Donald Trung

Tech News: 2022-19

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

Recent changes

• You can now see categories in the Wikipedia app for Android. [1]

Problems

• Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed. [2]
• Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change. [3]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [4]
• Incompatibility issues with Kartographer and the FlaggedRevs extension will be fixed: Deployment is planned for May 10 on all wikis. Kartographer will then be enabled on the five wikis which have not yet enabled the extension on May 24.
• The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.

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9 mei 2022 17:22 (CEST)

Tech News: 2023-18

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

Recent changes

• The content attribution tools Who Wrote That?, XTools Authorship, and XTools Blame now support the French and Italian Wikipedias. More languages will be added in the near future. This is part of the #7 wish in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [5][6][7]
• The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [8]
• The Speciaal:Voorkeuren page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [9]

Changes later this week

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

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MediaWiki message delivery 2 mei 2023 03:44 (CEST)

Tech News: 2023-35

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

• As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [10]
• All Speciaal:Bijdragen pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [11]
• Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [12]
• Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Schakel de visuele bewerker in" is now shown on the "Bewerken" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Bètafuncties" tab at some wikis. The preference "Gebruik de wikitekst-modus in de visuele tekstverwerker, in plaats van een andere wikitekst-tekstverwerker" is now also shown on the "Bewerken" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Bètafuncties" tab. [13][14]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
• New signups for a Wikimedia developer account will start being pushed towards idm.wikimedia.org, rather than going via Wikitech. Further information about the new system is available.
• All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [15]

Future changes

• The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
• A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!

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MediaWiki message delivery 28 aug 2023 15:59 (CEST)

Tech News: 2023-41

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

Recent changes

• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [16]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [17]
• At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature. [18]
• In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.

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MediaWiki message delivery 9 okt 2023 16:36 (CEST)

Tech News: 2024-08

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

Recent changes

• If you have the "Mij e-mailen bij bewerkingen van pagina’s of bestanden op mijn volglijst" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [19]
• There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
• Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
• The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB. [20]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [21][22]

• Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
• The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [23]

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MediaWiki message delivery 19 feb 2024 16:34 (CET)

Tech News: 2024-09

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

Recent changes

• The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [24]
• The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [25]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [26][27]

Future changes

• The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.

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MediaWiki message delivery 26 feb 2024 20:21 (CET)

Tech News: 2024-19

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

Recent changes

Example of a talk page with the new design, in French.

• The appearance of talk pages changed for all wikis, except for Commons, Wikidata and most Wikipedias (a few have already received this design change). You can read the detail of the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences ("Overlegactiviteit weergeven"). The deployment will happen at remaining wikis in the coming weeks. [28][29]
• Interface admins now have greater control over the styling of article components on mobile with the introduction of the SiteAdminHelper. More information on how styles can be disabled can be found at the extension's page. [30]
• Wikimedia Enterprise has added article body sections in JSON format and a curated short description field to the existing parsed Infobox. This expansion to the API is also available via Wikimedia Cloud Services. [31]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 May. It will be on all wikis from 9 May (calendar). [32][33]
• When you look at the Special:Log page, the first view is labelled "All public logs", but it only shows some logs. This label will now say "Main public logs". [34]

Future changes

• A new service will be built to replace Extension:Graph. Details can be found in the latest update regarding this extension.
• Starting May 21, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia will get the possibility to activate "Add a link". This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to all Wikipedias. These communities can activate and configure the feature locally. [35]

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MediaWiki message delivery 6 mei 2024 18:41 (CEST)

Tech News: 2024-21

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

Recent changes

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. [36]
• New changes have been made to the UploadWizard in Wikimedia Commons: the overall layout has been improved, by following new styling and spacing for the form and its fields; the headers and helper text for each of the fields was changed; the Caption field is now a required field, and there is an option for users to copy their caption into the media description. [37][38]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 May. It will be on all wikis from 23 May (calendar). [39][40]
• The HTML used to render all headings is being changed to improve accessibility. It will change on 22 May in some skins (Timeless, Modern, CologneBlue, Nostalgia, and Monobook). Please test gadgets on your wiki on these skins and report any related problems so that they can be resolved before this change is made in all other skins. The developers are also considering the introduction of a Gadget API for adding buttons to section titles if that would be helpful to tool creators, and would appreciate any input you have on that.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21 mei 2024 01:01 (CEST)

Wikidata weekly summary #628

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-05-20. Please help Translate.

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot:
  • Browse9ja Bot - Task: Automated data retrieval focusing on Nigerian / African-based information, integrating a chatbot, NLP API, knowledge graph, and machine learning model.
  • DhlizBot - Task: add Dhliz ID (P12696) for persons/films/TV series that exist in Dhliz (Q125594802) database.
  • AmeisenBot 2 - Task: Working on bot requests at WD:RBOT using QuickStatements.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Wikidata to split as sheer volume of information overloads infrastructure, by Bluerasberry. "The split will create a WikiCite graph separate from the main Wikidata graph. The main Wikidata graph will retain content of broader interest, including items for authors, journals, publishers, and anything with a page in a Wikimedia project."
  • Learnings from AI and Heritage inclusive Metadata requires more than erasing stereotyping terms - this article explores the presence of contentious terms in Wikidata labels.
  • Reconciling Shira: Wikibase Cloud and OpenRefine - as part of the Shira project to document and digitise Penn University's Jewish music collections, the author gives a step-by-step process on installing OpenRefine for Wikibase Cloud instances.
• Papers
  • Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo, Storia della collaborazione tra Wikidata e le biblioteche della Rete URBE nel controllo di autorità. Abstract: "The contribution draws a history of the presence of the identifiers of the authority records of the URBE network libraries in Wikidata, and of the collaboration that has evolved since 2020 between the Wikidata community and the cataloguers of the URBE network libraries, relating to the harmonisation of these authority records with Wikidata and the improvement of the quality of the respective data. The first part of the contribution traces the main stages of collaboration in chronological order, while the second part of the contribution presents the main areas in which the collaboration materialises (or can materialise) in the daily authority work carried out by cataloguers in theme-based groupings".
  • Using Open Data to Automatically Generate Localized Analogies. Numerical analogies that translate unfamiliar measurements into familiar reference objects (e.g., “275k sq miles is roughly as large as Texas”). By "Sofia Eleni Spatharioti, Daniel G. Goldstein, Jake M. Hofman"
• Videos
  • ¿Cómo contribuir masivamente a Wikidata con OpenRefine? (Spanish) - As part of the Coordinate Me Campaign, this is a review of the OpenRefine tool for contributing large sets of data to Wikidata.
  • Patrimoine spolié : le projet ProvEnhance (French) - A seminae on the looted heritage project on the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. At timestamp: 55:02 onwards, Wikibase is discussed as a platform to host the Looted Heritage and Provenance research project.

Tool of the week

• Wikidata GenderStats measures gender bias at the user level by computing stats on created items.
• Created items : a list of items created by a user with labels. This not new but this has been repaired.

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikimedia Deutschland job opening: Project Manager Machine Learning, Wikidata. Application deadline: Apply until 26.05.2024

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • population by native language (native language population of a place)
  • tartan (item's tartan; Tartan is a Scottish cloth pattern symbolizing a clan, region, or group.)
  • Newest External identifiers: ‎FilmVandaag ID, FBW ID, Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages ID, Jerusalem Film Cinematheque person ID, PitchBook profile ID, New Oxford American Dictionary ID, Stichting Erfgoed Nederlandse Biercultuur brewery ID, ‎Gentoo Wiki article ID, Dhliz ID, RAG ID, ‎The Sounds Resource game ID, The Lost Media Wiki page ID, Cbonds company profile, Iconoteca dell'Accademia di architettura ID, Kōmako author ID, urban area census code, The Law Dictionary entry, CDC Stacks ID, Authority file of the Iraqi Authors, Gentoo GURU package ID, TheLegacy game ID, Explanatory Ukrainian Dictionary ID, Grand Theft Wiki ID, Folkets lexikon ID, Pushkin Museum artist ID, Virtual Russian Museum artist ID, LGD Block Code, Australian Oxford Dictionary ID, ICPE establishment ID, case number (mainland China), Lille norske leksikon ID, WiiG.de developer ID, WiiG.de publisher ID, The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary ID, Azerbaijani National Assembly ID, Canadian Oxford Dictionary ID, ‎GOG product ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • is ontological root of (forms the root element of the ontology)
  • located in the Islamic territorial entity (the item is located on the territory of the following Islamic entity.)
  • address of addressee (address of the address e.g. on a postcard)
  • TheaterEncyclopedie ID (An item of the TheaterEncyclopedie)
  • relates to sustainable development goal, target or indicator (relation to the SDGs)
  • taxon synonym of (taxon item (considered a preferred name according to a given reference) of which this taxon name is a synonym - the new property will be the inverse property of {{P|1420}})
• New External identifier property proposals to review: last appearance, Perlego ID, Bokkilden ID, Wardah Books ID, Palula dictionary ID, NLR editions, glubinka.by, Transfermarkt competition ID, Quranic Arabic Corpus topic ID, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World: Digital Collection ID, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature ID, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable ID, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology ID, Yandex.Music track ID, Comprehensive Dictionary of the Contemporary Ukrainian Language ID, promodj album ID, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World ID, The Oxford Companion to the Mind ID, Arkitekturguide for Nord-Norge og Svalbard ID, person ID in MNAHA, New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary ID, Archnet authority ID, Nintendo Life game ID, Push Square game ID, Pure Xbox game ID, Global Egyptian Museum ID, TheLegacy company ID, Historic Synagogues of Europe ID, IAFD actor UUID, Database of Hungarian archaeology ID, The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages ID, Zoraptera Species File taxon ID, Dermaptera Species File taxon ID, Plecoptera Species File taxon ID, Grylloblattodea Species File taxon ID, Mantophasmatodea Species File taxon ID, Dictionary of Taiwan Hakka ID, vehicle keeper marking / VKM, Oxford Dictionary of English ID, Embioptera Species File taxon ID, Isoptera Species File taxon ID, Aphid Species File taxon ID, Coleorrhyncha Species File taxon ID, LGD Subdistrict Code, PLC (Primary Location Code), Sinhala Cinema Database ID, LGD District Code, LGD Village Code, LGD State or UT Code, Slovenski etymološki slovar ID, Korrespondenzen der Frühromantik, Bundes-Klinik-Atlas Hospital ID, Jedipedia.net ID, JJM Habitation id, McDonald's US product, Justapedia, Atarimuseum ID, PNG School Code

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • A map with locations of Pablo Picasso works - (source)
  • Descendants of King Antso III (source)
• Newest WikiProjects:
  • MELA on Palestine - The Wiki project page for the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) work group on Palestine.
  • India Aviation - A usergroup focused on airports in India
• Newest database reports: Complex constraint violations (list of Properties)
• Showcase Items: 12 Angry Men (Q2345) - 1957 drama film by Sidney Lumet
• Showcase Lexemes: panneband (L1223420) - means "headband" in Nynorsk

Development

• We have completed the preparation work to migrate the Query Builder's front end from Wikit to Codex (phab:T360096)
• We also continued work on the EntitySchema data type and refining the CI flow for EntitySchemas (phab:T362000)

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.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Participate in this week's Lexeme challenge:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

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