User talk:John Broughton/Archive 18 2014

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Happy New Year John Broughton!

Happy New Year!
Hello John Broughton:
Thanks for all of your contributions to improve the encyclopedia for Wikipedia's readers, and have a happy and enjoyable New Year! Cheers, BusterD (talk) 06:44, 1 January 2014 (UTC)



Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year 2014}} to user talk pages with a friendly message.

The Signpost: 01 January 2014

Tech News: 2014-02

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 2. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on January 7 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 9 (calendar).
  • The old note-taking site (Etherpad) was removed on December 30, 2013. You can see most of the documents on the new site. [1]

Problems

  • On January 2, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage projects were broken for 2 hours due to language cache update issues.
  • On the same day, it was not possible to edit most wikis for about 30 minutes, due to a database replication problem.

Future software changes

  • The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the default search method for Italian Wikipedia, French Wikisource, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage sites, and as a second search method for the German Wikipedia and all Wikibooks sites on January 6. [2]
  • Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedia users will also be able to enable CirrusSearch in their Beta Features options. [3]
  • Plural form rules for some languages will be changed. Many translations of the user interface for Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and other languages will need to be changed. [4] [5] [6]
  • You will see a warning when you try to delete a page linked to from other pages. [7] [8]
  • You will be able to hide redirect pages on the list of protected pages. [9] [10]
  • You will be able to use keyboard shortcuts in the Translate tool, by pressing Alt+1 and similar key groups. [11] [12]
  • E-mails sent by MediaWiki will include the name of the site in their From: line. You will be able to change this name on your wiki by editing the MediaWiki:Emailsender page. [13] [14]
  • Images viewed in the Beta Features media viewer will load faster. [15] [16]

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

08:35, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Another request

Hi John. If you have time, I was wondering if you could help take a look at a couple fairly minor Request Edits for Hightail here and Viralheat here. CorporateM (Talk) 23:49, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM: Sure, glad to help out. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:05, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-03

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

You can read a recent blog post about how Tech News is put together, translated and sent to you across wikis each week.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 9. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 14, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 16 (calendar).
  • Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons may be slow due to a search engine issue. [17]

VisualEditor news

  • VisualEditor will be added for all users on several Wikipedias on January 13. [18]
  • You can now add and remove __NOTOC__, __FORCETOC__ and __NOEDITSECTION__ in the page metadata menu. [19] [20] [21]

Problems

  • For a few hours on January 6, it was not possible to edit pages using the Translate tool on Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimania 2013 wiki, due to a settings error. [22] [23]
  • For about 20 minutes on January 9, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

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

09:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Books & Bytes New Years Double Issue

Books & Bytes

Volume 1 Issue 3, December/January 2013

(Sign up for monthly delivery)

Happy New Year, and welcome to a special double issue of Books & Bytes. We've included a retrospective on the changes and progress TWL has seen over the last year, the results of the survey TWL participants completed in December, some of our plans for the future, a second interview with a Wiki Love Libraries coordinator, and more. Here's to 2014 being a year of expansion and innovation for TWL!

The Wikipedia Library completed the first 6 months of its Individual Engagement grant last week. Here's where we are and what we've done:

Increased access to sources: 1500 editors signed up for 3700 free accounts, individually worth over $500,000, with usage increases of 400-600%
Deep networking: Built relationships with Credo, HighBeam, Questia, JSTOR, Cochrane, LexisNexis, EBSCO, New York Times, and OCLC
New pilot projects: Started the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar project to empower university-affiliated Wikipedia researchers
Developed community: Created portal connecting 250 newsletter recipients, 30 library members, 3 volunteer coordinators, and 2 part-time contractors
Tech scoped: Spec'd out a reference tool for linking to full-text sources and established a basis for OAuth integration
Broad outreach: Wrote a feature article for Library Journal's The Digital Shift; presenting at the American Library Association annual meeting
...Read Books & Bytes!

VisualEditor newsletter for Janaury 2014

Did you know?

To add templates, go to the "Insert" menu and choose the "Transclusion" (puzzle piece) item. Enter the name of the template and click "Add template". If TemplateData exists for the template, then a list of possible parameters will appear. If not, you can add parameters yourself by typing the parameter name under "Add parameter". For unnamed parameters, use numbers ("1" for the first unnamed parameter).

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked mostly minor features and fixing bugs. A few significant bugs include working around a bug in CSSJanus that was wrongly flipping images used in some templates in right-to-left (RTL) environments (bug 50910) a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed (bug 59002), a major but quickly resolved problem due to an unannounced change in MediaWiki core, which caused VisualEditor to crash on trying to save (bug 59867). This last bugs did not appear on any Wikipedia. Additionally, significant work has been done in the background to make VisualEditor work as an independent editing system.

As of today, VisualEditor is now available as an opt-out feature to all users at 149 active Wikipedias.

  • The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has a very basic set of characters. The character inserter is especially important for languages that use Latin and Cyrillic alphabets with unusual characters or frequent diacritics. Your feedback on the character inserter is requested. In addition to feedback from any interested editor, the developers would particularly like to hear from anyone who speaks any of the 50+ languages listed under Phase 5 at mw:VisualEditor/Rollouts, including Breton, Mongolian, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Macedonian, and Azerbaijani.
  • meta:Office hours on IRC have been heavily attended recently. The next one will be held this coming Wednesday, 22 January at 23:00 UTC.
  • You can now edit some of the page settings in the "options" dialog – __NOTOC__ and __FORCETOC__ as selection (forced on, forced off, or default setting; bugs 56866 and 56867) and __NOEDITSECTION__ as a checkbox (bug 57166).
  • The automated browser tests were adjusted to speed them up and bind more correctly to list items in lists, and updated to a newer version of their ruby dependencies. You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server.
  • Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide was updated recently to show some new and upcoming features.

Looking ahead: The character formatting menu on the toolbar will get a drop-down indicator next Thursday. The reference and media items will be the first two listed in the Insert menu. The help menu will get a page listing the keyboard shortcuts. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including support for alignment (left, right, and center) and better control over image size (including default and upright sizes). The developers are also working on support for editing redirects and image galleries.

Subscriptions to this newsletter are managed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Please add or remove your name to change your subscription settings. If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:08, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2014

January 2014

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Seattle Seahawks may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:
  • title=Top 10 controversial calls |publisher=Nfl.com |date=2010-06-03 |accessdate=2013-08-10}}</ref>). Before 2005, Seattle had the longest drought of playoff victories of any NFL team, dating back to

Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 03:49, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-04

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

Recent software changes

VisualEditor news

  • In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
  • You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [34]
  • You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [35]
  • When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [36]
  • When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [37] [38]
  • The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [39]
  • Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [40]

Problems

  • There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [41]
  • There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [42]
  • On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [43]

Future software changes

Orange bar with new messages
  • If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [44] [45]
  • You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [46]
  • You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [47]
  • You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [48] [49]

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

10:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-05

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

Recent software changes

  • Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video. [50]
  • The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff. [51]
  • The Special:ActiveUsers page will be removed because it's too slow. [52]
  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).

Problems

Future software changes

  • You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [54]

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

09:46, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Yelp, Inc.

I have a COI. I would like to bring it up to GA, but it's been slow-going. Would you be willing to spend some time on it with me? The most glaring thing that comes to mind right now is the "Controversies" section, which is out-of-line with WP:Criticisms. It seemed like there was prior support for either "Integrity of reviews" or to spread it out through the article, but nobody edited boldly and instead the title of the section got increasingly worse. Also, I asked for it to be de-flated because it previously used a lot of low-quality sources to inflate it, but they trimmed too much and my comments about adding how the whole controversy got started went ignored.

It's hard to find someone willing to chip in on an article that may require more involvement and where editors disagree on some things (user:Wikidemon and user:Candleabracadabra for example disagree on the wording of the Lead and could use a third-party to review the arguments and see what can be worked out). I've seen in my prior pings that you really take the time to read sources and edit independently, so I thought I would try my luck. CorporateM (Talk) 15:16, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-06

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
  • Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis. [55] [56]
  • The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles. [57] [58]
  • You can now link to diffs using [[Special:Diff/12345]] and similar links. [59]
  • There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages. [60]
  • Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. [61]
  • All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons. [62]

VisualEditor news

  • You can now see a list of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Ctrl+/ inside VisualEditor. [63]

Future software changes

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

08:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 January 2014

FYI

A proposal has been made to create a Live Feed to enhance the processing of Articles for Creation and Drafts. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC to create a 'Special:NewDraftsFeed' system. Your comments are welcome. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:36, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-07

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
  • The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [74] [75] [76] [77] [78]
  • You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [79]

VisualEditor news

  • You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [80] [81]
  • The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [82] [83] [84]

Problems

  • On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [85]
  • On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes

  • Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [86] [87]
  • You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [88]
  • You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [89] [90]
  • The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster. [91]
  • Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [92] [93]
  • It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [94]
  • You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [95]
  • You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [96] [97]
  • If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode. [98]
  • Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas. [99]
  • bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest. [100]
  • The <poem> tag will be renamed to <lines>. The old tag will still work. [101]

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

09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-08

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
  • You can now use the list of active users again. [102] [103]
  • The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [104]
  • You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [105]
  • You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014. [106]

Problems

  • On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem. [107]
  • On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue. [108]
  • On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
  • There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
  • On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news

  • The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [109]
  • You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [110]
  • Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [111]
  • You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [112] [113] [114]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor Newsletter—February 2014

Did you know?
Click this image to see the details.

You can easily re-use references by going to the Insert menu, choosing "Reference", and clicking on "Use an existing reference" in the lower left corner. A list of all references, their numbers, and their ref names (if any) will be shown. You can search the list for any author, title, date, or other keyword. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some small changes to the user interface, such as moving the reference item to the top of the Insert menu, as well as some minor features and fixing bugs, especially for rich copying and pasting of references.

The biggest change was the addition of more features to the image dialog, including the ability to set alignment (left, right, center), framing options (thumbnail, frame, frameless, and none), adding alt text, and defining the size manually. There is still some work to be done here, including a quick way to set the default size.

  • The main priority is redesigning the reference dialog, with the goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs and URLs and streamlining the process. Current concept drawings are available at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.
  • A few bugs in the existing reference dialog were fixed. The toolbar was simplified to remove galleries and lists from the reference dialog. When you re-use references, it now correctly displays the references again, rather than just the number and name. If you paste content into a dialog that can't fit there (e.g. ==section headings== in references), it now strips out the inappropriate HTML.
  • You can now edit image galleries inside VisualEditor. At this time, the gallery tool is a very limited option that gives you access to the wikitext. It will see significant improvements at a later date.
  • The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu is being redesigned. Your feedback on the special character inserter is still wanted, especially if you depend on Wikipedia's character inserters for your normal editing rather than using the ones built into your computer.
  • You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu (three bars next to the Cancel button) (T54844).
  • If you edit categories, your changes will now display correctly after saving the page (T50560).
  • Saving the page should be faster now (T61660).
  • Any community can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData by leaving a note at T53734.

Looking ahead: The link tool will tell you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. The warning about wikitext will hide itself after you remove the wikitext markup in that paragraph. Support for creating and editing redirects is in the pipeline. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including default and upright sizes. The developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments, some behavioral magic words like DISPLAYTITLE, and in-line language setting (dir="rtl").

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 04:21, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-09

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

Recent software changes

VisualEditor news

  • You will soon be able to add and edit __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__ in the page settings menu. [117] [118] [119]
  • You will soon be able to use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘+Opt+S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor. [120] [121]
  • You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window. [122] [123]

Future software changes

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

10:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 4

Books and Bytes

Volume 1, Issue 4, February 2014

News for February from your Wikipedia Library.

Donations drive: news on TWL's partnership efforts with publishers

Open Access: Feature from Ocaasi on the intersection of the library and the open access movement

American Library Association Midwinter Conference: TWL attended this year in Philadelphia

Royal Society Opens Access To Journals: The UK's venerable Royal Society will give the public (and Wikipedians) full access to two of their journal titles for two days on March 4th and 5th

Going Global: TWL starts work on pilot projects in other language Wikipedias

Read the full newsletter


MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:00, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-10

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
  • When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts. [130]
  • You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [131] [132]
  • You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis. [133]
  • The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list. [134]

VisualEditor news

  • You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [135] [136] [137]
  • If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged. [138]
  • Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. [139]
  • VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [140] [141] [142]

Future software changes

Problems

  • For about an hour on February 23, there were problems with page loading due to a MediaWiki bug. [150]

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

09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

COI stuff

Hi John. I've been bugging a few editors hoping to get someone to fulfill my Request Edit here and review my AfC here. In both cases I have gotten some feedback on minor tweaks here and here respectively, but haven't been able to find anyone to actually make the edit per WP:COI. I'm being a little impatient knowing the AfC backlog is a month long. I was wondering if you had time to take a look and accept or reject the AfC, make the Request Edit, etc. if appropriate. CorporateM (Talk) 13:50, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM: I've taken care of the AfC request; I note that there seems to be a bad link for the image in the article, and that it's missing categories. I don't believe that adding categories involves COI issues (at least normally), so if you could fix that problem, it would be appreciated. I'll take a look at the edit request when I have a chance.
More generally, feel free to drop me a line whenever you've got an article in the AfC queue that's more than a week old. I do enjoy reviewing/editing well-sourced proposed articles. (Since most of the AfC submissions are not well =-sourced, I don't normally do AfC reviews.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:43, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! Yah, since trademarked images are not allowed in non-article space, I usually just leave a placeholder. I fixed the image and the categories. Fluffernutter said it could use an image and I may be able to obtain one of their showroom, but I am hesitant as to whether that would be promotional and if there is room for one on such a small article.
The SMS Audio one will be harder to compare the two versions, but I don't know what better way to do it, since many edits are needed and it would be even more tedious to describe them one-by-one. CorporateM (Talk) 20:59, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Hi John. Just a heads up, North got the SMS Audio page. If I haven't worn out my welcome, I could also use your input/collaboration here. CorporateM (Talk) 15:11, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Triumph International & Upromise

If I have not imposed too much of a burden on you yet as to wear out my welcome, I'd also love your input here and here. BTW, no rush, but I have also provided a cited text as a proposed improvement to the DARE article if you care to take a look here. CorporateM (Talk) 17:20, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM: I'd rather be involved in situations where you've not gotten any (adequate) response (say, in a week or so), or need a tie-breaker. So please let me know, later, if I'm still needed for any of these three situations. I'm always glad to help, but I prefer to give other editors adequate opportunity.
As an aside, one of the things you wanted me to look at are your comments about an article which you posted on this user talk page. A suggestion - it's generally better to put such comments on the article talk page, and then drop a note (I find the {{reply to}} template to be quite useful) on the user talk page. That way, future editors and readers can easily find the discussion. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:46, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
No problem! I'll be out-of-town next week, so I'll circle back either Friday or the week after around the 24th. CorporateM (Talk) 00:31, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Follow up

Hi John. My Talk page comments, Request Edits, COIN posts, etc. regarding DARE, Triumph International, and Upromise have not elicited a response. Unfortunately, I typically have to rely on pinging one of a handful of editors that are responsive to these types of requests. I'm about to go out of town for a week, so while I still have internet access, I wanted to make sure to follow up. If you do have time to take a look at the DARE text, I wouldn't mind taking the other two to someone else so I am not relying on you so heavily. CorporateM (Talk) 17:47, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM: I've added comments for each of the three that should, hopefully, move things along. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:58, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-11

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
  • You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [151] [152]

VisualEditor news

  • It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [153] [154]
  • It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [155]
  • VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [156]
  • We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [157]
  • You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [158] [159] [160]

Future software changes

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

09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-12

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf18) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 20 (calendar).
  • You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels. [166]
  • You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all small wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [167] [168]
  • You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014. [169]

VisualEditor news

  • Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [170] [171]
  • Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [172]
  • Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [173]

Future software changes

Problems

  • VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue. [177]

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

07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

AN/I discussion regarding Providence (religious movement)

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive833#Large amount of properly sourced content is being continually deleted from Providence Religious Movement Article. Sam Sailor Sing 11:08, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—March 2014

Did you know?
Click this image to see the details.

The template dialog has been simplified to make it faster and easier to add parameter data. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on changes to the template and image dialogs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks was the redesign of the template dialog. The template dialog now opens in a simplified mode that lists parameters and their descriptions. (The complex multi-item transclusion mode can be reached by clicking on "Show options" from inside the simplified template dialog.) Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing.  With today's update, searching for template parameters will become case-insensitive, and required template parameters will display an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. In addition to making it quicker and easier to see everything when you edit typical templates, this work was necessary to prepare for the forthcoming simplified citation dialog. The main priority in the coming weeks is building this new citation dialog, with the ultimate goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs, URLs, DOIs and other quick-fills. This will add a new button on the toolbar, with the citation templates available picked by each wiki's community. Concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.

  • The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. Pages that exist, but are not indexed by the search engine, are treated like non-existent pages (T56361).
  • Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from the paragraph you are editing.
  • The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has been slightly redesigned, to introduce larger buttons. Your suggestions for more significant changes to the special character inserter are still wanted.
  • The page options menu (three bars, next to the Cancel button) has expanded. You can create and edit redirect pages, set page options like __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__, and more.  New keyboard shortcuts are listed there, and include undoing the last action, clearing formatting, and showing the shortcut help window. If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
  • It is easier to edit images. There are more options and they are explained better. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size.  You can now set image sizes to the default, if another size was previously specified. Full support for upright sizing systems, which more readily adapt image sizes to the reader's screen size, is planned.
  • VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. These "slugs" are now smaller than normal blank lines, and are animated to be different from actual blank lines.
  • You can use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘ Command+⌥ Option+S shortcuts to open the save window, and you can preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
  • After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed to the Interlingual Occidental Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikibooks, and the French Wikiversity.
  • Any community can ask for custom icons for their language in the character formatting menu (bold, italic, etc.) by making a request on Bugzilla or by contacting Product Manager James Forrester.

The developers apologize for a regression bug with the deployment on 6 March 2014, which caused the incorrect removal of |upright size definitions on a handful of pages on the English Wikipedia, among others. The root cause was fixed, and the broken pages were fixed soon after.

Looking ahead:  Several template dialogs will become more compact. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. You will be able to see the Table of Contents change live as you edit the page, rather than it being hidden. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") may be offered to a few Wikipedias soon.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on 19 April 2014 at 2000 UTC. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:44, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-13

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf19) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 27 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

  • You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [178] [179]
  • Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [180]
  • You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [181]
  • You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [182]

Future software changes

  • Typography Refresh will be enabled for test wiki and MediaWiki.org users who use the Vector skin on March 27. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3. If you don't use Vector as your skin, you will not be affected.
  • You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
  • You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages. [183] [184]

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

18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Reference Errors on 28 March

Hello, I'm ReferenceBot. I have automatically detected that an edit performed by you may have introduced errors in referencing. It is as follows:

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, ReferenceBot (talk) 00:37, 29 March 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 March 2014

Tech News: 2014-14

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf20) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and all Wikipedia wikis on April 3 (calendar).
  • Typography Refresh was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3.
  • CirrusSearch, the new search tool, was enabled as a beta feature on over 30 new wikis on March 27. [185] [186]

VisualEditor news

  • Blocked users now see the same messages in VisualEditor as in the wikitext editor. [187] [188]
  • The search box for re-using a reference in VisualEditor is now cleared after each use. [189]
  • New links on sub-pages no longer point to the wrong location in VisualEditor. [190]
  • VisualEditor's media dialog no longer breaks when opening some types of images. [191]

Future software changes

  • You will not be able to use the Wikitech wiki for a short period around 16:00 UTC on April 1 due to a server change. [192]
  • CirrusSearch will become the main search engine for all non-Wikipedia wikis except Commons, Meta and Incubator on April 2.
  • You will soon be able to use a new special page listing duplicate files. [193]
  • Deleting a version of a file or a version of its description page will soon be shown differently in the logs. [194]

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

09:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for April 6

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Pabst Blue Ribbon, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Benetton (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 08:54, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 April 2014

Tech News: 2014-15

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf21) was scheduled to be deployed to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 3, however it was temporarily put on hold due to localization issues. (calendar).
  • Typography Refresh was enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and on all Wikipedias on April 3. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin.
  • CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on over 400 non-Wikipedia wikis on April 2. [195]

Future software changes

  • A new special page (Special:TrackingCategories) will soon list all the tracking categories on a wiki. [196] [197]
  • All Wikiquote projects will start using language links from Wikidata on April 8. [198]
  • The Hovercards feature will soon work with right-to-left languages. [199] [200]
  • You will soon be able to download files directly from MediaViewer, the new multimedia tool. [201]
  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. Comments are welcome.
  • You can help check that users can read CAPTCHAs in your language. [202]

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

08:00, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

SAS Institute

Hi John. I was wondering if you had any advice regarding this article (see my Talk page post here and the draft here). I'm actually cleaning up some classic COI mistakes I made when I authored the page three years ago, but at the same time, their reputation in the source material is gushingly positive. My draft so far is extremely toned down from the sources and it would still be the most positive article I have written in recent times, de-throning Noodles & Company, which is also a positive (but representative) article. When a page isn't "balanced" this tends to lead to assumptions that it is not representative, especially where a COI is involved and especially because COIs often make this argument of a positive article being representative falsely. Any thoughts? CorporateM (Talk) 22:50, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

@CorporateM: I've posted a counter-proposal of sorts on the article talk page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:50, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! There's nothing from you on the article Talk page though. Did you forget to hit Save Page? I do that sometimes. CorporateM (Talk) 04:22, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
@CorporateM: Fortunately, the browser tab was still open (I'd done preview, but not save), so I finished up. So yes, now there is something for you to look at. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:16, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
You are spot-on as always. Should I see if someone else may take an interest in the page or would you like to hang around to review the content, etc. as well? CorporateM (Talk) 16:50, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
@CorporateM: I'd like to be the final resort, generally. But as long as you've had something up for at least a week on a talk/discussion page without a (good) response by any other editor, I'm happy to get involved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:43, 13 April 2014 (UTC)
Coolio. It looks like User:Smartse may take an interest (*crosses fingers) and I know him to be an editor that can handle COI situations well. I don't mind waiting a couple weeks for an editor to get around to each section, just so long as I know someone will. Since the Request Edit queue isn't consistently managed, there's no consistency in scooting up the line and getting to the front of the queue over time. Anyways, thanks as always!! CorporateM (Talk) 16:53, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-16

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

We are looking for contributors to help write new issues every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
  • MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome. [203] [204] [205]
  • Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [206] [207]

VisualEditor news

  • You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click. [208]
  • The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
  • The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen. [209] [210]

Future software changes

  • The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17. [211] [212]
  • Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot). [213]
  • You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [214] [215] [216] [217]
  • Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list. [218]
  • You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [219] [220]
  • The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [221] [222]
  • An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [223]

Problems

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

07:18, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 5

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 5, March 2014
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

  • New Visiting Scholar positions
  • TWL Branch on Arabic Wikipedia, microgrants program
  • Australian articles get a link to librarians
  • Spotlight: "7 Reasons Librarians Should Edit Wikipedia"

Read the full newsletter

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:54, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-17

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

Tech News updates

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf1) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 22, and all Wikipedias on April 24 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled as a beta feature on 27 new wikis on April 18. [226] [227]
  • Problems with various fonts in SVG files were fixed last week. Files that use DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Serif Condensed, DejaVu Sans Light, Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts now show correctly. [228] [229] [230] [231]
  • The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [232]
  • You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [233]

VisualEditor news

  • If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [234] [235]
  • VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [236] [237]
  • You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [238] [239] [240]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Czech (cs), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), Hebrew (he), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Thai (th) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias on April 24. Feedback is welcome. [241]
  • Edits by anonymous users will now be marked with a new CSS class (mw-anonuserlink). This way, you can easily make those edits use a different color, font or background. [242] [243]
  • The user preference to remember login will soon be removed from all wikis. The edit review preferences will be moved to the recent changes tab, and the preference for the WikiLove tool will be moved to the editing tab. [244] [245] [246] [247]
  • You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [248] [249]
  • You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [250] [251]
  • It is now proposed to replace Bugzilla, Gerrit and other tools by a single tool called Phabricator. You can test Phabricator and add your opinion on MediaWiki.org. [252]
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on April 22 at 03:30 AM UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [253]

Problems

  • For about 40 minutes on April 17, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
  • There is a problem with the rendering of formulas with MathJax. If you enabled MathJax in your preferences, you might need to turn it off and on again. [254]

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

08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 April 2014

VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014

Did you know?

You can use VisualEditor to make redirects. First, remove any unwanted content from the page. Then go to the "Page options" menu (next to "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽") and choose the "Page settings" item. Click the box to "Redirect this page to". In the box, type in the name of the page that you want to redirect this page to.

You can also set or remove categories for the redirect in the "Page options" menu. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on performance improvements, image settings, and preparation for a simplified citation template tool in its own menu.

  • In an oft-requested improvement, VisualEditor now displays red links (links to non-existent pages) in the proper color. Links to sister projects and external URLs are still the same blue as local links.
  • You can now open templates by double-clicking them or by selecting them and pressing  Return.  This also works for references, images, galleries, mathematical equations, and other "nodes".
  • VisualEditor has been disabled for pages that were created as translations of other pages using the Translate extension (common at Meta and MediaWiki.org). If a page has been marked for translation, you will see a warning if you try to edit it using VisualEditor.
  • When you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor, the full protection notice and most recent log entry are displayed. Blocked users see the standard message for blocked users.
  • The developers fixed a bug that caused links on sub-pages to point to the wrong location.
  • The size-changing controls in the advanced settings section of the media or image dialog were simplified further. VisualEditor's media dialog supports more image display styles, like borderless images.
  • If there is not enough space on your screen to display all of the tabs (for instance, if your browser window is too narrow), the second edit tab will now fold into the drop-down menu (where the "Move" item is currently housed). On the English Wikipedia, this moves the "Edit beta" tab into the menu; on most projects, it moves the "Edit source" tab. This is only enabled in the default Vector skin, not for Monobook users. See this image for an example showing the "Edit source" and "View history" tabs after they moved into the drop-down menu.
  • After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed as an opt-in feature at Meta and on the French Wikinews.
The drop-down menu is on the right, next to the search box.

Looking ahead:  A new, locally controlled menu of citation templates will put citations immediately in front of users. You will soon be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) is being developed. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") will be offered as a Beta Feature soon. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Monday, 19 May 2014 at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this on your own page, subscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-18

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
  • You can now use interwiki prefix c: to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons. [255]

VisualEditor news

  • You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [256]
  • VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [257]
  • VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.

Future software changes

  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome. [258]
  • The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [259]
  • CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [260] [261]
  • You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [262]

Problems

  • For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [263] [264]
  • On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [265] [266]

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

07:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 April 2014

Tech News: 2014-19

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf3) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and all Wikipedias on May 8 (calendar).
  • The Compact Personal Bar was added as a beta feature to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added as a beta feature to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and to all Wikipedias on May 8. To test it, you can enable it now in your preferences on MediaWiki.org. [267]
  • It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool. [268]

VisualEditor news

  • External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. [269]
  • The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete. [270]
  • You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones. [271]
  • There is a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name for file names. [272][273]
  • Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users. [274] [275]
  • You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language. [276] [277]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Japanese (ja), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 8. Feedback is welcome. [278]
  • You can help translate about 100 new language names that have been added to our data source. They are used, for example, as hover text for interwiki links. Send an e-mail to Nemo if you want to help.
  • If you click on a redirect page in your watchlist, you will soon access the redirect itself. [279] [280]

Problems

  • For about 40 minutes around 00:20 UTC on April 29, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.

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

07:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Kuali

Because of the copyright violations, I suggest you take a copy off-line asap. I've killed the SD tags, but it's still deletable Jimfbleak - talk to me? 19:51, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 May 2014

Tech News: 2014-20

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf4) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 8. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and all Wikipedias on May 15 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

  • A new citation system in VisualEditor was enabled on the English Wikipedia. It will soon be enabled on more wikis. [281]
  • Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly. [282]

Future software changes

  • It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently. [283] [284]
  • You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API. [285] [286] [287] [288]
  • You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with Special:Flow. [289] [290]
  • The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work. [291]
  • The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded. [292] [293] [294]
  • MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on Wikimedia Commons on May 15. Feedback is welcome.
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on May 14 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [295]
  • Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead. [296]

Problems

  • There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error. [297] [298]

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

06:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-21

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

Tech News updates

  • Tech News is one year old this week; thank you for being with us!

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
  • The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work. [299] [300] [301]
  • MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome. [302] [303]
  • VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [304] [305]
  • You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.

VisualEditor news

  • VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys. [306] [307]
  • VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [308] [309]
  • VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [310] [311]
  • VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [312]
  • The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [313] [314]

Future software changes

Problems

  • For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [317]

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

07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—May 2014

Did you know?

The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates.  If your wiki has enabled the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, press "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.

  • There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction.  This allows editors who have opted in to use the "Language" tool in the "Insert" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this:  <span lang="en" dir="ltr">English</span>. This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
  • The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "⧼math-visualeditor-mwmathinspector-title⧽" item in the "Insert" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
  • The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field.  Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
  • TemplateData has been expanded:  You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones.  "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work.  There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names.  The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
  • Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
  • Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency.  The message shown when you "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽" out of an edit is clearer. The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie.  As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
  • Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
  • In the "Images and media" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
  • There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData.  You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box.  If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
  • There have been multiple small changes to the appearance:  External links are shown in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki.  This is a lighter shade of blue than the internal links.  The styling of the "Style text" (character formatting) drop-down menu has been synchronized with the recent font changes to the Vector skin.  VisualEditor dialogs, such as the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽" dialog, now use a "loading" animation of moving lines, rather than animated GIF images.  Other changes were made to the appearance upon opening a page in VisualEditor which should make the transition between reading and editing be smoother.
  • The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
  • At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead:  The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard.  The "Keyboard shortcuts" link will be moved out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 May 2014

Tech News: 2014-22

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 (calendar).
  • MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.

VisualEditor news

  • VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [318] [319] [320] [321]
  • A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [322] [323]
  • VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [324] [325]
  • It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [326]
  • VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [327]

Future software changes

  • Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [328]
  • It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [329] [330]
  • Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [331] [332] [333]
  • You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [334] [335]

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

08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 May 2014

Tech News: 2014-23

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [336]

VisualEditor news

  • Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [337]
  • The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [338] [339]
  • VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [340]
  • There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [341]

Future software changes

Problems

  • For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [348]

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

08:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

June 2014

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Wild Oats Markets may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "[]"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:
  • Inc., and Wild Oats Markets, Inc. |publisher= Federal Trade Commission |date=January 23, 2009] |accessdate=June 3, 2014}}</ref> In 2010, Luberski Inc., a West Coast based food distributor,

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 03:51, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 6

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 6, April-May 2014
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

  • New donations from Oxford University Press and Royal Society (UK)
  • TWL does Vegas: American Library Association Annual plans
  • TWL welcomes a new coordinator, resources for library students and interns
  • New portal on Meta, resources for starting TWL branches, donor call blitzes, Wikipedia Visiting Scholar news, and more

Read the full newsletter

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:59, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-24

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
  • You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [349] [350]

VisualEditor news

  • You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [351] [352]
  • The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [353] [354] [355]
  • You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [356] [357]

Future software changes

  • MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [358]
  • You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [359]
  • On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [360] [361]
  • You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [362] [363]
  • Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [364] [365] [366]
  • You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [367] [368]
  • Hovercards will no longer flicker. [369]

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

07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Citation bot

I think you've had some experience with discussing this: Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard#User:Citation bot - mass creation of sub-templates. Anything you have to add would be appreciated. -- Netoholic @ 19:00, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25

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

Reminder

  • You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
  • You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

  • You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [370]
  • When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [371] [372]
  • You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [373] [374] [375] [376]
  • The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [377] [378] [379]

Future software changes

  • Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [380]
  • You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [381]
  • You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [382] [383]
  • It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [384] [385]
  • Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [386]
  • The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [387]
  • An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
  • You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [388]

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

07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library: New Account Coordinators Needed

Hi Books & Bytes recipients: The Wikipedia Library has been expanding rapidly and we need some help! We currently have 10 signups for free account access open and several more in the works... In order to help with those signups, distribute access codes, and manage accounts we'll need 2-3 more Account Coordinators.

It takes about an hour to get up and running and then only takes a couple hours per week, flexible depending upon your schedule and routine. If you're interested in helping out, please drop a note in the next week at my talk page or shoot me an email at: jorlowitz@gmail.com. Thanks and cheers, Jake Ocaasi via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:41, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 June 2014

Tech News: 2014-26

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

  • You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [389] [390]
  • When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [391] [392]
  • You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [393] [394]
  • You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [395] [396]

Future software changes

  • You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [397] [398]
  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [399]
  • CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [400]
  • You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [401] [402]
  • An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [403]

Problems

  • On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
  • Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [404]

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

07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014

The character formatting menu

Did you know?

The character formatting menu, or "Style text" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

  • They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
  • You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
  • The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type  "date" for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and  "boolean" for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like {{citeweb}} → {{cite web}}) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
  • Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
  • They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead. 
  • It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
  • You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
  • The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki

Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-27

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

  • Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [405] [406]
  • A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [407] [408]
  • VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [409] [410] [411] [412]
  • Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [413] [414]

Future software changes

  • You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [415] [416]
  • Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
  • CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [417]
  • All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [418] [419]
  • Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [420]
  • You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [421] [422]
  • You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [423]

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

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-28

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

Tech News updates

  • We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [424]
  • It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [425] [426]
  • You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [427] [428]

VisualEditor news

  • Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [429] [430]
  • You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [431] [432] [433]
  • When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [434] [435] [436]
  • The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [437]
  • Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [438] [439] [440]

Future software changes

  • Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
  • A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [441]
  • If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [442] [443]
  • Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [444] [445]
  • Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [446] [447]

Problems

  • Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [448] [449]
  • For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [450] [451]

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

07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Pablo Ganguliwikipage

Hello we were thinking of ways to improve the Ganguli page. Is there a way to add more top media links and references about his recent achievements and news? also an image for the page? thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.217.154.20 (talk) 05:17, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, there is. Unfortunately, I don't have time to help on this. I strongly suggest that you post your question at WP:HD. Someone there is much more likely to be able to help you. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:26, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Invisalign

Hi John. Regarding a draft History section for this article, which I have submitted with a COI, I was wondering if you could take a look at the discussion here and weigh in? CorporateM (Talk) 17:28, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-29

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
  • It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis. [452] [453]
  • You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
  • You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.

VisualEditor news

  • The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles. [454] [455]
  • The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [456] [457] [458]
  • References will now be shown in the default font size again. [459]

Future software changes

  • CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16. [460]
  • The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [461] [462]
  • It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files. [463]
  • Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [464] [465]
  • Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis. [466] [467]
  • Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [468] [469]
  • Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [470]

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

07:48, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

National Retail Federation page created

John,

For the NRF page you created years ago, there are a few factual links that can be updated for the events listings: BIG Show - nrf.com/annual

The Washington Leadership Conference is now Retail Advocates Conference nrf.com/retailadvocates

NRF Loss Prevention Conference & EXPO is now NRF PROTECT nrf.com/nrfprotect

NRF Human Resources Executives Summit nrf.com/hrsummit

Shop.org Annual Summit – is the Shop.org Summit shop.org/summit

CMO Summit – corrected URL http://events.nrf.com/cmo14/Public/MainHall.aspx?ID=22780

NRF has also recently updated its logo, which one can find at https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalretailfederation/sets/72157644027640394/

Best, KyraQuilt KyraQuilt (talk) 19:05, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Retail Loss Prevention professional conferences

For the Retail Loss Prevention page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_loss_prevention, one area that may expand the page is a listing of professional conferences. Below is a list of major conferences and the organizations that host this functional area:

  • Food Marketing Institute (FMI) - Asset Protrection Conference
  • Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) - Retail Asset Protection Conference
  • Restaurant Loss Prevention & Security Association (RLPSA) - Restaurant Loss Prevention & Security Association Conference
  • National Retail Federation (NRF) - NRF PROTECT

KyraQuilt (talk) 19:10, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Trade shows of this sort rarely if ever rise to the level of notability. Wikipedia is not a directory, and a list such as you suggest has no place here. --Orange Mike | Talk 19:28, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
@Orangemike: As noted, Kyra and I are talking about improvements to the Retail loss prevention article. We'd want to have a reliable source for each trade show listed, of course. Assuming we do, I don't see a small section with a list as being in violation of WP:NOT. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:11, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-30

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
  • CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [471] [472] [473]
  • The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [474]
  • Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [475] [476]
  • A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [477]

VisualEditor news

  • Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [478]
  • All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [479]
  • You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [480]
  • Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [481] [482] [483] [484] [485] [486]

Future software changes

Problems

  • Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem. [490]

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

07:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-31

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
  • You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.

VisualEditor news

  • You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor. [491] [492]
  • The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit. [493]
  • If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters. [494] [495]
  • You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [496] [497]

Future software changes

  • You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [498] [499]
  • Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. [500]
  • It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [501] [502]

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

08:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 7

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 7, June-July 2014
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs)

  • Seven new donations, two expanded partnerships
  • TWL's Final Report up, read the summary
  • Adventures in Las Vegas, WikiConference USA, and updates from TWL coordinators
  • Spotlight: Blog post on BNA's impact on one editor's research

Read the full newsletter

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:20, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-32

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

Tech News updates

  • Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [503]
  • You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [504] [505] [506]
  • You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files. [507]
  • New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [508] [509]

VisualEditor news

Future software changes

  • You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [521] [522]
  • All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [523]
  • Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [524]

Problems

  • Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [525]
  • Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed. [526]

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

07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor's user guide

Hi John,

I don't know if you have any free time, but I'm updating mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide today and tomorrow. There have been many changes recently, which change a few workflows and invalidate most of the images. Are you interested in looking at it? I'm unfortunately working on a pretty tight deadline: a translation push starts on Wednesday morning at Wikimania (in London). Images can be easily updated later, but this will be our best chance to make major changes to the text this year. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Actually, I prefer to start with updated images, and revised the text accordingly - I find that much easier. I'd be happy to do the text if you do the images. (The images don't need to be inserted into the user manual; I just need to know where they are [what their names are].) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:13, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm updating images at mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Editing links right now, and working my way down the page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Great! I'll follow behind, changing the text. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:00, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
By the way, I'm using https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/Sandbox?veaction=edit&uselang=qqx to find out the auto-translating system names.
Also, what do you think about moving the section about citing references up higher? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
Lunch time, and then I've got to work on other things for a while, but I hope to get back to the reference section later today. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:44, 5 August 2014 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Yes, the citing references section should be higher up. If you don't do it, I'll move it one section higher (references are more important than, and more frequent than, editing images and other files, I'm sure). A good argument could be made to put it yet one section higher (before links are discussed), but I can see valid counterarguments (for example, if links are used within references). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:24, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I've finished the first six sections. The seventh, Templates, is problematical. Two of the first three screenshots need to be replaced, and that's as far as I got. Also, two screenshots near the end of what was section 6 (citations; now section 5) also need to be replaced. So my question to you is whether I should wait for you to do more screenshot replacements - in sections 7 to the end - or whether this cluster is just an anomaly, and I should continue editing to the end, because there is no reason to think that a lot more screenshots are wrong.

I've posted, at your talk page, more details about the four problematical screenshots, as well as two subsection headings I added that need to be "wrapped" in translation tags. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:31, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

In case it wasn't clear: you should assume that any image containing a "<" in the upper left corner or an "X" in the upper right corner is out of date. Before we started, it was probably half the (70) images on the page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—July and August 2014

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

Screenshot of VisualEditor's link tool
Dialog boxes in VisualEditor have been re-designed to use action words instead of icons. This has increased the number of items that need to be translated. The user guide is also being updated.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

  • Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
  • You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
  • All references and footnotes (<ref> tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Insert" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Insert" menu.
  • When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
  • All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
  • The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
  • The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-33

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

Recent software changes

  • Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [527]
  • Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [528]

VisualEditor news

  • Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14. [529]

Future software changes

  • Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser! [530] [531] [532]
  • If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning. [533] [534]
  • You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [535] [536]
  • An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [537]

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

07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Steve Harrison (candidate) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Steve Harrison (candidate) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Steve Harrison (candidate) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Boleyn (talk) 16:11, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-34

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

Recent software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
  • There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages. [538] [539] [540]
  • You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [541] [542]
  • You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [543]
  • You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.

Wikidata

  • After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews. [544]
  • After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. [545]

Problems

  • There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [546] [547]

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

07:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

refs

please use high quality resources rather than blogs

thanks Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:26, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

@Jmh649: To quote from WP:RS: "Note that otherwise reliable news sources—for example, the website of a major news organization—that publish in a 'blog' style format for some or all of their content may be as reliable as if published in a more 'traditional' 20th-century format."
In this case, the blog I cited (I'm assuming you're referring to this edit) was published by The New York Times, and the author is a journalist who "specializes in writing in-depth stories about health and medicine".
you're welcome -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:44, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Per WP:MEDRS we tend to use the high quality secondary sources over the popular press. Thus this would be a better source http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03_036.pdf Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:50, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
@Jmh649: I didn't realize that medical articles had higher standards for sourcing - thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'll keep in mind that WP:MEDRS does say that "... high-quality popular press can be a good source for social, biographical, current-affairs, financial, and historical information in a medical article". -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:50, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
Thanks agree. Switched the ref. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:53, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-35

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

VisualEditor news

  • There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed. [548]
  • You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [549]
  • If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [550] [551] [552]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
  • After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page. [553]

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

09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Andreas Kaplan-related sockpuppet investigation notice

Hello, you are receiving this notice because you made a contribution at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Andreas Kaplan (2nd nomination), now closed. Subsequent to the closure of the AfD, a related sockpuppet investigation (define) was opened. If you are interested, you can view or contribute to it. Thank you. — Brianhe (talk) 03:31, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-36

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

Recent software changes

  • You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [554] [555]
  • You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [556] [557]
  • A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [558] [559]
  • If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [560]

VisualEditor news

  • You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [561]
  • We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [562] [563] [564]
  • VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [565]
  • We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [566]
  • You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [567]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
  • There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [568]
  • You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [569]
  • You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
  • You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [570]

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

07:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-37

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

VisualEditor news

  • From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [571] [572] [573]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
  • You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [574]
  • You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [575]

Problems

  • There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 September 2014

Tech News: 2014-38

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

Recent software changes

  • You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [576] [577]
  • There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [578] [579] [580]
  • New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [581]

Problems

  • There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [582]

VisualEditor news

  • If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [583]
  • The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [584] [585]
  • You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [586]

Future software changes

  • The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
  • These changes are coming with the new version:
    • If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [587] [588] [589]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-39

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
  • Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
  • There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [591] [592]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
  • If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[593] [594]
  • In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [595] [596]
  • The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [597]
  • The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [598]
  • There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for strikethrough. [599] [600]
  • In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [601]

Future site changes

  • You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [602]

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

09:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-40

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

Recent software changes

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
  • Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [606] [607]
  • You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [608]
  • If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [609] [610]
  • The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [611]

Future changes

  • You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
  • JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [612]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

http://www.gopedia.org/

is not reachable.

I'm getting a message back from https://sites.google.com/a/gopedia.org/www: "Google Apps wurde für gopedia.org gesperrt. Wenden Sie sich an Ihren Administrator, um nähere Informationen zu erhalten." --Manorainjan (talk) 15:08, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

@Manorainjan: Yes, gopedia.org is not reachable. The website was built using a Google software tool, but Google then stopped supporting that tool. So the website doesn't work anymore. I could rebuild it, but I'm not that interested, at the moment.
More helpfully, you can find the website and its contents here, at archive.org. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:53, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-41

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

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
  • If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [620] [621]
  • We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [622]
  • On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [623] [624]
  • You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [625]
  • 1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [626]

Future changes

  • You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [627]
  • More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [628] [629]

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

06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Books and Bytes - Issue 8

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 8, August-September2014
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs)

  • TWL now a Wikimedia Foundation program, moves on from grant status
  • Four new donations, including large DeGruyter parntership, pilot with Elsevier
  • New TWL coordinators, Wikimania news, new library platform discussions, Wiki Loves Libraries update, and more
  • Spotlight: "Traveling Through History" - an editor talks about his experiences with a TWL newspaper archive, Newspapers.com

Read the full newsletter



MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:51, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon.  Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358). 

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:The Missing Manual

Did copies of it end up selling online? Enigmamsg 02:45, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

@Enigmaman: No, the publisher never put out an ebook version of the book. It is possible, however, to build your own via Book:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:16, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
I was showing it (the abridged version, I still have some copies) to someone last night and he pointed out that the physical version of the book had a price on it. I meant were copies of that sold. Enigmamsg 19:05, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
@Enigmaman: Hmm, not sure what you mean by the "abridged" version - there is a Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual, a quite small book, which has just chapter one of W:TMM (as an appendix), but that's quite a different thing.
Anyway, yes, the book was physically sold (and the Reader's Guide as well) - some thousands of copies, though I haven't bothered to look to see exactly how many. It's still for sale, for example here. The Reader's Guide is also for sale, for example, here.
The text of the book now on Wikipedia (H:TMM) wasn't available until about a year after the (main, large) physical book was published. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:11, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
I meant the Reader's Guide. My mistake. Enigmamsg 01:52, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
@Enigmaman: Perhaps the source of confusion is that the Reader's Guide was initially given out for free by the publisher, O'Reilly Media, at a Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area (2008? 2009?). It subsequently became simply another book sold by that publisher, though it's quite possible (I don't know) that it was handed out (for free) at later Maker Faire events as well. The publisher also provided copies to some volunteer Wikipedia events, I believe, and perhaps there were some free copies given out for other purposes. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:43, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
You sent me a box of them to hand out at an NYC Meetup in 2008 or 2009. I tried to find the Meetup page where you asked for someone to hand out copies but I can't find it. It appears to be gone. Maybe I should check deleted contributions. Enigmamsg 04:17, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-42

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

Recent software changes

Problems

  • 10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [632]
  • Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [633]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
  • 5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [634]

Meetings

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

08:54, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 October 2014

Tech News: 2014-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

  • You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
  • You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [638] [639]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [641]

Changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
  • 10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [642]
  • If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [643] [644]

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

13:48, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-44

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

Problems

  • There was an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [645]
  • There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [646]
  • There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [647]

Software changes this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [648]
  • The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [649] [650] [651]
  • VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [652]
  • VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [653]
  • The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [654]

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

05:20, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 October 2014

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

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. [658]
  • 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. [659] [660] [661]
  • 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. [662] [663]
  • 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. [664]
  • The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [665] [666] [667] [668] [669]
  • After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [670] [671] [672]

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. [673]

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)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today :)

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:

  • DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
  • Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
  • Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
  • British Newspaper Archive: expanded by 100+ accounts for British newspapers
  • Highbeam: 100+ remaining accounts for newspaper and magazine archives
  • Questia: 100+ remaining accounts for journal and social science articles
  • JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 23:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
This message was delivered via the Mass Message to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014

Screenshot on an iPad, showing how to switch from one editor to the other
Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [674] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November.  This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation.  When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top.  Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design. Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 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. [675] [676]
  • The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [677]

File information cleanup

Problems

  • Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [678]

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. [679] [680]
  • 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". [681]
  • The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [682]

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)

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. [683]

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. [684]

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)

Copyright checks when performing AfC reviews

Hello John Broughton. This message is part of a mass mailing to people who appear active in reviewing articles for creation submissions. First of all, thank you for taking part in this important work! I'm sorry this message is a form letter – it really was the only way I could think of to covey the issue economically. Of course, this also means that I have not looked to see whether the matter is applicable to you in particular.

The issue is in rather large numbers of copyright violations ("copyvios") making their way through AfC reviews without being detected (even when easy to check, and even when hallmarks of copyvios in the text that should have invited a check, were glaring). A second issue is the correct method of dealing with them when discovered.

If you don't do so already, I'd like to ask for your to help with this problem by taking on the practice of performing a copyvio check as the first step in any AfC review. The most basic method is to simply copy a unique but small portion of text from the draft body and run it through a search engine in quotation marks. Trying this from two different paragraphs is recommended. (If you have any question about whether the text was copied from the draft, rather than the other way around (a "backwards copyvio"), the Wayback Machine is very useful for sussing that out.)

If you do find a copyright violation, please do not decline the draft on that basis. Copyright violations need to be dealt with immediately as they may harm those whose content is being used and expose Wikipedia to potential legal liability. If the draft is substantially a copyvio, and there's no non-infringing version to revert to, please mark the page for speedy deletion right away using {{db-g12|url=URL of source}}. If there is an assertion of permission, please replace the draft article's content with {{subst:copyvio|url=URL of source}}.

Some of the more obvious indicia of a copyvio are use of the first person ("we/our/us..."), phrases like "this site", or apparent artifacts of content written for somewhere else ("top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", use of smartquotes, etc.); inappropriate tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone or a very slanted marketing voice with weasel words; including intellectual property symbols (™,®); and blocks of text being added all at once in a finished form with no misspellings or other errors.

I hope this message finds you well and thanks again you for your efforts in this area. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC).

       Sent via--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:20, 18 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. [685]

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. [686]

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. [687]
  • VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [688]
  • You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [689]
  • VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [690] [691]

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)

Publishers Clearing House

Hi John. I was wondering if you had a minute to get involved in the discussion on this page. An editor Bilbobag seems to have a strong interest in a controversial subject. We got a third opinion from Martin Hogbin, who seemed to be suggesting some substantial trimming of the controversial material was appropriate, saying the article was unencyclopedic and should give a summary, rather than mentioning every controversial event.

I was going to get started on maybe proposing a draft that is trimmed down a bit, if you think that's the appropriate next-step. However, I think Bilbo and I will need help from a third party to help provide an outside opinion, resolve any disagreements, etc.. CorporateM (Talk) 15:22, 4 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. [692]
  • You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [693]

Problems

  • There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [694]

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). [695]
  • You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [696]
  • It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [697] [698]
  • The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [699] [700] [701]
  • (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. [702] [703]

Future changes

  • Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [704]

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)

Updates

Hi John,

I made a note to tell you all of this before Thanksgiving, so it's possible that some of this has been overtaken by events, but:

  • We have a complaint that the concept of reference groups aren't well explained in the VisualEditor/User guide. It isn't making sense to people who haven't used ref groups in wikitext. I'm not sure whether how much detail is appropriate, however. The user guide already seems pretty long and complex to me. (Maybe that's due to the difficulty of editing the master page, though.)
  • We also need to add tables. However, almost everything about tables will be changing in the coming weeks. I've added a little placeholder section, and incidentally requested help with a broken image on the page.
  • It's possible that almost all the screenshots will need to be re-done in a couple of weeks. The changes should be largely or entirely aesthetic, but you should feel free to remind me if I'm not getting it handled.

I hope that you're doing well. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:01, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): I edited the user guide to make it clearer that almost all editors don't need to use reference groups, but if they do, they should go to WP:REFGROUP for information. Personally, I'd be happy with saying even less - I don't know, for example, why a VE tool is mentioned. The use of reference groups is so rare that I've seen them - but not initiated one - in perhaps a handful of edits that I've done. Reference groups are almost like asking the price of a really expensive item: if you have to ask someone how to use this technique, you almost certainly shouldn't be using it.
A placeholder for something about to change radically sounds exactly correct to me.
I'm doing well. Thanks for posting this, and best wishes to you for the holidays. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:06, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
The "theme" will change here in the first week of January. Because of where it falls with respect to the holiday code freeze, it will be at MediaWiki before Christmas, and everywhere else after New Year's. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 12 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. [705]
  • You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [706]
  • 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). [707]
  • You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [708]
  • VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [709]
  • The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [710]

Future changes

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

16:43, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (December 2014)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today :)

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:

Other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team.00:25, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
This message was delivered via the Mass Message tool to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

Marco Rubio

This edit left a floating "Rubio was elected at the age of 28 to ..."

I think I cleaned it up, but I don't know the timeline. Can you review the article again? Thanks! Hipocrite (talk) 15:23, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

@Hipocrite: Thanks for fixing my mistake. That text was hanging because I didn't plan to leave it in the article, but forgot to delete it. I didn't want it in the article because the reader can calculate Rubio's age upon being elected to the Florida House, if he/she is interested, and while it's apparently unusual to be elected to the House at such a young age, it's not unprecedented. I consider factoids like this to be things that writers insert as part of a particular story line (see the title of the citation for Rubio's runoff victory, for example), which is fine for alternative newspaper articles with a point of view, but not for Wikipedia. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:54, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014

Screenshot showing how to add or remove columns from a table

Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements

Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan and colspan elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ⌃ Ctrl+F or ⌘ Cmd+F.

You can now create and edit simple <blockquote> paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Paragraph" into a "Block quote".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "*  " will make the line a bullet list; "1.  " or "# " will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Above All State Park/GA1

John Broughton, it has been over a month since you last posted to this review. If you are still interested in pursuing it, please return to it. If not, I can put it back into the reviewing pool. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:47, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

@BlueMoonset: - I've made my comments, and I really don't have anything else to add. So, yes, please keep the process moving. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:29, 22 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. [715]

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. [716]

Future changes

  • The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [717]
  • A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [718]

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)

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