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Contacting me. This page is the best way to get my attention. Please do ping me in conversations, but I often fall behind. Partly this is because of the large number of notifications I get from Structured Discussions on MediaWiki wiki. The mailbox I use with Wikipedia is mainly for website registrations, password resets, spam, and notifications. Unfortunately you often can't get one without the others. I don't check it regularly. If you want to send me something non-publicly, please do use wikimail and leave a note here so that I know about it.

Newsletters are archived (or dual-delivered) to /Newsletters. Apologies for all the un-actioned newsletters here; I hope to clean them up some day. See also /NewsSelection. Automated notices are manually archived to /Notices.

Welcome from Martyman

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Welcome!

Hello Pelagic, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page.

I see you aren't brand new but I thought as no one else had greated you yet I would say hi. I notice you have been editing articles related to Sydney which is great there is still a lot of information about Australia that needs to be fleshed out. It would be great if you would consider joining the Sydney WikiProject which helps users focus their efforts and sets out guidlines and targets for Sydney articles. It would also help you meet other editors who may have similar interests to you. There is also the Australian Wikipedians' notice board which is central meeting place for Australian Wikipedians. --Martyman-(talk) 09:39, 1 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi

Thanks, Martyman, that's a great welcome message. I'm posting back onto my own talk page in case you have a watch on it. I'm new at this so still don't have a great grasp on how the various user pages, discussion pages, project pages, etc. fit into the whole authoring/revision/consensus/editing process.

Pelagic 17:42, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It can be a bit confuding yes, though after enough time most things here become almost second nature. It is easy to forget how daunting the interface and communication system is for new comers. I can recommend that the Wikipedia:Community Portal has many useful links for learning your way around. --Martyman-(talk) 21:02, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sydney meetup

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Hi, I got your name from this list, and thought you might be interested in a meetup in Sydney at the Alexandria Hotel tomorrow. I hope you can join us. Sorry for the late notice. --99of9 (talk) 11:23, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Western banded snake eagle, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Raptor. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:15, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Apology

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Pelagic ... very sorry if you got a few password reset messages. I couldn't remember my previously created but unused account name and the system looked like it let me send a password reset to your acccount and my email -- hopefully it just looks that way and doesn't really do it. I am now pelagicsmath Pelagicsmath (talk) 01:04, 9 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for White-rumped falcon

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 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:04, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Hi, DaveDodgy here. I read what you were writing about Bankstown Airport and it's naming. Do you still have the old street directory with only the edition number (no year) ? Thanks. DaveDodgy (talk) 14:27, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, Dave, that post was nine years ago! I'd forgotten all about it. I'm not sure whether I could put my hands on the book, it may be packed away. If I find it on the bookshelf I'll let you know, but I have a feeling it's in a crate under a pile of other crates behind a mountain of stuff in a storage unit. Or my wife may have thrown it out years ago without my knowledge. Pelagic (talk) 11:58, 18 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. I know exactly how you feel. I moved home so many times in the last 4 years alone! Things in PODS, things in a 20' container, things hidden in the roof, things chucked out by my landlords, and cousin, etc. Not knowing what I still have, and what is gone. Or where it is! Nightmare!!!! Depressing!!!! If you ever see the same street directory, at a garage sale, or where ever (based on the image of the front cover) have a look, and get back online ! :) Sorry to any moderator, I know this comment doesn't belong here. DaveDodgy (talk) 13:32, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:The Dark Fields

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Care to reply? --George Ho (talk) 04:36, 18 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the prompt, George. I've replied on the talk page. I hope this mention pings you (am still trying to get my head around the alerting system). Pelagic (talk) 10:51, 20 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:40, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A brownie for you!

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Thank you for your help!!! Songuitar333 (talk) 07:08, 14 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

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The Teamwork Barnstar
Thank You for editing Pransukh Nayak and helping me in DYK. Regards, Nizil (talk) 05:40, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia

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Hello! Your submission of Cheerleading in Australia at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 00:11, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Did you know nominations/Cheerleading in Australia

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Hello. I have reviewed your DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia, and there are some sourcing and issues that need to be addressed. Please fix these as soon as possible, otherwise the nomination will be marked for closure as stale. Thank you and happy editing. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 01:28, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please see new note on your DYK nomination. Yoninah (talk) 22:34, 12 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Cheerleading in Australia

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Hello Pelagic. As you have not responded to comments left on your DYK nomination of Cheerleading in Australia, the nomination has now been marked for closure. If you wish for the nomination to continue, please leave a message there before it is closed. Thank you. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 02:02, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Did you know nominations/Cheerleading in Australia

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As you have not been active on Wikipedia over the past few weeks, I have now marked your DYK nomination for closure. If you wish for the nomination to continue, please return to editing as soon as possible. Thank you. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 04:00, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]


This bot DID NOT nominate any file(s) for deletion; please refer to the page history of each individual file for details. Thanks, FastilyBot (talk) 01:00, 10 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Page move

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I moved the page you created today to User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/08/16. You created the page in mainspace because you forgot to prepend User: before your name. Schazjmd (talk) 21:58, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Belated note: thanked on their talk page with some wikilove. Pelagic (talk) 01:59, 9 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Arb comments

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Hi Pelagic, could it be that your latest comment on the Fram proposed decision talkpage got accidentally placed in the wrong section? It ended up underneath mine but looks as if it was meant to be in yours, right? Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:48, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Heheh, now that I look more closely, it seems you actually posted it three times, in a different section each. Probably because somebody else was busy inserting more section headings above yours and edit-conflicting with you all the time. ;-) Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:51, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Aha, you've hit the nail on the head, FP☼. I see that Gerda added some subheads and that the section-edit links work by section number — action=edit&section=22 or #/editor/22 — so that explanation would make … 'perfect' sense. The mobile interface doesn't appear to be detecting edit conflicts for me. (Nothing appeared to happen after tapping the Publish button. Also nothing happened when I tried to delete the stray comment in Nosebagbear's section, as you were removing that at the same time. Have left a null-edit summary in the history: mobdiff.) Not sure if the broken ec-detection is a general thing, or specific to AMC, &/or dependent on platform/device. Thanks for cleaning up. Pelagic (talk) 18:53, 12 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Brock Blomberg Bio Request

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Hello! I want to thank you again for helping with this request to review and remove the misinterpreted content from the Brock Blomberg article. I was hoping you'd be able to return to this request to remove inaccurate text about T. Winegar as well. I included the link to the (resolved) legal docket, per your request. The last 2 paragraphs of the "Career" section are problematic (as outlined here), but I'm willing to focus on the Winegar content specifically if that's your preference. I understand you probably have a few other requests out there, so if there are fellow editors who may be willing to assist or offer recommendations, please feel free to point me in that direction too. Thanks, again, for your ongoing help and guidance! TY Ursinus (talk) 19:10, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

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Hello!

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:45, 13 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Darkinyung people

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Thanks for your edits on this page.

One point about bibliographic listings: they are sorted alphabetically by author(s) last name, not by date only. If there is more than one work by the same author, they are sorted by date within author; and if there is more than one work by the same author in the same year, they are distinguished by a single lower-case alphabetic suffix (called a "date disambiguator"), for example Smith 1995a, Smith 1995b, etc.

I mention this because I saw your hidden comment in the wikitext ("ordered by year"). I have a script which takes care of this all automatically (plus a lot more): just on the sorting (a small part of its job), it has to worry about authors with the same last name but different first names, cites with more than one author; cites that don't have any author at all, plus it adds date disambiguators automatically, if needed. If you see "fixes" in my edit summaries on any of the Australian Aboriginal articles, it is referring to this script, which I call my "ETVP script" and is partly described by the long pinned thread on my talk page. --NSH001 (talk) 23:52, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]


Desktop improvements prototype

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Hello, Pelagic!

Exploration of the Unknown
I hereby award you the Exploration of the Unknown award! You are being recognized for your courage and willingness to test a feature, gadget, or tool in development and for the constructive feedback you provided.


Thanks for taking the time to participate in the user feedback round for our desktop improvements prototype. This feedback is super valuable to us and is currently being used to determine our next steps. We have published a report gathering the main takeaways from the feedback and highlighting the changes we’ll make based on this feedback. Please take a look and give us your thoughts on the talk page of the report. To learn more about the project overall and the other features we’re planning on building in the future, check out the main project page.

SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:28, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Secret message

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I wonder whether you would like User:Pelagic/common.js to look like User:Whatamidoing (WMF)/common.js.

(Just remember that if you "do" this, you will have to "undo" it when the Beta Feature arrives.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:38, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the hint, Whatamidoing (WMF). I'm giving it a try now. Pelagic ( messages ) Z – (20:35 Mon 01, AEST) 10:35, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Let me know what you think. I'm loving it. (I suspect that the devs produced this so that I would quit pestering them to release it here now. It is sooooo handy on long pages like VPT and ArbCom cases.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It sure beats scrolling up to the section heading in a long discussion. There are a few things I’d need before I get to "I’m loving it" territory, though:
  1. @-mention tool (coming soon): copying and editing the user-page URL is a right pain. This would be enough to prevent me from using it regularly in production. Seems like a nice-to-have at first, but with continued use it’s more of a must-have. I wonder if the French, Hungarians, etc. feel the same.
  2. Edit summary (already a thread on this but I should go back and add to it): most of the time on a talk page, the edit summary is going to be blah like "response" or "comment", but I’ve already had situations where I wanted to put something more specific.
  3. Faith that it won’t lose my work when the browser tab reloads. I gather that most post-VE code is supposed to be able to recover, but for me that often doesn’t work. The classic-editor cycle of type–preview–type–preview is more robust. Great for short comments, but for long edits with lots of tab switching there's always Old Faithful.
  4. Works on mobile.
— Pelagic ( messages ) Z – (07:57 Tue 02, AEST) 21:57, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-24

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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

  • Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [1]
  • Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [2]
  • There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [3][4]

Changes later this week

  • Advanced item You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [5]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).

Future changes

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

21:12, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #2 – Quick updates

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Read this in another language • Subscription list

Mockup of the new reply feature, showing new editing tools
The new features include a toolbar. What do you think should be in the toolbar?

This edition of the Editing newsletter includes information the Wikipedia:Talk pages project, an effort to help contributors communicate on wiki more easily. The central project page is on MediaWiki.org.

– Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-25

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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

  • Advanced item Toolforge hosts several tools created by the Wikimedia community like edit counters or enhanced editors. It is changing the domain from tools.wmflabs.org to toolforge.org. The routing scheme is moving from tools.wmflabs.org/toolname to toolname.toolforge.org. You can read the details. Tools that use OAuth will have to be updated to keep working. You can ask for help.

Problems

  • There is a Wikidata item link in the sidebar on many pages. This disappeared for a couple of days for users who have the Monobook skin. This was because of a bug. It has now been fixed. [7]
  • Editing, logging in and logging out didn't work properly for a short period of time last week. It was soon fixed. [8]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • Advanced item Pywikibot is a Python library to automate work on wikis. It will not support Python 2 after the new version in July. Support for Python 3.4 and MediaWiki below 1.19 will also be dropped. You should migrate to Python 3. You can ask for help. [9]
  • The selectors .menu and .vectorMenu will no longer work in the Vector skin. This can affect gadgets and user scripts. .menu should be replaced by ul. .vectorMenu should be replaced by .vector-menu. [10]

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

21:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-26

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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.

Problems

  • There are some new tools to make it easier for newcomers to start editing. They are available on some wikis. These wikis had a problem with the visual editor for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug in the new tools. It was soon fixed. [11]
  • Advanced item Some user scripts and gadgets stopped working because of a change to CSS selectors. .vectorTabs should be replaced with .vector-menu-tabs to fix this. [12]

Changes later this week

  • The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This will be released on 24 June. You can give feedback. [13]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 June. It will be on all wikis from 25 June (calendar).

Future changes

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

18:49, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:53, 28 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-27

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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.

Problems

  • Everyone was logged out. This was because a few users saw the wikis as if they were logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [15]
  • Some readers didn't see new edits to pages. If the page had been recently changed they saw an older version of the page instead. This only affected readers who were logged out. It lasted for ten days. It has been fixed. [16]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • The Modern and Monobook skins use the ID searchGoButton for the go button. This is searchButton for Vector. To have the same ID for all skins it will change to searchButton in Monobook and Modern too. This will affect gadgets and user scripts. It will happen on 23 July. They should be updated to use searchButton. You can read more and see a list of affected scripts.

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

16:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Editing news 2020 #3

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On 16 March 2020, the 50 millionth edit was made using the visual editor on desktop.

Seven years ago this week, the Editing team made the visual editor available by default to all logged-in editors using the desktop site at the English Wikipedia. Here's what happened since its introduction:

  • The 50 millionth edit using the visual editor on desktop was made this year. More than 10 million edits have been made here at the English Wikipedia.
  • More than 2 million new articles have been created in the visual editor. More than 600,000 of these new articles were created during 2019.
  • Almost 5 million edits on the mobile site have been made with the visual editor. Most of these edits have been made since the Editing team started improving the mobile visual editor in 2018.
  • The proportion of all edits made using the visual editor has been increasing every year.
  • Editors have made more than 7 million edits in the 2017 wikitext editor, including starting 600,000 new articles in it. The 2017 wikitext editor is VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode. You can enable it in your preferences.
  • On 17 November 2019, the first edit from outer space was made in the mobile visual editor.
  • In 2019, 35% of the edits by newcomers, and half of their first edits, were made using the visual editor. This percentage has been increasing every year since the tool became available.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-28

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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.

Problems

  • The Score extension has been disabled for now. This is because of a security issue. It will work again as soon as the security issue has been fixed. [17]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • Abstract Wikipedia is a new Wikimedia project. It will collect language-independent information that can be easily read in different languages. It builds on Wikidata. The name is preliminary. You can read more. [18]
  • The iOS Wikipedia app developers are thinking about new experimental tools. If you use an iPhone you can help them by answering the survey.
  • Some rules for user signatures will soon be enforced. Lint errors and invalid HTML will no longer be allowed in user signatures. Nested substitution will not be allowed. A link to your user page, user talk page or user contributions will be required. You can check if your signature works with the new rules. This is because the signatures can cause problems for tools or other text on the page.

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

20:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-29

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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

  • Users can thank others for their edits. Checkusers can now see user data related to that action. This can help identify sock puppets who harass others using thanks. [19]

Problems

  • Everyone was logged out a couple of weeks ago to fix a security problem. The problem was not entirely fixed. Because of this everyone was logged out once again last week. [20][21]

Changes later this week

  • Wikis that are not for one specific language can translate pages. Sometimes parts of translations are outdated or missing. Outdated translations are marked with a pink background. Missing translations will also be marked in the future. This markup can sometimes break things. It can soon be disabled by using <translate nowrap></translate> on the source page. [22]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 July. It will be on all wikis from 16 July (calendar).

Future changes

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

16:30, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-30

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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

  • A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. The mobile main page special casing stopped working 14 July. 60 wikis now have main pages that don't work well on mobile. You can see which ones, how to fix it and how to get help in Phabricator. This is the same problem that was reported in Tech News 2020/24 and 2020/26.

Problems

  • There is a problem with the interlanguage links. The interlanguage links are the links that help you find a specific page in a different language. The sorting is broken. The developers are working on a solution. [27]
  • Some users keep getting the notifications for the same event. Some of these are old events. [28]
  • Some users have trouble logging in. This is probably a browser cookie problem. The developers are working on understanding the problem. If you have trouble logging in you can see the details on Phabricator. [29]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • There is a Printable version link. This will disappear. That is because web browsers today can create a printable version or show how it will look in print anyway. [30]

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

19:11, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Pelagic

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Your username is fantastic. that is all. :) --Merbabu (talk) 09:47, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-31 (part)

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[...]

  • The first features of the Desktop Improvements project are available for logged-in users on all wikis. In order to use them, uncheck Use Legacy Vector in your local or global preferences in section Skin preferences. More improvements are planned. Feedback is welcome.

[...]

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-32

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[...]

Changes later this week

  • The video player will change to be simpler and more modern. This week, the current beta feature will become the video player for everyone on most non-Wikipedia wikis. The old player will be removed. [31]
  • Users' global.js and global.css pages will now also be loaded on the mobile site. You can read documentation for how to avoid applying styles to the mobile skin. [32]

[...]

15:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-33

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[...]

Recent changes

  • FileImporter and FileExporter became standard features on all Wikis during the first week of August. They help you transfer files from local wikis to Wikimedia Commons with the original file information and history intact. [33]

[...]

16:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-35

[edit]

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

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

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

17:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

IFLA Library Reference Model moved to draftspace

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An article you recently created, IFLA Library Reference Model, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Mccapra (talk) 23:37, 26 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why, @Mccapra? Are you saying it's non-notable? Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:30 Thu 27, AEST) 04:30, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. I’m saying it does not have enough sources to remain published. It has one that is not third-party. Thanks Mccapra (talk) 04:55, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Mccapra, that's not my understanding of how it works. Articles, even if undeveloped, are kept if the subject is notable. But whatever, I've added some third-party ref's and expanded the content slightly. Understandably for a new standard, a lot of the third-party matter is conference presentations and slide decks. I also removed the AfC template, since I have no intention of going through that process. Thanks for replying so promptly. Would you be happy for me to de-draftify it in its new state? Pelagic ( messages ) – (17:32 Thu 27, AEST) 07:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes thanks that’s great. Mccapra (talk) 09:00, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Awesome, thanks for reviewing. Pelagic ( messages ) – (19:01 Thu 27, AEST) 09:01, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-41 (highlights)

[edit]

m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2020/41

Selected items:

  • There is a new tool where you can see which home wiki users have in discussions on Meta. This can help show which communities are not part of the discussion on wikis where we make decisions that affect many other wikis.

Problems

  • There were many errors with the new MediaWiki version last week. The new version was rolled back. Updates that should have happened last week are late. [34]
  • Everyone was logged out. This was because a user reported being logged in to someone else's account. The problem should be fixed now. [35]
  • Advanced item Many pages have JavaScript errors. You can read more and now see a list of user scripts with errors.

Wikidata weekly summary #437 (highlight)

[edit]
  • Tool of the week
    • OD2WD automatically converts CSV files from Open Data portals into QuickStatements for Wikidata republishing. Demo video

Wikidata weekly summary #439 (trimmed)

[edit]

...

    • Wikidata Training Workshop 4, by Canadian Arts Presenting Association - YouTube
      • Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata - (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5)
  • Tool of the week
    • WikibaseJS-cli allows to edit Wikidata from command line, including creating items from samples ("templates") and do complex transformations of statements
    • Query examples:

...

...

  • Development

...

    • Working on creating and tracking implicit usages of Wikidata descriptions so description changes show up in the watchlist on Wikipedia and co (phab:T265897)
    • Created Extension:WikibaseManifest documentation on MediaWiki.
    • Looking into what would be considered a mismatch when comparing WIkidata's data against another database. This is groundwork for potentially automating this in the future to find potential issues in the data to flag to editors.
    • Working on deploying the new Item quality scoring model for ORES to production so we have improved quality scores [No link in original newsletter, but see Item quality judgments from ORES.]

...

... Read the full report · Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) 16:00, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-44

[edit]

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 the wikis for up to an hour on October 27 around 14:00 (UTC). It will probably be shorter than an hour. [36]
  • Last week, links to "diffs" from mobile watchlists and recentchanges were linking to page-revisions instead of diffs. This has now been fixed. [37]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • Since the introduction of the interface administrators user group in 2018, administrators couldn’t view the deleted history of CSS/JS pages. Now they can. [38]
  • There was a problem with the Change Tags. The software would apply the "Reverted" tag to any page actions such as page-protection changes if they came directly after a reverted edit. This has now been fixed for new edits. [39]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias in November. Another announcement will be made once the date is finalized. [40]

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

17:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #15

[edit]

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

[edit]
Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

[edit]
Concept A for add a link.

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

[edit]

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:52, 1 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2020-45

[edit]

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 no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It could lead to downgrade attacks. Since October 29, 2020, users who use old TLS versions will not be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. A list of browser recommendations is available. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [41]
  • Advanced item There is a new automatic tracking category available: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. It collects pages which use the {{formatnum}} parser function with invalid (non-numeric) input, e.g. {{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that {{formatnum:123,456}} is also invalid input: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted so that it can be reliably and correctly localised. The tracking category will help identify problematic usage and double-formatting. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [42]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 4. It will be on all wikis from November 5 (calendar).
  • Administrators and stewards will be able to use a special page (Special:CreateLocalAccount) to force local account creation for a global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user (by a block or a filter). [43]
  • The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on November 4. This change excludes the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias, plus a few smaller Wikipedias with special circumstances. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [44]

Future changes

  • A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of {{formatnum}} when it is given a negative argument. [45]
  • In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be shown for everyone. They will get an alias instead. There will be a new user right or an opt-in function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users. There would be some criteria for who gets the user right or opt-in. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This is early in the process and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they suggest solutions.

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

16:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #440

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Hasley (RfP scheduled to end after 2 November 2020 17:23 UTC)
  • Events
    • Past: Wikidata & Wikibase office hour, October 27 (notes)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Arthur Smith and Daniel Mietchen discussing author items in Wikidata and the Author Disambiguator Tool, 3 November. Agenda
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #37, November 8
    • Upcoming: live SPARQL queries on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, November 3 at 18:00 CET
This is 32 hours of video covering 85 individual presentations in 7 languages.
1266 "unique viewers" have watched some portion on YouTubeSince the conference began last Monday.
  • Tool of the week
    • reCH is a Wikidata anti-vandalism tool that is used to review edits and patrol new changes.
  • Development
    • Fixing the issue of `content was: ""` (empty string) when deleting Lexemes (phab:T263435)
    • Final steps for deployment of JSON dumps for Lexeme (phab:T264883)
    • Working on fixing an issue with adding statements with datatype mathematical formula (phab:T266673)
    • The Query Builder can now generate its first very simple query and show the result. You can follow along as we develop it at the demo system.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

IP block

[edit]

This IP address or range is used by Netskope web security, which is widely used by companies and governments. For myself, I can bypass it, or wait until I am off work and edit from home. But there might be a fair bit of collateral blockage. Since it's only a short duration, side effects might not be too significant.

(Unless it's actually the X-Forwarded-For 60._._.14 that's blocked, in which case the user was someone in my building!)

This blocked user's request to have autoblock on their IP address lifted has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request.
Pelagic (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))
Pelagic (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

Block message:

Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "ACMruralevents". The reason given for ACMruralevents's block is: ...

Decline reason: The autoblock is doing its job properly. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇 15:33, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Meh, thanks anyway. Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:25 Fri 06, AEST) 04:25, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]


[edit]

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited South Mosman ferry wharf, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Howard Hinton.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Fixed Pelagic ( messages ) – (14:08 Tue 15, AEDT) 03:08, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #447

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata Live is a real-time visual dashboard for Wikidata edits; paper, interface (visualizes recent changes to Wikidata in quasi real time).
  • Development
    • Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
    • Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
    • Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
    • Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
    • Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2020-52

[edit]

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 11 January 2021.

Recent changes

  • The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [46]

Changes later this week

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

Future changes

  • You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
  • Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [47]
  • Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [48]

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

20:52, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 December 2020

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:25, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year Wikipedia

[edit]

HNY from Australia! Pelagic ( messages ) – (00:04 Fri 01, AEDT) 13:04, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #449

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Due to the winter holidays, no deployment has happened for Wikidata in the last two weeks.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2021-02

[edit]

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 choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [49]
  • You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [50]
  • Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
    • The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [51]
    • Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [52]
    • When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
  • Advanced item There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [53]
  • Advanced item Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlist to watch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [54]
  • Advanced item Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [55]
  • Advanced item CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers. You can use wikilinks like w:en:MediaWiki:Common.js#L-50. [56]
  • Recurrent item There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.

Changes later this week

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

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

15:41, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #450

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
    • Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
    • Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
    • Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


DiscussionTools update

[edit]

Hello,

The Editing team has scheduled a major update to mw:Extension:DiscussionTools (the new Reply tool) for next week's deployment train. Since you invoke the feature from a script (I do, too), you're probably going to see that update next week, before it's officially released in the mw:Beta Feature system. The new update will use a similar system for starting a ==New discussion==. As before, full-page wikitext editing will not be affected. There is more information on the project page at mw:Talk pages project/New discussion.

You don't have to do anything about this; I just didn't want you to be surprised. If you encounter problems next week, please ping me or leave a note on the talk page for the project. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 12 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #451

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
    • Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
    • Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2021-03

[edit]

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

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

Future changes

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

16:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Hexagon article

[edit]

Hi, Thanks for the encouragement. I don't know how to talk to you without creating a new section, which I have done here. I got feedback that my article rewrite was too informal but have not been able to get clarification. Apparently KGirl is too busy to talk to me. I also got feedback to do incremental revisions rather than a rewrite, so I made an incremental revision. Hopefully it will stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Phoenix-anna/sandbox/Hexagon_Qualcomm Qualcomm_Hexagon

Phoenix-anna (talk) 12:16, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Anna, sorry I left you hanging. New section for a new discussion is the way to go with these talk pages, so definitely the right approach here. (Before they introduced the mw:Echo notification system, posting to user-talk like this was the only way to get someone's attention.) I’m not sure how best to go forward, but have some tentative thoughts (and piecewise updates rather than all-at-once replacement was one of them). I’ll post about procedural matters at User talk:Phoenix-anna/sandbox/Hexagon Qualcomm so that the discussion stays with the draft. — Pelagic ( messages ) – (23:54 Thu 21, AEDT) 12:54, 21 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #455

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
  • Development
    • Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
    • Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
    • Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
    • Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
    • Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
    • Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
    • Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
    • Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Wikidata weekly summary #456

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed wrongly encoded HTML in some messages in the Wikidata Bridge (phab:T272350)
    • Working on showing all languages in the language suggester for monolingual text Properties (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with spaces in external identifier URLs being replaced by "+" (phab:T271126)
    • Added a rate limit for creating Item IDs, which should help with decreasing the number of skipped Q-IDs (phab:T272032)
    • Fixed an issue where whitespace was stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Fixing the case where you cannot easily edit negative quantities after saving (phab:T274129)
    • Working on making it possible to query for quantity values in the Query Builder (phab:T268942)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Tech News: 2021-08

[edit]

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 will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [59]
  • Advanced item The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU. [60]

Problems

  • Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [61]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

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

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Test

[edit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&dtenable=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&dtenable=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new&something=blah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pelagic?action=edit&section=new

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Pelagic&action=edit&section=new

Pelagic ( messages ) – (06:08 Mon 01, AEDT) 19:08, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:30, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #457

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Press, articles, blog posts, videos
    • Blogpost: Wikidata and Correspondence Archives (Enriching basic metadata with a knowledge graph)
    • Blogpost: The promise of Wikidata - How journalists can use the crowdsourced open knowledge base as a data source (at DataJournalism.com)
    • Video: Accra Archive Wikidata and Wikipedia Workshop (GLAMS Campaign Ghana) - YouTube
    • Video: COVID-19 coverage on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Identify and describe items of bibliographic interest (articles, monographs, authors) on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
    • Video: Visualizing the global research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia - YouTube
    • Video: Demo: How to upload new bibliography and create dashboards on Wikidata - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciliation Open Refine Wikidata (in Swedish) - YouTube
    • Video: Reconciling researchers to Wikidata via Google Sheets - YouTube
    • Video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook
    • Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
    • Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
  • Tool of the week
    • EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Development
    • Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
    • Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
    • Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
    • Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
    • Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
    • Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
    • Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
    • Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Continuing to build out the Query Builder and focusing on input for quantity and date queries (phab:T268942 and phab:T272697)
    • Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2021-09

[edit]

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

  • Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
  • A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.

Problems

  • There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [62]
  • Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [63]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).

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

19:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

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Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

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Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

[edit]

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

[edit]

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

[edit]

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Something you may be interested in taking a look at

[edit]

The first of many? :) (And yes – I know this is mystery meat navigation! :D) (Although... how do I get it to not act like the userboxes are on the right of the page all the way down? D:) DesertPipeline (talk) 05:17, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind; fixed the userpage problem :D DesertPipeline (talk) 05:27, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@DesertPipeline: awesome, hall of fame! Pelagic ( messages ) – (12:11 Fri 12, AEDT) 01:11, 12 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #458

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
    • Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
    • Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
    • Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2021-10

[edit]

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

  • Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
  • Flagged revisions now give admins the review right. [65]
  • When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [66]

Problems

  • Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [67]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
  • The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [68]

Future changes

  • There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
  • Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [69][70]
  • New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.

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

17:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #459

[edit]

Selected items...

  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
    • DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
    • The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
  • Development
    • Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)

A barnstar for you!

[edit]
The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
Thnx for helping at the teahouse :) Chefs-kiss (talk) 17:42, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2021-11

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m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/11.

Recent changes

23:21, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks

[edit]

Hi Pelagic. Thanks for your help at teahouse. It has helped with supporting the last paragraph of this news story. Most appreciated. --Gryllida (talk) 21:03, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Books & Bytes – Issue 42

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The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 42, January – February 2021

  • New partnerships: PNAS, De Gruyter, Nomos
  • 1Lib1Ref
  • Library Card

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --11:27, 22 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Help regarding MediaWiki

[edit]

Hello Pelagic!

I'm Rafi. I Talked with you in the teahouse regarding the training of a group of editors. I'm a fresher in python and hope to learn other languages in the future. Recently I made a visit to MediaWiki and became astonished watching devs of the whole world working together just to develop open-source programs. I'm thinking of starting my journey there but feeling a lil bit confused. I've thought of starting with pywikibot. Is Talkpage feature available there too? If yes, then I can take help from you or other editors using your talkpage there. Thanks a lot and take love!! -Mrb Rafi (talk) 13:45, 22 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Rafi! I’ve learnt some other programming languages in the past, but as yet I have no experience in Python or programming for MediaWiki. It’s something I thought I would like to learn "one day". You might have just inspired me to make a start. So whilst I might not be able to offer you experience, I’d be happy to stay in touch.
MediaWiki wiki has talk pages labelled "discussion". The difference is that most talk pages there use the Structured Discussions extension.
P.S. I just discovered at mw:manual:Pywikibot/PAWS that there’s a Jupyter Hub instance that we can use! Pelagic ( messages ) – (05:41 Fri 26, AEDT) 18:41, 25 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Awesome Pelagic!! I've got a classmate then. XD. I think this link is quite helpful for new learners. I'm learned python from Coursera and have a very basic idea. Now I'm trying to learn about regular expressions. -Mrb Rafi (talk) 12:21, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2021-12

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m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2021/12

Recent changes

Changes later this week

Future changes

  • Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [72][73]
  • ...

16:51, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #460

[edit]
Selected items...
  • Tool of the week
    • Sparql_rc is a recent changes feed that only shows you changes in an area of Wikidata you care about. It now also supports Lexemes.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
    • ~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.
  • Development
    • Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
    • Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
    • Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches

18:16, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 March 2021

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:45, 28 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #461

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Closed request for adminship: Minorax, welcome onboard!
  • Development
    • The dev team spent the last week prototyping a few things to learn if some things would be feasible/a good idea. Among other things we tried building a small tool to connect Senses to Items, looked into the different types of ontology issues that can be found on Wikidata and checked what using a document store for data storage would look like.
    • Note: from March 29th until April 12th, Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) is not available to answer messages. If you have any requests for the development team, please ask on Contact the development team. For any emergency, you can contact Lea Lacroix (WMDE). Because of Easter holidays in Germany, the upcoming newsletter will be issued one day later, on April 6th.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Tech News: 2021-13

[edit]

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

  • Some very old web browsers don’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [74]
  • Advanced item IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [75]

Problems

  • When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [76]
  • Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [77][78]

Changes later this week

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

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

17:29, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

on merging Bonkei to Penjing

[edit]

Hello Pelagic. Please join discussion in Talk:Penjing#Proposal to merge Bonkei to Penjing (April 2021)--HaussmannSaintLazare (talk) 02:53, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2021-14

[edit]

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 can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [79]

Changes later this week

  • Advanced item The citoid API will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [80]
  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).

Future changes

  • Advanced item PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.

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

19:38, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The Asgill Affair article

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Hi Pelagic, I see you've been busy on this article. Since Henry Greville's article has him in the wrong regiment, please could you make the necessary correction? I happen to know how many weeks of work went into correcting the mistakes in General Washington's Dilemma by Katherine Mayo. There are some errors relative to the names and regiments of the thirteen officers drawing lots, of which Henry Greville was one. The 7th Earl Spencer mistranscribed the name of the writer of the eye-witness-account-of-the-drawing-of-lots letter. All references to The Hon. R. Fulke Greville, of the First Foot Guards, are now known to refer to Lieutenant and Captain The Hon. Henry Greville of the Second Regiment of Foot Guards (now known as the Coldstream Guards). All references to Asgylle and Asgyle refer to Lieutenant and Captain Charles Asgill of the First Regiment of Foot Guards (now known as the Grenadier Guards). [1] Anne (talk) 15:42, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No need to delete the unread message. It shows in my alerts. But since you say this specific concern is resolved, I won't ping back. I’ve reinstated the post for reference, and moved it to the bottom. One day I'll clean out all the newsletters and make this page easier to use. I pinged about the "Thirteen Officers" reference at Data; will await an answer there. Pelagic ( messages ) – (18:46 Sun 18, AEDT) 07:46, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, Pelagic, I was a bit concerned about changing Greville's regiment, given all the confusion over that, and his name, but was eventually persuaded by an admin to get on with it and do it, so I thought I would save you the bother of looking. If I am supposed to be replying to you elsewhere, I have had no notification, and don't know where to look for your comment. My IT skills are not up to coping well here (I'm not part of the computer generation). Anne (talk) 08:00, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, Anne, I must have inadvertently pinged you when pasting above. I just saw the quote from p. 100 that you provided at Talk:Sir Charles Asgill, 2nd Baronet#Henry Francis Greville. Thanks for sharing that. I can think of reasons why you may not have seen a notification from Wikidata; rather than running you from pillar to post, let's continue the discussion at Asgill's talk page. I have replied there. Pelagic ( messages ) – (08:15 Mon 19, AEDT) 21:15, 18 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ "The Thirteen Officers and Their Regiments". The Journal of Lancaster County's Historical Society. 120 (3): 100. 2019. OCLC 2297909.

Wikidata weekly summary #464

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).
  • Development
    • Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
    • Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
    • Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
    • Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
    • Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
    • Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
    • Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
    • Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.


Tech News: 2021-16

[edit]

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

  • Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [81][82]
  • If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [83][84][85]
  • Advanced item Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [86]
  • The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes

  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.

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

16:48, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:33, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

[edit]
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:30, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata weekly summary #465

[edit]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.