Tech/News/2020/41

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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Recent changes

There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.
You can now thank users for file uploads or for changing the language of a page. [1]

Problems

There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [2]
Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [3]
Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 October. It will be on all wikis from 8 October (calendar).
Letters immediately after a link are shown as part of the link. For example the entire word in [[Child]]ren is linked. On Arabic wikis this works at both the start and end of a word. Previously on Arabic wikis numbers and other non-letter Unicode characters were shown as part of the link at the start of a word but not at the end. Now only Latin and Arabic letters will extend links on Arabic wikis. [4]

Future changes

You will be able to read but not to edit the wikis for up to an hour on 27 October around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [5]

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