The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe and contribute.
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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 (1.23wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on December 19. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on December 31 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 2, 2014 (calendar).
- You can now test the new search tool ("CirrusSearch") on all Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikimedia chapter wikis hosted on Foundation servers. Enable "New search" in your Beta features preferences. [1]
- There was a bug where notifications were not sent when the signature of the user leaving the message linked to a translated namespace. The problem was fixed in the software and will soon be fixed on Wikimedia sites. [2] [3]
- You can now use the log-in system for external tools (OAuth) on all Wikimedia wikis that use the unified login. [4]
- If your wiki adds stars or other icons to interwiki links for featured articles in other languages, you may need to change the JavaScript code. [5]
- You can thank other users for their edits even if your browser does not have JavaScript. [6] [7]
- All edits made through Flow, the new discussion system for MediaWiki, are now visible in user's contributions. You can test it on the Flow talk page on MediaWiki.org. [8] [9]
- You can test a visual tool that shows edits made to an article over time. It only works for English Wikipedia pages for now and is slow on long articles. [10]
- You can test the first version of the new mobile Wikipedia app for Android and iOS. [11]
- Translatewiki.net, the site where you can translate the MediaWiki software, now has a new main page for users without an account. [12]
Future software changes
- There will be no technical changes this week (December 23 to December 29) due to end-of-year holidays.
- When someone deletes, restores, uploads, or moves a file on Commons, pages on all wikis that use that file will be refreshed. [13] [14]
- New users will soon have their user and talk pages added to their watchlist as soon as they create an account. [15] [16].
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will not show the text of versions of a page that have been hidden. [17] [18]
- You will soon be able to see the raw HTML created by some wikitext by using the Special:ExpandTemplates tool. [19] [20]
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