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Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

  • Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

  • Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
  • Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [2]
  • Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

  • A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:28, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

John Asher Page

Hi Stefen, I think the John Asher page is ready for you to review. It is located at User:Annointed777/John Asher (horse racing). Pictures still need to be added, I don't know how to add them, I think I can get them for us. A good friend of mine, daughter is married to Joe Talamo. He is a trainer himself in California. I know he will help if we need it, but I wanted to speak to you first.

I don't know how to change "Racing Awards" to just Awards and I can't get "Kentucky Broadcasters Association" to link, it keeps showing red, but Wikipedia has a page so I must be doing something wrong.

I rally enjoyed learning about Asher so much. I hope I did this justice. It definitely needs the "Stefen Tower" magic! It made me sad that such a wonderful person did not already have a Wikipedia Page. I am so glad you assigned me this project. I consider this "your page" - I would not have known about him if it were not for you. I am looking forward to your feedback, Once you feel that this page is final, I look forward to my next assignment! Your friend (Annointed777 (talk) 23:32, 31 August 2024 (UTC)) {ping|StefenTower}

Annointed777 I did a quick review. It's a good start but not quite ready for release. There's a number of technical issues that wouldn't take long to remedy, but the biggest issue that I see is the hagiographic writing -- that is, we aren't supposed to write a love letter or marketing brochure, but instead a drier description like you would normally see in an encyclopedia. See WP:TONE. After you address the tone, I will (if you like) do a run-through and fix any remaining technical issues that I see. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 19:22, 1 September 2024 (UTC)
Hi Stephen,
I would love you to do a run-through on it. I write songs and screenplays, so it might take me awhile to change my writing style. I did tone it way down. I am hoping that when we get this is a state that is good enough to be published, that you will publish it. I would love it to stand next to your other great articles. John Asher deserves that. I would like to be your assistant on here until I get really qualified, if that's okay with you. I think I can get the "guts" of the article correct with sources, but it seems like I get attached to the subjects, I'm working on. I actually spent the last couple days on making it what I thought was neutral. I read your articles and really like them, especially the one article on Muhammad Ali, it's amazing. Maybe I should purposely work on someone I don't like and then it will be neutral. LOL!
Off the subject, and I don't even know if this is appropriate or against Wikipedia rules, I hope not, but I would love to hire you part time to work on a project that I am working on. It's absolutely amazing, but I am having trouble with the very things that you are excellent with. My email is derosasongs@gmail.com - It's the most exciting project, Grammy Award winning producers and mixers are involved, a big director is already attached, the largest video game company in the U.S. has committed to work on it. Please email me if you have any interest and I will explain it in more detail!
Back to Asher! I don't know anything about photos. I can ask Ron Ellis to call Churchill, he will defiantly help us. I love the picture of Asher in his office. I don't want to do anything incorrect. Photos will defiantly make it come alive. I view this page as your so I will take your direction if that is okay with you.
{{ping|StefenTower} (Annointed777 (talk) 20:20, 1 September 2024 (UTC))
Annointed777 Re: first paragraph, it's quite all right to work on bios of people you admire, as I admire Ali, but we do have to put on our "encyclopedic writing" cap when we do the work. It's mainly about getting to the point, avoiding passion, discarding our biases (as much as we can), and reflecting reliable sources. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't write in a way that highlights special aspects of a subject, although we're supposed to go by what reliable sources report about those aspects. If the overall description of the subject is in WP:BALANCE and we're using an encyclopedic tone, we're good. All that said, I think it would be best if you can take a stab at addressing the tone so you can get practice there. Note that we have no WP:DEADLINE. When the article is ready, I can help you move it to the article space -- and you will still receive the credit for having originally created it. As it should be.
Re: second paragraph, I don't think I will have the availability anytime soon (I'm quite far behind on my own projects! :) ), but I may think about it some more. Thank you for considering me at any rate.
Re: third paragraph, I poked around for some images. There were none on Wikimedia Commons, and several on Flickr, but the ones on Flickr were all encumbered by strict copyright. The bottom line is we need a photo where the photo-taker is basically willing to give it away - that is, they give away some or all of their rights to the image. And it would be easier in a legal sense if any photos were taken of Asher while he was doing something in a public-facing manner (i.e., nothing private). Note that we can certainly publish the article without an image.
Last, there's no need to ping me on my own user talk page. I get notifications automatically. Cheers! Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 00:06, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
Hi Stefen,
I like how you identified the paragraphs. I'll do the same. Since you are my mentor and I hope I'l be your assistant! Also I don't care about the credit, I'd like you to get it. I would't have done this page if it wasn't;t for your you and it would never get published if it wasn't for you. I know after I dome best you will add the magic to it. So I vote that you publish it.
Paragraph 1 -
I really appreciate your patience. You really have a great way of explaining and being kind about it. It's defiantly a gift and one I so appreciate! I will take your advice and take a stab at it!
Paragraph 2 -
My project is going to be gong on for long time. It's actually a new Company. I am creating a virtual singer to be a pop - I like to think that this will be her influence. She is also neuro-divergent, Autism is so misunderstood and they are my favorite people. I have some traits, but I'm mostly ADHD. I like you and you are ever interested the door is always open. If there is anything I can do to help you with your project, please let me know. I mostly have contacts in the music business and some in TV and film but mostly music. If your project has anything to do with music. I am defiantly the girl who can give you contacts! I would love to hear about your project. I saw that you were working on a YouTube Show. I subscribed to your channel. If I can help you in any way,
3. I will call people and drive them crazy until we get the photos. I will keep you posted and let you know when I have a new version of John Asher for you to see and I will also work on the Pics! Thank you for everything! You are the best!!! and thank you for telling me not to ping people on their own page. It totally shows what a newbie I am! LOL!!! (Annointed777 (talk) 04:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC))

Hi Stefen, Hope you are doing well, sorry for the delay, I was buried with work. I think I have toned down the John Asher page. I am hoping it is ready for your magic to be added. I'm sure it will still need a pass from you. I am trying to study your pages to get a better sense of the writing style. When the page is approved I will work on getting the picture in case someone who is deciding to give right to the picture wants to read it. I tried putting in categories at the bottom but somehow I duplicated the page, so I cancelled it. Let me know what you think!(Annointed777 (talk) 16:00, 9 September 2024 (UTC))

This is still on my radar. I will get to reviewing the article eventually. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 20:16, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Let editors edit, ffs

Sometimes I get the notion there are some editors here who just want to let the air out of other editors' tires, for kicks. If someone is doing loads of genuine, good-faith work, don't get in their way! Imperfections can be addressed in due course. This site is bleeding too many editors, and the last thing we should do is discourage work. Editors should ask themselves whether they are fairly interpreting policies/guidelines or becoming so wound up and appearing as pesky hall monitors, insisting that every 'i' is crossed and 't' is dotted. Note that this isn't a call just to other editors, but also to myself. We need to check ourselves more here.

That all said, anyone intentionally breaking guidelines/policies or otherwise dropping messy, unorganized, unsourced, etc. content into articles deserves the wet trout treatment. ;) Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 22:51, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Stefen, if it wasn't for you and another another patient person on Wikipedia, I would not have continued here. It is very intimidating when you first get on Wikipedia. I was having panic attacks every time I pressed publish. I hope this post helps others become a mentor like you are. I appreciate you so much! I think I am your number one fan, but I am sure I am only one of many who feel this way! Thank you Stefen for your support. It would be great if there was a promotion to get more editors on. I would love to help with that.(Annointed777 (talk) 00:06, 13 September 2024 (UTC))

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

  • Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [4][5]
  • Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [6]

Project updates

  • Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [7]
  • Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [8]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:49, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 64

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 64, July – August 2024

  • The Hindu Group joins The Wikipedia Library
  • Wikimania presentation
  • New user script for easily searching The Wikipedia Library

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --16:34, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Board Elections

Hi Stefen, It's Annointed777 - I just received a 2nd notice regarding the board elections. I have read about the candidates but I do not know enough to determine who the best ones are to vote for, what are the top priorities. If you have a chance would you mind emailing me at derosasongs@gmail.com with who you think would be the best choices and I will pay extra attention to them? Thank you Stefen. (Annointed777 (talk) 02:31, 13 September 2024 (UTC))

Sorry, I don't pay attention to this aspect of Wikipedia as I'm too busy with other things. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 18:39, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

User:Velma Larkin has falsely accusing me of vandalism

Hi there, a user named User:Velma Larkin has falsely accusing me of vandalism and User:Velma Larkin must be indefinitely blocked. I hope you understand. Thanks. 2001:569:74E3:4000:D86:8CFC:FC26:86AC (talk) 05:41, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

That user has been reported to WP:AIV. I expect they will be blocked soon. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 05:43, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Thank you! I didn't know to look here. 166.194.200.16 (talk) 05:51, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Help! There is a persecutor run amok on Wikipedia

You warned user:Velma Larkin about an improper warning of an IP editor, well, I am getting the same treatment.

Please help me with a dispute with user:Velma Larkin, because they are acting like a corrupt enforcement officer of Wikipedia by falsely accusing me of vandalism. Please investigate their reverts and their patrolling of IP edits.

I stand by my recent edit of USS San Francisco (SSN-711) as a model of IP editing for the good of the planet. Doesn't everyone live a good IP edit around here? You should! 166.194.200.16 (talk) 05:50, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

I restored your edit, and then another editor came along and partly changed it back, then changed their mind. It should be all right now. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 05:55, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

  • Wishlist item Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
  • The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [9]
  • References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [10]
  • It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [11]
  • Advanced item Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [12]

Technical project updates

  • Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [13]

Tech in depth

  • Advanced item The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
  • Advanced item To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
    • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
    • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Fun

Always fun to encounter a "not an improvement" change, fix it (completing one aspect to be an actual but minor improvement and reverting another aspect), be personally attacked by that non-improving editor in a subsequent edit, then after calling the "not an improvement" change to that editor's attention, they remove the discussion and slough it off as "not serious", like they're entitled to go around making "not an improvement" changes and attacking fellow editors. This editor literally just changed dates in maintenance templates from a few months ago to this month and finds that actually disruptive edit is useful somehow. Egad. Hopefully this isn't the kind of editor Wikipedia is cultivating in 2024. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 22:34, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

New message from Shearonink

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Wounded Knee Massacre § Massacre? Mass Shooting? - what to state in the lead section. Shearonink (talk) 20:46, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
  • Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
  • The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
  • Advanced item It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [14]
  • Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [15][16]
  • View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item From Wikimedia Enterprise:
    • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
    • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

  • Advanced item The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:11, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

The I-265 page is rife with all kinds of errors.

I would like to better explain the error I am trying to correct then we can work on trying to get sources added. Allindsey1978 (talk) 00:49, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

There is WP:NODEADLINE to make this change to the article. Please find the source(s) before adding. Unfortunately, if you keep adding unsourced stats, that could lead to an admin blocking you. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 00:52, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

  • Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
  • Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [17]
  • For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [18]
  • The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
  • View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

  • The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [19]

Meetings and events

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:16, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Category:Louisville White Sox has been nominated for deletion

Category:Louisville White Sox has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Omnis Scientia (talk) 14:57, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Category:Louisville Black Caps has been nominated for deletion

Category:Louisville Black Caps has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether it complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Omnis Scientia (talk) 14:57, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Retired this morning

As I have become increasingly alarmed by bad-faith editing from anonymous IPs becoming too much of a distraction for serious editing, so much so I have truly begun to dread doing any work here, I have decided it is best to quit Wikipedia. Part of the problem is admins pretending not to see the problem, or attacking serious editors who raise the alarm, and that just compounds it. It's part of a growing pattern I have felt as an experienced editor, that those of us who want to do professional-grade work are being ground down and driven out by a platform that seems to encourage gameplay over serious editing. Sometimes even this gameplay pretends to be serious, with bad-faith actors who have figured out how to make their edits look proper when in reality they are destructive.

Further issues I see are increased unchecked POV pushing in articles, particularly history-related ones, as well as the usually unspoken but very clear bureaucratic animus against WikiProjects, especially at a time they are needed more than ever to focus the work.

There are just too many problems now to work against, and it seems in many areas that editors have simply vanished. The pool of editors is obviously dwindling, and the feeling that I'm having to carry the load of those who've left is unsettling. This is supposed to be a joyous volunteer site for doing interesting, productive work, but today's reality is it just feels like grueling, agonizing work for no remuneration, with very little joy.

Unfortunately, I feel that Wikipedia is going down the tubes, and I'm just too small of a voice to help avert this downfall. I'm going to work on things that are much more uplifting, where I can make more of a difference, and get more back for my hard work, including joy. Stefen 𝕋owers among the rest! Gab • Gruntwerk 20:12, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Stephen,
This is such sad news. I read this and started to cry. You are what is great about Wikipedia. Can you please email me and I will give you my phone number so we have a chat? Derosasongs@gmail.com You are making such a difference. It is discouraging when people don't take this seriously but your bright light only shines brighter when a world like this gets darker. Whatever you do, you are going to make a difference because that is who you are. I am sorry that you have lost the joy in this but I do understand. Please let's have a conversation. You are needed. You are a world changer! Your friend, Annointed777 (Annointed777 (talk) 00:53, 7 October 2024 (UTC))

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

  • Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [20]

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [22]
  • Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [23]
  • Advanced item Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
  • Advanced item Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
  • Five new wikis have been created:

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MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

  • The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [29][30]
  • WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [31]
  • View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [32]
  • Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [33]
  • Advanced item Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [34]

In depth

  • The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
  • The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:16, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.
iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

  • Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
  • Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
  • View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [35][36][37][38][39]
  • It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "2 December 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [40][41]
  • Advanced item Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [42]
  • The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [43]

In depth

  • The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
  • The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

Updates for technical contributors

  • Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [45]
  • Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [46]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:53, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

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