons. You can see an example that is using this source. [248]
• There is a new opt-in beta feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. You can try it out.
• When you update a page with translations on wikis with the Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed. [249]
• The new version of MediaWiki was released to all wikis last week (calendar).
• MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis. [250]
• The live option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated. [251]

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. [252]

Changes this week

• There is no new version of MediaWiki this week because of the Wikimedia Developer Summit.

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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

• You can now upload WebP files to Commons. [253]

Problems

• video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up. [254]

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. [255]
• 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. [256]
• You will be able to use <chem> to write chemical formulas. Before you could use <ce>. <ce> should be replaced by <chem>. [257]
• You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist. [258]
• 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. [259]
• 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. [260]
• When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu. [261]
• 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.

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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

• You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor. [262]

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).

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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 OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different. [263]

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. [264]
• 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. [265][266]
• The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

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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.

Problems

• The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed. [267]

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. [268]
• 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. [269]
• 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. [270][271]

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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

• 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. [272]

Problems

• The Firefox add-on Firefogg 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. [273]
• 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. [274]

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. [275]
• 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. [276]
• The Developer Wishlist is a list where developers prioritize tools they need. The voting closes at 14 February 23:59 (UTC). This process is only for developers.

Review

• You can read the 2016 product summary from the Wikimedia Foundation Product group to see what they did with things they said they would work on in the annual 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.

Recent changes

• The edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the Wikimedia design guide. [277]

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. [278]
• 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. [279]
• OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way. [280]
• 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.

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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.

Problems

• On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file. [281]

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. [282]
• 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. [283]
• 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. [284][285]

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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

• 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. [286]
• 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. [287]

Problems

• Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed. [288]
• 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. [289]

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. [290]
• 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. [291]
• 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.

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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 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. [292][293]
• 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. [294]
• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. [295][296]

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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 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. [297]
• DMOZ no longer works. Templates that use DMOZ can be redirected to archive.org or another mirror. DMOZ has been removed from the RelatedSites extension on Wikivoyage. [298]
• 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. [299]
• 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. [300]
• 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. [301]

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. [302]

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. [303]
• 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.

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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

• When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes. [304]

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. [305][306]

Changes this week

• New filters for Recent changes will be released on Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias and MediaWikiwiki on March 28. Other wikis will get it progressively. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and, on certain wikis, user intent prediction.
• 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).

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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 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. [307]
• 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. [308]
• 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. [309]

Problems

• Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [310]

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.
• You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech and Hebrew Wikipedia on 11 April. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and user intent prediction. User intent prediction means the filter tries to help editors determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [311]

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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

• Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. [312]

Changes this week

• 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. [313]
• 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. [314]
• The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [315]
• 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.

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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

• You can add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [316]
• You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [317]
• The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [318]

Problems

• 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. 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. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

• There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

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 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• stats.wikimedia.org will be replaced. You can see the new prototype. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. 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. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [319]
• From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. [320][321]

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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

• New filters for recent changes are now available as a beta feature on most wikis. You can turn it on in your preferences. Remaining wikis will have the new filters on 9 May. [322]
• When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups. [323]

Problems

• Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [324]

Changes this week

• The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [325]
• Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [326]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 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 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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 content translation tool works again. It was turned off because of a database problem. [327]
• Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. This is the same thing as Tech News wrote about in issue 2017/16. You need to add mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ) block for your scripts also, or add mediawiki.util dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. [328][329]

Problems

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 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.

Changes this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

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 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. 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. [330]
• The Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. [331]

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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.

Problems

• Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. [332]
• There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May. [333]

Changes this week

• When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. [334]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (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 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users. [335][336]
• Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: ((1x| sad :-{ face )). This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. [337][338]

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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

• You can now use ISBNs to automatically generate citations in the visual editor. This works on wikis that have enabled Citoid. [339]
• The Two Column Edit Conflict View is available as a beta feature on all wikis. It is a new interface for the edit conflict resolution page. [340]

Problems

• The mediawiki.util library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ).done(function(){ as the first line in the file and }); as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue. [341]

Changes this week

• The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences. [342]
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

• Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages. [343][344]
• Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. Tech News wrote about this last week. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. You can now see the full list of wikis with this problem and help fix them to avoid that things break later this month. You might find false positives. You can read more about what to fix. [345][346]

Older unreported changes

• Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word __NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. [347][348]

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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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
• There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. [349]

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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.

Problems

• Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen. [350]

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 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to control who can notify you on the Wikimedia wikis. You will have a user blacklist. When you add a user to the blacklist you will not get a notification when they mention you. You can test this on Beta Wikipedia. You can read more and give feedback on Meta. [351]

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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

• You can see new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from. [352]
• When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox. [353]
• You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article. [354]
• New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June. [355]

Problems

• The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen. [356]

Changes this week

• Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences. [357]
• You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions. [358]
• When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead. [359]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
• String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. [360]

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 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all. [361][362]
• Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too. [363]
• The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.

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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

• Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. [364]
• When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results. [365]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 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 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [366]
• Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. [367]
• Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. [368][369]

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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.

Problems

• ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. [370]

Changes this week

• irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [371]
• Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [372]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 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 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.

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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 <inputbox> has a new searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [373]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
• Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone. [374]

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 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC. [375]

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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

• There was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed. [376]

Changes this week

• Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
• There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
• EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. 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. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [377]

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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

• There are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article. [378]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (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 11 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis. [379]
• We will not use Tidy on Wikimedia wikis in the future. It will be replaced by June 2018. It could be earlier. Editors will need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors.

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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

• "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. [380]

Problems

• On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. [381]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (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 18 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is: Migrate to HTML5 section ids. [382] The meeting will be on 19 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Page Previews, currently a Beta Feature, will be enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. [383]

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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

• CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [384][385][386]
• .mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [387]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
• It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications on a wiki. This new feature will accessible in your preferences, in the Notifications tab, on Wednesday, July 26. Please see the documentation. [388]

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 25 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikimedia Foundation July 2017 Metrics & Activities Meeting. The meeting is about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are perceived and understood by the world. The meeting will be on 27 July at 19:00 (UTC). See the agenda and how to join.

Future changes

• New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.

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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.

Problems

• Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [389]
• Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.

Changes later this week

• Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. [390]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (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 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [391]

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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

• You can now see which Wikipedia language versions are read in a specific country. This tool is called Wikipedia Views Visualized. [392]
• The Architecture Committee is now the Wikimedia Technical Committee. You can read the charter. [393]

Problems

• You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [394]
• The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [395]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).

Future changes

• Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [396]
• Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [397][398]
• Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [399][400]

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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

• Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [401]

Problems

• The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [402][403]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).

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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

• You can now test the new Timeless skin on the test wiki and mediawiki.org. You can turn it on in your preferences. You can report bugs in Phabricator. It will come to more wikis soon. [404][405]
• Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [406]
• If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [407]
• The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

• Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [408]
• The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [409]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (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 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [410][411]
• You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [412]

Problems

• Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [413]

Changes later this week

• You can block users from sending you notifications. [414]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (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 29 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Technical Committee. The topic this week is Migrate to HTML5 section ids. The meeting will be on 30 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [415]
• New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [416]
• The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.

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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

• We are asking Tech News readers five questions to make the newsletter better. You can answer the questions here. We are grateful for every reply we get.

Recent changes

• The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [417][418]

Problems

• Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [419]

Changes later this week

• New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [420]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (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 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can see a presentation about and discuss the new Technical Committee on 5 September at 17:30 (UTC). There will be a presentation on YouTube and a discussion in #wikimedia-office on Freenode. You can use the web chat. [421]

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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

• You can get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [422]
• The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [423]
• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [424]

Problems

• Tech News 2017/36 reported about new filters for edit review coming to watchlists. This was planned to happen last week. It will happen next week instead. [425]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
• OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 September at 15:00 (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 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
• New filters for edit review are available now on recent changes as a beta feature. Some of those filters and other features will be deployed as default features in the coming weeks. Users will be able to opt out in their preferences. [426]

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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

• You can now see contributions from an IP range at Special:Contributions. Before you could only see contributions from single IP addresses. Some older contributions from IP ranges could be missing at first because it will take some time to add them. [427][428]
• Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted. Phabricator projects and repositories have been renamed. [429]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (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 19 September 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 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• We are replacing Tidy on Wikimedia wikis. Editors need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors. Some wikis have already switched. If your wiki would like to switch to the new format now, you can file a task.

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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

• Wikitext syntax highlighting is a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. You can now search through the entire article with CTRL+F or cmd+F when you edit. Before it just searched through a part of the article. The developers are also fixing a couple of other bugs. [430][431]
• Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions as a beta feature or by default can now create and move Structured Discussions boards. Structured Discussions was previously called Flow. [432]

Changes later this week

• You now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [433]
• Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [434]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation Readers department has proposed changing the mobile website. You can read more on mediawiki.org. This would be a big change.
• You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

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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

• You can now use preload features in the visual editor. This means you can create links to create new pages and some text will already be in the edit window when someone clicks on it. [435]

Changes later this week

• If you have turned on "Automatically enable most beta features" you will now get the 2017 wikitext editor. Before this you had to turn it on manually even though it is a beta feature. [436]
• Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [437]
• The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [438]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (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 3 October at 19:00 (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 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [439]
• The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

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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 number of active users listed by ((NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS)) and on Special:Statistics will now only include Wikidata edits as activity on Wikidata and not on other wikis too. [440]
• Previously you could create wiki links starting with two colons. Now you need to use one colon. [[::File:X.jpg]] now has to be [[:File:X.jpg]]. There is now a new Linter category. You can see a list on Special:Linterrors/multi-colon-escape. The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. You can read more about using Linter. [441]

Problems

• You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [442]

Changes later this week

• The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [443]
• If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (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 10 October at 19:00 (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 11 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• When you edit a template with the visual editor it follows the template's format configuration on how to save it. You can now change the format in more powerful ways if your wiki wants it. [444][445]
• 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 has been a beta feature for the last five months. You can now try out the new interface on a page where you will actually get simulated edit conflicts. You can give feedback to the developers.

Problems

• There is a problem with recent changes pages and your watchlist that show a large number of pages. Until it is fixed, Wikidata edits will not be shown on recent changes or in your watchlist on Commons or Russian Wikipedia. If necessary, Wikidata edits will be removed from all wikis. [446]
• Notifications are not working for some actions. For example some users don't get a notification when they are mentioned. The developers are working on fixing this. [447]
• Users on some wikis could not change their preferences. This has now been fixed. [448]

Changes later this week

• Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia from 17 October. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [449]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (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 17 October at 19:00 (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 18 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• You can use ccnorm_contains_any when you create an abuse filter. This can be used to look for multiple words or phrases within a string. It will find words where some characters have been replaced. You can read more in the documentation. [450]

Changes later this week

• When you search in some languages the search function could use specific other languages if the first language didn't work. This is called a fallback language. This didn't work properly and created bad searches. The search index is being fixed to work better. [451]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (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 24 October 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 25 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is a Structured Commons community focus group for Commons and Wikidata contributors who want to give input on structured data on Wikimedia Commons. You can sign up to join it. [452]

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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

• You can now block users from emailing you through the Wikimedia wikis. [453]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (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 31 October 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 1 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• You will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [454]

Changes later this week

• The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 6 November. You can post proposals from 19:00 UTC and until November 19.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• URLs that link to sections on Wikimedia wikis with non-Latin scripts have looked like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#.D0.98.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.80.D0.B8.D1.8F instead of https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#История. This will soon be fixed. Old links will still work. [455][456]

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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 diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [457]
• A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [458]
• Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [459]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Support for uploading and viewing 3D models is coming soon to Wikimedia Commons. The feature will support the .STL file format. You can see an example on the test wiki. [460]

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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

• If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [461]
• The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [462][463][464]

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 21 November at 19:30 (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 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Language converter syntax will 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. This will happen next week. [465][466]

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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

• You can now test the new advanced search function beta feature on mediawiki.org. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. It will come to German and Arabic Wikipedia this week. It will come to more wikis later. [467]
• You can now upload large files with the Internet Archive upload tool. Previously you could not upload files larger than 100 MB. [468]
• You can now use the Timeless skin on all wikis. You can choose skins in Special:Preferences#Appearance. [469]

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).

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 28 November at 19:30 (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 29 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

• It is now possible to upload MP3 files to Commons. Only users with MP3 file upload rights can upload MP3 files. [470]
• You can now use live updates for recent changes if you use the new filters. This feature updates the filtered recent changes every three seconds when you activate it. [471]
• There is an experimental onion service for Wikimedia projects. [472]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).
• Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems. [473]
• Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [474][475]

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 December at 19:30 (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 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. You can vote for wishes on the survey page until 10 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2016 results page.
• The Community Liaisons team at the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for active tech ambassadors. This is to make sure the Wikimedia communities get all the information they need about new features and can be involved in the technical development. [476]

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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

• URLs that link to sections on Wikimedia wikis with non-Latin scripts have looked like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#.D0.98.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.80.D0.B8.D1.8F instead of https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#История. This has now been fixed on all wikis. Old links will still work. [477]
• A new tag marks edits where a redirect was created or removed. This still works when the editor writes something else in the edit summary. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. [478]
• If you use Chrome on Android, you can now use the print to PDF button to create a PDF of an article. [479]
• Filter by number of edits or filter by time range have been grouped on a same menu on the recent changes page if you use the new filters. The "View new changes since $1" link is now more prominent. [480]
• Some of the web fonts that were provided by the Universal Language Selector extension are being removed. This is to reduce the load time on pages. The web fonts were added many years ago to help users read text in scripts which did not have fonts or had broken fonts. This is not the case any more. You can check the status page for a list of all web fonts and whether they are currently being used and especially for special requirements. [481]

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).

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 12 December at 19:30 (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 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can discuss new or improved blocking tools with the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-Harassment Tools team. They will work on building better blocking tools. Leave comments on the talk page.

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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

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2018.

Problems

• When you import a page from another wiki the usernames of the users who edited the article on the wiki you imported it from are shown in the article history. This should link to the users on the original wiki. A script to fix this caused problems for Wikidata and German Wikipedia. It also created a large number of SUL accounts on wikis where editors had never edited. [482]
• Some bot owners got email about their bots logging in from a new computer. If this is from one or a couple of wikis, you can turn these messages off in your preferences on those wikis until the problem has been solved. If not, you can report more about the problem in Phabricator.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

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 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Files on Commons will have structured metadata in the future. The developers are now looking for examples of different kinds of metadata to make sure they are aware of them when they build prototypes for structured data on Commons. You can read more and help by giving examples of interesting media files.
• The Structured Commons team are making sure Commons work with structured data. If you regularly contribute to Commons and Wikidata you can answer a survey that helps the team prioritise the tools that are important for the Commons and Wikidata communities. The survey ends on 22 December. You can read more on Commons. You can also help the team decide on better names for "captions" and "descriptions". This ends on 3 January 2018.
• The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey has now ended. You can see the results. They decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year.

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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 Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [483][484]
• Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [485]
• Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [486]
• Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of its old custom one. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [487][488]

Problems

• Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [489]
• With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [490]
• The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [491]
• Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [492]

Changes later this week

• Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [493]
• The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [494][495]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
• WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [496]

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 9 January at 19:30 (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 10 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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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

• Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [497]
• There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [498]

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [499][500]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (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 16 January at 19:30 (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 17 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [501][502]

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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

• Filters on Special:RecentChangesLinked will get the new look similar to on the recent changes page. Special:RecentChangesLinked will also get some new features. [503][504]

Problems

• With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [505]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [506]

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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

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation is working on how to get less unmaintained code on Wikimedia wikis. This could be by finding maintainers or removing unmaintained features. They are now looking for feedback on what do do with AbuseFilter, the IRC RecentChanges feed, the RelatedSites extension and TimedMediaHandler. You can leave feedback on the linked talk pages. [507]

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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

• Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to. [508]
• The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language. [509]
• Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded. [510]

Problems

• Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this. [511]

Changes later this week

• When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users. [512]
• When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like gallery widths="150px". You could use em or % instead of px but it would make no difference. You can now only use 150px or nothing (150). If you write something else, instead of treating it like px, it will not work. [513]
• The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of Yes or No it will say Thank and Cancel. It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public. [514]
• Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it. [515]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (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 6 February at 19:30 (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 7 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Education Program extension will be removed on 30 June. It is replaced by the Programs and Events Dashboard. [516][517]

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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

• TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [518][519][520]
• Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.

Changes later this week

• You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [521]
• The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like ((reflist)), would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [522]
• The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [523]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (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 13 February 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 14 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The settings page and beta options for the mobile website are being improved. [524]

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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 explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [525][526]
• You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [527]

Problems

• Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [528]
• Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like ((sfn)) are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [529][530]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (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 20 February at 19:30 (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 21 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The way edit summaries and log comments are stored in the database is being changed. In the future this will make longer comments possible. [531]
• Edit conflicts could be solved in a different way in the future. You can test a new prototype.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

• Checkusers and stewards can now view private data such as the IP address in the abuse log. This data is removed regularly. [532]

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki version was rolled back because of a bug. [533][534]
• Since the deployment train last week until late evening on 20 February UTC, when you thanked someone for an edit, the thank went to the latest unthanked edit to that page. It didn't matter which edit you tried to give thanks for. This has been fixed. [535]
• Special:Statistics did not take newly created pages into account since 13 February 2018. Because of this the statistics are recreated. [536][537][538]

Changes later this week

• Users with version 10 of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer get JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis. If you use this browser on your computer, you can try upgrading to a newer version. [539]
• The Wikinews wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 27 February. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [540][541]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 1 March (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 27 February at 19:30 (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 28 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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 make longer edit summaries. [542]

Changes later this week

• You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. [543]
• On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [544][545]
• Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [546]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (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 6 March at 19:30 (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 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now test global preferences and give feedback.
• You can now read about planned works on maps during 2018. This will be done by June. You can give feedback on the planned maps work.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

• 3D models can now be uploaded to Commons. [547]
• Page Previews has been updated to use HTML for previews. This has fixed many issues. An A/B test was done on English and German Wikipedia to measure how it is used. Other changes were also made. [548]
• Some edits have to be checked against too many conditions before they can trigger an abuse filter. If that is the reason no filter is triggered the edit will be tagged for review. [549]
• Auto-saving has been added to the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. Right now it is meant to help if your browser crashes or if you accidentally close a tab. [550]

Problems

• The abuse filter did not tag all edits that should have been tagged after last week's MediaWiki version had come to the wikis. It was fixed on 9 March (UTC). [551]

Changes later this week

• You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. This was originally planned to happen last week. [552]
• It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [553][554]
• A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [555][556][557]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (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 13 March at 19:30 (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 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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 March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed. [558]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).

Meetings

• There is no Editing team meeting this week.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days. [559][560]
• In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity. Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments on the project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

• Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [561] [562]
• The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [563]
• TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [564]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (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 27 March 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 one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [565]
• Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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

• Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.
• The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools, please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.

Problems

• MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version 1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week. [566][567][568]
• The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [569]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).
• User subpages ending in .json will now be protected from other people editing them, like .js and .css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage like User:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns. [570]
• Tidy will be replaced by RemexHtml on the next set of wikis. On April 4, we plan to turn off Tidy on all Wikiquotes (except frwikiquote) and Wikimedia chapters and user groups wikis. 23 wikis will have Tidy replaced this time. [571][572][573]
• AbuseFilter will transition to use OOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks. [574] [575]
• In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [576]
• You can see names of individual abuse filters in Special:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed. [577]
• You can now search through filter patterns at Special:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or a regular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted. [578]

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 3 April 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 4 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you can give your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.
• On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please follow T175706 to monitor progress of Tidy replacement. [579][580]

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