User talk:Josve05a/Archives/2019/March
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar).
Meetings
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You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- You can give feedback on the future of talk pages.
- The mobile website will use the standard fonts on your computer or phone instead of a generic font. This will make it easier to read text in many scripts. [1][2]
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:38, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – March 2019
News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2019).
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Guideline and policy news
- The RfC on administrator activity requirements failed to reach consensus for any proposal.
- Following discussions at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and Wikipedia talk:Administrators, an earlier change to the restoration of adminship policy was reverted. If requested, bureaucrats will not restore administrator permissions removed due to inactivity if there have been five years without a logged administrator action; this "five year rule" does not apply to permissions removed voluntarily.
Technical news
- A new tool is available to help determine if a given IP is an open proxy/VPN/webhost/compromised host.
Arbitration
- The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
- paid-en-wp
wikipedia.org has been set up to receive private evidence related to abusive paid editing. - checkuser-en-wpwikipedia.org has been set up to receive private requests for CheckUser. For instance, requests for IP block exemption for anonymous proxy editing should now be sent to this address instead of the functionaries-en list.
- paid-en-wp
- The Arbitration Committee announced two new OTRS queues. Both are meant solely for cases involving private information; other cases will continue to be handled at the appropriate venues (e.g., WP:COIN or WP:SPI).
Miscellaneous
- Following the 2019 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: Base, Einsbor, Jon Kolbert, Schniggendiller, and Wim b.
Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
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
- Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the
mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatementsLua function or the#statementsparser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer<maplink>if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator. - There is now an EventStream to see when links are added or removed on Wikimedia wikis. You can read the discussions and plans.
Problems
- Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
- Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [3]
- Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [4][5]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:29, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
- When you use rollback you will be able to get a confirmation prompt on most wikis. It asks you if you wanted to do the rollback. This is to avoid misclicks. You will have to opt in to get it. On German Wikipedia it will be an opt-out feature from 28 March. [6][7]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Admins will be able to block someone from editing a page or a namespace. This already works on a few Wikimedia wikis. You can read more. If your wiki wants to be an early tester of this, you can tell the developers. [8]
- Toolforge will shut down the Ubuntu Trusty job grid. This will happen the week of 25 March. Tools that use this grid needs to be moved to the new Debian Stretch job grid. If they haven't, they will be taken offline. Maintainers can restart the tools later. Users may not be able to use them in the meanwhile. You can see a list of affected tools.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:43, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
Hello, check this edit. - NorthPark1417 (talk) 00:50, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
- The bot did exactly what it is supposed to do. See Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Josvebot 3 and User talk:Josvebot/Archive 2018#Unicode control characters?. (t) Josve05a (c) 09:05, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
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 new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [9]
Problems
- There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [10]
- The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [11]
- Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [12]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 27 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:04, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
"Cite" templates
Hi. I see that you turned several references in the Ramakrishna article into "{{cite...}}" templates. May I try to convince you to not do that?
The "cite" templates were a TERRIBLY BAD idea. They have many disadvantages and no advantages at all.
- They are MUCH harder to create and edit than the plain refs.
- The format that they generate, "27 (15) 31" instead of "volume 27, issue 15, page 31" is not meaningful to readers who are not academics or professional researchers. Like the practice of abbreviating journal names beyond recognition, it was invented by publishers of paper journals to save space, a very expensive resource for them. That is not a concern for Wikipedia; clarity for general readers is.
- In the code, they are roughly twice as long as the plain version. That makes it hard also to edit the text around them.
- Using the wrong keyword for a parameter may produce very wrong results, without warning. (Try <ref>{{cite book|title=Foo|issue=21}}</ref>
- They cannot easily handle non-standard situations, such as journals that refer to articles by number instead of page numbers. Even when they do have options for such situations, editors must read the template documentation to find them.
- And, like most complicated templates, they add another ton of complexity to the "language" that new editors must learn in order to edit Wikipedia -- which is the only reason I can think of for why the number of editors has been shrinking for a decade.
Novice editors, who do not know the usual visible format for Wikipedia refs, can be excused to use the cite template generator to generate refs. Those who know what the refs should look like have no excuse for using them.
It is understandable that, to reduce conflicts, editors should not remove "cite" templates just for the sake of it. But please let's work to make Wikipedia better, for reader and editors alike, by NOT using those templates for new refs, and NOT changing refs that are already in good plain format to use them.
All the best,--Jorge Stolfi (talk) 13:01, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
- The majority of that article's refs used cite template or had no consistent style. I'll take a look at your message again tomorrow when I have more time to think, just wanted to acknowledge that I've seen it. (t) Josve05a (c) 20:31, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks. Just let me add that the goal of consistent style is not just impossible to achieve for a work created by volunteers, but pointless (since it does not make Wikipedia serve its readers better, not even by a bit, and is continuously being undone by new edits) and downright harmful (since it wastes the work of editors and greatly pollutes their watchlists).
Wikipedia should urge its editors to work on the contents of articles, which is still extremely defective, rather than on looks. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 21:01, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
- While the use of citation templates might be contentious to some, it is generally considered good practice in articles with inconsistent citation style, to prefer citation templates, in order to help other editors work towards getting the article a consistent style. It also helps that citation templates are machine-readable, and other websites track where specific citations (doi's etc.) are used online, e.g. Wikipedia. THis is not th eplace to discuss the templates being or not being, but rather my usage of them, and I do not see that I've done anything wrong. Your sicussion seems much better on a noticeboard or another venue. However, only to touch on your points quickly:
- They are not harder to edit than plain refs (especially not in VE, since there are text fields and descriptive text for citation data).
- How the templates output the style has been 2created" by consensus (see Wikipedia:CS1 and Wikipedia:CS2).
- That a text becomes "long" has two sides to it. One is the byte (storage) space, which Wikimedia has no lack of. The other, that it becomes harder to edit a text, might be somewhat true, but not a substantial issue IMO.
- If a journal article does not have page numbers, but instead article numbers, such info should be added as page information (or possibly
|at=). - (t) Josve05a (c) 21:13, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks. Just let me add that the goal of consistent style is not just impossible to achieve for a work created by volunteers, but pointless (since it does not make Wikipedia serve its readers better, not even by a bit, and is continuously being undone by new edits) and downright harmful (since it wastes the work of editors and greatly pollutes their watchlists).
The Signpost: 31 March 2019
- From the editors: Getting serious about humor
- News and notes: Blackouts fail to stop EU Copyright Directive
- In the media: Women's history month
- Discussion report: Portal debates continue, Prespa agreement aftermath, WMF seeks a rebranding
- Featured content: Out of this world
- Arbitration report: The Tides of March at ARBCOM
- Traffic report: Exultations and tribulations
- Technology report: New section suggestions and sitewide styles
- News from the WMF: The WMF's take on the new EU Copyright Directive
- Recent research: Barnstar-like awards increase new editor retention
- From the archives: Esperanza organization disbanded after deletion discussion
- Humour: The Epistolary of Arthur 37
- In focus: The Wikipedia SourceWatch
- Special report: Wiki Loves (50 Years of) Pride
- Community view: Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:03, 31 March 2019 (UTC)