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 (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
- You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [1] [2]
VisualEditor news
- It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [3] [4]
- It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [5]
- VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [6]
- We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [7]
- You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [8] [9] [10]
Future software changes
- You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [11]
- CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages. [12] [13]
- It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript. [14]
- An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [15]
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