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It's the latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community! Not everything may affect you. More translations are available.
Issues and maintenance
- IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs which resulted in dead links as Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [1]
Changes later this week
- You will soon be able to add links to pages on the multilingual Wikisource to Wikidata items. [2]
- Editors often use a "non-breaking space" to create a gap between two items while keeping them together, avoiding a line break. You will soon be able to add this character via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [3][4]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits from being made. Filter maintainers can now use a syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55as well as the1.2.3.4/27syntax for IP ranges. [5]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
- Minerva is the skin that Wikimedia wikis use for mobile sites like en.m.wikipedia.org. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This didn't work on Minerva unless the edit button was opened in a new window or tab. On the English Wikipedia this has now been fixed by adding a "view source" link to the black "toaster" message that pops up when you try to edit a protected page. Other projects should follow soon. Some projects use HTML that results in overlapping text on the page with the source text. This text is included from MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext. If your wiki is in the list of this Wikidata item, check if the wikitext contains "position:relative" and start a local discussion if it does. You can read more. [6][7]
- Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis on February 8. The new IP address will be
185.15.56.1. You can read more.
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Fine print: Tech news in British English (en-gb) does not necessarily use British spelling. It is only British in spirit, unoversimplified when compared to the regular English version, allowing more complex terms (e.g. "issues" instead of "problems") and constructions.