User talk:Ypnypn

Welcome to Meta!

Hello Ypnypn, and welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). If you would like, feel free to ask me questions on my talk page. Happy editing!

Tech news: 2013-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The Translate extension and Universal Language Selector were enabled on Wikimedia Commons on May 20. Commons users can now easily change languages, and translate pages with a friendly interface. [1]
• The Notifications feature, active on the English Wikipedia, now supports local blacklists and whitelists. It is possible to hide users (for example certain bots) from all notifications on the wiki. Also, e-mail notifications are now grouped. [2] [3]
• The first stable release of MediaWiki 1.21 for sites outside Wikimedia was published on May 25. [4]
• The tool storing information about languages (CLDR) was updated to the latest version (23.1). [5]
• Due to a software issue, users couldn't enable or disable Gadgets. The issue is now fixed.

Future software changes

• MediaWiki will stop supporting XHTML 1.0 and HTML versions lower than version 5. HTML5 will now be the default language for pages created by the software. [6] [7]
• The software will check if all uploaded files are secure and match their type. [8]
• The Wikimedia Commons Android app will come out of the beta phase on its next release. [9]
• Account creation by manual log-in will now be recorded in the account creation log (bug 42434). [10]
• Links to file description pages will again be accessible directly from within videos (bug 43747). [11]
• The software behind recent changes patrolling was re-written; the change fixes issues related to patrolling new pages, among other things. [12]
• During a meeting, developers agreed on rules about making big changes to the software. [13]
• There is now a category to list pages with invalid music code. [14]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Unsubscribe.

Tech news: 2013-23

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf5) was added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 29. It will be enabled on the English Wikipedia on June 3, and on all other Wikipedias on June 5. [15]
• The Tamil Wikipedia shared a Lua module they created to automate their Main Page. [16]
• There is now a test wiki to test new features in right-to-left languages. [17]
• The Thanks feature was added to the English Wikipedia; users can now thank others for individual edits. [18]
• The new interface for account creation and log-in is now the default on 30 wikis, including the English Wikipedia, Commons, Meta, and Wikidata. The feature will be added to all wikis after June 5. Users can return to the old look by adding ?useNew=0 to the web address. [19]
• Videos are now played in pop-up windows if their size on the page is smaller than 200 pixels (800 pixels on the English Wikipedia). [20]
• Opening your talk page now marks notifications as read, for wikis using the Notifications feature. (bug 47912) [21].
• All autoconfirmed users can now reset transcoding of video files; previously only administrators could do this. [22]
• The Nearby feature allows people who use mobile devices to see Wikipedia articles about objects and places around them. [23]

Future software changes

• The PostEdit feature is now part of MediaWiki, and will work on all wikis. (bug 48726) [24]
• The Narayam and WebFonts extensions will be replaced by the Universal Language Selector extension. [25]
• MediaWiki will now be updated every week, starting on June 6. Thanks to this, bugs will be fixed and features will be added faster than they are now. [26]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Tech News: 2014-45

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

Recent software changes

• The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference. [27]
• You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [28] [29]

Problems

• There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [30]
• Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [31] [32] [33]
• HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
• Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [34] [35]
• VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [36]
• The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41]
• After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [42] [43] [44]

Future changes

• The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [45]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #132

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

• Discussions
  • Zero error rate - help improve the quality of Wikidata's data

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Lydia, Magnus and Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the ODI award gala

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata won the Open Data Award by the Open Data Institute in the category Publisher \o/ (blog post by ODI, blog post by WMDE)
  • Tutorial: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries
• Did you know?
  • Less than 23% of Wikidata items have no statement. Down from ~53% a year ago.
  • Newest properties: consecrator, Slovene Cultural Heritage designation, penalty, charge, judge, defender, prosecutor, defendant, number of casualties, deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID
• Development
  • Continued work on LabelLookup and related code to further improve performance
  • Made it possible to show references in statements on property pages. (Remaining bugs before roll-out are issues with adding/editing/removing statements on property pages.)
  • Further improvements to sitelink editing (The edit toolbar now floats so it doesn't scroll out of the page on a long list of sitelinks. An empty row for adding a new sitelink is shown by default when editing to make this faster and take less scrolling.)
  • Further adapting of simple query code so we can get it to review at the Foundation again.
  • Lots of bug fixes all over the place
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:04, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-46

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

Recent software changes

• You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [46] [47]
• The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [48]

File information cleanup

• Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
• You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
• You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.

Problems

• Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [49]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
• You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [50] [51]
• The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [52]
• The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [53]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #133

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming office hours for Commons (Nov 20th) and Wikidata (Dec 3rd). More details on the office hour page.
  • GLAM/Wikidata hackathon in Amsterdam
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Help make sure these items have labels in your language
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NATO code for grade
• Development
  • Work on reviving the tree of life built from Wikidata data
  • Added a "featured portal" badge (Q17580674)
  • Improved the performance of getting labels and sitelinks in Lua (and decreased the memory usage)
  • Did groundwork on applying page deletions to the repo
  • Refactor initialization of EntityView so that we can use batched label lookup for improved performance.
  • Added IRC to available protocolls for the URL datatype
  • Improved calendar model display
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 00:00, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-47

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

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
• The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19. [54]

Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator

• The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
• You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
• You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
• Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
• You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC. [55]

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

18:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #134

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Had a great hackathon for GLAM and Wikidata in Amsterdam last weekend
  • IRC office hour about structured data on Commons (logs)
  • Building a periodic table using Wikidata
  • Lydia will be speaking at internetdagarna in Stockholm on Monday
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Commons will get Phase 2 on December 2nd
  • The Sum of all Paintings - new app to nicely display data related to artwork
  • Institutions on Commons without an item on Wikidata
  • Wikidata descriptions being used to help clarify search results in the Wikipedia mobile app
  • WikidataTodo now shows you tasks to be done on Wikidata related to a specific country as well
  • VisualEditor coming as a beta feature
  • Statements on properties are getting closer to the finish line. You could help figure out which properties to use for describing and classifying properties.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MarineTraffic Port ID, MarineTraffic Ship ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer, SIREN number, CLARA-ID, History of Parliament ID, IRC channel, Commons Institution page
• Development
  • When a page is deleted on a client (Wikipedia, etc) its sitelink is now removed automatically from its Wikidata item
  • Reworked the automatic precision detection for coordinates
  • The long planned split of the code base into two independent Wikibase Repo and Client extensions is getting closer pretty fast these weeks
  • Made good progress on making the sitelinks section much more compact and moving it into the right-hand sidebar
  • While still reworking lots of details that slightly changed in DataModel 2.0 we already started working on a possible DataModel 3.0
  • More performance optimizations in the form of more advanced label lookup implementations
  • Implemented file-based cache of SiteStore to improve performance
  • Bug fixes
  • Updated the property suggester with new data! :)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 21:47, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-48

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

Recent changes

• The move from Bugzilla to Phabricator is done. You can now report bugs in Phabricator. [56]

Problems

• There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the colspan or rowspan option. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17. [57]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
• You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options. [58]
• VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [59]
• You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [60]
• VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [61] [62]

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

19:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #135

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Internetdagaarna in Stockholm
  • Past: Hacks/Hackers in Berlin
  • Picture this!
  • Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB - where next?
  • Wikidata and identifiers - part 2, the matching process
  • IRC office hour on Wednesday
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Commons will get access to the data on Wikidata on Tuesday
  • Statements on properties and language fallbacks are coming
  • VisualEditor is now available as a beta feature to make editing of project and help pages easier
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: China Vitae ID, Formatter URL, subject item, equivalent property, SIL code, Thai cultural heritage ID, has melody, MarineTraffic Port ID, drives on the, detail map, plaintiff, date of official opening, squad number, BBC Things identifer
• Development
  • Moved the sitelink section into a sidebar (if the page is too narrow it will float below the statement section like it is now)
  • Wrapping up work on injecting LabelLookups into EntityView (should boost performance)
  • Implemented new notification bar to replace the notification bubble we had before
  • Fixed more issues with geocoordinates
  • Wrapping up work on client side usage tracking (important for arbitrary access)
  • Making language fallback work for referenced entities (via LabelLookup)
  • Transformations for pass XML dumps got merged, should fix phabricator:T74348
  • Enabled Statements on Properties on http://test.wikidata.org for testing
  • JSON dumps will no longer contain redirects from the week after next week on
  • Improved performance of client’s other projects sidebar
  • Worked on bug triage (looking at the testme bugs)
  • Replaced the custom Wikidata Jenkins continuous integration slaves with regular ones
  • Fixed error in DataModel that was noticed by DataModelSerializer tests
  • Input on mw:Wikibase/Indexing
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:14, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #136

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • IRC office hour (log)
  • Wikidata for research - a grant proposal anyone can edit
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikimedia Commons now has access to the data on Wikidata
  • Statements on properties are now live
  • Sneak peek at a prototype for checking Wikidata's data against 3rd party databases
  • The Game has a new mode: alma mater
  • Work is ongoing for a bot job to tag thousands of objects in OpenStreetMap with the equivalent Wikidata ID
  • Resolver finds Wikidata items for a given identifier (VIAF, GND, IMDB, ...)
  • English-Wikipedia now has a template, RedQ, which puts a Wikidata link next to red links for subjects which have no Wikipedia article in any language, This should prevent duplicate Wikidata items from being created when an article is written, and assist Wikipedia editors to find relevant facts and sources. Please copy it to other-language Wikipedias.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: working title, undercarriage
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Wikidata for research aims to integrate Wikidata more closely with research, and to this end, a grant proposal is being drafted.
• Development
  • Started work on units
  • More work on evaluating options for querying
  • Implemented Property DataType (for relationships between properties)
  • Improvements to get by with fewer memcache request on clients
  • Work on file-based cache of the SiteStore
  • Work on improved label lookup performance
  • Wrapping up work on usage tracking
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 16:48, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-50

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

Recent software changes

• All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [63]
• You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [64]

Problems

• There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [65]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar). [66]
• You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [67]
• It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [68] [69]
• The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [70] [71] [72]
• (Lua) You can no longer use mw.text.unstrip to get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix. [73] [74]

Future changes

• Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [75]

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

17:11, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #137

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Running Wikidata queries on scientific publications
  • Finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia
  • past: Wikidata workshop in NYC
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Ancient philosopher communities visualized based on Wikidata data
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: departure transaction, acquisition transaction, port, curator, pendant of
  • Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Music
• Development
  • More work on making it possible to query Wikidata data (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
  • Further improvements to performance on the clients (Wikipedia etc)
  • Fixed and improved JSON dump creation process
  • Finishing touches on new sitelinks section
  • Worked more on supporting quantities with units - first basic version is making good progress
  • Unprotected Q183 (Germany) again (had to be protected to ensure site availability)
  • Improved performance for page views on Wikidata (no longer accessing actual entity data blob, when page is available from parser cache)
  • Moved issues from github to phabricator and closed/checked bugs marked for testing
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:00, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-51

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

Recent software changes

• You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [76]
• You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [77]
• You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar). [78]
• You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [79]
• VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [80]
• The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [81]

Future changes

• The star image of the watchlist may change soon. [82] [83]
• You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC). [84] [85]

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

16:44, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #138

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

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: Petr Matas
  • Closed RfAs: Jared Preston (Successful)
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Welcome Freebase!
    • Freebase announcement
    • Wikidata announcement
    • Wikiproject
    • Primary sources tool
    • Heise
    • Venturebeat
    • Gigaom
  • Wikidata for Research – presenting the team and a first sketch of the workplan
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • New features! Language fallbacks, property data type and performance improvements
  • New tree of life based on Wikidata data
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: subproperty of, mandatory qualifier, NIST/CODATA ID, EgliseInfo ID
  • New task forces: Freebase, Sled dog racing
  • Showcase items: Lion
• Development
  • Happy holidays from the dev team, everyone :)
  • ~=[,,_,,]:3
  • Enabled other projects sidebar feature as default on Italian Wikipedia
  • Deployed new code to Wikidata, including performance improvements, language fallback, and property data type
  • Fixed some small issues that popped up after deployment
  • Ongoing work on performance improvements (batched label lookup)
  • Ongoing work on the JavaScript widgets needed for the planned redesign
  • Ongoing work on the WikibaseJavaScriptApi extension that was split from the Wikibase code base
  • Finished tree of life
  • Some more work on support for units
  • Closed/checked even more ‘testme’ bugs on Phabricator
  • Wikidata Query has gotten a number of stability fixes. To increase availability and performance we now have multiple instances of it with a load balancer in front of it.
  • The data for the entity suggester has been updated. Suggestions when adding new statements should be even better now.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 17:49, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-52

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

Recent software changes

• The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private. [86]

Software changes this week

• There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6. [87]

Future changes

• The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [88]
• A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [89]

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

16:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-01

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

Software changes

• There are no technical changes this week.

Feedback about Tech News in 2014

• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2014? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us at m:Talk:Tech/News. You can write in your language. Thank you!

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

16:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #139

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

• Discussions
  • Provide your input on article placeholders based on Wikidata
  • new RfC: CoI editing
  • Anonymous artists at wiki project visual arts
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • We need to start talking about scaling Wikidata over the next months and years: Scaling Wikidata: success means making the pie bigger
  • The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers
  • wikidata4research4all
  • There was a well-attended Wikidata meetup at 31C3
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata Query now runs on multiple, load-balanced, self-restarting servers. Thanks to Yuvi for the help.
  • Vandals suck. Don't know how to help us fight them? Here are two pages to get you started: Wikidata:Vandalism and Wikidata:Abuse filter.
  • The Wikidata BEACON generator was updated by Magnus. It now uses all properties with “formatter URL”, so always up-to-date with target URLs. It is faster, too.
  • Number of visual artworks on Wikidata by institution
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Terminologia Histologica (TH), Terminologia Embryologica (TE), ICD-9-CM, operations and procedures key (OPS), ICD-10-PCS, central government debt as a percent of GDP, AniDB identifier, main property, awarded for work, Pokémon browser number, inscription, quote, subtitle, BBC Your Paintings artwork identifier, has vertex figure, index case of, number suspected, number probable, number confirmed, general formula, this taxon is source of, Route number, LAC identifier, CONA, ATCvet, TGN, Chess Club ID, Chess Games ID, Cycling Database ID, ProCyclingStats ID, DOI Prefix, Alexa rank, has index case, related property, number of faces, MPAA film rating, unveiled by, station number, wing configuration, TERYT municipality code, referee, YouTube video identifier, BBF identifier, Korean Movie Database ID, Dictionary of Welsh Biography ID
  • Showcase items: Iggy Azalea, Helsinki
• Development
  • Happy new year! :) It'll be a great one for Wikidata!
  • Have you filed bugs in the past? Awesome! It'd be super helpful if you have a look at your old bugs and see if they are still relevant. You can find them at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/authored/ (make sure you're logged in on Phabricator)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 23:01, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #140

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Office hour on IRC on Friday. You should come :)
  • Past: London Wikidata Meetup 2
    • We had a meetup with nine people:
    • set up Wikidata:WikiProject UK and Ireland (sound recording of meeting available)
  • Upcoming: Open Data Day, 21st February 2015
    • For generic wiki, see International Open Data Day
    • Open Data Camp UK, Saturday/Sunday 21st/22nd February 2015
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • We just crossed 14000 active users (over the last month). Thank you all!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Gray's Anatomy 1918 subject, Total valid votes, inverse of, NLP identifier
  • Newest WikiProjects: Food, UK and Ireland, Suisse
  • Newest gadgets: ExportClaims, Mark as patrolled from list of changes
• Development
  • The sitelink section has been reworked. This will go live on Wikidata on Tuesday. The sitelinks will then be slimmer and they will appear in a sidebar on the right side if there is enough space.
  • More performance improvements when parsing an item page, ~%15 faster for some pages :)
  • Titan was selected as the graph DB to implement a Wikidata query service running in production
  • Fixed adding links to ru.wikinews.org which was broken by its change to HTTPS-only
  • Worked on redesigning the header area (label, description, alias, in-other-languages box)
  • Polished d:Wikidata:Data access and d:Wikidata:Database download. Could still use some more work though if you have time.
  • Enabled PHP_CodeSniffer with Mediawiki rules and some additional ones to make us aware of more code issues
  • We no longer log some common 404 errors in the exception log
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 18:25, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-03

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

Recent software changes

• Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [90]
• You can now use the {{!}} magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [91]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
• A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [92]
• The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [93]
• The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [94] [95] [96]
• The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [97]

Future changes

• You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [98]

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

16:47, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #141

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

• Discussions
  • RfC: Speedy vs Regular deletion‎
  • Closed RfAs: George.Edward.C (successful)
  • Open RfAs: Petr Matas, Edoderoo
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • The Wikidata for research proposal was submitted to the European Union on January 14. Congrats to Daniel for spearheading that huge effort.
  • Blog post about how Wikidata can change the way citizen scientists contribute
  • IRC office hour happened (log)
  • Blog posts about gender inequality index based on Wikidata data by Max and Magnus
  • MediaWiki Developer Summit
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The development plan has been updated and expanded
  • Official Wikipedia app now uses Wikidata descriptions \o/ More to come!
  • Usage tracking will likely be deployed on February 2 on Wikidata. This will not be user-visible. It just means that pages using data from arbitrary items get updated/purged when the data changes. Arbitrary access is being tested at Test Wikidata and testwiki:Test Wiki. An example is at testwiki:Kitten on arbitrary page.
  • Assigning items on Mix'n'match will now make that change on Wikidata for you automatically
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: IGESPAR identifier, SIPA identifier, SkyscraperPage building id
• Development
  • Deployed new sitelinks interface design to Wikidata. It's not done yet but we're getting there. Tweaks are in progress.
  • Worked on redesign of header area
  • Fixed some bugs that popped up after deployment
  • Enabled usage tracking and arbitrary access on test.wikipedia.org and test.wikidata, and preparations for enabling it on Wikidata
  • Collecting Query examples for the new query functionality
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:00, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-04

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

Recent changes

• You can download the new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. The new version shows lead images, better galleries and content from Wikidata. It also has many other new features.[99] [100]
• Programs and bots still can't read information about images on many wikis. You can see the list of wikis with the most files to fix. Wikipedia in Italian, Indonesian and Japanese language have the most files to fix. On the biggest wikis you should use bots. Bots can add information templates to groups of files. You can ask other tech users to help you.

Problems

• All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [101]

Software changes this week

• There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [102]

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

18:12, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #142

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

• Discussions
  • Closed RfAs: Petr Matas (unsuccessful), Edoderoo (successful)
  • Open RfAs: Eurodyne
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: MediaWiki Developer Summit
  • Upcoming: FOSDEM
  • Upcoming: Wikidata for research meetup in February in Paris and Berlin
  • Past: Meetup in Cambridge
  • Brainstorming for Wikimania talks related to Wikidata is happening at phabricator:T87334 and you can apply for a scholarship
  • Wikidata - a year in numbers
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Want to help out mapping schema.org and Wikidata properties? There is now a ticket for coordination.
  • The new Content Translation tool uses Wikidata data to suggest the correct article to link to when translating a Wikipedia article to another language
  • Using GNOME Shell? There is a Wikidata search provider for you.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: award shared with, native label, pollenizer, pollination
  • You can influence the languages shown in the "in other languages box" by adding a bable box to your user page like here.
• Development
  • More work on header section redesign
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 2.5
  • Broke and fixed JSON dumps - sorry!
  • Implemented entity change subscription service
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:08, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-05

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

Recent software changes

• You can now translate articles with the new ContentTranslation tool on several wikis. [103]

This week

• There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [104]

Future changes

• You can join a project to improve WikiProjects. [105]
• The Compact Personal Bar will be removed for now. It has a bug that breaks the tool to choose your language. It will come back when the bug is fixed. [106]

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

16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #143

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

• Discussions
  • Closed RfAs: Eurodyne (unsuccessful)
  • Open RfAs: BlackBeast
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: MediaWiki Developer Summit
  • Past: FOSDEM
  • Upcoming: ArtBytes hackathon
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • ATOM feeds for changes in Wikidata Query results. Define your own to keep an eye on changes in specific topics
  • Overview of the number of visual artworks items on Wikidata by creator (>5 items)
  • The Wikidata Free Image Search Tool can now also search Commons (not just follow language links)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: British Museum person-institution, Sächsische Biografie, equivalent class, LfDS object ID, DAAO identifier
  • Newest WikiProjects: Authority control
• Development
  • Fixed diffs not showing old ranks, qualifiers and references on the left side (phabricator:T87096)
  • Worked on several date and time related issues, like incorrect padding of the year to 11 instead of 16 digits (phabricator:T87764)
  • Further work on header section redesign (phabricator:T75654)
  • Started redesign of statements section (phabricator:T87316)
  • Introduced a hint showing the language when a language fallback is used on an item or property (phabricator:T85105)
  • Working on splitting a Wikibase View component out of the Wikibase Repo code base
  • Currently testing how PHPCS and PHPMD can help raising Wikibase’ code quality
  • Released Wikibase DataModelSerialization 1.3 with language fallback support
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:20, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-06

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

Problems

• There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [107]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
• The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [108]
• You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [109] [110]

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

16:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #144

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

• Discussions
  • Open RfAs: BlackBeast
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Upcoming: Eurpeana Tech
  • Andrew Su gave a talk about crowd sourcing and citizen science for biology including Wikidata (slides)
  • Going to Wikimania? Apply for a scholarship.
  • Internet Archive, Wikidata and Open Education
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikibooks will get access to language links via Wikidata on February 24th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks.
  • Roughly 17000 of the candidate articles that Google identified as potentially being about the same topic but lacking a language link have been merged. About 17500 are remaining and waiting for you to go through them via https://tools.wmflabs.org/yichengtry/
  • Mix'n'Match got a face lift
  • Magnus says every day new images are added to over 1000 items \o/
  • RStats client for Wikidata
  • Reasonator now also supports biography texts in French
• Did you know?
  • Showcase items: Lucy (first name)
• Development
  • Did more work on Capiunto to get it into a state where it can be deployed to Wikimedia sites.
  • Mourned Titan (phabricator:T88550) as its developers were bought up. Began evaluation for which graph database to use instead for a Wikidata query service (mw:Wikibase/Indexing)
  • Further work on header section redesign
  • Tweaks to the sitelink section
  • Worked on making monolingual text datatype accept more languages
  • Finished showing the language when a language fallback is used
  • Started looking into fixing the existing Guided Tours after Guided Tours extension API changes
  • Worked on implementing Lua convenience functions for rendering arbitrary Snaks. This is useful for displaying references or qualifiers. (phabricator:T76213)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 17:54, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-07

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

Recent software changes

• You can now use {{#lsth: PageName | SectionName }} to transclude a section with its title. [111]

Problems

• MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [112]
• UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [113]
• All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [114]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
• You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [115] [116] [117]
• You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [118] [119]
• It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [120]
• You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).

Future changes

• Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [121]
• In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [122]

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

16:26, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #145

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Past: Europeana Tech
  • Wir lieben Freie Software
  • Mapping resources using open knowledge: starting with books!
  • New recommendations outline ways to strengthen Europeana’s future relationship with Wikimedia
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Spiffy new project building on top of Wikidata: inventaire.io. Check out this example entry!
  • You will now see when a language fallback for a label is used on an item or property. The language name will be shown next to it.
  • Automatic descriptions for Wikidata items by Magnus
  • The templates for adding badges (good article, featured article, etc) to articles on Wikipedia in the sidebar are getting removed from articles rapidly in favor of getting that information from Wikidata \o/ German Wikipedia even deleted those templates already. English Wikipedia seems to be getting close.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Journalisted ID, Biography at the Bundestag of Germany, Metacritic ID
  • Newest WikiProjects: Identical Twins
• Development
  • <3
  • We are hiring! Passionate about Wikidata and know your way around Java Script and co? Apply!
  • We'll spend the next week working with Nik and Stas from WMF to move queries forward in Berlin
  • Worked on implementing a Lua interface for arbitrary Snak rendering. This can be used to render eg. qualifiers or references in Wikipedia infoboxes.
  • Did groundwork for Lua convenience functions that render data in the user’s interface language, rather than the content language (for multilingual wikis, like Commons or Wikidata only)
  • Did further work on making the Lua interface code nicer and share code with the parser functions
  • Removed input method selector in the sitelink input as it was hiding the actual input and not very useful there
  • Fixed some issues in diff views showing new data instead of old data
  • Created a few scripts to make it easier for 3rd parties to install Wikibase
  • Fixed icinga notification that tests if dispatch lag gets high
  • Investigated several issues regarding storage of time values and started fixing them
  • Fixed editing of qualifiers
  • Fixed most browser tests after introduction of new header design
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:25, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-08

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

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
• On Wednesday your Meta user page will be shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. [123] [124] [125]
• You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [126]
• In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [127]
• The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first.​ [128]

Meetings

• The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [129]
• You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [130]
• You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [131]

Future changes

• You can comment on a proposal about abandoned Labs tools.

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

17:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #146

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

• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Asking ever bigger questions with Wikidata
  • Wikidata4Research meetup in Berlin
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • As announced Wikibooks is getting access to Wikidata for their sitelinks on 24th. Coordination at d:Wikidata:Wikibooks
  • ViziData
  • Update on data quality project
  • Update on structured data for Commons
  • Using mw.wikibase.getEntity in a Lua module? Please read this.
  • Number of visual artworks items by property (type, genre, creator...) on Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: operty:P1721|pinyin transliteration]], posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, SANDRE ID, brand
  • Showcase items:Montblanc
• Development
  • Still looking for an awesome frontend developer to join the team
  • Met with Nik and Stas from WMF in Berlin for a week to move query functionality forward. Made good progress on evaluating backends and languages
  • Worked on RDF mapping/export
  • Introduced mw.wikibase.renderSnak(s) for rendering arbitrary Snaks in Lua. This can be used for rendering for example qualifiers or references.
  • Made it so that links in the “other projects” sidebar are alphabetically ordered
  • Made the diff views for dates easier to read
  • Continued work on the planned Wikibase View component
  • Continued work on header redesign
  • Worked on a new special page that lets you set label, description and aliases in one page
  • Fixed all browsertests to use new header section and adjusted them to use phantomjs
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • d:Wikidata:Glossary could use some serious simplification to make it easier to understand. Can you help?
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 20:45, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-09

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 software changes

• All new accounts are now global. [132]
• Your Meta user page is now shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can report problems if you see any. You can ask a bot to delete your old user pages. [133] [134] [135]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
• It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [136]
• It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [137]
• Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [138]
• Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [139]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
• Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [140]

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

16:28, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #147

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

• Discussions
  • RfC: Reforming administrator inactivity criteria
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Platypus - a speaking interface for Wikidata
  • Past: Wikidata for Research meetup
  • Past: GLAMhack (two of the results: The Endless Story and a family tree)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata reached 200,000,000 edits
  • Welcome Wikibooks! Wikibooks now gets its language links via Wikidata as well.
  • Vote for your favorite Wikimania submissions. Here are the Wikidata related ones.
  • New release of the Wikidata Toolkit with lots of good stuff.
  • There are now over 30,000 objects in OpenStreetMap tagged with a Wikidata ID. Can you add more?
  • Want to see where we want infoboxes to go with Wikidata? Check out the infobox fromage on French Wikipedia. Have a look at the wiki text here.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Naturbase ID, Fach, AllMusic song ID, AllMusic album ID, AllMusic artist ID, Flora of North America ID, Florentine musea Inventario 1890 ID, beats per minute
  • Newest WikiProjects: Cheese, Filming Locations
  • Showcase items: None this week. Yours next week?
  • You can listen to Wikidata (setting at the bottom)
• Development
  • Chaged a number of Lua modules (from deprecated function mw.wikibase.getEntity to mw.wikibase.getEntityObject)
  • Updated the json documentation
  • Always link to Wikidata on client pages that don’t have any langlinks. This affects users without JavaScript and logged out users, logged in users will still see the link item dialog. gerrit:168632
  • Fixes for the Wikibase qunit Jenkins job
  • Made Vagrant git-update also properly update Wikibase and dependencies
  • Fix for phabricator:T88254 (malformatted Wikidata entries appearing in Watchlist RSS feed in clients)
  • Final touches on new header design
  • Investigated how we can provide language fallback also in suggestions when search or adding new statements
  • More work on allowing additional languages in monolingual text datatype
  • Added missing backend piece for quantities with units. Now the remaining piece is the user interface.
  • Enabled Wikibase Client on Wikibooks
• Monthly Tasks
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher 12:46, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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

Recent software changes

• A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [141]
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
• You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [142] [143]

Software changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
• You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
• Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [144] [145] [146] [147]
• The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [148]
• The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [149]

Meetings

• You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
• You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [150]

Future changes

• You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [151]

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

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)