It's been almost two weeks since the last newsletter, and a lot of improvements have been made during that time. The main things that people have noticed are significant improvements to speed for typing into long pages (T54012), scrolling (T54014) and deleting (T54013) on large pages. There have also been improvements to references, with the latest being support for list-defined references, which are <ref>s defined inside a <references> block (T53741). Users of Opera 12 and higher have had their web browser removed from the browser black-list, mostly as a result of work by a volunteer developer (T38000). Opera has not been fully white-listed yet, so these users will get an additional warning and request to report problems.
Significant changes were made to the user interface to de-emphasize VisualEditor. This has cut the use of VisualEditor by approximately one-third. You can read about these at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Updates/August 1, 2013, but they include:
- Re-ordering links to the editors to put "Edit source" first and VisualEditor second
- Renaming the link for VisualEditor to "Editbeta"
- Disabling the animation for section editing.
- Changing all labels for the classic wikitext editor to say "Edit source", regardless of namespace.
There have also been many smaller fixes, including these:
- Horizontal alignment of images working correctly on more pages (T53995)
- Categories with ':'s in their names (like Category:Wikipedia:Privacy) now work correctly (T53902)
- Magic JavaScript gadgets and tools like sortable tables will now work once the page is saved (T53565)
- Keyboard shortcut for "clear annotations" - now Control+\ or ⌘ Command+\ (T53507)
- Fixed corruption bugs that led to duplicate categories (T54238) and improper collapsing when multiple new references were added in a row (T54228).
- Improvements to display elements: The save dialog in Monobook is restored to normal size (T52058), pop-up notices on save now look the same in VisualEditor as in wikitext editor (T41632), and the popup about using wikitext has a link to the definition of wikitext that now opens in a new window (T54093)
Most of the Wikimedia Foundation staff is traveling this week and next, so no updates are expected until at least August 15th. If you're going to be in Hong Kong for Wikimania 2013, say hello to James Forrester, Philippe Beaudette, and the other members of the VisualEditor team.
As always, if you have questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 23:25, 6 August 2013 (UTC)