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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?
Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.
If you enable the Beta Feature for "⧼visualeditor-preference-visualdiffpage-label⧽", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.
Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.
In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.
This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence. An arrow indicates that the paragraph changed location.
You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.
The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges. [1]
The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. This tool has been used at the English Wikipedia for a long time. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be tricky for admins to set up. Other wikis can have this service, too. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.
Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. This has already been enabled at the English Wikipedia. If you want columns for a long list of footnotes on this wiki, you can use either <references /> or the plain (no parameters) {{reflist}} template. If you edit a different wiki, you can request multi-column support for your wiki. [3]
If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!
Community ban discussions must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
A change to the administrator inactivity policy has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
A change to the banning policy has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.
Technical news
CheckUsers are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
The edit filter has a new featurecontains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.
And so ends the first round of the competition, with 4 points required to qualify for round 2. With 53 contestants qualifying, the groups for round 2 are slightly smaller than usual, with the two leaders from each group due to qualify for round 3 as well as the top sixteen remaining users.
Our top scorers in round 1 were:
Aoba47 led the field with a featured article, 8 good articles and 42 GARs, giving a total of 666 points.
FrB.TG , a WikiCup newcomer, came next with 600 points, gained from a featured article and masses of bonus points.
Ssven2, another WikiCup newcomer, was in third place with 403 points, garnered from a featured article, a featured list, a good article and twelve GARs.
Ceranthor, Numerounovedant, Carbrera, Farang Rak Tham and Cartoon network freak all had over 200 points, but like all the other contestants, now have to start again from scratch. A good achievement was the 193 GARs performed by WikiCup contestants, comparing very favourably with the 54 GAs they achieved.
Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 1 but before the start of round 2 can be claimed in round 2. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.
If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Cwmhiraeth (talk) and Vanamonde (talk) 15:27, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
Bots Newsletter, March 2018
Bots Newsletter, March 2018
Greetings!
Here is the 5th issue of the Bots Newsletter (formerly the BAG Newletter). You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.
While there were no large-scale bot-related discussion in the past few months, you can check WP:BOTN and WT:BOTPOL (and their corresponding archives) for smaller issues that came up.
The edit summary limit has been increased to 1000 characters (see T6715). If a bot you operate relied on the old truncation limit (255 characters), please review/update your code, as overly long summaries can be disruptive/annoying. If you want to use extra characters to have more information in your edit summary, please do so intelligently.
You will soon be able to ping users from the edit summary (see T188469). If you wish to use this feature in your bot, please do so intelligently.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
On Special:AbuseLog you can now choose to list only actions that actually made an edit. Other actions are when the filter warned the editor or blocked the edit from being made. There are also more search options. [6][7]
Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor, but it is complex. The tool will now warn in the JavaScript console if the configuration isn't correct. Soon Citoid will disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it. [8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 March. It will be on all wikis from 8 March (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 7 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
In the future you will be able to use global preferences. This means you could change a preference for all wikis instead of having to change it every time for each wiki. You can now test global preferences and give feedback.
Significantly (on average to 1/4th) reduced the number of changes from Wikidata showing up on the watchlists and recent changes on Wikipedias and the other sister projects. This way changes that do not affect an article should no longer show up. We're still holding off roll-out to Commons, Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Armenian Wikipedia because of scalability concerns.
Working on optimizing one of the largest database tables (wb_terms) (phab:T188279)
Fixing a bug on how Wikidata changes are shown on Wikipedia (phab:T189320)
Continued addressing security review issues for Wikibase-Lexeme extension (phab:T186726)
Final note from Léa: thanks to people who participated to the feedback page! Today's Weekly Summary is already improved thanks to your suggestions. Feel free to add more comments, and feel free to edit the newsletter yourself: all small contributions are welcome :)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Page Previews has been updated to use HTML for previews. This has fixed many issues. An A/B test was done on English and German Wikipedia to measure how it is used. Other changes were also made. [10]
Some edits have to be checked against too many conditions before they can trigger an abuse filter. If that is the reason no filter is triggered the edit will be tagged for review. [11]
Auto-saving has been added to the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. Right now it is meant to help if your browser crashes or if you accidentally close a tab. [12]
Problems
The abuse filter did not tag all edits that should have been tagged after last week's MediaWiki version had come to the wikis. It was fixed on 9 March (UTC). [13]
Changes later this week
You can notify users in edit summaries. They will get a ping just as if they had been mentioned on a wiki page. This was originally planned to happen last week. [14]
It is now possible to specify the block parameters for each filter in Special:AbuseFilter. The parameters include block duration and if the user should be blocked from editing their own talk page. The block duration is separate for anonymous and registered users. [15][16]
A hundred Wikimedia wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 13 and 14 March. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [17][18][19]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 March. It will be on all wikis from 15 March (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 March at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 14 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street
(note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location)
We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Megs (talk)
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
On March 12 early morning UTC, the number of 503 error messages increased due to an issue on esams datacenter. It has been fixed. [20]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 March. It will be on all wikis from 22 March (calendar).
Meetings
There is no Editing team meeting this week.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 21 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
From April 4, the autopatrol status of edits will only be accessible in the Recent Changes database table, so only for 30 days. [21][22]
In-Context Help and Onboarding is a new project, aiming to improve retention of new wiki editors. The goal is to give them short tutorials and other training experiences based on their activity. Collaboration team is expecting feedback and comments on the project talk page, especially from people working with newcomers.
The property suggestions were updated last week, the last update was in December 2017. The most noticable effect is the higher ranking of "family name" (P734) on items about people. Input about the suggester is still welcome.
George, le deuxième texte (fr), a website querying Wikidata to find French female authors, in order to bring more diversity in the literature school programs
New, configurable download page for Mix’n’match catalogs (example)
Due to the winter storm warning, the WikiWednesday Salon & Skillshare scheduled for March 21st has been cancelled. Please consider attending one of the many edit-a-thons scheduled for this week. We look forward to editing with you soon!
Upcoming: EuropeanaTech and Wikidata Workshop Day for GLAMs, Rotterdam (NL), Monday 14 May. A day of GLAM-related workshops around Wikidata and Structured Commons, for beginners and advanced users.
New search code for Wikidata merged. You may notice the improvement in the search results output for Wikidata item. However, new code for search is not enabled, only new results format. The search code will be enabled next week.
Improving formatting of language and lexical category in diff for Lexemes (phab:T189679)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
Some of the interface icons and text sizes will change slightly, as part of the updates for improved accessibility and consistency. These icons are used in many features, including Notifications, Recent Changes, Beta Features, Visual Editor, 2017 Wikitext Editor, Code Editor, and others. While editor toolbars, dialogs, and menus will appear slightly bigger; elements on special pages will be slightly smaller. Functionality will not change. [23][24]
The deprecated #toc and #toctitle CSS ids have been removed. If your wiki was still using these for fake Tables of Content (ToC) then these might lose their styling. They can be replaced with .toc and .toctitle classes where appropriate. [25]
TemplateStyles will be deployed to the Wikivoyages on 28 March 2018. [26]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 March. It will be on all wikis from 29 March (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 March at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be one hour earlier than usual on 28 March at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
From 9 April, the sort order of categories will be distorted for a short time. We are upgrading versions of an internationalisation library (ICU) and using a maintenance script to update existing database entries. This will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on wiki size. Read more details. [27]
Changes are coming to search for Serbian projects. Cyrillic and Latin variants of a word and different grammatical forms of a word will be able to find each other. Read more on MediaWiki in Serbian or English.
G'day all, please be advised that throughout April 2018 the Military history Wikiproject is running its annual backlog elimination drive. This will focus on several key areas:
tagging and assessing articles that fall within the project's scope
adding or improving listed resources on Milhist's task force pages
updating the open tasks template on Milhist's task force pages
creating articles that are listed as "requested" on the project's various lists of missing articles.
As with past Milhist drives, there are points awarded for working on articles in the targeted areas, with barnstars being awarded at the end for different levels of achievement.
The drive is open to all Wikipedians, not just members of the Military history project, although only work on articles that fall (broadly) within the scope of military history will be considered eligible. This year, the Military history project would like to extend a specific welcome to members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red, and we would like to encourage all participants to consider working on helping to improve our coverage of women in the military. This is not the sole focus of the edit-a-thon, though, and there are aspects that hopefully will appeal to pretty much everyone.
The drive starts at 00:01 UTC on 1 April and runs until 23:59 UTC on 30 April 2018. Those interested in participating can sign up here.
ACTRIAL's six month experiment restricting new page creation to (auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.
Paid editing
Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary.
Subject-specific notability guidelines
The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.
News
The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.
Administrators who have been desysopped due to inactivity are now required to have performed at least one (logged) administrative action in the past 5 years in order to qualify for a resysop without going through a new RfA.
Editors who have been found to have engaged in sockpuppetry on at least two occasions after an initial indefinite block, for whatever reason, are now automatically considered banned by the community without the need to start a ban discussion.
There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee is considering a change to the discretionary sanctions procedures which would require an editor to appeal a sanction to the community at WP:AE or WP:AN prior to appealing directly to the Arbitration Committee at WP:ARCA.
Miscellaneous
A discussion has closed which concluded that administrators are not required to enable email, though many editors suggested doing so as a matter of best practice.
The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team has released the Interaction Timeline. This shows a chronologic history for two users on pages where they have both made edits, which may be helpful in identifying sockpuppetry and investigating editing disputes.
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
Template Wizard script available for testing. It will show up as a puzzle-piece icon in the 2010 WikiEditor. You can click on the icon to insert a template.
The Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey is to be sent to participants around the world this week. If you are volunteer developer, and have contributed code to any pieces of MediaWiki, gadgets, or tools, please take 20 to 40 minutes to complete the survey.
Problems
MediaWiki deployment train has been rolled back to version 1.31.0-wmf.26 on week 13, due to a multiplication of lost connections during MySQL queries. Some of the recent changes may have not been applied. They will be deployed next week. [28][29][30]
The Notifications badge icons were overlapping other links. This has been fixed. [31]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 April. It will be on all wikis from 5 April (calendar).
User subpages ending in .json will now be protected from other people editing them, like .js and .css pages already are. If you have a tool that stores static configuration, you can now use a subpage like User:Example/mygadget.json to do this without concerns. [32]
Tidy will be replaced by RemexHtml on the next set of wikis. On April 4, we plan to turn off Tidy on all Wikiquotes (except frwikiquote) and Wikimedia chapters and user groups wikis. 23 wikis will have Tidy replaced this time. [33][34][35]
AbuseFilter will transition to use OOUI starting April 4, and the rule editor will also be changed to a CodeEditor (ACE) similar to what is found on user JavaScript pages. The move to OOUI will continue over the next few weeks. [36][37]
In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [38]
You can see names of individual abuse filters in Special:AbuseLog. Now if the name of an abuse filter contains some wikisyntax like links, it will not change to a link when displayed. [39]
You can now search through filter patterns at Special:AbuseFilter. You may specify either a plain string or a regular expression and the matching filters will show a snippet of their pattern with the match highlighted. [40]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 3 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
If you're using, creating or improving Lua modules, you can give your feedback to help harmonizing the modules across wikis and add more useful functions.
On April 11th, we plan to turn off Tidy on all wikis with less than 50 entries in all high priority linter categories. About 60 wikis will have Tidy replaced. Currently about 600 wikis have had Tidy replaced and we have another 300 wikis to go. We plan to finish this transition from Tidy to RemexHtml by end of June 2018. Please follow T175706 to monitor progress of Tidy replacement. [41][42]
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