User talk:Nhatminh01/Archives/2019

Tech News: 2019-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News writers, editors and translators wish you a pleasant 2019 year.

Recent changes

• RelatedSites extension has been undeployed. It was used to create interwiki links on Wikivoyage, now handled by Wikidata. [1]
• MediaWiki logstash logging is moving to a new infrastructure. This is an ongoing deployment. [2]
• codesearch.wmflabs.org has been updated, with new and updated repositories and a new search options for code. [3]
• On several wikis, an account named "Abuse filter" has been created on December 17 to perform some technical maintenance on AbuseFilter. This account has sysop rights but it's a system user and no human can use it. The account already existed on wikis where AbuseFilter can perform blocks, which are issued using this account. See T212268 for more information and future plans.

Problems

• In AbuseFilter, the "Throttle" action takes three parameters: count, period and groups. They must now strictly respect the requirements listed on mediawiki.org. A list of broken filters is on Phabricator. If you're familiar with AbuseFilter, please take a look and fix them. [4]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from January 9. It will be on all wikis from January 10 (calendar).

Meetings

• Search Platform Office Hours is rescheduled to January 9. Check the details for time and date.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:30, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Captions in January

The previous message from today says captions will be released in November in the text. January is the correct month. My apologies for the potential confusion. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:43, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Structured Data - file captions coming this week (January 2019)

My apologies if this is a duplicate message for you, it is being sent to multiple lists which you may be signed up for.

Hi all, following up on last month's announcement...

Multilingual file captions will be released this week, on either Wednesday, 9 January or Thursday, 10 January 2019. Captions are a feature to add short, translatable descriptions to files. Here's some links you might want to look follow before the release, if you haven't already:

1. Read over the help page for using captions - I wrote the page on mediawiki.org because captions are available for any MediaWiki user, feel free to host/modify a copy of the page here on Commons.
2. Test out using captions on Beta Commons.
3. Leave feedback about the test on the captions test talk page, if you have anything you'd like to say prior to release.

Additionally, there will be an IRC office hour on Thursday, 10 January with the Structured Data team to talk about file captions, as well as anything else the community may be interested in. Date/time conversion, as well as a link to join, are on Meta.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to seeing those who can make it to the IRC office hour on Thursday. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:09, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can now use Google Translate in the content translation tool. [5][6]
• You can now add captions to files on Commons. Captions are short descriptions of the file. They can be translated to all languages we use. They can't use wikitext markup.
• Earlier a quoted HTML attribute had to be followed by a space. Now it doesn't. This means that some pages could look different when you save them even if you didn't edit that part of the text. [7][8]
• Templates with could not show the difference between the live template and the sandbox version when they were tested. This has now been fixed. has a new wrapper parameter now. You can use it for selectors like .mw-parser-output <wrapper parameter value> <selector from CSS page>. [9]

Problems

• When you see an edit in the recent changes feed or in the history of a page some of them have tags. Some tags are added automatically. You can also add tags manually. Tags for edits that have been added manually can be edited. This didn't work for a little while. This has now been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

• You can move files from your wiki to Wikimedia Commons and keep the file history with the new FileExporter. It will be a beta feature on all wikis from 16 January. If you want to test it you activate it and check your wiki's configuration file.
• Users who could cause more damage to the wikis if someone took over their account have to have more secure passwords. This includes administrators and other user groups. They can't use passwords that are in a list of common passwords. Accounts with common passwords are easy to take over. The list of common passwords was made longer a few weeks ago and has a different error message. Some user groups have been added to those who can't use common passwords. This is to protect all accounts with user rights that could cause damage. [11]
• The AbuseFilter variable minor_edit has been removed. It was deprecated in 2016. Now you can't use it. You can fix the filters using it. You can find them if you use the search bar on Special:AbuseFilter.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 15 17:55, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• Some people did not get last week's issue of Tech News. This was because of a problem with MassMessage. If you did not get last week's issue, you can read it on Meta. [12]

Recent changes

• The content translation tool can now use version 2 as the default version for users who turned on the beta feature. For example it adds the tracking category Pages with unreviewed translations to translations that might have used machine translations without fixing the problems. This is so others can find them. You can find this category in Special:TrackingCategories on Wikipedias.
• https://mediawiki2latex-large.wmflabs.org can now convert collects of up to 800 pages to PDF, EPUB or ODT. Previously this was 200 pages.

Problems

• When a template was edited with the visual editor, it would sometimes put all information on one line. This makes it difficult to read for editors who use the wikitext editor. It also makes it more difficult to see what happened in a diff. This problem affected edits made between 8 and 17 January and is now fixed. [13]
• MassMessage is used to post a message to many pages. It has not been working reliably. Some messages have not been posted to everyone. [14][15]
• Because of a database problem that had to be fixed immediately you could not edit most wikis for a couple of minutes on 17 January (UTC). This has now been fixed. [16]

Changes later this week

• You will be able to use template styles in the Module namespace. [17]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 January. It will be on all wikis from 24 January (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:37, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Wikimedia servers use HHVM to run the PHP code. They are going to use PHP7 and stop using HHVM. You can test PHP7 with a new beta feature. That way you can help find and report problems.

Problems

• When someone moves a page to a name that already exists that page that had the name the article is moved to is deleted. For a couple of months this didn't always work. Some users saw an error message instead. This has now been fixed. [18]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:16, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: January 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 1 • January 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Registration for Wikimedia+Education Conference is open Collaboration with Yerevan State University of Languages and Social Sciences after V. Brusov Meet the first Programs & Events Dashboard sysops More than a hundred students gathered in Ecuador to edit Wikipedia Selet WikiSchool continues to teach young Tatar language Wikipedians The WikiClub contributes to the development of our human qualities Third prize for Wikipedia in schools project We've updated the design of Education space! The WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique is back Wiki Advanced Training at VVIT Creating our first WikiClub WikiClubs participate in edit-a-thon of cartoons Wikimedia and Education in Portugal: Where are we now Wikimedia Israel: “Wikipedia Ambassadors” program for Arabic-speaking schools is launched

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 04:41, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• Op-ed: Random Rewards Rejected

• In focus: The Collective Consciousness of Admin Userpages

• News and notes: WMF staff turntable continues to spin; Endowment gets more cash; RfA continues to be a pit of steely knives

• In the media: The Signpost's investigative story recognized, Wikipedia turns 18 and gets a birthday gift from Google, and more editors are recognized

• Discussion report: The future of the reference desk

• Featured content: Don't miss your great opportunity

• Arbitration report: An admin under the microscope

• Traffic report: Death, royals and superheroes

• Technology report: When broken is easily fixed

• Gallery: Let us build a memorial fit for such pain and suffering

• News from the WMF: News from WMF

• Recent research: Ad revenue from reused Wikipedia articles; are Wikipedia researchers asking the right questions?

• Essay: How

• Humour: Village pump

• From the archives: An editorial board that includes you

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 06:51, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• It was easy to untick a box by accident in Special:Preferences. This will now be fixed. [19]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 February. It will be on all wikis from 7 February (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can use the ambox CSS class to show page issues to mobile readers. When you use ambox there are classes you can use.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 February. It will be on all wikis from 14 February (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:46, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• When you thank someone on the mobile web you will now have two seconds to cancel the thank. This is in case you clicked on the thank button by accident. [20]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 February. It will be on all wikis from 21 February (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is a proposal to add a red link to mobile search results if there is no page with that name. This is how it works on desktop. You can leave feedback. [21]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:14, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk to us about talking

The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.

We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.

We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.

We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.

We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.

You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:

1. First, sign up your group here.
2. Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group. This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
3. Then ask people what they think about communication processes. We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki. Please consider asking these five questions:
   1. When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
   2. What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
   3. What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
   4. What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
   5. What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
4. Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group. Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.

You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.

Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.

You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.

Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you.

Trizek (WMF) 15:08, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• There is a new version of the iOS Wikipedia app. It has for example syntax highlighting and new toolbars to make it easier to write wikitext. It also has night mode, a find-on-page function and other things. You can give feedback and suggestions. [22]

Changes later this week

• When you look at your watchlist or the recent changes page you can use the new filters for edit review. There you can choose tags to filter different edits. Empty tags will no longer be shown. [23]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 February. It will be on all wikis from 28 February (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 February at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikipedia app for Android will invite users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. You can read more and leave feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:17, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: February 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 2 • February 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedia User Group Nigeria in Collaboration with AfroCrowd Celebrate Black Month History with a 2Day Editathon Wikimedia+Education Programme announced Wikipedia in Education, Uruguay Oslo Metropolitan University hires “Wikipedia-assistants” Basque Education Program: 2018 in review Wikimedia Israel introduces Wikidata to Education Wikimedia Serbia made tutorials in Serbian language on editing Wikipedia Seminar on wikis in education Wikimedia, Tourism and Education: Launching project ISAL The Swiss Lab: Wikipedia as a game Meet Hungary

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 17:52, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• From the editors: Help wanted (still)

• News and notes: Front-page issues for the community

• In focus: Wikimedia affiliate organizations seek community participation in 2019 board election

• Discussion report: Talking about talk pages

• Featured content: Conquest, War, Famine, Death, and more!

• Arbitration report: A quiet month for Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Binge-watching

• Technology report: Tool labs casters-up

• Gallery: Signed with pride

• Recent research: Research finds signs of cultural diversity and recreational habits of readers

• Essay: Optimist's guide to Wikipedia

• From the archives: New group aims to promote Wiki-Love

• Humour: Pesky Pronouns

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 11:17, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-10

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can give feedback on the future of talk pages.
• The mobile website will use the standard fonts on your computer or phone instead of a generic font. This will make it easier to read text in many scripts. [24][25]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:38, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatements Lua function or the #statements parser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer <maplink> if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator.
• There is now an EventStream to see when links are added or removed on Wikimedia wikis. You can read the discussions and plans.

Problems

• Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
• Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [26]
• Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [27][28]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:29, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2019)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials on the Library Card platform:

• Kinige – Primarily Indian-language ebooks - 10 books per month
• Gale – Times Digital Archive collection added (covering 1785-2013)
• JSTOR – New applications now being taken again

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Baylor University Press, Taylor & Francis, Cairn, Annual Reviews and Bloomsbury. You can request new partnerships on our Suggestions page.

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 17:40, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Tech News: 2019-12

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• When you use rollback you will be able to get a confirmation prompt on most wikis. It asks you if you wanted to do the rollback. This is to avoid misclicks. You will have to opt in to get it. On German Wikipedia it will be an opt-out feature from 28 March. [29][30]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Admins will be able to block someone from editing a page or a namespace. This already works on a few Wikimedia wikis. You can read more. If your wiki wants to be an early tester of this, you can tell the developers. [31]
• Toolforge will shut down the Ubuntu Trusty job grid. This will happen the week of 25 March. Tools that use this grid needs to be moved to the new Debian Stretch job grid. If they haven't, they will be taken offline. Maintainers can restart the tools later. Users may not be able to use them in the meanwhile. You can see a list of affected tools.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:44, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-13

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [32]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [33]
• The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [34]
• Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [35]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:05, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: March 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 3 • March 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedia at UNESCO Mobile Learning Week 2019 Wiki Education publishes evaluation on how to get subject matter experts to edit WikiGap brings editors to close WikiGap and open Wiki Pathshala Education Mapping exercise is open for public review Wikimedia movement projects and activities presented at EDU RUSSIA 2019 forum “Edit-a-thons give us opportunity to distract from common interests” The club members write articles about New Year WikiClub as a non-formal educational centre in rural communities Mini MediaWiki Training at VVIT

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 06:31, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• From the editors: Getting serious about humor

• News and notes: Blackouts fail to stop EU Copyright Directive

• In the media: Women's history month

• Discussion report: Portal debates continue, Prespa agreement aftermath, WMF seeks a rebranding

• Featured content: Out of this world

• Arbitration report: The Tides of March at ARBCOM

• Traffic report: Exultations and tribulations

• Technology report: New section suggestions and sitewide styles

• News from the WMF: The WMF's take on the new EU Copyright Directive

• Recent research: Barnstar-like awards increase new editor retention

• From the archives: Esperanza organization disbanded after deletion discussion

• Humour: The Epistolary of Arthur 37

• Op-Ed: Pro and Con: Has gun violence been improperly excluded from gun articles?

• In focus: The Wikipedia SourceWatch

• Special report: Wiki Loves (50 Years of) Pride

• Community view: Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:03, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• Notifications tell you about things that happen on the wiki. You can turn on notifications about new links to pages you created. For performance reasons you can no longer get e-mails about this. [36]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 April. It will be on all wikis from 4 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:29, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Bring your idea for Wikimedia in Education to life! Launch of the Wikimedia Education Greenhouse

Apply for Education Greenhouse Are you passionate about open education? Do you have an idea to apply Wikimedia projects to an education initiative but don’t know where to start? Join the the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse! It is an immersive co-learning experience that lasts 9 months and will equip you with the skills, knowledge and support you need to bring your ideas to life. You can apply as a team or as an individual, by May 12th. Find out more Education Greenhouse. For more information reachout to mguadalupewikimedia.org

—MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:16, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• More wikis are now testing visual editor section editing for mobile users. You can read more.
• Admins on French and Polish Wikipedia can block someone from editing a page or a namespace. If your wiki wants to get these blocks before they are available to all wikis, you can tell the developers. [37][38]

Problems

• You will be able read but not edit most wikis for 30 minutes on 11 April at 05:00 (UTC). This is because of a hardware problem. You can see a list of the affected wikis. [39]
• A map update caused some problems on 29 March and 30 March. It was rolled back. [40]
• Pages on some Wikivoyages had problems with the top headline. This has been fixed. [41]

Changes later this week

• When you add an edit summary the VisualEditor will search your recent edit summaries in case you want to re-use one. This works in both the visual and wikitext modes on desktop. It also works on the mobile site. [42]
• The Wikimedia wikis will get a URL shortener. This will work from 11 April. You can read more. [43]
• The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it will return "" (empty string). When you read a page it will return "-" (dash). For now this will only affect content namespaces. [44]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 April. It will be on all wikis from 11 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to preview references. This means that when you hover over the link you will get a popup that shows you a preview of the reference. It will work much like page previews. This is so you don't have to go to the bottom of the page to see a reference. This will now be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. [45][46]
• The Wikidata JSON output will change. Empty containers will be serialised as empty objects. This is a breaking change that will affect tools that use JSON outputs and APIs. It will happen on 30 April. You can read more and see how to test your code.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:24, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• All wikis now have the TemplateWizard for the wikitext editor.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 April. It will be on all wikis from 18 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will get a new constraint status called suggestion. This will change how the WikibaseQualityConstraints constraint checking API works. [47][48]
• You can test the depicts property for structured data on Commons.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:00, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The advanced search function URL now shows which namespaces you search in. The namespace field is collapsed by default on the search page. You can also add new fields to the search interface through a hook. [49][50][51]
• The wikis now look slightly different in the mobile web version. [52]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikipedia articles will have the sameAs meta property. It adds structured data. This makes it easier for search engines to find Wikipedia articles. It also makes it easier to reuse content. There will an A/B test. [53][54]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:08, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: April 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 4 • April 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Launch of the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse! Wikipedia Student Scholar Wikimedia Commons: a highly hostile place for multimedia students contributions Wikimedia+Education Conference highlights

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 01:27, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-18

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Wikipedia app for Android now invites users to add Wikidata descriptions to Wikidata objects that have Wikipedia articles but no Wikidata descriptions. It will only invite users who have added a number of Wikidata descriptions in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. [55][56]

Problems

• Tech News was late last week because of a MassMessage bug. Other newsletters had the same problem. [57]

Changes later this week

• You will see when you last refreshed the recent changes page. This is so you can see how recent the changes are. [58]
• When you write a comment in Structured Discussions but have not posted it yet your web browser will save it in local storage instead of session storage. This means you do not lose them even if you close your web browser. Structured Discussions used to be called Flow. [59]
• You will be able to turn off milestone notifications. Milestone notifications congratulate you when you have made certain numbers of edits. [60]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 1 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata wb_terms table will be dropped. This will affect some Wikidata tools. They need to be updated. The table has become too big which is causing problems. This will happen on 29 May. You can read more. You can ask for help if you need it.
• Wikimedia wikis will soon use a token when you log out. This changes how the API works. Some tools might need to be updated. [61]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:28, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 April 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• News and notes: An Action Packed April

• In the media: Is Wikipedia just another social media site?

• Discussion report: English Wikipedia community's conclusions on talk pages

• Featured content: Anguish, accolades, animals, and art

• Arbitration report: An Active Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Mötley Crüe, Notre-Dame, a black hole, and Bonnie and Clyde

• Technology report: A new special page, and other news

• Gallery: Notre-Dame de Paris burns

• News from the WMF: Can machine learning uncover Wikipedia’s missing “citation needed” tags?

• Recent research: Female scholars underrepresented; whitepaper on Wikidata and libraries; undo patterns reveal editor hierarchy

• From the archives: Portals revisited

• Humour: Jimbo and Larry walk into a bar ...

• Opinion: The gaps in our knowledge of our gaps

• Interview: Katherine Maher marks 3 years as executive director

• Community view: 2019 Wikimedia Summit gathers movement affiliate representatives to discuss movement strategy

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 17:38, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-19

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. The developers are working on solving the problem. [62]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 8 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:28, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 May. It will be on all wikis from 16 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 15 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:49, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 4

Newsletter • April 2019

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Timeless newsletter, with a cat! Or maybe not.

Un chat qui miaule???

It's true! The angry cat, a fundamental part of Timeless, has resulted in confusion and bug reports all across the projects and phabricator. And now it shall be immortalised forever in the new, shiny Timeless logo.

Updates:

After putting off the project for three months because I got hit in the head with a flight of stairs, and then putting off the project for another two months while working out what the status of the grant was, I have now put off the project even more in order to focus on my other project for a bit. So progress lately has been a bit whims-based as a result:

• The project now has a logo. For some reason.
• The angry cat in the background is now customisable! Behold: not a cat. What would you like to replace it with on your project?
• I broke, unbroke, and then sort of sideways broke all the form styles. Help.

Radar:

• The French Wiktionary voted to set Timeless as their default skin, with results possibly as you might expect: I ran away and hid, and the WMF said no. A bit of discussion later and we largely agreed that all else aside, this is a bit of a branding issue, but we love the enthusiasm! Also the bug reports that inevitably come out of such a discussion. I'm still working on properly going through those.
• Theme support is still stuck in limbo, but now we have another skinning RfC. tl;dr, we wanna replace the entire skinning system, and Skizzerz'll write a prototype later.

I will be fully resuming work on Timeless next week, or maybe the week after, depending on what madness (or illness) comes out of the Hackathon in Prague. Please come talk to me there to discuss strategy!

-— Isarra ༆ 16:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-21

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The report for phase 1 of the talk pages consultation 2019 has been published. Communities are invited to start phase 2 of the consultation on their wikis.

Problems

• File descriptions for files from Commons were not shown properly on other Wikimedia wikis for a few days. For example the image descriptions and license information were missing. This has now been fixed. [63][64]
• Some diffs show an error message when you try to see them. The developers are working on fixing it. It could be because of some edit comments. [65][66]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The content translation tool on Wikipedia can use machine translations. There is a system to stop translations where the editors do not fix machine translation mistakes. This warns or stops them if they seem to just copy what the machine translation gives them. If this system is too strict or not strict enough you can tell the language team. [67]
• The Wikidata wbeditentity API endpoint will remove all aliases if the request includes an empty alias. This is how it supposed to work. It has not been working this way because of a bug. This will start on 12 June. [68]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:04, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• Big changes to the replica database will happen on 3 June. Some tools on Cloud Services will stop working if the maintainers do not update them to use the new schema. This probably affects tools that query for revisions or log entries made by a user. [69][70]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 May. It will be on all wikis from 30 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:34, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: May 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 5 • May 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Education in Wales Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse: Applications closed! Wiki Camp 'Meet Germany' Seniors also count! Mandatory internship at Wikimedia Armenia Wikimedia Experience Survey by VVIT WikiConnect OFWA Wikipedia Education Highlights April 2019 Wikimedia Education at "Wikicamp Chattogram 2019" Edit a thon about flora and fauna to celebrate the earth day

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 07:16, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 May 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• From the editors: Picture that

• News and notes: Wikimania and trustee elections

• In the media: Politics, lawsuits and baseball

• Discussion report: Admin abuse leads to mass-desysop proposal on Azerbaijani Wikipedia

• Recent research: Wikipedia more useful than academic journals, but is it stealing the news?

• Arbitration report: ArbCom forges ahead

• News from the WMF: Wikimedia Foundation petitions the European Court of Human Rights to lift the block of Wikipedia in Turkey

• Traffic report: Dark marvels, thrones, a vile serial killer biopic, that's entertainment!

• Technology report: Lots of Bots

• Essay: Paid editing

• From the archives: FORUM:Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 02:14, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can now write all special letters in all African Wikipedia languages. This works in the desktop version. [71]
• There is now a field called depicts on Commons. This is a way to show what is in a picture with the help of Wikidata. It is still in development. [72]
• Some tools on Toolforge may break on or after 3 June because of database changes. Maintainers should update their tools to use the new schema. [73][74]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [75]

Changes later this week

• Some wikis have one tab for the visual editor and one tab for a wikitext editor. Others wikis just have one tab. If your wiki has two tabs, clicking a link to create a new page has always opened a wikitext editor. It will now open the editor you used the last time you edited. [76]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:25, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• When you create a PDF from a page on the wiki this is now done by Proton. Before this we used Electron. It should look the same but work better. Both use Chromium. This is a different system from when you collect several articles into a book and make a PDF from them. [77][78]
• The Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standard OOUI icons. There will be additional minor fixes for positioning in the next deployment. [79]
• Bots and other scripts that do not set an identifiable User-Agent may find their requests strictly rate-limited until they identify themselves properly. [80]

Problems

• Please check if the Flagged Revisions configuration on your wiki is as you expect (or as it was a few weeks ago). If not, please report it. [81]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 12 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:07, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [82]

Changes later this week

• MIDI files can soon be played without the Score extension. You can then add them with [[File:Filename.midi]]. Later override_midi and override_audio will stop working. Instead you will need to add the MIDI file below the music score. [83]
• A new video player will soon replace the old one. You will be able to enable it as a beta feature in your preferences. It will later be enabled for everyone if there are no big problems. [84]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some gadgets and user scripts still use the old wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI values. These values are always true. They will soon be removed. This might break the gadgets and scripts. You should fix your gadgets to not use these values. [85]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:38, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• The new version of MediaWiki for last week was not fully released due to issues. It was removed from most wikis on Tuesday and from test wikis on Thursday. [86]
• Most wikis were slow and then briefly read-only last week due to one of the database servers having a problem. It is now replaced. [87]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can watch or join the next Wikimedia Language showcase. It will be about the usage of Machine Translation in Wikimedia projects. The showcase will be on 26 June at 13:00 (UTC). A recording will be kept for later viewing
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 26 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:30, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 June 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• Discussion report: A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia

• News and notes: Mysterious ban, admin resignations, Wikimedia Thailand rising

• In the media: The disinformation age

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Special report: Did Fram harass other editors?

• Traffic report: Juneteenth, Beauty Revealed, and more nuclear disasters

• Technology report: Actors and Bots

• Gallery: Unlike the North Face, Wiki Loves Earth

• Recent research: What do editors do after being blocked?; the top mathematicians, universities and cancers according to Wikipedia

• From the archives: Women and Wikipedia: the world is watching

• Opinion: Why the Terms of Use change didn't curtail undisclosed paid editing—and what might

• In focus: WikiJournals: A sister project proposal

• Community view: A CEO biography, paid for with taxes

• Op-Ed: 2019 Wikimedia Affiliate Selected Board Seats Election Results

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:56, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The development of Wikidata Bridge has started. The goal is to allow Wikidata edits from Wikipedia. [88]

Problems

• Sometimes pages load slowly for users routed to the Amsterdam data center. Investigation is in progress. [89]
• Wikidata query service was overloaded between 11:50 UTC until 13:15 UTC on June 24. It has been fixed. [90]

Changes later this week

• You will be able to read but not to edit all wikis for a short amount of time, on 3 July at 06:00 (UTC). This is to move a database. [91]
• There is no deployment of a new version of MediaWiki on the wikis this week (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 3 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:23, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: June 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 6 • June 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue The introduction of the Wikipedia into the educational program has expanded Welcome Vasanthi to the Education Team! Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference happening in India "Won't somebody please think of the children?" The first Annual Report of VVIT WikiConnect An effective collaboration of WikiClubs and schools Wikiclassroom: New way for students' inspiration Wikipedia as a classroom activity kicks off in Kosovo

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 17:39, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• For event organizers, if you request a temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation, this will now also raise the edit rate limit for those new accounts at the event, which will prevent another bottleneck. [92]
• Administrators at all Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource wikis are now able to use the new partial blocks feature. [93]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 July. It will be on all wikis from 11 July (calendar).
• The design of MediaWiki's software windows will change for desktop users. Layout will be simpler, buttons will be bolder and clearer, and close buttons will be just icons. This is like the mobile design. This will affect ContentTranslation, VisualEditor, TemplateWizard, and other tools. [94]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [95]
• There will be a change in the name format of new Wikidata RDF dumps starting on 15 July. [96]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:13, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The mobile web will get more advanced editing tools. Seven more Wikipedias can use them now. This works for Arabic, Indonesian, Italian, Persian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai Wikipedia. You can try the tools on the mobile web and give feedback. [97]

Changes later this week

• The abuse filter system user will soon do maintenance edits on broken abuse filters. This user is called Abuse filter and has administrator rights. This is meant to fix technical problems. It will not do any other changes. You can read more.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 July. It will be on all wikis from 18 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikipedia app for Android will invite users to add image captions to images on Commons. It will only invite users who have added a number of edits in the app without being reverted. This is to avoid spam and bad edits. You can read more and leave feedback. [98]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:30, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Communities interested by easing newcomers' first steps can now benefit from the Growth team experiments on their wikis. Check the conditions and the request process.
• The Coolest Tool Award 2019 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools by July 29. The awarded tools will be presented at Wikimania. [99]

Problems

• The release of the last version of MediaWiki (1.34.0-wmf.14) has been blocked for groups 1 and 2. [100]

Changes later this week

• Phabricator database will be moved to a different server. Writes will be blocked on Thursday 25 July, between 05:30 and 06:00 AM UTC. Reads will remain unaffected. [101]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 July. It will be on all wikis from 25 July (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some items in the visual editor will change later this week. This will make it easier to edit links, citations, and templates on both desktop and mobile. [102][103]
• With advanced search turned on you will be able to choose the sorting order of the search results when you do a search. [104][105]
• Users who edit from IP addresses whitelisted on a request for temporary lift of the IP cap for mass account creation will bypass CAPTCHAs. This will happen in August. If you think this should not happen for some reason, please let us know.
• The variable user_wpzero will be removed from AbuseFilter. A list of filters needing a fix is provided.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:07, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #1—July 2019

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

Did you know that you can use the visual editor on a mobile device?

Every article has a pencil icon at the top. Tap on the pencil icon to start editing.

Edit Cards

This is what the new Edit Cards for editing links in the mobile visual editor look like. You can try the prototype here: 📲 Try Edit Cards.

Welcome back to the Editing newsletter.

Since the last newsletter, the team has released two new features for the mobile visual editor and has started developing three more. All of this work is part of the team's goal to make editing on mobile web simpler.

Before talking about the team's recent releases, we have a question for you:

Are you willing to try a new way to add and change links?

If you are interested, we would value your input! You can try this new link tool in the mobile visual editor on a separate wiki.

Follow these instructions and share your experience:

📲 Try Edit Cards.

Recent releases

The mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the mobile site. The Editing team recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:

1. Section editing
   • The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
   • The team studied this with an A/B test. This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
2. Loading overlay
   • The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.

Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.

New and active projects

This is a list of our most active projects. Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.

• Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how: 📲 Try Edit Cards.
• Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
• Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with 20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
• Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.

Looking ahead

• Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the Community Growth space. Talk to the team about how editing can be improved.
• Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.

Learning more

The VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

18:33, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Wikidata will be in read-only mode on 30 July from 05:00 to 05:30 UTC because of a server switch. [106]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 July. It will be on all wikis from 1 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 July at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:42, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: July 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 7 • July 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue First WikiEducation gathering in Mexico SEABA school in India has hired a Wikimedian to teach Wikimedia project in their school. Selet WikiSchool: results of first half of 2019 Students Use Archival Documents in a Competition, WMIL Stepanakert WikiClub: Meeting with the Speaker of the Artsakh Parliament - Ashot Ghoulian Collaboration with American University of Armenia Finalizing the Collaboration with Armenian Education Foundation Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference Journey

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 09:53, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 July 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• News and notes: Wikimedia grants less accessible for travel, equipment, meetups, and India

• In the media: Politics starts getting rough

• Discussion report: New proposals in aftermath of Fram ban

• Arbitration report: A month of reintegration

• Gallery: Classic panoramas from Heinrich Berann

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Community view: Video based summaries of Wikipedia articles. How and why?

• News from the WMF: Designing ethically with AI: How Wikimedia can harness machine learning in a responsible and human-centered way

• Recent research: Most influential medical journals; detecting pages to protect

• Special report: Administrator cadre continues to contract

• Traffic report: World cups, presidential candidates, and stranger things

• In focus: The French Wikipedia is overtaking the German

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:19, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-32

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 August. It will be on all wikis from 8 August (calendar).

Problems

• A change in RelatedArticles extension accidentally enabled it for everyone, not just for mobile users. This has been fixed. [107][108]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Today everyone can see IP addresses if someone edits without an account. In the future this could be more hidden. This is to protect unregistered editors so fewer can see their IP address. This would only happen after we make sure the tools for vandal fighting can still be effective. You can read more and comment.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-33

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Editors using the mobile website on Wikipedia can opt-in to new advanced features via your settings page. This will give access to more interface links, special pages, and tools. Feedback on the discussion page is appreciated. [109]
• Due to the absence of volunteer maintenance of Cologne Blue skin, the link to activate it will be hidden. The skin will still work, but editors using it are encouraged to switch to another skin. [110]

Changes later this week

• Due to Wikimania, there is no deployment this week. [111]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The "Wikidata item" link will be moved from "Tools" to "In other projects" section on all Wikimedia projects, starting on August 21. Full announcement, Phabricator task.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:20, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-34

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• There will be no Tech News issue next week. The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 2 September 2019.

Problems

• Some abuse filters stopped working because of a code change. Only variables for the current action will work. Variables defined inside a branch may not work outside of that branch. You can read more to see how to fix the filters.
• Only six accounts can be created from one IP address per day. Between 12 August and August 15 this was two accounts per day. This was because of a security issue. It is now six accounts per day again. [112]

Changes later this week

• Only a limited number of accounts can be created from one IP address. An IP address can be whitelisted so that it can create as many accounts as needed. This is useful at events where many new persons learn to edit. IP addresses that are whitelisted for this reason will also not show CAPTCHAs when you create accounts. This will happen on Wednesday. [113]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 August. It will be on all wikis from 22 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There is an RFC about creating a new global user group with the right to edit abuse filters. This will be used to fix broken filters and make sure all filters will still work when software changes happen. You can read more and comment.
• Special:Contributions/newbies will no longer be working. This is because of performance reasons. It showed edits by new accounts. You can see this in the recent changes feed instead. [114]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:21, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 August 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• News and notes: Documenting Wikimania and our beginnings

• In focus: Ryan Merkley joins WMF as Chief of Staff

• In the media: Many layers of fake news: Fake fiction and fake news vandalism

• Discussion report: Meta proposals on partial bans and IP users

• Traffic report: Once upon a time in Greenland with Boris and cornflakes

• Op-Ed: We couldn't have told you this, but Wikipedia was censored

• Opinion: The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia

• Community view: Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong

• News from the WMF: Meet Emna Mizouni, the newly minted 2019 Wikimedian of the Year

• Recent research: Special issue on gender gap and gender bias research

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:42, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 5

Newsletter • August 2019

Welcome to the fifth and final issue of the Timeless newsletter!

Progress was made. True story.

I am happy to announce that after about a year, this delightful project in which absolutely nothing has gone according to plan is coming to a close. Or at least, the grant-funded portion is. Which means we will now be resuming our regular schedule of random whims-based development, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever unless you use MonoBook, and there's a report.

What's new from the past two months:

A lot less than we'd hoped, frankly. We:

• Fixed various bugs, some of which even weren't for stuff I'd just broken two patches previously.
• Resolved sundry compatibility issues for other extensions, templates onwiki, whatever, largely by removing dumb crap from the css.
• Implemented some shiny new features you'll probably hate or just never use or actually see, like click-toggled dropdowns, icons everywhere, and options to select a default layout or set an image for the site header wordmark.
• Brought the total number of open tasks on the Timeless workboard down to 70.

We also wound up with:

• Patches resulting in RelatedArticles working in MonoBook, and FlaggedRevisions showing up in Minerva, unless someone actually managed to turn that off as well. (Blame T181242.) It's possible we went a little overboard with the whole 'let's close all the tasks!' sprint.
• An unfortunate repeated discovery that themes (the Night/Winter variants I keep insisting will happen at some point) are still pretty far off on the horizon. Um.
• Possibly a quite a few more bugs coming your way. This month, and especially the past week, have been a bit of a mess, development-wise. While hopefully none of the worse issues make it to production, please keep the reports coming for whatever you do find and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can. Y'all've been amazing about this, and it's really appreciated.

And I guess that's that. I'm really bad at reporting, and this is a report. For the purposes of the grant, this was a requirement, but do you want me to keep trying to send these out?

-— Isarra ༆ 18:08, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [115]
• The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
• The previously announced change of positions of the "Wikidata item" link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [116]
• The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [117]
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for "All contents" and "All discussions". They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the "All discussions" filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [118]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
• When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [119]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [120]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [121]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [122]
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [123]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:08, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: August 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 8 • August 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Summer WikiCamp for secondary school students 2019 in Armenia Together, we can create an environment that promotes Quality Education International Days and pop culture motivate primary and secondary education students to write on Wikipedia and Wikidata Quality learning and recruiting students at Edu Wiki camp We spend such wonderful days in WikiCamps that noone wants to return home

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 01:00, 5 September 2019 (UTC)

Structured Data - blogs posted in Wikimedia Space

There are two separate blog entries for Structured Data on Commons posted to Wikimedia Space that are of interest:

• Working with Structured Data on Commons: A Status Report, by Lucas Werkmeister, discusses some ways that editors can work with structured data. Topics include tools that have been written or modified for structured data, in addition to future plans for tools and querying services.
• Structured Data on Commons - A Blog Series, written by me, is a five-part posting that covers the basics of the software and features that were built to make structured data happen. The series is meant to be friendly to those who may have some knowledge of Commons, but may not know much about the structured data project.

I hope these are informative and useful, comments and questions are welcome. All the blogs offer a comment feature, and you can log in with your Wikimedia account using oAuth. I look forward to seeing some posts over there. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Last week's Tech News had delivery problems. Some did not get the newsletter. Some got it more than one time. The problem where some pages got it three times should now be fixed. [124]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 October. It will be on all wikis from 3 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 2 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working on a watchlist expiry feature. This means you can put things on your watchlist for a period of time instead of forever. They are looking for feedback on the questions they have.
• Special:Contributions will get the standard OOUI look. This makes it easier to use on mobile and makes it look like other Special: pages. There is a script you can use to make the form smaller if you want to. [125]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:50, 30 September 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: September 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 9 • September 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Learning history by expanding articles about novels Organizing the Education space at Wikimania 2019 - A conversation with Shani Evenstein Wiki Goes to School is back in three cities in Indonesia Wikipedia workshop at the Summer IT School for Teachers WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique 2019 is over Wikipedia Education Program held at Netrokona Government College, Bangladesh Stepanakert WikiClub turns 4! Wikimedia Indonesia trained the trainers through WikiPelatih 2019 Students learning Wikipedia editing by attending Wikicamp at Nabran What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 19:34, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-41

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The abuse filter function now has a faster parser. This is to shorten the waiting time when you save an edit. [126]

Problems

• There is a problem in the visual editor when you copy or delete text with footnotes. It will be fixed soon. [127]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 October. It will be on all wikis from 10 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Community Wishlist Survey has a new format. It will focus on wikis that typically get less support. It will probably go back to the normal format next year. It is not decided exactly how it will work this year. You can leave feedback.
• The URL of the Wikimedia wiki main pages could be changed. This is because the current URLs cause several problems. For example https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page would be https://www.wikidata.org/ instead. You can tell the developers if this would cause problems for your wiki.
• There is a new technical community newsletter. You can read more about the work of Wikimedia's technical community. Subscribe to get the information in the future.
• Outreachy is an internship program for groups who are underrepresented in free and open-source software. There are seven Wikimedia projects about coding, documentation and quality assurance in the next round. Persons who fit the criteria can apply. The last day to apply is 5 November.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:35, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-42

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can now use more advanced editing tools on the mobile web. You can turn them on and off in your preferences in the mobile version. [128]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 October. It will be on all wikis from 17 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are no longer supported. This means the browsers might start looking a bit weird. They will not get security support. You can't read Wikimedia wikis in Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows versions that are older than Windows XP. This is because almost no one uses the browsers anymore. Supporting them made the wikis less secure for everyone else. [129]
• In the future section headings might have a share link. This is to make it easier to link to the section. You can read more and discuss.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

23:55, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The API sandbox and help pages now show more clearly when API modules are marked as internal. API modules marked as internal were probably internal before. It was easier to miss. You should look for non-internal alternatives. [130]

Problems

• There is a translation tool we use on wikis with more than one language. For a few days it did not create pages for new languages when someone translated a page. The languages did not show in the language bar. This has been fixed. [131]
• The history and diffs can show wrong content. This is because of a cache problem. It will soon be fixed. [132]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 October. It will be on all wikis from 24 October (calendar).
• Reference Previews will be a beta feature on all Wikipedias and some Wikivoyages. It shows you a preview of the footnote when you hover over or click on the number. It has been a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia since April.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 October. See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:38, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2020

Hello!

You are getting this message because you've previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey, in either the Wikisource or Wiktionary categories. I wanted to let you know that this year's survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until November 11. Unlike previous years, we are only accepting proposals for non-Wikipedia content projects with no dedicated teams (i.e., Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews). You can learn more on the survey page.

You can vote on proposals from November 20 to December 2. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won't send out a separate reminder to you about that. We look forward to your participation. Thank you! IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: October 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 10 • October 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedia Chile launched its new online course for school teachers Wikimedia Norway is developing an education program for Sámi students and universities teaching Sámi subjects Teachers Association of the Republic of Indonesia (PGRI) Keeps Improving Teachers’ Digital Literacy Through the Use of Wikipedia Lectures on Wikipedia at the the University of Warsaw Wikicamp in Armenia through the Eyes of Foreigners New Wiki Education evaluation report of Wikidata courses published courses. Wikimedia 2030 Strategoy Youth Salon by VVIT WikiConnect Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse – Highlights from the first unit of the online courses. What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 08:30, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-44

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can post proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can post proposals until 11 November. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• Mobile users now have a specific design for their Watchlist. [133][134]
• You can share feedback and ideas on the Desktop Improvements project. The goal is to make the interface easier to use for readers and editors without removing any functionality. The Foundation's Readers Web team will work on this over the next two years.
• OOUI now allows using px (pixels) instead of em (em) for some specific cases. [135][136]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 October. It will be on all wikis from 31 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 30 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be no software changes from 19 December to 2 January. The first MediaWiki version next year will come the week of 6 January. [137]
• Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015, this information was moved from global variables named wg* to mw.config. The old global variables will be removed later this year. You can know more about it and tell the developers if you want to try this out on your wiki first.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:16, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Editing News #2 – Mobile editing and talk pages

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Inside this newsletter, the Editing team talks about their work on the mobile visual editor, on the new talk pages project, and at Wikimania 2019.

Help

What talk page interactions do you remember? Is it a story about how someone helped you to learn something new? Is it a story about how someone helped you get involved in a group? Something else? Whatever your story is, we want to hear it!

Please tell us a story about how you used a talk page. Please share a link to a memorable discussion, or describe it on the talk page for this project. The team wants your examples. These examples will help everyone develop a shared understanding of what this project should support and encourage.

Talk pages project

The Talk Pages Consultation was a global consultation to define better tools for wiki communication. From February through June 2019, more than 500 volunteers on 20 wikis, across 15 languages and multiple projects, came together with members of the Foundation to create a product direction for a set of discussion tools. The Phase 2 Report of the Talk Page Consultation was published in August. It summarizes the product direction the team has started to work on, which you can read more about here: Talk Page Project project page.

The team needs and wants your help at this early stage. They are starting to develop the first idea. Please add your name to the "Getting involved" section of the project page, if you would like to hear about opportunities to participate.

Mobile visual editor

The Editing team is trying to make it simpler to edit on mobile devices. The team is changing the visual editor on mobile. If you have something to say about editing on a mobile device, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.

Edit Cards

What happens when you click on a link. The new Edit Card is bigger and has more options for editing links.

• On 3 September, the Editing team released version 3 of Edit Cards. Anyone could use the new version in the mobile visual editor.
• There is an updated design on the Edit Card for adding and modifying links. There is also a new, combined workflow for editing a link's display text and target.
• Feedback: You can try the new Edit Cards by opening the mobile visual editor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Edit cards talk page.

Toolbar

The editing toolbar is changing in the mobile visual editor. The old system had two different toolbars. Now, all the buttons are together. Tell the team what you think about the new toolbar.

• In September, the Editing team updated the mobile visual editor's editing toolbar. Anyone could see these changes in the mobile visual editor.
  • One toolbar: All of the editing tools are located in one toolbar. Previously, the toolbar changed when you clicked on different things.
  • New navigation: The buttons for moving forward and backward in the edit flow have changed.
  • Seamless switching: an improved workflow for switching between the visual and wikitext modes.
• Feedback: You can try the refreshed toolbar by opening the mobile VisualEditor on a smartphone. Please post your feedback on the Toolbar feedback talk page.

Wikimania

The Editing Team attended Wikimania 2019 in Sweden. They led a session on the mobile visual editor and a session on the new talk pages project. They tested two new features in the mobile visual editor with contributors. You can read more about what the team did and learned in the team's report on Wikimania 2019.

Looking ahead

• Talk Pages Project: The team is thinking about the first set of proposed changes. The team will be working with a few communities to pilot those changes. The best way to stay informed is by adding your username to the list on the project page: Getting involved.
• Testing the mobile visual editor as the default: The Editing team plans to post results before the end of the calendar year. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: VisualEditor as mobile default project page.
• Measuring the impact of Edit Cards: This study asks whether the project helped editors add links and citations. The Editing team hopes to share results in November. The best way to stay informed is by adding the project page to your watchlist: Edit Cards project page.

– PPelberg (WMF) (talk) & Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

11:11, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 October 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• In the media: How to use or abuse Wikipedia for fun or profit

• Special report: “Catch and Kill” on Wikipedia: Paid editing and the suppression of material on alleged sexual abuse

• In focus: The BBC looks at Chinese government editing

• Interview: Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars

• Community view: Observations from the mainland

• Arbitration report: October actions

• Traffic report: Wrestling with a couple of teenagers, a Nobelist, and a lot of jokers

• Gallery: Wiki Loves Broadcast

• Recent research: Research at Wikimania 2019: More communication doesn't make editors more productive; Tor users doing good work; harmful content rare on English Wikipedia

• Essay: Wikipedia is in the real world

• News from the WMF: Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:13, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-45

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [138]

Changes later this week

• MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors. [139]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:48, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

22:03, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [140]

Changes later this week

• You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:17, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The mobile beta mode will be disabled to have less maintenance. The developers will focus on the desktop improvements project. You can turn on advanced mobile contributions mode if you want to see the categories. You could also jump back to the top. This can instead be done with a gadget or user script. [141]
• Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them. [142]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (calendar). This is because of holidays.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view. [143]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:52, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

This Month in Education: November 2019

This Month in Education Volume 8 • Issue 11 • November 2019 Contents • Headlines • Subscribe In This Issue Wikimedians aim to make a difference in the lives of students in Ghana with support from the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse The Third "Editatón WikiUNAM" Spreading Free Knowledge in the Land of Minangkabau What can we learn from the Open Education movement about attaining educational SDG in the digital age? We are highlighting the work of User:Ixocactus this month‎ “Olympic sports through history” on Serbian Wikipedia courses. Workshops with Wiki Club members "Learning about other Culture" SEABA School, Lehragaga. What is happening at Wikimedia Space?

About This Month in Education · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · For the team: Romaine 03:15, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• From the editor: Put on your birthday best

• News and notes: How soon for the next million articles?

• In the media: You say you want a revolution

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases

• Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker

• Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things

• Gallery: Winter and holidays

• Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews

• Essay: Adminitis

• From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited

• In focus: An update on the Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy

• Special report: How many people edit in your favorite language? Where are they from?

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:26, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [144]
• The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [145]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:58, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Wikimedia projects use Translatewiki to translate the wiki interface. You can now use WatchTranslations to watch projects there. You would get an email if there are missing translations to your language. [146]
• There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 December. It will be on all wikis from 12 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can test a new reference tool. It makes it possible to reference different parts of a source without repeating all information. You can test it on the beta cluster. You can see an example article. [147]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:38, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. It did not show new changes last week. This was because of an API problem. It is now working again. [148]
• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information again. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. This is because of a database problem. The developers are working on solving the problem. [149]

Changes later this week

• You can get email notifications. You can get them immediately, a summary every day or a summary once every week. If you choose a summary you can soon choose not to get notifications you have already marked as read on the wiki. [150]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 December. It will be on all wikis from 19 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The partial blocks feature is now stable. It will come to most wikis on 6 January. Your wiki can ask to wait. Contact NKohli (WMF) if you don't want it now. [151]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:16, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-52

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

• Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 6 January 2020.

Recent changes

• All mobile site users now have new features. Features include: tabs for page/discussion; an expanded user-menu; direct access to history pages. These features were initially part of the "advanced mode".

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.

Future changes

• You can use setlang in the URL to change the user interface language. This will no longer happen automatically. When you open the link you will be asked to confirm the language change. This will not happen if Javascript is not working in your browser. [152]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:06, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 December 2019

News, reports and features from the English Wikipedia's weekly journal about Wikipedia and Wikimedia

• From the editors: Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again

• News and notes: What's up (and down) with administrators, articles and languages

• Special report: Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?

• In the media: "The fulfillment of the dream of humanity" or a nightmare of PR whitewashing on behalf of one-percenters?

• Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki

• Arbitration report: Announcement of 2020 Arbitration Committee

• Traffic report: Queens and aliens, exactly alike, once upon a December

• Technology report: User scripts and more

• Gallery: Holiday wishes

• Recent research: Acoustics and Wikipedia; Wiki Workshop 2019 summary

• From the archives: The 2002 Spanish fork and ads revisited (re-revisited?)

• On the bright side: What's making you happy this month?

• Op-Ed: Why we need to keep talking about Wikipedia's gender gap

• WikiProject report: Wikiproject Tree of Life: A Wikiproject report

Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 12:39, 27 December 2019 (UTC)