User talk:Inkbug/Archive 2

Wikidata weekly summary #101

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Notability of items
  • Organisation of statements, sitelinks and external identifiers
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Media Hack Days, Berlin March 22nd-23rd
  • Ateliers Wikidata, Bordeaux, France March 22nd-23rd
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Happy Pi Day
  • paper by Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NLC authorities, Atlas ID, fuel system, supercharger, ID (General Administration of Press and Publication), ISMN, NUKAT authorities
• Development
  • Changed the {{property}} parser function and Lua’s mw.wikibase.entity.formatPropertyValues to only return the statements ranked as preferred or if none are available the ones ranked as normal (This will probably go live on April 25th.)
  • Worked on improving page load time further by reducing the number of reloads during page loading
  • Made diffs for time and geocoordinates more complete and prettier
  • Continued research for user interface redesign
  • Tpt worked on optionally showing links to other sister projects in the client’s sidebar (bugzilla:54374)
  • Wrote a fix for Wikidata changes not showing up in the client’s watchlist (bugzilla:62149)
  • Updated a major chunk of our inline code documentation
  • Continued discussing technical details about how coordinates should be stored in Wikibase
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Léonore ID (P640) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:29, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

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. [1]
• You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all small wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [2] [3]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014. [4]

VisualEditor news

• Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [5] [6]
• Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [7]
• Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [8]

Future software changes

• You will soon see an error message if you try to log-in or register with an invalid or taken username. [9]
• You can now test first version of a tool that includes OpenStreetMap maps inside the UploadWizard. Comments are welcome. [10]
• You will soon be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature. [11]

Problems

• VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue. [12]

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

07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #102

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Wikiquote notability
  • Belongs to jurisdiction
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Cambridge revisited II documents how you can query Wikidata and put the results on a map.
  • Cambridge revisited V shows that maps have popups with texts generated on Wikidata statements and labels.
  • The architecture of the Wikimedia storage of the meta data of media files discusses that integration of Commons is a subset of what we can achieve when we consider the whole of media files.
  • Spaghetti Open Data, Bologna. March 28th - 30th
  • GLAM Treffen, Bremen. March 29th - 30th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Riksdagen person-id
• Development
  • Continued making the UI faster
  • Fixed Wikidata changes not showing up in the watchlist on the client (Wikipedia, etc.) (bugzilla:62149)
  • Decided to turn off the inoperable wikidata.org language subdomains for now to reduce confusion
  • Created initial version of Wikibase Internal Serialization component
  • wbEntity and wbUsedEntities JavaScript variables are now cached in the parser cache
  • Ongoing refactoring to get rid of the previously used numeric ID numbers in favor of prefixed IDs
  • Made wbsearchentities aware of previously unquoted percent characters
  • Put some time into fixing longstanding oddities that made the developers cry from time to time
  • Worked on reducing internal usage of EntityContent, in preparation for redirect support
  • Worked on performance issues with JSON dump generation (hopefully we can start generating dumps soon)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the original language (P364) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:00, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

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. [13] [14]
• Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [15]
• 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. [16]
• You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [17]

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. [18] [19]

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

18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #103

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
• Wikiquote notability
  • Discussion relating to DBpedia
  • Discussion over Wikidata data
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Summary: The summaries will now be sent out on Saturday as opposed to Friday.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: astronomical filter, National Archives specific records type ID, National Archives topical subject ID, National Archives geographic ID, National Archives organization ID, National Archives person ID, compressor type, Internet Broadway Database person ID, Internet Broadway Database show ID, Internet Broadway Database production ID, Internet Broadway Database venue ID, English Heritage list number, apparent magnitude
• Newest task forces: Heraldry task force
• Development
  • Reduced page load time significantly once again. Page load time was cut to roughly 2/3. For now we’re happy with the resulting page load times. We’ll start concentrating on other areas of the user interface now.
  • Fixed faulty selection handling when adding a property using the keyboard (bugzilla:62868)
  • Worked on fixing issues with handling of spaces in quantities (bugzilla:62567)
  • Fixed miscount of Wikidata changes on the client watchlist (bugzilla:45812)
  • Wrote new browser tests for special pages using the Cucumber and Selenium frameworks
  • Improved error formatting, localisation and handling. We will work on error message wording next to make them more understandable.
  • Worked on the code which propagates page moves from the clients into Wikidata as a preparation for allowing page deletions to appear on Wikidata
  • Made the Wikibase extension work with the new “Compact language links” Beta feature and a bit more independent from the UniversalLanguageSelector in general
  • The student team working on the entity suggester has finished the first version of it. The code is being reviewed now and is hopefully ready for deployment soon. Once it is deployed it will show you what new properties you could add to an item.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the original language (P364) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 19:05, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

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. [20] [21]

VisualEditor news

• Blocked users now see the same messages in VisualEditor as in the wikitext editor. [22] [23]
• The search box for re-using a reference in VisualEditor is now cleared after each use. [24]
• New links on sub-pages no longer point to the wrong location in VisualEditor. [25]
• VisualEditor's media dialog no longer breaks when opening some types of images. [26]

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. [27]
• 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. [28]
• Deleting a version of a file or a version of its description page will soon be shown differently in the logs. [29]

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

09:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #104

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed: Merge project chats
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Toolkit 0.1.0 released!
  • Wikidata development has been going on for two years!
  • Wikiquote gets Phase I on Tuesdays (April 8th)
• Did you know?
• Newest properties: JSTOR journal code, Openpolis ID, Philippine Standard Geographic Code ID
  • Newest task forces: France task force, US legislation task force
• Development
  • Property of an existing claim can no longer be changed through API with wbeditentity (bugzilla:62425)
  • UI for simple query SpecialPage (bugzilla:55593)
  • minor fixes in the UI
  • UI for claims on property pages
  • worked on review of property suggester (review)
  • still looking for a working student/intern
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the original language (P364) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:42, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

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. [30]

Future software changes

• A new special page (Special:TrackingCategories) will soon list all the tracking categories on a wiki. [31] [32]
• All Wikiquote projects will start using language links from Wikidata on April 8. [33]
• The Hovercards feature will soon work with right-to-left languages. [34] [35]
• You will soon be able to download files directly from MediaViewer, the new multimedia tool. [36]
• 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. [37]

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

08:00, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #105

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC: Quality is measurable
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Announcing ToolScript. With ToolScript can be used to get the output of all Magnus' tools
  • Feline mayors of the world or why Wikidata is awesome
  • A Rijksmuseum representative indicated what kind of information she hopes Wikidata will deliver
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiquote now gets its sitelinks via Wikidata. Welcome, Wikiquote! Access to the other data will follow.
  • Do you want automatic sidebar links to other Wikimedia projects powered by Wikidata? Here you go: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2014-April/003690.html Thanks Tpt!
  • Use Wikidata for internationalization on any website! How awesome is this? Very!
  • Vote for some Wikidata talks for Wikimania
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: KulturNav-id, compression ratio, patent number, OmegaWiki Defined Meaning, phone number, International Standard Recording Code, Theatricalia play ID, Swiss Football Association Club Number, Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator level, ISFDB publisher ID, Swedish Football Association ID, Box Office Mojo film ID, Parsons code, ISFDB series ID, ISFDB publication ID, ISFDB author ID, Linguist list code, NARA online catalogue
• Development
  • Still looking for an awesome intern. Do you know someone who'd fit?
  • Bene* continued working hard on making “badges” (the “featured” and “good article” stars) in Wikidata a reality
  • Finishing touches for Statements on properties
  • Worked on better error messages when parsing failed
  • Updated the translations to use much easier to manage JSON files for each language
  • Made a list of hard to understand messages that should be reworded
  • Implemented a usable interface for Special:SimpleQuery
  • Closed a backdoor that let you change the property of a snak via the API, sorry guys
  • Continuous refactoring and improving of the code base that defines what Wikidata and the Wikibase extensions are
  • Kept Wikidata up to date with the typography update
  • Started to redesign the Wikibase page on mediawiki.org
  • Investigated if standard spam prevention features of MediaWiki work as they should on Wikidata (Result: mostly yes but some fixes/tweaks are needed.)
  • Released version 1.0 of the Diff extension.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the movement (P135) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:20, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

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. [38] [39] [40]
• Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [41] [42]

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. [43]
• 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. [44] [45]

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. [46] [47]
• 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). [48]
• You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [49] [50] [51] [52]
• 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. [53]
• You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [54] [55]
• The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [56] [57]
• 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). [58]

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. [59]

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

07:18, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #106

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Sources will be called references because of a discussion
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • List of items without images but possibly free images available
  • Any interested in another Wikidata office hour? (Say yes)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator (BFI) SNO/CNO, earliest written record
• Development
  • Lots of small little cleanups.
  • Sprintbreak as most people are taking a few days off.
  • Happy Q21196! Say Hi to the Q108636 ;-)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:36, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

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. [60]
• 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. [61] [62]
• 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. [63] [64] [65] [66]
• The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [67]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [68]

VisualEditor news

• If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [69] [70]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [71] [72]
• You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [73] [74] [75]

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. [76]
• 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. [77] [78]
• 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. [79] [80] [81] [82]
• You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [83] [84]
• You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [85] [86]
• 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. [87]
• 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). [88]

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. [89]

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

08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #107

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over property creation guidelines
  • Open RfA: JurgenNL
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Lydia will give an update on Wikidata at the WMF Metrics and Activities meeting
  • Indian Parliamentarians' Label-a-thon is taking place to add labels for all members of the Lok Sabha.
  • In May, edit-a-thons hounouring Adrianne Wadewitz are taking place to add more gender related information to Wikidata.
  • Wikidata office hour on May 19th at 17:00 UTC.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Time and geocoordinates have been reworked and need some testing at test.wikidata.org. Found issues? Let Lydia know.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: coordinates of the point of view, Rotten Tomatoes ID, depicts Iconclass representation, Iconclass notation, Helveticarchives ID, Slovenska biografija ID, BCU Ecrivainsvd, AUSTLANG code, ABS ASCL code
• Development
  • Worked on making it possible to use languages not supported by MediaWiki in Wikidata
  • We now also display statements with "no value" or "unknown value" on the client (when using the parser function or Lua)
  • Created another maintenance script to fix data integrity issues
  • Finishing touches on the first version of the new entity suggester
  • Simple queries are starting to work (If you want to see a demo attend the WMF Metrics and Activities meeting)
  • Worked more on making error messages localizable
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 0.7.4
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:18, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

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. [90]

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [91]
• VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [92]
• 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. [93]
• The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [94]
• CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [95] [96]
• You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [97]

Problems

• For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [98] [99]
• On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [100] [101]

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

07:22, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #108

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Lydia gave a first demo of simple queries and other cool stuff at the WMF Metrics and Activities Meeting
  • ongoing this weekend: Youth Science Hack Day where a team is working on a Wikidata powered quiz app
  • upcoming: Data Science Day
  • upcoming: MediaWiki hackathon in Zurich
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Helen and Anjali join Wikidata as Outreach Program for Women interns
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: coordinates of the point of view, Rotten Tomatoes ID, depicts Iconclass representation, Iconclass notation, Helveticarchives ID, Slovenska biografija ID, BCU Ecrivainsvd, AUSTLANG code, ABS ASCL code
• Development
  • Got simple queries in shape for a first demo at the WMF Metrics and Activities Meeting
  • Cleaned up constraints checks and input validation
  • Worked on requirements for the user interface redesign
  • Started work on monolingual text datatype
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:51, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

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. [102]
• It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool. [103]

VisualEditor news

• External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. [104]
• The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete. [105]
• You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones. [106]
• There is a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name for file names. [107][108]
• Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users. [109] [110]
• You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language. [111] [112]

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. [113]
• 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. [114] [115]

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.

07:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #109

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • RfC: Developer user group
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • There will be a German handbook on Wikidata and authority control. Feedback and proofreading is very welcome until next week at https://hshdb.github.io/normdaten-in-wikidata/2014-05-06.html
• Development
  • Attending the MediaWiki hackathon in Zurich
  • Work on finalizing the JSON dumps
  • More work on simple queries to get them ready for performance and security review and a first release
  • Legoktm created an API module to retrieve the current dispatch stats status
  • Fixed an issue with iferror when using the property parser function (bugzilla:55347)
  • Show correct data in the in other languages box for older revisions (bugzilla:63309)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:01, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

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. [116]
• Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly. [117]

Future software changes

• It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently. [118] [119]
• You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API. [120] [121] [122] [123]
• You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with Special:Flow. [124] [125]
• The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work. [126]
• The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded. [127] [128] [129]
• 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). [130]
• 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. [131]

Problems

• There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error. [132] [133]

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

06:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #110

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed RfCs: Clarifying the requirement for property creation, Quality is measurable, One vs. sereveral sitelink-item correspondence, Property documentation redux and DBpedia import process
  • Open RfA: Dexbot (adminbot)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • wrap-up blog post of the MediaWiki hackathon in Zurich
  • upcoming: SMWCon
  • upcoming: IRC office hour on Moday
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Data access for Wikiquote will be enabled on June 10th. Coordination and questions should go to d:Wikidata:Wikiquote.
  • Superclasses maps shows coordinates for a class of items on a map. Classes are coming from Wikidata.
  • The EditItem suggester was released. You give it a property and it will return a list of items likely missing that property.
  • The new duplicate item finder lists items that should potentially be merged.
• Did you know?
  • Newest task forces: Wikidata:WikiProject Mathematics
• Development
  • We're looking for a PHP developer to join the dev team and work on Wikidata. Apply!
  • Looking for a cool university project with impact? We have some of them around Wikidata - not just for computer science students. Get in touch with Lydia.
  • Had a lot to think about and recap from the Zürich Hackathon, e.g. things regarding search, suggestions as well as the user interface redesign
  • Started doing mockups of the new user interface (Nothing to show yet, sorry!)
  • Setup an autogenerating code documentation instance on labs at wbdoc.wmflabs.org. Hint: Submitting patches that make the inline code documentation even better is a good starting point to get involved in coding
  • Continued working on the wikiba.se site and FAQ
  • Worked on new datatype monolingual text (basically a string with an associated language)
  • Reworked a hell lot of “change operations” code that’s responsible for each and every edit as well as validating user input and API requests, for example denying empty descriptions and finding and blocking unnecessary duplications
  • Checked all the new Beta features that the teams in San Francisco are developing and made sure they work with Wikidata
  • Our efforts to make Wikidata faster broke some gadgets so we helped fixing them. Sorry for the breakage!
  • Dug into odd display bugs with the MonoBook skin and attempted to fix them (bugzilla:64741)
  • More testing on simple queries
  • Tpt worked on making inter-project links in the sidebar a beta-feature
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:25, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

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. [134] [135] [136]
• 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. [137] [138]
• VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [139] [140]
• 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. [141] [142]
• VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [143] [144]
• VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [145] [146]
• VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [147]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [148] [149]

Future software changes

• User ID number will no longer be visible in preferences. [150] [151]

Problems

• For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [152]

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

07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #110

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about Draft articles
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata office hour log
  • Wikiconference USA in New York on May 30th and June 1st
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Editors may now include their ORCID identifiers (and others, such as VIAF) on their user pages, using the Authority control template. You can register for an ORCID at http://orcid.org
• Play the Wikidata Game
• Development
  • jQuery 1.9 compatibility fixes
  • More fixes for gadgets (authority control, preview gadget)
  • Improve formatting and handling of snak formatting errors
  • Continued working on monolingual text data type
  • Continued making messages easier to understand
  • Removed a bunch of unused code, interfaces and methods
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the academic degree (P512) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 16:29, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

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. [153] [154] [155] [156]
• A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [157] [158]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [159] [160]
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [161]
• VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [162]

Future software changes

• Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [163]
• It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [164] [165]
• 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. [166] [167] [168]
• You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [169] [170]

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

08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #111

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: FakirNL, Josve05a
  • Wikidata:Tours
  • RfC: Open datasets (Meta)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Slides from WikiConference USA
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The seventeenth million item is made then delete as a dupe. So seventeenth million plus 2 anyone?
• Development
  • More work on mockups for new user interface design. Hope to have something publishable soon.
  • More work on monolingual text datatype
  • Fixed lots of small bugs when editing statements like bugzilla:65398
  • Made progress on globe precision issues (bugzilla:65535 and bugzilla:64887)
  • Cleaned up installation instructions
  • Tagged version 1.0 of Wikibase Internal Serialisation and Wikibase Datamodel Serialisation
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:28, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

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. [171]

VisualEditor news

• Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [172]
• The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [173] [174]
• VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [175]
• There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [176]

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. [177] [178]
• The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search. [179] [180]
• You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot). [181] [182]

Problems

• For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [183]

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

08:07, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #112

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed RfAs: FakirNL (Successful), Josve05a (Unsuccessful)
  • Open RfAs: Taketa, Jianhui67, 555
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Magnus Manske writes about how the Wikidata Game has developed over two weeks
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • User:Thepwnco is working on some Wikidata:Tours during for a FOSS project
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Italian Chamber of Deputies ID, eye color, number of injured, EPSG ID
• Development
  • Did a lot of cleanup in Wikibase.git
  • thePHPcc thinghy
  • Released DataValues Time 0.6
  • Add time support to QueryEngine
  • Release Wikibase DataModel 0.8
  • Worked on the way deleted items are formatted (= shown on other items)
  • Released ValueView 0.6, which includes refactoring of the entity suggester code, bug fixes.
  • Fix issue with entering strings (newline character sometimes got added and then cause api error)
  • Fix bug 64658 (date adjustment dialogue doesn't show up on Firefox with Monobook skin)
  • Fix bug 64887 (issue with display of globecoordinate when precision does not match predefined precisions)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:09, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

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. [184] [185]

VisualEditor news

• You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [186] [187]
• The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [188] [189] [190]
• You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [191] [192]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [193]
• You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [194]
• 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. [195] [196]
• 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. [197] [198]
• Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [199] [200] [201]
• You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [202] [203]
• Hovercards will no longer flicker. [204]

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

07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #113

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Wikidata participation in Wiki Loves Pride
  • Discussion: Delete as a new user group
  • RfC: Refining "part of"
  • Open RfAs: Calak, Andre Engels
  • Closed RfAs: Taketa (successful) Jiangui67 (successful) 555 (successful)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The preview gadget has been rewritten and now comes with a completely new user interface. You can enable it here.
  • Wikiquote received access to the data on Wikidata (aka phase 2) on Tuesday.
  • Try out the new Wikidata Property Browser.
  • The Merge gadget has been updated. It is now faster and only one edit per merge is performed.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: original spelling, ranking, number of points/goals scored, number of matches played, ploidy, AlgaeBase URL, military casualty classification, winner, number of victims, participated in, described by source, number of seats
  • Newest task forces: Sports task forces
• Development
  • Continued with the implementation of redirects. There are a lot of corner cases to work out...
  • Created new data value handlers for quantities and geo coordinates, bringing queries closer
  • Moved browser tests to a new repository at https://github.com/wmde/WikidataBrowserTests to make the main Wikibase repo smaller and cleaner
  • Fixed a bunch of issues with the monobook skin
  • Made some more jQuery 1.9 compatibility fixes
  • More cleanup for the coming switch to WikibaseDataModel 1.0.
  • Icinga Dispatch Lag monitoring scripts, including IRC notifier bot, have been tested and are ready for Ops implementation. This should give us quicker notifications in case the notifications to Wikipedia and co about changes on Wikidata are slow again.
  • Enabled data access for Wikiquote
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:17, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

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. [205]
• 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. [206] [207]
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [208] [209] [210] [211]
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [212] [213] [214]

Future software changes

• Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [215]
• You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [216]
• You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [217] [218]
• It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [219] [220]
• Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [221]
• The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [222]
• 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. [223]

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

07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Idea collection: data quality and trust
  • Open RfAs: PMG, Dr Zimbu, 콩가루
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Several Wikipedias now have a template (d:Q17195970) for articles which have a related property in Wikidata.
  • User:Thepwnco is working on a documentation overhaul and updating Help pages for a FOSS project - leave feedback on suggested changes here
  • First concept designs of Wikidata's possible new interface
  • GenderCounter uses Wikidata to provide an accurate service with distinguishing male and female names
  • ca.wikipedia found a nice way to use Wikidata. They're comparing their living people to Wikidata to see if any of them have a date of death there. They're then put into a category for review: ca:Categoria:Persones vives a revisar
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: BBC Your Paintings, successor, predecessor, ITTF ID, points/goal scored by, TLS, Anime News Network ID, Monte Carlo Particle Number, Number of points/goals conceded, points for, matches/games drawn/tied, matches lost/games lost, matches won/games won
  • New task forces: LGBT task force
• Development
  • Created a script that provides the schema creation SQL for Wikibase Query
  • Releases Wikibase Internal Serialization 1.1
  • Made WikibaseDataModelJavascript a separate component at https://github.com/wmde/WikibaseDataModelJavascript.
  • Continued working on full redirect support for items. It touches a surprising big chunk of the code base.
  • Continued working on the QueryEngine code base and it’s data type support.
  • Fixed and updated the most recent implementation of the property and item selector widget, e.g. a MonoBook specific bug.
  • Pushed along reviews and deployment of the entity suggester code that will make suggestions for new properties to be added to items. Our hope is to have it through performance review for the next deployment.
  • Pushed along reviews of the “in other projects” sidebar: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Beta_Features/Other_projects_sidebar
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
• Note from John
  • Hey everyone, it's rare these small sections come along but there is a bit of interesting news to get across which one line under 'noteworthy stuff' won't be the best for. For the next 6 summaries, they will be translatable at Wikidata. This is an interesting idea which was first proposed on the delivery page and on Wikidata-l by Base. This is purely a trial and if you all want the summaries to remain translatable, please participate! You can view the first translated summary (hopefully) here! Also sorry for this one being late :)

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:29, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

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. [224] [225]
• When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [226] [227]
• 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. [228] [229]
• You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [230] [231]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [232] [233]
• CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [234]
• 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. [235]
• You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [236] [237]
• 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). [238]

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. [239]

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

07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #115

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Second UI designs are now up for comments
  • Discussion about predecessor and successor timelines
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata intro and QA, June 29th in Paris
  • Open Hack Day, 5th and 6th of July, London
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: contains settlement, coincident with, bridgehunter.com ID, uglybridges.com ID, China railway TMIS station code, MTR station code, capital of, NSK identifier, daily ridership, binding of software library, ASI Monument ID, ihsi identifier, Iranian National Heritage registration number, LNB identifier, BBC Your Paintings, replaced by, replaced, ITTF ID, points/goal scored by, TLS, Anime News Network ID
• Development
  • Redirects are moving slow because they touch so much of our and the core code base, but they are coming closer!
  • Final touches on the monolingual data type and UI
  • Fixed some smaller but nasty bugs in the UI like not being able to change only the rank
  • Finally improved the most confusing error messages and hints you get to read when using the Wikibase client or repo
  • The Wikibase DataModel JavaScript component (which moved to it’s own repository) reached version 0.2.0
  • Continued working on the QueryEngine component (the foundation for queries)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 11:49, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

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. [240] [241]
• A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [242] [243]
• 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. [244] [245] [246] [247]
• Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [248] [249]

Future software changes

• You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [250] [251]
• 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. [252]
• 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. [253] [254]
• Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [255]
• 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. [256] [257]
• You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [258]

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

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #116

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • A question from an intern
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Open Hack Day, 5th and 6th of July, London
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata got 10 times easier to use with the entity suggester
  • Lydia needs your help with some selfies (already uploaded ones are at c:Category:Wikidata selfies)
  • Wikidata the Game has a new game: occupation
  • As part of the Outreach Program for Women d:User:User:Thepwnco is continuing improving all help pages to help new users understand Wikidata better. At the same time w:User:Discoveranjali is helping with social media outreach and creating presentations workshops about Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: replaced by structure, State Catalogue of Geographical Names (Russia), Linguasphere code, NCI ID, Glottolog code, proxy, ComicBookDB ID, Index Fungorum ID
• Development
  • Upcoming API change (wblinktitle)
  • Deployed entity suggester.
  • More work on redirects. They are taking shape. Done with much of the groundwork. We've seen the first one! :D
  • Continued work on user interface redesign mockups
  • Monolingual text datatype is also taking shape but needs more user interface love to make it intuitive.
  • Investigated making Wikidata.org its own client so you can for example get access to better Lua functions for access to an item's label on a discussion page. Outcome: Should be possible but needs some more work.
  • Fixed bugs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:44, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

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. [259]
• 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. [260] [261]
• You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [262] [263]

VisualEditor news

• Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [264] [265]
• 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. [266] [267] [268]
• 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. [269] [270] [271]
• 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}}. [272]
• Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [273] [274] [275]

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. [276]
• 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). [277] [278]
• Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [279] [280]
• 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. [281] [282]

Problems

• Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [283] [284]
• For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [285] [286]

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

07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #117

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Improving the FAQ
  • Should we link to restricted access databases?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Two new GuidedTours (aka interactive tutorials) have been released—we now have one on editing items and one on editing statements! Both tours are available from the Wikidata:Tours portal and feedback can be left on the talk page at Wikidata_talk:Tours. The work was a combined effort of User:Bene* and Outreach Program for Women intern User:Thepwnco.
  • We passed another milestone \o/ 10 million items now have an "instance of" or "subclass of" statement making it easy to tell what the item is about.
  • Last week to add some selfies. We need more!
  • Items with no image around you? Here you go! (change the number in the URL and click toggle markers) Thanks Magnus!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: GUI toolkit or framework, SFDb ID, non-native language spoken, nominated for, number of seats in legislature, Cycling Archives Cyclist ID, licensed to broadcast to, MusicBrainz series ID, script directionality, World Glacier Inventory ID, original combination, Foundational Model of Anatomy ID, bug report page, FCC Facility ID, convicted of
• Development
  • Bene* worked with the dev team this week. He pushed forward support for storing badges (eg featured article) on Wikidata and implemented the first two guided tours.
  • CTRL+ click and middle click on a search result in the entity selector now opens the result in a new tab.
  • Further progress on redirects
  • Fixed a number of annoyances with the entity selector
  • Continued work on mockups for new user interface
  • Investigated what issues come up if we make wikidata.org its own client. Things look good so we will probably enable it soonish. This will mean you can link Wikidata pages in items and access the data in them on other pages on Wikidata.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which has been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 14:16, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

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. [287] [288]
• 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. [289] [290]
• The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [291] [292] [293]
• References will now be shown in the default font size again. [294]

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. [295]
• The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [296] [297]
• 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. [298]
• Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [299] [300]
• 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. [301] [302]
• Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [303] [304]
• Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [305]

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

07:48, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #118

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about removing person data
  • Discussion to increase the support votes required for successful RfAs
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Main Page redesign suggestions
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ID, GUI toolkit or framework, SFDb ID, non-native language spoken, nominated for, number of seats in legislature, Cycling Archives Cyclist ID, licensed to broadcast to
• Development
  • Finished setting up JSON dumps. If everything goes well, a first dump will be available on Monday evening
  • Worked on badges UI integration and made initial progress at making them editable
  • Did a lot of JavaScript refactoring in order to put Api related code into an own component
  • Made it possible to access data from Wikidata items on Wikidata itself using Lua (not yet enabled)
  • Fixed a bug that allowed creation of items with the same label+description of another item
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:13, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

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. [306] [307] [308]
• 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. [309]
• Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [310] [311]
• A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [312]

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. [313]
• 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. [314]
• You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [315]
• Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [316] [317] [318] [319] [320] [321]

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. [322]
• You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [323]
• An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [324]
• 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. [325]

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

07:41, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #119

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • User conduct policies RfC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The first draft for the Main page redesign is ready for review (a summary of proposed changes can be found at Project Chat)
  • User:Thepwnco is working on updating Wikidata documentation for all sister projects, starting with Wikidata:Wikisource
  • Drop by the Wikidata Lounge, a new initiative to promote friendliness and civility started by d:User:Micru
  • Wikinews will get sitelink support on August 19th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: b-side, executive producer, OpenPlaques identifier, pet, Lost Art-ID, journey origin
• Development
  • Published the first JSON dumps
  • Finishing touches on badges support
  • Finishing touches on redirects
  • Finishing touches on the "in other projects" beta feature that displays links to sister projects in the sidebar of Wikipedia for example
  • Tested and fixed issues with allowing sitelinks to Wikidata pages and accessing item data via Lua on Wikidata itself
  • Final tests before we can start switching to the new serialization format
  • The code for simple queries is being reviewed by the Foundation. This is hopefully the last step before we can deploy this too.
  • Worked on improving the code of the {{#property}} parser function in preparation of allowing arbitrary data access and allowing linked output.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:47, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

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. [326] [327]
• 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. [328]
• 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. [329] [330]
• You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [331] [332]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [333] [334]
• 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. [335]
• It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [336] [337]

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

08:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #120

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: Gabbe
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • List of Wikidata talks at Wikimania 2014
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata's new Main page is almost ready to go live, but is still in need of a visually-appealing banner! Got an idea for an eye-catching design that represents what Wikidata's all about? Submit proposals before August 11 at d:Wikidata:Portal Redesign/Banner
  • Wikidata's tours are now translatable. You may help translating at d:Wikidata:Tours/Items and d:Wikidata:Tours/Statements.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: published in
  • Showcase items: Kleinmachnow
• Development
  • Created CLI script to import entities into the QueryEngine store (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Querycli.jpg)
  • More work on redirects (should be good to deploy on August 19th)
  • More work on the monolingual datatype
  • Started work on rewriting the sitelinks part of the user interface (that’s the first coding steps of getting us a new user interface design)
  • Final touches on badges (should be good to deploy on August 19th)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:42, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

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). [338]
• You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [339] [340] [341]
• 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. [342]
• New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [343] [344]

VisualEditor news

• You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [345] [346]
• VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [347]
• Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [348] [349] [350] [351]
• Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [352] [353] [354] [355]

Future software changes

• You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [356] [357]
• All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [358]
• Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [359]

Problems

• Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [360]
• 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. [361]

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

07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

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). [362]
• Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [363]

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. [364]

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! [365] [366] [367]
• 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. [368] [369]
• You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [370] [371]
• 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). [372]

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

07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #121

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikimania \o/ It was amazing and Wikidata all over the place. Wikidata's true potential is starting to show.
  • Guided tours and Wikidata: How to explain a complex project and encourage new editors
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Editing Wikidata directly from Wikipedia
  • Histropedia now uses Wikidata to build timelines
  • Slides and videos of first Wikidata talks at Wikimania online: 1 2 3 (more slides and videos will follow))
  • First prototype screenshot of asking questions to Wikipedia mobile readers (similar to Wikidata the Game)
  • Userboxes
• Did you know?
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Interesting Content, WikiProject sum of all paintings
• Development
  • Attended Wikimania and Socrates
  • Worked on rewriting the sitelinks part of the user interface to make it ready for the new user interface design
  • Discussed Wikidata, structured data on Commons and a ton of other things with many people at Wikimania
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:57, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #122

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfOS: John F. Lewis
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help choose which banner will be featured on the new Main page! Click here to view the two banner candidates and leave your feedback before August 20th 16:00 UTC.
  • Wikidata Translate, a Wikidata-based Google translator open source clone.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: journey destination, score method, grave picture, present in work, Fide ID, Norsk filmografi ID, Jewish Encyclopedia ID, plea, collection size
  • New task forces: WikiProject Movies
• Development
  • Finished a large number of new features and got them ready for roll-out. More in this email.
  • Wikibase made a big step forward to finally switch to DataModel 1.0.
  • Improved support for entity IDs bigger than 2 billion (32 bit integer).
  • We had to adapt Wikibase to some major changes (more major than usual, partly caused by discussions at Wikimania) in MediaWiki core: The default Vector skin became it’s own component and the ResourceLoader got some small but important updates.
  • Continued work on refactoring code of the user interface to make it ready for new design
  • Wrote a script to get number of users having wikidata in their recent changes/watchlist from the database
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

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. [373] [374] [375]
• You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [376] [377]
• You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [378]
• 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. [379]
• 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. [380]

Problems

• There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [381] [382]

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

07:16, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #123

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata at Wikimania 2014 in London
  • "Growing items" by User:Micru, an essay about modelling concepts and understanding items
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The new Main page will go live early next week! See the announcement at Project chat for more details and to leave any last comments
  • It will be possible to show the badges like "Featured Article" stored on Wikidata in the sidebar of the clients (Wikipedia, Wikisource, ...) starting Tuesday. Wikipedia will follow on Thursday.
  • Starting Tuesday we will deploy a new beta feature on the clients. It will allow you to show links to other sister projects in the sidebar based on the links in Wikidata.
  • Planning for structured data support for Commons is starting to pick up speed. Get involved: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/multimedia/2014-August/000774.html Also maybe attend the office hour?
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: list of monuments, list of works, legal form, catholic.ru ID, motto, Sandbox Monolingual text, nickname, official name, Sports Reference ID, people missing, fictional universe described in
  • Newest WikiProjects: Wikidata:WikiProject Structured Data for Commons
• Development
  • Deployed lots of new features like badges, access to language links for Wikinews and Wikidata, the monolingual text data type and redirects!
  • Working hard on making the new UI a reality, mainly refactoring the UI widgets right now. Covers a lot of ground and will take some time.
  • More work on HHVM issues that need to be fixed before Wikidata can switch to it.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:29, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

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. [383]
• You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [384]
• If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [385] [386] [387]

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. [388]

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

09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #124

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • past: OpenSym
  • upcoming: IRC office hour about structured data for Wikimedia Commons
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New Main Page and other new features
  • Breaking changes for gadgets
  • Badges support via Wikidata has been rolled out to Wikipedia and other sister projects. If the icons shown are not the ones your project would like please request a change here.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NIEA building ID, Cadw Building ID, color index, absolute magnitude
• Development
  • Deployed more new stuff \o/ (in other projects sidebar; new internal serialization format; showing badges on the Wikipedias and other sister projects; Special:GoToLinkedPage)
  • Added a new “item-redirect” permission
  • Continuous work and reviews for the new JavaScript user interface
  • DataModel 1.0 will be more strict when adding Claims or Statements to Entities. Quite some tests needed to be made compatible
  • Adopted to recent API changes (getPossibleErrors and others got dropped)
  • Replaced hundreds of class name aliases in the code with the actual class names
  • Attended OpenSym
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

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. [389] [390]
• You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [391] [392]
• 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". [393] [394]
• If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [395]

VisualEditor news

• You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [396]
• 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. [397] [398] [399]
• VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [400]
• We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [401]
• You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [402]

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. [403]
• 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. [404]
• 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. [405]

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

07:48, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

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. [406] [407] [408]

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. [409]
• You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [410]

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.

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #125

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Why Wikidata is so important to Histropedia
  • Wikidata Outreach: What happened?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The new main page can now be translated.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: reporting mark, maximum glide ratio , FIFA player code, WALS family code, WALS genus code, WALS lect code, category for people died here, category for people born here, PRDL Author ID
• Development
  • Performance improvements for "in other projects sidebar" beta feature and bug fixes in the feature on wikis with sidebar cache enabled (e.g. zhwiki, commons)
  • Worked on performance improvements to badges feature
  • Fixing bug with xml format in the API, and added tests for it so hopefully this does not break again!
  • Worked more on enabling statements on properties
  • Further work on new user interface design groundwork - mostly refactoring and enabling editing of multiple sitelinks and label/alias/description at once
  • First pokes at usage tracking
  • Drafted an RfC to improve recent changes so we can show Wikidata changes also when enhanced recent changes is enabled
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 18:42, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

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. [411] [412]
• 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. [413] [414] [415]
• 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. [416]

Problems

• There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [417]

VisualEditor news

• If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [418]
• The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [419] [420]
• You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [421]

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. [422] [423] [424]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

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. [425]

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. [426] [427]

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.[428] [429]
• In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [430] [431]
• The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [432]
• 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. [433]
• There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [434] [435]
• In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [436]

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. [437]

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

09:04, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

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. [438] [439]
• There are now many more translations for language names. [440]

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. [441] [442]
• 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. [443]
• If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [444] [445]
• The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [446]

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. [447]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #126

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • A new blocking policy has been accepted.
  • Proposal for an individual engagement grant to use Wikidata items for citations needs your input
  • RfC: redirect vs. deletion
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • past: Open Government WikiHack organized by Wikimedia DC in Washington, DC
  • upcoming: Wikidata training organized by Wikimedia UK with Magnus in London
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • With the deployment next Tuesday you will be able to edit all sitelinks at once as well as all fields of the "in other languages" box. This is an intermediate step towards the new user interface and will evolve further over the next weeks. You can see what is coming on Tuesday now already on test.wikidata.org.
  • WikiProject Names aims to improve name related data on Wikidata. Initial focus is on first names (given names). Half of items for first names still need cleaning up, but 15% of items for persons already have a given name defined.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Stack Exchange tag, vici.org ID, sourcing circumstances, has contributing factor, has immediate cause, birth name (Monolingual text), title, Nupill Literatura Digital - Document, Nupill Literatura Digital - Author, Commons Creator template, monogram, cause of, Cycling Quotient ID, male population, female population, number of households, contributing factor of, immediate cause of, used by, end cause, family name identical to this first name, country for sport, parents of hybrids, Glad identifier, kulturnoe-nasledie.ru identifier
  • Showcase items: Hessian Broadcasting Corporation, Fishing Creek
• Development
  • Jan Zerebecki has joined the Wikidata dev team.
  • Worked on supporting statements on properties in WikibaseDataModelSerialization (bugzilla:66425)
  • Fixed broken xml api output (bugzilla:70531), as well as some inconsistencies in the xml format and added tests that should help avoid future breakage in the xml format
  • Finished performance improvements for badges
  • Worked on entity usage tracking
  • Pietro from the EAGLE project came to visit us, one of the first 3rd party users of Wikibase. See http://www.eagle-network.eu
  • Added a hook point to allow 3rd party users (like the EAGLE project) of Wikibase to control what goes into the search index
  • Started work on a widget that lets you edit badges right in the item instead of going to the special page
  • Use checkboxes instead of a multiselect to edit badges on d:Special:SetSiteLink
  • Work on hhvm-related issues in Wikibase and temporarily disabled the beta feature on Wikidata until fixes are deployed for the issues.
  • Deployed new code on test.wikidata! (to be deployed on wikidata on Tuesday), see mw:Wikidata_deployment#wmf.2F1.25wmf1
  • Work on fixing empty maps in the JSON serialization, differentiate them from empty lists (fixed prerequisite bugzilla:70606)
  • Jeroen made a little video demonstrating how you can get a clone of Wikibase DataModel, set it up, and run it's tests: https://asciinema.org/a/12530
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 12:13, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #127

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • [[:d:Wikidata:Requests for comment/User conduct policies|Closed RfC: User conduct policies]
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Toolkit 0.3.0 released - Wikidata Toolkit
  • ProteinBoxBot is making Wikidata the canonical resource for referencing and translating identifiers for genes and proteins from different species
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: depends on, motto, series ordinal, Federal Register Document Number, monogram, cause of, Cycling Quotient ID
• Development
  • Investigated and fixed issues with time values
  • Investigated issues with coordinate value precision
  • Fixed a number of issues related to HHVM
  • Further work on usage tracking
  • Created smoke tests for items and properties
  • Created a widget to edit badges directly on the item without going through the special page
  • Prepared for a week of work with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers next week to get more planning done for structured data support for Commons
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:48, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

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. [448] [449]
• 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. [450] [451]
• You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [452]
• 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. [453]
• 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. [454]

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. [455] [456]
• 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. [457]
• On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [458] [459]
• You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [460]
• 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [461]

Future changes

• You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [462]
• More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [463] [464]

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

06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #128

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Open RfA: Nikosguard
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming IRC office hour about structured data on Commons
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • All human genes are now wikidata items, for example: Here is one (of approximately 40,000) called "spinocerebellar ataxia 37" - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q18081265. Blog post about this to appear here: http://blog.wikimedia.de/tag/wikidata/
  • Want to be kept up-to-date on structured data on Commons? There is now a new newsletter you can subscribe to.
  • Interested in some statistics about the data on Wikidata? Check Wikidata Stats every now and then. (Thanks Magnus for moving it to the new dump format.)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: UBERON ID, Yandex.Music ID, has quality, Exceptionnal heritage of Wallonia ID, Orphanet ID, demonym (monoligual text), maximum Strahler number
• Development
  • Spent the week with the WMF multimedia team and volunteers to get more clarity about structured data on Commons. We'll be asking for feedback on a lot of stuff over the next weeks. The main info hub is taking shape at Commons:Structured data.
  • More fixes for the switch to HHVM
  • Looked into possible performance improvements. Some of them will be taken into the next sprint.
  • Battled a handful of nasty issues on the live-site
  • Wikibase DataModel 1.1 was released
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:32, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

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. [465] [466]
• 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. [467]
• Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [468]

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. [469]

Meetings

• You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC). [470]
• 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). [471]
• You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [472]

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

08:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

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. [473] [474]

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. [475]

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. [476]

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. [477]
• If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [478] [479]

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

13:47, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #129

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Do you want to see constraint violation reports and referencing improved? Please provide input.
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (log)
  • hackathon around scholarly articles on Wikidata (etherpad with notes)
  • Blog post about the meeting to discuss structured data on Commons in Berlin
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Clusters of humans and species on Wikidata
  • New parameter in the template Property documentation: subject item; see [this example edit] for how to use it
  • New tool: Linked Items. Returns sorted, de-duped list of Q values from a Wikipedia page, or chunk of wiki-text. Thank you, Magnus!
  • Wikidata annotation tool is looking for feedback
  • Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase by Denny and Markus has been published. It gives a very nice non-technical overview of Wikidata.
  • Magnus re-wrote Wiki ShootMe to now use Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Always wanted to know which topics have amazing articles on Wikimedia projects across many languages? Here you go!
  • Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number
• Development
  • Improvements to sitelink editing usability
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 2.0
  • Profiling and performance improvements in Wikibase and Wikibase DataModel
  • Implementing LabelLookup, which is needed to improve performance of EntityId formatting. This will lead to improved item page loading times.
  • Added new featured list and recommended article badges.
  • Remove most usage of class aliases to be compatible with HHVM (dependencies of bugzilla:71295)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 20:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #114

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Game now has a 'Commons Categories' game
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: At the Circulating Library ID, MacTutor id (biographies), allmovie identifier, number of survivors, given name version for other gender, name in native language, tempo marking, manifestation of, zbMATH author ID, Executive Order number
• Development
  • Made significant performance improvements (to be rolled out next week)
  • Worked on usability improvements to the editing of sitelinks
  • When you link to an image on Wikimedia Commons in a statement it will now show up in “global usage” there.
  • Made the phpunit tests for Wikibase much faster
  • Wikibase phpunit tests on travis pass with hhvm now
  • Fixed label/description uniqueness constraint checks
  • Work on entity usage tracking
  • Year formatter now shows the year instead of the unformatted ISO string in case of a precision mismatch
  • Diff and old revision pages don’t run the JavaScript UI any more, should be much faster now
  • Introduced a Changers concept to the JavaScript frontend, wrapping the API and entityStore functionality
  • Identified issue causing content in the old serialization format to be included in XML dumps
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:27, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

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. [480]
• There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [481]
• There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [482]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [483]
• 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. [484] [485] [486]
• VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [487]
• VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [488]
• 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. [489]

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

05:20, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #131

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata turned 2 on Wednesday! Have a look at the notes from the community and development team and add your note. Also don't forget to check out all the cool presents (a painting, speed improvements, a huge load of unconnected articles that you can help connect via the Wikidata Game, WikidataLDF, a recent changes visualisation)!
  • Wikidata II
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata is nominated for 2 Open Data Awards! \o/ Magnus and Lydia will attend the award ceremony next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
  • Wikidata as the central hub for open life science data
  • What is Wikipedia about? Great data viz based on Wikidata
  • Super Lachaise, a mobile app based on Wikidata for a cemetery in Paris
  • Random items without statements
  • Tutorial: How to make a “descendants of” timeline using Wikidata
  • Updated statistics on the topics with most highly-rated articles on Wikipedia
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID, Municipality code of Brazil, Pleiades identifier, MalaCards ID, natural product of taxon, official blog, University of Barcelona authority ID, Beilstein Registry Number, Gmelin Number
• Development
  • Worked around memory corruption in zend PHP
  • HHVM beta feature is enabled again for Wikidata
  • Fixes for various breaking changes in mediawiki core
  • Work on language fall backs for new serialization code
  • Work on fixing XML dumps
  • Work on making Special:Version correct again for Wikidata extensions
  • Implemented LabelLookup to improve performance further
  • Worked more on remaining tasks for simple queries
  • Poked remaining tasks for statements on properties
  • Further improvements to the usability and workflow of sitelink editing
  • Wrote browser tests for authority control gadget
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 14:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

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. [490]
• You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [491] [492]

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. [493]
• 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. [494] [495] [496]
• 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. [497] [498]
• 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. [499]
• The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [500] [501] [502] [503] [504]
• After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [505] [506] [507]

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. [508]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #132

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Zero error rate - help improve the quality of Wikidata's data

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Lydia, Magnus and Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the ODI award gala

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata won the Open Data Award by the Open Data Institute in the category Publisher \o/ (blog post by ODI, blog post by WMDE)
  • Tutorial: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries
• Did you know?
  • Less than 23% of Wikidata items have no statement. Down from ~53% a year ago.
  • Newest properties: consecrator, Slovene Cultural Heritage designation, penalty, charge, judge, defender, prosecutor, defendant, number of casualties, deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID
• Development
  • Continued work on LabelLookup and related code to further improve performance
  • Made it possible to show references in statements on property pages. (Remaining bugs before roll-out are issues with adding/editing/removing statements on property pages.)
  • Further improvements to sitelink editing (The edit toolbar now floats so it doesn't scroll out of the page on a long list of sitelinks. An empty row for adding a new sitelink is shown by default when editing to make this faster and take less scrolling.)
  • Further adapting of simple query code so we can get it to review at the Foundation again.
  • Lots of bug fixes all over the place
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:04, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

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. [509] [510]
• The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [511]

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. [512]

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. [513] [514]
• 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". [515]
• The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [516]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #133

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming office hours for Commons (Nov 20th) and Wikidata (Dec 3rd). More details on the office hour page.
  • GLAM/Wikidata hackathon in Amsterdam
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help make sure these items have labels in your language
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NATO code for grade
• Development
  • Work on reviving the tree of life built from Wikidata data
  • Added a "featured portal" badge (Q17580674)
  • Improved the performance of getting labels and sitelinks in Lua (and decreased the memory usage)
  • Did groundwork on applying page deletions to the repo
  • Refactor initialization of EntityView so that we can use batched label lookup for improved performance.
  • Added IRC to available protocolls for the URL datatype
  • Improved calendar model display
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:59, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

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. [517]

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. [518]

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

18:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)