User talk:MadGuy7023/14
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The Signpost: 01 January 2014
- Traffic report: A year stuck in traffic
- Arbitration report: Examining the Committee's year
- In the media: Does Wikipedia need a medical disclaimer?
- Book review: Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
- News and notes: The year in review
- Discussion report: Article incubator, dates and fractions, medical disclaimer
- WikiProject report: Where Are They Now? Fifth Edition
- Featured content: 2013—the trends
- Technology report: Looking back on 2013
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- EdwardsBot (talk) 05:30, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 08 January 2014
- Public Domain Day: Why the year 2019 is so significant
- Traffic report: Tragedy and television
- Technology report: Gearing up for the Architecture Summit
- News and notes: WMF employee forced out over "paid advocacy editing"
- WikiProject report: Jumping into the television universe
- Featured content: A portal to the wonderful world of technology
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- EdwardsBot (talk) 08:12, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
??
Greetings Mad Guy, I recently received an email indicating I was a Wikipedia link "vandal" of sorts. There must be some sort of hacking going on as I've actually never edited a wiki entry. I don't actually even know how or would currently have any reason to do so.
Shit happens.
I am huge fan of Wikipedia and have made small donations over the past 2 years.
Sincerely,
Joshua Doolittle Bambitat.com
VisualEditor newsletter for Janaury 2014
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
- News and notes: German chapter asks for "reworking" of Funds Dissemination Committee; should MP4 be allowed on Wikimedia sites?
- Technology report: Architecture Summit schedule published
- Traffic report: The Hours are Ours
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Sociology
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- EdwardsBot (talk) 22:43, 19 January 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 January 2014
- Book review: Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from Across the Known Multiverse
- News and notes: Modification of WMF protection brought to Arbcom
- Featured content: Dr. Watson, I presume
- Special report: The few who write Wikipedia
- Technology report: Architecting the future of MediaWiki
- In the media: Wikipedia for robots; Wikipedia—a temperamental teenager
- Traffic report: No show for the Globes
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The Signpost: 29 January 2014
- Traffic report: Six strikes out
- WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
- News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
- Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
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The Signpost: 12 February 2014
- Technology report: Left with no choice
- Featured content: Space selfie
- Traffic report: Sports Day
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VisualEditor Newsletter—February 2014
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)
The Signpost: 19 February 2014
- News and notes: Foundation takes aim at undisclosed paid editing; Greek Wikipedia editor faces down legal challenge
- Technology report: ULS Comeback
- WikiProject report: Countering Systemic Bias
- Featured content: Holotype
- Traffic report: Chilly Valentines
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:10, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
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Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation, and please do get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 01:29, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 February 2014
- Featured content: Odin salutes you
- WikiProject report: Racking brains with neuroscience
- Special report: Diary of a protester: Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest
- Traffic report: Snow big deal
- Recent research: CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:27, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 January 2014
- Traffic report: Six strikes out
- WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
- News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
- Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
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- EdwardsBot (talk) 11:13, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
(test) The Signpost: 05 March 2014
- Traffic report: Brinksmen on the brink
- Discussion report: Four paragraph lead, indefinitely blocked IPs, editor reviews broken?
- Featured content: Full speed ahead for the WikiCup
- WikiProject report: Article Rescue Squadron
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:49, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 12 March 2014
- Traffic report: War and awards
- Featured content: Ukraine burns
- WikiProject report: Russian WikiProject Entomology
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:45, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor newsletter—March 2014
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)
The Signpost: 19 March 2014
- WikiProject report: We have history
- Featured content: Spot the bulldozer
- News and notes: Foundation-supported Wikipedian in residence faces scrutiny
- Traffic report: Into thin air
- Technology report: Wikimedia engineering report
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:15, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation, and please do get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:46, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 March 2014
- Comment: A foolish request
- Traffic report: Down to a simmer
- News and notes: Commons Picture of the Year—winners announced
- Featured content: Winter hath a beauty that is all his own
- Technology report: Why will Wikipedia look like the Signpost?
- WikiProject report: From the peak
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:19, 29 March 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 02 April 2014
- WikiProject report: Deutschland in English
- Special report: On the cusp of the Wikimedia Conference
- Featured content: April Fools
- Traffic report: Regressing to the mean
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:02, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 09 April 2014
- News and notes: Round 2 of FDC funding open to public comments
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Law
- Special report: Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz
- Traffic report: Conquest of the Couch Potatoes
- Featured content: Snow heater and Ash sweep
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The Signpost: 23 April 2014
- Special report: 2014 Wikimedia Conference—what is the impact?
- News and notes: Wikimedian passes away
- WikiProject_report: To the altar—Catholicism
- Wikimania: Winning bid announced for 2015
- Traffic report: Reflecting in Gethsemane
- Featured content: There was I, waiting at the church
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014
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.
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)
The Signpost: 30 April 2014
- News and notes: WMF's draft annual plan turns indigestible as an FDC proposal
- Traffic report: Going to the Doggs
- Breaking: The Foundation's new executive director
- WikiProject report: Genetics
- Interview: Wikipedia in the Peabody Essex Museum
- Featured content: Browsing behaviours
- Recent research: Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:24, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 07 May 2014
- Traffic report: TMZedia
- WikiCup: 2014 WikiCup enters round three
- In the media: Google and the flu; Adrianne
- WikiProject report: Singing with Eurovision
- Featured content: Wikipedia at the Rijksmuseum
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:56, 9 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 14 May 2014
- Investigative report: Hong Kong's Wikimania 2013—failure to produce financial statement raises questions of probity
- WikiProject report: Relaxing in Puerto Rico
- Featured content: On the rocks
- Traffic report: Eurovision, Google Doodles, Mothers, and 5 May
- Technology report: Technology report needs editor, Media Viewer offers a new look
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:44, 17 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
- News and notes: "Crisis" over Wikimedia Germany's palace revolution
- Featured content: Staggering number of featured articles
- Traffic report: Doodles' dawn
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:03, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 28 May 2014
- News and notes: The English Wikipedia's second featured-article centurion; wiki inventor interviewed on video
- Featured content: Zombie fight in the saloon
- Traffic report: Get fitted for flipflops and floppy hats
- Recent research: Predicting which article you will edit next
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:52, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 04 June 2014
- News and notes: Two new affiliate-selected trustees
- Featured content: Ye stately homes of England
- In the media: Reliable or not, doctors use Wikipedia
- Traffic report: Autumn in summer
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The Signpost: 11 June 2014
- News and notes: PR agencies commit to ethical interactions with Wikipedia
- Traffic report: The week the wired went weird
- Paid editing: Does Wikipedia Pay? The Moderator: William Beutler
- Special report: Questions raised over secret voting for WMF trustees
- Featured content: Politics, ships, art, and cyclones
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:27, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 18 June 2014
- News and notes: With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
- Featured content: Worming our way to featured picture
- Special report: Wikimedia Bangladesh: a chapter's five-year journey
- Traffic report: You can't dethrone Thrones
- WikiProject report: Visiting the city
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VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014
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)
The Signpost: 25 June 2014
- News and notes: US National Archives enshrines Wikipedia in Open Government Plan
- Traffic report: Fake war, or real sport?
- Exclusive: "We need to be true to who we are": Foundation's new executive director speaks to the Signpost
- Discussion report: Media Viewer, old HTML tags
- Featured content: Showing our Wörth
- WikiProject report: The world where dreams come true
- Recent research: Power users and diversity in WikiProjects
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:51, 29 June 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 02 July 2014
- In the media: Wiki Education; medical content; PR firms
- Traffic report: The Cup runneth over... and over.
- News and notes: Wikimedia Israel receives Roaring Lion award
- Featured content: Ship-shape
- WikiProject report: Indigenous Peoples of North America
- Technology report: In memoriam: the Toolserver (2005–14)
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:23, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 09 July 2014
- Special report: Wikimania 2014—what will it cost?
- Wikimedia in education: Exploring the United States and Canada with LiAnna Davis
- Featured content: Three cheers for featured pictures!
- News and notes: Echoes of the past haunt new conflict over tech initiative
- Traffic report: World Cup, Tim Howard rule the week
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:54, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 16 July 2014
- Special report: $10 million lawsuit against Wikipedia editors withdrawn, but plaintiff intends to refile
- Traffic report: World Cup dominates for another week
- Wikimedia in education: Serbia takes the stage with Filip Maljkovic
- Featured content: The Island with the Golden Gun
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:26, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 23 July 2014
- Wikimedia in education: Education program gaining momentum in Israel
- Traffic report: The World Cup hangs on, though tragedies seek to replace it
- News and notes: Institutional media uploads to Commons get a bit easier
- Featured content: Why, they're plum identical!
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:31, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 30 July 2014
- Book review: Knowledge or unreality?
- Recent research: Shifting values in the paid content debate
- News and notes: How many more hoaxes will Wikipedia find?
- Wikimedia in education: Success in Egypt and the Arab World
- Traffic report: Doom and gloom vs. the power of Reddit
- Featured content: Skeletons and Skeltons
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:06, 2 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.
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)
The Signpost: 06 August 2014
- Technology report: A technologist's Wikimania preview
- Traffic report: Ebola
- Featured content: Bottoms, asses, and the fairies that love them
- Wikimedia in education: Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:51, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 13 August 2014
- Special report: Twitter bots catalogue government edits to Wikipedia
- Traffic report: Disease, decimation and distraction
- Wikimedia in education: Global Education: WMF's Perspective
- Wikimania: Promised the moon, settled for the stars
- News and notes: Media Viewer controversy spreads to German Wikipedia
- In the media: Monkey selfie, net neutrality, and hoaxes
- Featured content: Cambridge got a lot of attention this week
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:56, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 August 2014
- Traffic report: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero
- WikiProject report: Bats and gloves
- Op-ed: A new metric for Wikimedia
- Featured content: English Wikipedia departs for Japan
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:09, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 27 August 2014
- In the media: Plagiarism and vandalism dominate Wikipedia news
- News and notes: Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster
- Traffic report: Viral
- Featured content: Cheats at Featured Pictures!
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The Signpost: 03 September 2014
- Arbitration report: Media viewer case is suspended
- Featured content: 1882 × 5 in gold, and thruppence more
- Traffic report: Holding Pattern
- WikiProject report: Gray's Anatomy (v. 2)
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:03, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 10 September 2014
- Traffic report: Refuge in celebrity
- Featured content: The louse and the fish's tongue
- WikiProject report: Checking that everything's all right
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:56, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 September 2014
- WikiProject report: A trip up north to Scotland
- News and notes: Wikipedia's traffic statistics are off by nearly one-third
- Traffic report: Tolstoy leads a varied pack
- Featured content: Which is not like the others?
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:37, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 September 2014
- Featured content: Oil paintings galore
- Recent research: 99.25% of Wikipedia birthdates accurate; focused Wikipedians live longer; merging WordNet, Wikipedia and Wiktionary
- Traffic report: Wikipedia watches the referendum in Scotland
- WikiProject report: GAN reviewers take note: competition time
- Arbitration report: Banning Policy, Gender Gap, and Waldorf education
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:50, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 01 October 2014
- From the editor: The Signpost needs your help
- Dispatches: Let's get serious about plagiarism
- WikiProject report: Animals, farms, forests, USDA? It must be WikiProject Agriculture
- Traffic report: Shanah Tovah
- Featured content: Brothers at War
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VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014
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) 00:11, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 08 October 2014
- In the media: Opposition research firm blocked; Australian bushfires
- Featured content: From a wordless novel to a coat of arms via New York City
- Traffic report: Panic and denial
- Technology report: HHVM is the greatest thing since sliced bread
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:42, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 October 2014
- Op-ed: Ships—sexist or sexy?
- Arbitration report: One case closed and two opened
- Featured content: Bells ring out at the Temple of the Dragon at Peace
- Technology report: Attempting to parse wikitext
- Traffic report: Now introducing ... mobile data
- WikiProject report: Signpost reaches the Midwest
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:48, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 22 October 2014
- Featured content: Admiral on deck: a modern Ada Lovelace
- Traffic report: Death, War, Pestilence... Movies and TV
- WikiProject report: De-orphanning articles—a huge task but with a huge team of volunteers to help
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:22, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 29 October 2014
- Featured content: Go West, young man
- In the media: Wikipedia a trusted source on Ebola; Wikipedia study labeled government waste; football biography goes viral
- Maps tagathon: Find 10,000 digitised maps this weekend
- Traffic report: Ebola, Ultron, and Creepy Articles
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:30, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 05 November 2014
- In the media: Predicting the flu, MH17 conspiracy theories
- Traffic report: Sweet dreams on Halloween
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:02, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014
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 [1] 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)
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The Signpost: 12 November 2014
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The Signpost: 26 November 2014
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The Signpost: 03 December 2014
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Jesmion
I could discover and appreciate, am Jesmion, i was blocked on offense of suckpuppet, and i have made a lots of apologies, regarding to that offense, and as i see your name 'MadGuy7023' i was convinced that you can render help to reactivate my name Jesmion to the core, i have madeup my mind to use Jesmion from my other names, thanks for helping — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.190.14.185 (talk) 05:00, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
- The only way that account can be unblocked is by posting an unblock request on the talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}} and you must demonstrate understanding of why the account was blocked in the first place, as well as why you should be unblocked. Make sure you know the guide to appealing blocks. Also you need to be logged into the account otherwise it will be impossible to prove your identity. MadGuy7023 (talk) 20:18, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 02:28, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marcus Az-Absent (talk • contribs) 15:04, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 10 December 2014
- Op-ed: It's GLAM up North!
- Traffic report: Dead Black Men and Science Fiction
- Featured content: Honour him, love and obey? Good idea with military leaders.
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:51, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
im sorry it was a mistake — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A000:1103:C068:B8D6:3175:8643:FACF (talk) 14:21, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi
I am also Tvs545 I think that you deleting my work is stupid and silly. It isn't all about you we can edit too you r so mean — Preceding unsigned comment added by GG740 (talk • contribs) 05:06, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Indian women
You might like to look at Indian Rights for Indian Women in Canada as well (now that it's visible again (see history/my diffs there for explanation of this remark...)). Peridon (talk) 20:09, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi MadGuy7023 - Thanks for deleting the page. I'm new to Wikipedia and am not sure what the criteria are for starting a new page. I've read Your First Article and have a better idea now, but of course still not a full conception.
My goal here is to create a neutral, encyclopedic history of our start-up and do so via crowd-sourcing. So I would like to be the "initial mover" that creates the page, and then others can edit and over time we will improve it and fully flesh it out.
How should I go about creating the page to accomplish this result? Is using a sub-page a good start? If so, how do I invite collaborators?
Brandtus Rex (talk) 23:17, 15 December 2014 (UTC) Brandtus Rex
- Firstly you need to make sure you meet the notability guidelines (see Wikipedia:Notability)
- You can also read Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
- I'm sure the Article wizard can help you to see if the page can be created.
- Talk pages are there to discuss certain changes with other editors. If you are working with others you can discuss changes on the talk page (see Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines and Help:Using talk pages)
- Hope this is useful. MadGuy7023 (talk) 22:44, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
Foreign languages are not gibberish
You tagged Kurdsh with {{db-g1}} (an article consisting entirely of gibberish), even though WP:CSD#G1 explicitly states that this criterion does not cover articles not written in English. As it is, the article is perfectly valid Arabic, but covers a topic on which Wikipedia already has an article (Kurds), so it qualifies for deletion under WP:CSD#A10. Please be careful to use the correct deletion criteria in the future. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 14:00, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 December 2014
- Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee election results
- Featured content: Tripping hither, tripping thither, Nobody knows why or whither; We must dance and we must sing, Round about our fairy ring!
- Traffic report: A December Lull
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:08, 19 December 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014
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
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
- Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
- Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
- File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
- The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
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)
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. [2]
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. [3]
Future changes
- The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [4]
- A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [5]
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)
Hello,
Thank you for helping me with the IP address. Would you like to create an edit warring report or shall I? I previously made a report with another IP, and they were blocked for 24h or 31h, and clearly that didn't help as they have returned with another IP. Callmemirela (talk) 15:20, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
- If you look at my contributions you will see that there already is one! MadGuy7023 (talk) 15:22, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
- Thank you SO MUCH! I will edit it with more reverts from the IP address and include my previous report. Callmemirela (talk) 15:30, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
I did put a new user name request to Jackmcbarn — Preceding unsigned comment added by Niche Video Media (talk • contribs) 16:36, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
The Signpost: 24 December 2014
- From the editor: Looking for new editors-in-chief
- In the media: Wales on GamerGate
- Featured content: Still quoting Iolanthe, apparently.
- WikiProject report: Microsoft does The Signpost
- Traffic report: North Korea is not pleased
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:26, 25 December 2014 (UTC)