Wikipedia:Technik/Archiv/2014

Tech News: 2014-01

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• You can now see the text of DjVu and PDF files in search results on wikis testing the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [1] [2]
• With the new version of the Wikibase DataModel extension, you can install it outside Wikimedia wikis. [3]

VisualEditor news

• Images are now shown inside VisualEditor as HTML5 <figure /> elements. Comments are welcome. [4]
• You can now test a basic version of VisualEditor on mobile devices; see this article as an example.

Problems

• On December 23, Wikimedia Labs was broken for 4 hours due to an NFS problem. [5]

Future software changes

• CirrusSearch will be added as the second search method for Spanish (es), French (fr), Portuguese (pt) and Russian (ru) wikis on December 30. Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies and Wikinews users will also be able to enable it in their Beta Features options.
• AbuseFilter log entries will be visible in CheckUser tool reports. [6] [7]
• It will soon be possible to search for log entries done by users without an account. [8] [9]
• It will no longer be possible to globally hide users with more than 1,000 edits. [10] [11]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:45, 30. Dez. 2013 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 2. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on January 7 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 9 (calendar).
• The old note-taking site (Etherpad) was removed on December 30, 2013. You can see most of the documents on the new site. [12]

Problems

• On January 2, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage projects were broken for 2 hours due to language cache update issues.
• On the same day, it was not possible to edit most wikis for about 30 minutes, due to a database replication problem.

Future software changes

• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the default search method for Italian Wikipedia, French Wikisource, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage sites, and as a second search method for the German Wikipedia and all Wikibooks sites on January 6. [13]
• Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedia users will also be able to enable CirrusSearch in their Beta Features options. [14]
• Plural form rules for some languages will be changed. Many translations of the user interface for Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and other languages will need to be changed. [15] [16] [17]
• You will see a warning when you try to delete a page linked to from other pages. [18] [19]
• You will be able to hide redirect pages on the list of protected pages. [20] [21]
• You will be able to use keyboard shortcuts in the Translate tool, by pressing Alt+1 and similar key groups. [22] [23]
• E-mails sent by MediaWiki will include the name of the site in their From: line. You will be able to change this name on your wiki by editing the MediaWiki:Emailsender page. [24] [25]
• Images viewed in the Beta Features media viewer will load faster. [26] [27]

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09:34, 6. Jen. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

You can read a recent blog post about how Tech News is put together, translated and sent to you across wikis each week.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 9. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 14, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 16 (calendar).
• Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons may be slow due to a search engine issue. [28]

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor will be added for all users on several Wikipedias on January 13. [29]
• You can now add and remove __NOTOC__, __FORCETOC__ and __NOEDITSECTION__ in the page metadata menu. [30] [31] [32]

Problems

• For a few hours on January 6, it was not possible to edit pages using the Translate tool on Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimania 2013 wiki, due to a settings error. [33] [34]
• For about 20 minutes on January 9, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

• Wikidata will be added to all Wikisource wikis on January 14. [35]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the second search method for the English Wikipedia on January 13. On Wikibooks and the German Wikipedia, you will also be able to test it by adding it in your Beta Features options.
• You will soon be able to export page collections into other formats than PDF. [36]
• It will soon be possible to upload groups of photos from Flickr using UploadWizard. [37] [38]
• The Wikimedia Foundation has shared a multimedia vision for 2016. You are invited to comment. [39]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:32, 13. Jen. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
• You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [40]
• As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [41] [42]
• You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [43]
• You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [44]

VisualEditor news

• In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
• You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [45]
• You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [46]
• When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [47]
• When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [48] [49]
• The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [50]
• Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [51]

Problems

• There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [52]
• There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [53]
• On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [54]

Future software changes

Orange bar with new messages

• If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [55] [56]
• You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [57]
• You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [58]
• You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [59] [60]

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11:21, 20. Jen. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video. [61]
• The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff. [62]
• The Special:ActiveUsers page will be removed because it's too slow. [63]
• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).

Problems

• On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved. [64]
• For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

• You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [65]

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10:46, 27. Jen. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
• Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis. [66] [67]
• The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles. [68] [69]
• You can now link to diffs using [[Special:Diff/12345]] and similar links. [70]
• There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages. [71]
• Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. [72]
• All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons. [73]

VisualEditor news

• You can now see a list of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Ctrl+/ inside VisualEditor. [74]

Future software changes

• Edits and files hidden with the Oversight tool will be moved to the RevisionDelete system. The Oversight tool will then be removed from Wikimedia wikis. [75] [76] [77]
• For languages where not all sister projects exist, you will be able to link to other language projects using double interwikis (:ko:v, :v:ko, etc.). [78]
• It will soon be possible to use the GettingStarted tool on other wikis than the English Wikipedia. You can translate it on Translatewiki.net. [79]
• You will soon be able to include the Special:Contributions page into other pages. [80]
• You will be able to see where a file is used inside MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [81] [82]
• It will soon be possible to send MassMessage messages using the API. [83]
• You will soon see audio statistics on the Special:TimedMediaHandler page. [84]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:30, 3. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
• The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [85] [86] [87] [88] [89]
• You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [90]

VisualEditor news

• You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [91] [92]
• The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [93] [94] [95]

Problems

• On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [96]
• On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes

• Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [97] [98]
• You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [99]
• You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [100] [101]
• The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster. [102]
• Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [103] [104]
• It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [105]
• You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [106]
• You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [107] [108]
• If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode. [109]
• Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas. [110]
• bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest. [111]
• The <poem> tag will be renamed to <lines>. The old tag will still work. [112]

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10:30, 10. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
• You can now use the list of active users again. [113] [114]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [115]
• You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [116]
• You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014. [117]

Problems

• On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem. [118]
• On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue. [119]
• On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
• There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
• On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news

• The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [120]
• You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [121]
• Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [122]
• You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [123] [124] [125]

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09:38, 17. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Universal Language Selector will be enabled by default again on this wiki by 21 February 2014

On January 21 2014 the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector (ULS) was disabled on this wiki. A new preference was added for logged-in users to turn on ULS. This was done to prevent slow loading of pages due to ULS webfonts, a behaviour that had been observed by the Wikimedia Technical Operations team on some wikis.

We are now ready to enable ULS again. The temporary preference to enable ULS will be removed. A new checkbox has been added to the Language Panel to enable/disable font delivery. This will be unchecked by default for this wiki, but can be selected at any time by the users to enable webfonts. This is an interim solution while we improve the feature of webfonts delivery.

You can read the announcement and the development plan for more information. Apologies for writing this message only in English. Thank you. Runa

Amendment to the Terms of Use

Hello all,

Please join a discussion about a proposed amendment to the Wikimedia Terms of Use regarding undisclosed paid editing and we encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please translate this statement if you can, and we welcome you to translate the proposed amendment and introduction. Please see the discussion on Meta Wiki for more information. Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) 23:00, 21. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 27 (calendar).
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) was added to the Italian Wikiquote and all Wikiversity projects. Users can now enable it in their Beta options. [126] [127]
• The Universal Language Selector was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis again. You can enable web fonts in your ULS options (see how).

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to add and edit __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__ in the page settings menu. [128] [129] [130]
• You will soon be able to use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘+Opt+S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor. [131] [132]
• You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window. [133] [134]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to use the <categorytree> tag again. [135]
• You will soon be able to post messages with the MassMessage tool in all talk namespaces. [136] [137]
• Notifications will soon work in all namespaces. [138][139][140]

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11:18, 24. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Call for project ideas: funding is available for community experiments

I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.

Do you have an idea for a project that could improve your community? Individual Engagement Grants from the Wikimedia Foundation help support individuals and small teams to organize experiments for 6 months. You can get funding to try out your idea for online community organizing, outreach, tool-building, or research to help make Wikipedia better. In March, we’re looking for new project proposals.

Examples of past Individual Engagement Grant projects:

• Organizing social media for Chinese Wikipedia ($350 for materials)
• Improving gadgets for Visual Editor ($4500 for developers)
• Coordinating access to reliable sources for Wikipedians ($7500 for project management, consultants and materials)
• Building community and strategy for Wikisource (€10000 for organizing and travel)

Proposals are due by 31 March 2014. There are a number of ways to get involved!

Hope to have your participation,

--Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation 20:44, 28. Feb. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-10

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
• When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts. [141]
• You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [142] [143]
• You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis. [144]
• The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list. [145]

VisualEditor news

• You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [146] [147] [148]
• If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged. [149]
• Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. [150]
• VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [151] [152] [153]

Future software changes

• The new tool for viewing media files will soon show a progress bar and a thumbnail while loading full images. [154] [155]
• You will soon be able to make user contributions show only page creations. [156] [157]
• Article Feedback Tool will be removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will also no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki. [158] [159]
• Wikis using the new search tool will come back to the old tool for a few hours starting at 00:00 UTC on March 6. [160]

Problems

• For about an hour on February 23, there were problems with page loading due to a MediaWiki bug. [161]

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10:30, 3. Mea. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
• You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [162] [163]

VisualEditor news

• It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [164] [165]
• It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [166]
• VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [167]
• We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [168]
• You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [169] [170] [171]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [172]
• CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages. [173] [174]
• It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript. [175]
• An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [176]

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10:10, 10. Mea. 2014 (CET)

Proposed optional changes to Terms of Use amendment

Hello all, in response to some community comments in the discussion on the amendment to the Terms of Use on undisclosed paid editing, we have prepared two optional changes. Please read about these optional changes on Meta wiki and share your comments. If you can (and this is a non english project), please translate this announcement. Thanks! Slaporte (WMF) 22:56, 13. Mea. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-12

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf18) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 20 (calendar).
• You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels. [177]
• You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all small wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [178] [179]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014. [180]

VisualEditor news

• Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [181] [182]
• Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [183]
• Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [184]

Future software changes

• You will soon see an error message if you try to log-in or register with an invalid or taken username. [185]
• You can now test first version of a tool that includes OpenStreetMap maps inside the UploadWizard. Comments are welcome. [186]
• You will soon be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature. [187]

Problems

• VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue. [188]

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08:14, 17. Mea. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-13

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf19) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 27 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [189] [190]
• Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [191]
• You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [192]
• You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [193]

Future software changes

• Typography Refresh will be enabled for test wiki and MediaWiki.org users who use the Vector skin on March 27. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3. If you don't use Vector as your skin, you will not be affected.
• You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
• You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages. [194] [195]

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19:56, 24. Mea. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf20) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and all Wikipedia wikis on April 3 (calendar).
• Typography Refresh was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3.
• CirrusSearch, the new search tool, was enabled as a beta feature on over 30 new wikis on March 27. [196] [197]

VisualEditor news

• Blocked users now see the same messages in VisualEditor as in the wikitext editor. [198] [199]
• The search box for re-using a reference in VisualEditor is now cleared after each use. [200]
• New links on sub-pages no longer point to the wrong location in VisualEditor. [201]
• VisualEditor's media dialog no longer breaks when opening some types of images. [202]

Future software changes

• You will not be able to use the Wikitech wiki for a short period around 16:00 UTC on April 1 due to a server change. [203]
• CirrusSearch will become the main search engine for all non-Wikipedia wikis except Commons, Meta and Incubator on April 2.
• You will soon be able to use a new special page listing duplicate files. [204]
• Deleting a version of a file or a version of its description page will soon be shown differently in the logs. [205]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

11:20, 31. Mea. 2014 (CEST)

Changes to the default site typography coming soon

This week, the typography on Wikimedia sites will be updated for all readers and editors who use the default "Vector" skin. This change will involve new serif fonts for some headings, small tweaks to body content fonts, text size, text color, and spacing between elements. The schedule is:

• April 1st: non-Wikipedia projects will see this change live
• April 3rd: Wikipedias will see this change live

This change is very similar to the "Typography Update" Beta Feature that has been available on Wikimedia projects since November 2013. After several rounds of testing and with feedback from the community, this Beta Feature will be disabled and successful aspects enabled in the default site appearance. Users who are logged in may still choose to use another skin, or alter their personal CSS, if they prefer a different appearance. Local common CSS styles will also apply as normal, for issues with local styles and scripts that impact all users.

For more information:

• Summary of changes and FAQ
• Discussion page for feedback or questions
• Post on blog.wikimedia.org

-- Steven Walling (Product Manager) on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation's User Experience Design team

Tech News: 2014-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf21) was scheduled to be deployed to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 3, however it was temporarily put on hold due to localization issues. (calendar).
• Typography Refresh was enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and on all Wikipedias on April 3. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin.
• CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on over 400 non-Wikipedia wikis on April 2. [206]

Future software changes

• A new special page (Special:TrackingCategories) will soon list all the tracking categories on a wiki. [207] [208]
• All Wikiquote projects will start using language links from Wikidata on April 8. [209]
• The Hovercards feature will soon work with right-to-left languages. [210] [211]
• You will soon be able to download files directly from MediaViewer, the new multimedia tool. [212]
• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. Comments are welcome.
• You can help check that users can read CAPTCHAs in your language. [213]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:00, 7. Apr. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

We are looking for contributors to help write new issues every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
• MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome. [214] [215] [216]
• Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [217] [218]

VisualEditor news

• You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click. [219]
• The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
• The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen. [220] [221]

Future software changes

• The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17. [222] [223]
• Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot). [224]
• You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [225] [226] [227] [228]
• Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list. [229]
• You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [230] [231]
• The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [232] [233]
• An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [234]

Problems

• Wikimedia Foundation servers were updated after a security bug called Heartbleed was discovered last week. You should change your password as an extra precaution. [235]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:18, 14. Apr. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News updates

• You can now subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed to read Tech News in your news aggregator. The newsletter will now also show on the English Planet Wikimedia every Monday. [236]
• We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf1) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 22, and all Wikipedias on April 24 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled as a beta feature on 27 new wikis on April 18. [237] [238]
• Problems with various fonts in SVG files were fixed last week. Files that use DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Serif Condensed, DejaVu Sans Light, Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts now show correctly. [239] [240] [241] [242]
• The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [243]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [244]

VisualEditor news

• If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [245] [246]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [247] [248]
• You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [249] [250] [251]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Czech (cs), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), Hebrew (he), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Thai (th) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias on April 24. Feedback is welcome. [252]
• Edits by anonymous users will now be marked with a new CSS class (mw-anonuserlink). This way, you can easily make those edits use a different color, font or background. [253] [254]
• The user preference to remember login will soon be removed from all wikis. The edit review preferences will be moved to the recent changes tab, and the preference for the WikiLove tool will be moved to the editing tab. [255] [256] [257] [258]
• You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [259] [260]
• You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [261] [262]
• It is now proposed to replace Bugzilla, Gerrit and other tools by a single tool called Phabricator. You can test Phabricator and add your opinion on MediaWiki.org. [263]
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on April 22 at 03:30 AM UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [264]

Problems

• For about 40 minutes on April 17, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
• There is a problem with the rendering of formulas with MathJax. If you enabled MathJax in your preferences, you might need to turn it off and on again. [265]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:34, 21. Apr. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-18

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
• You can now use interwiki prefix c: to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons. [266]

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [267]
• VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [268]
• VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.

Future software changes

• CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome. [269]
• The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [270]
• CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [271] [272]
• You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [273]

Problems

• For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [274] [275]
• On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [276] [277]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:22, 28. Apr. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-19

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf3) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and all Wikipedias on May 8 (calendar).
• The Compact Personal Bar was added as a beta feature to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added as a beta feature to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and to all Wikipedias on May 8. To test it, you can enable it now in your preferences on MediaWiki.org. [278]
• It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool. [279]

VisualEditor news

• External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. [280]
• The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete. [281]
• You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones. [282]
• There is a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name for file names. [283][284]
• Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users. [285] [286]
• You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language. [287] [288]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Japanese (ja), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 8. Feedback is welcome. [289]
• You can help translate about 100 new language names that have been added to our data source. They are used, for example, as hover text for interwiki links. Send an e-mail to Nemo if you want to help.
• If you click on a redirect page in your watchlist, you will soon access the redirect itself. [290] [291]

Problems

• For about 40 minutes around 00:20 UTC on April 29, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:29, 5. Mai 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf4) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 8. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and all Wikipedias on May 15 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• A new citation system in VisualEditor was enabled on the English Wikipedia. It will soon be enabled on more wikis. [292]
• Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly. [293]

Future software changes

• It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently. [294] [295]
• You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API. [296] [297] [298] [299]
• You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with Special:Flow. [300] [301]
• The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work. [302]
• The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded. [303] [304] [305]
• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on Wikimedia Commons on May 15. Feedback is welcome.
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on May 14 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [306]
• Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead. [307]

Problems

• There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error. [308] [309]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:00, 12. Mai 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-21

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News updates

• Tech News is one year old this week; thank you for being with us!

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
• The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work. [310] [311] [312]
• MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome. [313] [314]
• VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [315] [316]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys. [317] [318]
• VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [319] [320]
• VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [321] [322]
• VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [323]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [324] [325]

Future software changes

• User ID number will no longer be visible in preferences. [326] [327]

Problems

• For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [328]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:18, 19. Mai 2014 (CEST)

VisualEditor global newsletter—May 2014

This is a one-time mailing to projects that may need this information. Future newsletters will be available as opt-in only. To receive future newsletters (about one per month), please add your page to the subscribers' list at m:VisualEditor/Newsletter. You're welcome to translate to your language.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

Did you know?

The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates. If your wiki has enabled the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, press "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Einfügen" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Einfügen" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.

• There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction. This allows editors who have opted in to use the "Sprache" tool in the "Einfügen" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this: <span lang="en" dir="ltr">English</span>. This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
• The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "⧼math-visualeditor-mwmathinspector-title⧽" item in the "Einfügen" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
• The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field. Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
• TemplateData has been expanded: You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones. "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work. There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names. The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
• Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
• Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency. The message shown when you "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽" out of an edit is clearer. The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie. As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
• Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
• In the "Bilder und Medien" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
• There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData. You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box. If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
• There have been multiple small changes to the appearance: External links are shown in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. This is a lighter shade of blue than the internal links. The styling of the "Text gestalten" (character formatting) drop-down menu has been synchronized with the recent font changes to the Vector skin. VisualEditor dialogs, such as the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽" dialog, now use a "loading" animation of moving lines, rather than animated GIF images. Other changes were made to the appearance upon opening a page in VisualEditor which should make the transition between reading and editing be smoother.
• The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
• At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead: The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard. The "Tastaturkürzel" link will be moved out of the "Seitenoptionen" menu, into the "Hilfe" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 22. Mai 2014 (CEST)

Media Viewer

Greetings, my apologies for writing in English.

I wanted to let you know that Media Viewer will be released to this wiki in the coming weeks. Media Viewer allows readers of Wikimedia projects to have an enhanced view of files without having to visit the file page, but with more detail than a thumbnail. You can try Media Viewer out now by turning it on in your Beta Features. If you do not enjoy Media Viewer or if it interferes with your work after it is turned on you will be able to disable Media Viewer as well in your preferences. I invite you to share what you think about Media Viewer and how it can be made better in the future.

Thank you for your time. - Keegan (WMF) 23:29, 23. Mai 2014 (CEST)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Tech News: 2014-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 (calendar).
• MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [329] [330] [331] [332]
• A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [333] [334]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [335] [336]
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [337]
• VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [338]

Future software changes

• Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [339]
• It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [340] [341]
• Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [342] [343] [344]
• You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [345] [346]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:29, 26. Mai 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [347]

VisualEditor news

• Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [348]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [349] [350]
• VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [351]
• There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [352]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
• You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist. [353] [354]
• The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search. [355] [356]
• You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot). [357] [358]

Problems

• For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [359]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:07, 2. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
• You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [360] [361]

VisualEditor news

• You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [362] [363]
• The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [364] [365] [366]
• You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [367] [368]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [369]
• You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [370]
• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [371] [372]
• You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [373] [374]
• Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [375] [376] [377]
• You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [378] [379]
• Hovercards will no longer flicker. [380]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:39, 9. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Reminder

• You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

• You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [381]
• When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [382] [383]
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [384] [385] [386] [387]
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [388] [389] [390]

Future software changes

• Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [391]
• You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [392]
• You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [393] [394]
• It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [395] [396]
• Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [397]
• The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [398]
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
• You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [399]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:13, 16. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

Media Viewer is now live on this wiki

Media Viewer lets you see images in larger size

Greetings— and sorry for writing in English, please translate if it will help your community,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team is happy to announce that Media Viewer was just released on this site today.

Media Viewer displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, to provide a better viewing experience. Users can now view images faster and more clearly, without having to jump to separate pages — and its user interface is more intuitive, offering easy access to full-resolution images and information, with links to the file repository for editing. The tool has been tested extensively across all Wikimedia wikis over the past six months as a Beta Feature and has been released to the largest Wikipedias, all language Wikisources, and the English Wikivoyage already.

If you do not like this feature, you can easily turn it off by clicking on "Disable Media Viewer" at the bottom of the screen, pulling up the information panel (or in your your preferences) whether you have an account or not. Learn more in this Media Viewer Help page.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about Media Viewer. You are invited to share your feedback in this discussion on MediaWiki.org in any language, to help improve this feature. You are also welcome to take this quick survey in English, en français, o español.

We hope you enjoy Media Viewer. Many thanks to all the community members who helped make it possible. - Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 23:54, 19. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Tech News: 2014-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [400] [401]
• When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [402] [403]
• You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [404] [405]
• You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [406] [407]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [408] [409]
• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [410]
• CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [411]
• You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [412] [413]
• An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [414]

Problems

• On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
• Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [415]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:20, 23. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

• Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [416] [417]
• A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [418] [419]
• VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [420] [421] [422] [423]
• Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [424] [425]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [426] [427]
• Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
• CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [428]
• All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [429] [430]
• Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [431]
• You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [432] [433]
• You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [434]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:53, 30. Jun. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News updates

• We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [435]
• It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [436] [437]
• You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [438] [439]

VisualEditor news

• Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [440] [441]
• You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [442] [443] [444]
• When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [445] [446] [447]
• The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [448]
• Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [449] [450] [451]

Future software changes

• Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
• A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [452]
• If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [453] [454]
• Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [455] [456]
• Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [457] [458]

Problems

• Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [459] [460]
• For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [461] [462]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:07, 7. Jul. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
• It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis. [463] [464]
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
• You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.

VisualEditor news

• The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles. [465] [466]
• The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [467] [468] [469]
• References will now be shown in the default font size again. [470]

Future software changes

• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16. [471]
• The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [472] [473]
• It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files. [474]
• Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [475] [476]
• Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis. [477] [478]
• Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [479] [480]
• Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [481]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:48, 14. Jul. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [482] [483] [484]
• The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [485]
• Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [486] [487]
• A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [488]

VisualEditor news

• Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [489]
• All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [490]
• You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [491]
• Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [492] [493] [494] [495] [496] [497]

Future software changes

• It will soon be possible to watch individual discussions in the Topic namespace rather than whole pages for talk pages using Flow. [498]
• You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [499]
• An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [500]
• A request for comments on how to improve MediaWiki API was re-started on MediaWiki.org. Your feedback is welcome.

Problems

• Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem. [501]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:41, 21. Jul. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
• You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.

VisualEditor news

• You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor. [502] [503]
• The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit. [504]
• If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters. [505] [506]
• You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [507] [508]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [509] [510]
• Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. [511]
• It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [512] [513]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:08, 28. Jul. 2014 (CEST)

Updates related to VisualEditor

Please help translate this message in your language. Thanks :)

Hi, everybody. This is a reminder that we invite you to discuss VisualEditor's recent development and plans ahead during the next office hours with James Forrester (Product Manager):

• Thursday, August 14, 9:00 UTC;
• Thursday, September 18, 16:00 UTC.

If you are not able to attend but have a question for James, you can leave your question at mediawiki.org or on my talk page by the day before, and I will try to get a response. We plan to continue these monthly sessions as long as there is community interest, and to announce them through the VisualEditor global newsletter as well (please subscribe your talk page there to get the latest news about the software).

Most of the VisualEditor team will be at Wikimania in London in August! You'll be able to meet the developers during the Hackaton or at the following sessions:

• VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, Saturday, August 9;
• VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, Sunday, August 10.

WMF community liaisons will share a booth with community advocates at the Community Village and look forward to talking to you there. Thanks for your attention! --User:Elitre (WMF) 18:02, 31. Jul. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News updates

• Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [514]
• You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [515] [516] [517]
• You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files. [518]
• New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [519] [520]

VisualEditor news

• You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [521] [522]
• VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [523]
• Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [524] [525] [526] [527]
• Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [528] [529] [530] [531]

Future software changes

• You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [532] [533]
• All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [534]
• Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [535]

Problems

• Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [536]
• Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed. [537]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:37, 4. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

VisualEditor global newsletter—July and August 2014

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

Dialog boxes in VisualEditor have been re-designed to use action words instead of icons. This has increased the number of items that need to be translated. The user guide is also being updated.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

• Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
• You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
• All references and footnotes (<ref> tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Einfügen" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Einfügen" menu.
• When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
• All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
• The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
• The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30. There is a VisualEditor Translation Sprint going on during Wikimania; whether you're in London or not, any contributions are welcome!

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! --Elitre (WMF), 16:40, 9. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [538]
• Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [539]

VisualEditor news

• Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14. [540]

Future software changes

• Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser! [541] [542] [543]
• If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning. [544] [545]
• You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [546] [547]
• An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [548]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:43, 11. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-34

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
• There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages. [549] [550] [551]
• You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [552] [553]
• You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [554]
• You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.

Wikidata

• After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews. [555]
• After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. [556]

Problems

• There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [557] [558]

Tech news written by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:16, 18. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

-- JurgenNL (talk) 19:35, 21. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

Process ideas for software development

’’My apologies for writing in English.’’

Hello,

I am notifying you that a brainstorming session has been started on Meta to help the Wikimedia Foundation increase and better affect community participation in software development across all wiki projects. Basically, how can you be more involved in helping to create features on Wikimedia projects? We are inviting all interested users to voice their ideas on how communities can be more involved and informed in the product development process at the Wikimedia Foundation. It would be very appreciated if you could translate this message to help inform your local communities as well.

I and the rest of my team welcome you to participate. We hope to see you on Meta.

Kind regards, -- Rdicerb (WMF) talk 00:15, 22. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Tech News: 2014-35

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

VisualEditor news

• There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed. [559]
• You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [560]
• If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [561] [562] [563]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
• After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page. [564]

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

11:21, 25. Aug. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [565] [566]
• You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [567] [568]
• A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [569] [570]
• If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [571]

VisualEditor news

• You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [572]
• We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [573] [574] [575]
• VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [576]
• We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [577]
• You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [578]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
• There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [579]
• You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [580]
• You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
• You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [581]

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

09:48, 1. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Grants to improve your project

Apologies for English. Please help translate this message.

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th. Your idea could improve Wikimedia projects with a new tool or gadget, a better process to support community-building on your wiki, research on an important issue, or something else we haven't thought of yet. Whether you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your own project development time in addition to hiring others to help you.

• Submit your proposal
• Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session MediaWiki message delivery (dischkrian) 18:52, 2. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Grants to improve your project

Apologies for English. Please help translate this message.

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th. Your idea could improve Wikimedia projects with a new tool or gadget, a better process to support community-building on your wiki, research on an important issue, or something else we haven't thought of yet. Whether you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your own project development time in addition to hiring others to help you.

• Submit your proposal
• Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session PEarley (WMF) (dischkrian) 18:12, 3. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-37

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

VisualEditor news

• From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [582] [583] [584]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
• You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [585]
• You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [586]

Problems

• There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

11:33, 8. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Change in renaming process

Part or all of this message may be in English. Please help translate if possible.

Single-user login (SUL) finalisation's goal is so that every Wikimedia editor has a single, recognized global account with one username across all projects. As you may know, after a long delay, it's now underway as an effort between bureaucrats, stewards, and Wikimedia Foundation engineers. This will also allow for development of cross-wiki tools like global notifications and watchlists. There is no set date for the completion of single-user login finalization at this time.

The process involves changing all rename processes into one global renaming process. The ability for local bureaucrats to rename users on this wiki will be turned off on Monday, 15 September 2014, as one of the first steps. Global renamers are in the process of being created to make sure projects and languages are represented by the time this occurs. I sent a note to every bureaucrat about this process three weeks ago with an invitation to participate and many have begun requesting to be a part of the group. Together with the stewards, the global renamers will be empowered to help editors work through the often difficult process of getting a global name.

In parting, visit Special:MergeAccount to unify your account if you have never done so. If your local pages about renaming still need to be updated, please do so and consider pointing people to m:SRUC for future rename requests, especially if this project does not have bureaucrats that hold global renamer permissions. If you have any questions, you can read more on the help page on Meta. You can also follow the technical progress on mediawiki.org. Contact me on Meta any time with questions as well. Thank you for your time.

-- User:Keegan (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 9. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

VisualEditor available on Internet Explorer 11

VisualEditor will become available to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 during today's regular software update. Support for some earlier versions of Internet Explorer is being worked on. If you encounter problems with VisualEditor on Internet Explorer, please contact the Editing team by leaving a message at VisualEditor/Feedback on Mediawiki.org. Happy editing, Elitre (WMF) 09:29, 11. Sep. 2014 (CEST).

PS. Please subscribe to the global monthly newsletter to receive further news about VisualEditor.

Tech News: 2014-38

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 software changes

• You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [587] [588]
• There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [589] [590] [591]
• New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [592]

Problems

• There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [593]

VisualEditor news

• If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [594]
• The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [595] [596]
• You can now use help buttons in the "Seiteneinstellungen" menu to see what the options are for. [597]

Future software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
• These changes are coming with the new version:
  • If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [598] [599] [600]

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

10:34, 15. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Dateien hochladen, Assistent zum Auffilodn vo Datein?

Hello! Sorry for writing in English. It was noted that on this wiki there is little community activity around uploads: less than 50 "leschn" actions in "Datei" last year.

I guess this wiki doesn't have the interest or energies to maintain complex templates and metadata, especially for EDP files. I propose to

• send users to commons:Special:UploadWizard from the sidebar and
• limit local "Datei auffelodn" to the "Administratorn" group (for any emergency uploads),

so that no new work is needed on this wiki and all users can have a functioning, easy upload interface in their own language. All registered users can upload on Commons.

All this will be done around 2014-09-30.

1. If you disagree with the proposal, just remove this wiki from the list.
2. To make the UploadWizard even better, please tell your experience and ideas on commons:Commons:Upload Wizard feedback.
3. In all cases, existing files will not be affected, but everyone is welcome to join m:File metadata cleanup drive. The goal is to give better credit to the authors who provided us their works.

Nemo 21:12, 18. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Thanks for considering my proposal. 50 wikis changed their configuration and this wiki wasn't among them. Regards, Nemo bis (dischkrian) 09:19, 2. Okt. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-39

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 software changes

• You can test a new Beta Feature called HHVM. It should make editing faster. Please report bugs if you see them. [601]

Problems

• There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
• Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
• There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [602] [603]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
• If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[604] [605]
• In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [606] [607]
• The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [608]
• The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [609]
• There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [610] [611]
• In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [612]

Future site changes

• You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [613]

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

11:04, 22. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-40

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 software changes

• On Commons, you can now see what files are most used across all wikis. You can also see the same list for deleted or uncreated files. [614] [615]
• There are now many more translations for language names. [616]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
• Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [617] [618]
• You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [619]
• If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [620] [621]
• The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [622]

Future changes

• You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
• JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [623]

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

11:44, 29. Sep. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-41

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 the phab: and phabricator: interwikis to link to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org. [624] [625]
• Some wikis have a template to track bugs in Bugzilla. You should update it to work with Phabricator. You can look at the one on mediawiki.org to see how. [626] [627]
• You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [628]
• A new tool can now create thumbnails of large TIFF images. This concerns files larger than 50 megapixels. These thumbnails are also sharpened. You can comment on Commons. [629]
• The Media Viewer tool has a clearer link to the file page. It also has buttons to download, share and embed the file. You can enlarge images by clicking on them. [630]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
• If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [631] [632]
• We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [633]
• On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [634] [635]
• You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [636]
• 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [637]

Future changes

• You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [638]
• More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [639] [640]

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

08:10, 6. Okt. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-42

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 software changes

• You can now log into Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. Create your account and add your Bugzilla email address. We are copying the bugs from Bugzilla. Bugzilla is still open. [641] [642]
• You will now get the VisualEditor newsletter in your language if someone has translated it. You can add translations. You can know about the next translations by joining the translators list or asking Elitre (WMF).

Problems

• 10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [643]
• Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [644]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
• 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [645]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC). [646]
• There is a proposal to organize file pages better. It would use the same tools as Wikidata. You can join a meeting about it on October 16, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [647]
• You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [648]

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

10:53, 13. Okt. 2014 (CEST)

VisualEditor News #8—2014

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that replaced some categories with a link to the system message MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

The tool for editing TemplateData has been deployed to 30 more Wikipedias this week. Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template page or a subpage, and then click the "Vorlagendaten bearbeiten" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect and mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community is available. Thank you all for your work.

This was the first translatable VisualEditor newsletter, so thanks to everybody who made this possible! If it hasn't been delivered in your language, and you'd like to help with translations in the future, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre (WMF), so that you will be notified when the next issue is due.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)

11:49, 13. Okt. 2014 (CEST)

Tech News: 2014-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

• You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
• You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [649] [650]

File information cleanup

• You can join a wiki project to help tools read file information. It will help people reuse files.
• See how to fix metadata. You can fix it by adding markers to templates and adding templates to files.
• You can see a list of files missing machine-readable information on your wiki.
• The files missing readable data are also in these categories: no license, no description, no author or no source. [651]

Problems

• Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [652]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
• 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [653]
• If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [654] [655]

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

15:47, 20. Okt. 2014 (CEST)

Meta RfCs on two new global groups

Hello all,

There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would not contain any additional user rights. That proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.

We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.

It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at m:Stewards' noticeboard.

Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 19:04, 26. Okt. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-44

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

• There was an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [656]
• There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [657]
• There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [658]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [659]
• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [660] [661] [662]
• VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [663]
• VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [664]
• The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [665]

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

06:20, 27. Okt. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-45

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 software changes

• The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference. [666]
• You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [667] [668]

Problems

• There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [669]
• Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [670] [671] [672]
• HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
• Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [673] [674]
• VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [675]
• The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [676] [677] [678] [679] [680]
• After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [681] [682] [683]

Future changes

• The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [684]

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

18:28, 3. Nov. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-46

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 software changes

• You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [685] [686]
• The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [687]

File information cleanup

• Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
• You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
• You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [688]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
• You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [689] [690]
• The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [691]
• The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [692]

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

16:00, 10. Nov. 2014 (CET)

Global AbuseFilter

Hello,

AbuseFilter is a MediaWiki extension used to detect likely abusive behavior patterns, like pattern vandalism and spam. In 2013, Global AbuseFilters were enabled on a limited set of wikis including Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Wikispecies and (in early 2014) all the "small wikis". Recently, global abuse filters were enabled on "medium sized wikis" as well. These filters are currently managed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and have shown to be very effective in preventing mass spam attacks across Wikimedia projects. However, there is currently no policy on how the global AbuseFilters will be managed although there are proposals. There is an ongoing request for comment on policy governing the use of the global AbuseFilters. In the meantime, specific wikis can opt out of using the global AbuseFilter. These wikis can simply add a request to this list on Meta-Wiki. More details can be found on this page at Meta-Wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on m:Talk:Global AbuseFilter.

Thanks,

PiRSquared17, Glaisher

— 18:34, 14. Nov. 2014 (CET)

VisualEditor News #9—2014

Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Log in and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings button in the upper-right corner to pick which editor to use. Choose "⧼Mobile-frontend-editor-visual-editor⧽" to use VisualEditor, or "⧼Mobile-frontend-editor-source-editor⧽" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available on the mobile website.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in them was just introduced to Wikipedias. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be added later.

To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus are now hidden behind a "Mehr" item, such as "Unterstreichen" in the styling menu.

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias this week, and the following week at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar menus are now shown in the menus.

VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience/Design group. The appearance of dialog boxes has already changed in the mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. You are welcome to compare the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search engine could not find the page. A link inside a template to a local page that does not exist will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to an error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [693] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData has been deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. This tool was already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Vorlagendaten bearbeiten" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData to learn more about it. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common value for that parameter. The autovalue can be overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog box in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "vorgeschlagen" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide is being updated to add information about editing tables. The translations of the user guide for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design! Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)

00:29, 15. Nov. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
• The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19. [694]

Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator

• The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
• You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
• You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
• Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
• You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC. [695]

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

19:28, 17. Nov. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-48

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 move from Bugzilla to Phabricator is done. You can now report bugs in Phabricator. [696]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the colspan or rowspan option. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17. [697]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
• You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options. [698]
• VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [699]
• You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [700]
• VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [701] [702]

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

20:31, 24. Nov. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-50

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 software changes

• All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [703]
• You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [704]

Problems

• There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [705]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar). [706]
• You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [707]
• It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [708] [709]
• The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [710] [711] [712]
• (Lua) You can no longer use mw.text.unstrip to get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix. [713] [714]

Future changes

• Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [715]

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

18:10, 8. Dez. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-51

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 software changes

• You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [716]
• You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [717]
• You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar). [718]
• You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [719]
• VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [720]
• The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [721]

Future changes

• The star image of the watchlist may change soon. [722] [723]
• You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC). [724] [725]

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

17:43, 15. Dez. 2014 (CET)

Tech News: 2014-52

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 software changes

• The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private. [726]

Software changes this week

• There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6. [727]

Future changes

• The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [728]
• A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [729]

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

17:52, 22. Dez. 2014 (CET)

VisualEditor News #10—2014

Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements

Basic support for editing tables is now available. You can add and delete tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan and colspan elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ^ Ctrl+F or ⌘ Cmd+F.

You can now create and edit simple <blockquote> paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Absatz" into a "Blockzitat".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "* " will make the line a bullet list; "1." or "#" will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change.

There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ^ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

The current VisualEditor design will be replaced with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at mediawiki.org in late December and on other sites in early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January.

Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Translations of the user guide for most languages are outdated. Only Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translations are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Fett" and "Kursiv" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

19:59, 26. Dez. 2014 (CET)