In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

• SkinSwitcher^[1] (source) by User:Eizzen – Allows users to view pages in any of the seven available skins (Vector, MonoBook, Modern, CologneBlue, Minerva, MinervaNeue, and ApiOutput)
• AutoPurge^[2] (source) by User:Eizzen – Similar to standard null edit/purge buttons, this script automatically purges certain cache problem pages listed in a user-defined window.AutoPurgePages variable array.
• Display Contributions^[3] (source) by User:Mvolz – Displays your edit count next to Contributions link in the top bar.
• PageCreator^[4] (source) by User:Eizzen – Displays information about a page's creator and links to the first revision of the page.
• LastEditor^[5] (source) by User:Eizzen – Provides links to user, talk and contribs pages of page's last editor, and additionally provides a "diff" link, minor edit marker, and summary of the edit in question.
• DiffOnly^[6] (source) by User:Mr. Stradivarius – Adds "diff only" links to diff pages, and optionally to history pages, recent changes, and the watchlist. Diff-only pages load quickly, so are useful for tasks that involve trawling through lots of diffs.

New gadget

• Xtools ArticleInfo^[7] (source) – Show statistics about a page in real-time, just below the page header.

Newly approved bot tasks

• RonBot (task 2) – Reduce just the GIF files in Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests.
• FA RotBot (task approval) – A bot-triggering-bot. FA RotBot will tell InternetArchiveBot to run on a list of Featured Articles on a regular schedule.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #37 & #38. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

• 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. [1]
  • 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. [2]
  • 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. [3]
  • 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. [4][5]
  • Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted. Phabricator projects and repositories have been renamed. [6]
  • OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.
• Problems
  • Tech News 2017/36 reported about new filters for edit review coming to watchlists. This was planned to happen September 12, but was delayed by a week. [7]
• 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. [8]
  • Tidy is being replaced 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.

Installation code