User talk:RandomDSdevel/Archive 8
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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 visual editor can generate wikicode with image options in your language. Examples of image options are "thumb" or "left". You can ask to change to options in your language in Phabricator. [1][2]
- Wiktionaries and Wikisources can now use the visual editor. It is an opt-in beta feature. It still needs development to work better with these projects. [3][4]
- ORES is using new models. Tools that use ORES' predictions can behave strangely. ORES also has a new API. [5]
- The visual editor now supports classical Greek characters. [6]
Problems
- There was a bug when you used keyboard arrows in templates in the visual editor. This has now been fixed. [7]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
- The wikipedia.org portal will get many small bug fixes and improvements. Most will be for the search box and suggested results that were added in March. [8]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 12 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are improving transclusion of templates for Parsoid and balanced templates. The meeting will be on 13 April at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [9]
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20:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
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 filter Special:Log in more detail. You can filter different imports and new users. [10][11]
- You can use Telnet to read Wikimedia wikis. [12]
- MediaWiki wikis can handle bigger file uploads. The new limit is 4 GB. [13]
Changes this week
- Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 19 April and 21 April. This will start at 14:00 UTC and last for 15 to 30 minutes. [14]
- There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data center test.
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on April 19 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is shadow namespaces. The meeting will be on 20 April at 21:30 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
20:40, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8

This month:
In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.
Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)
With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: {{Wikipedia Requests}}. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying article=
, category=
, or wikiproject=
, and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do {{Wikipedia Requests|category=Living people}}
. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!
The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.
If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Requests#Transition project and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.
WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.
And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.
Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name s52475__wpx_p
. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called projectindex
. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!
- The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
- The WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.
Until next time,