The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.
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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.
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). [1]
- You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [2] [3] [4]
- 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. [5]
- New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [6] [7]
VisualEditor news
- You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [8] [9]
- VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [10]
- Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [11] [12] [13] [14]
- Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [15] [16] [17] [18]
Future software changes
- You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [19] [20]
- All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [21]
- Pages in the
Translations:namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [22]
Problems
- Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [23]
- 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. [24]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.