User talk:Tommyang/Archives/2014/1

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) 04:47, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

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)

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"

• Op-ed: WikiCup competition beginning a new year

• WikiProject report: Jumping into the television universe

• Featured content: A portal to the wonderful world of technology

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• EdwardsBot (talk) 07:32, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #92

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

• Discussions
  • Discussion over Wikisource's notability within Wikidata
  • Make Symmetric & Inverse Property addition automatic and bidirectional
  • Closed RfAs: Lymantria (Successful), Lavallen (Successful)
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Presentation about Wikidata at Aldil, Lyon, France
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource is deployed to testwikidata
  • A group of students is working on suggestions to make it easier to add missing information. They published a status report and a rough first demo.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: track gauge, pathogen transmission process, CVR, ERA Journal ID
  • Newest task forces: Manga and Anime task force
  • Showcase items: Douglas Adams
  • Fun Fact: Does not exist (Q404)
  • Wikidata's presence: The Dutch Wikipedia have a category for coordinating coordinates on Wikidata (Categorie:Wikipedia:Coördinaten niet op Wikidata)
• Development
  • Adrian Lang joins the team
  • Cirrus Search is now the default search on Wikidata and should improve d:Special:Search's handlich of special characters for example
  • Made the “in other languages” box also show up for people who have not configured a babel box (bugzilla:49079)
  • No longer showing a table of content when it has less than 3 items in it to prevent it from showing up on property pages (bugzilla:58422)
  • More performance improvement work
  • Finishing touches on quantities datatype user interface
  • Display qualifiers in non-Java Script user interface
  • Prevented import of wikitext into the main namespace (bugzilla:47070)
  • Split the DataValues component into more clearly defined libraries and switched Wikibase over to use these
  • Switched Wikibase to use Wikibase DataModel 0.6
  • Changed development and installation workflows to make use of the dependency manager Composer (more details)
  • Made tests run with less warnings (especially in Firefox)
  • Started replacing wikibase.fetchedEntities with a proper entity store
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Public holiday (P832) propery
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 09:34, 11 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

• Wikidata will be added to all Wikisource wikis on January 14. [24]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the second search method for the English Wikipedia on January 13. On Wikibooks and the German Wikipedia, you will also be able to test it by adding it in your Beta Features options.
• You will soon be able to export page collections into other formats than PDF. [25]
• It will soon be possible to upload groups of photos from Flickr using UploadWizard. [26] [27]
• The Wikimedia Foundation has shared a multimedia vision for 2016. You are invited to comment. [28]

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)

Wikidata weekly summary #93

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

• Events
  • upcoming: FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource now gets its language links via Wikidata
  • Reasonator gets extended functionality
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: PlantList-ID, Danemark Job Code (DISCO-08), Instruction Set, Thailand central administrative unit code, student of, archive URL
  • Showcase items: ethanol
  • Fun Fact: A Space Odyssey (Q2001)
• Development
  • Enabled language links for Wikisource
  • Move more part of an item page from JS to HTML to improve performance and non-JS interface
  • Database performance improvements
  • Work on forward compatibility for new entity types
  • Introducing the EntityStore service to improve modularity
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:22, 19 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

• Op-ed: Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles

• In the media: Is Google hurting Wikipedia traffic?; "Wikipedia-Mania" in the New York Times

• Traffic report: The Hours are Ours

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Sociology

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• EdwardsBot (talk) 22:02, 19 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

• 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).
• You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [29]
• As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [30] [31]
• You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [32]
• You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [33]

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)

Wikidata weekly summary #94

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

• Discussions
  • Discussion about using 'instance of' specific for animals
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Next Wikidata IRC office hour on Monday, February 3rd
  • FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Development Plan for 2014+ has been published
  • Wikidata stats now also includes statistics for ranks
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ICTV virus ID, rector, fictional analog of, writable file format, readable file format, place made
  • Showcase items: Cactaceae
• Development
  • Daniel and Katie took part in the MediaWiki Architecture Summit in San Francisco
  • Bugzilla:60027 Add language to label and description field to make it less likely that people enter a label or description in a wrong language
  • Bugzilla:58394 Avoid throwing out of bounds error when adding new claims
  • Bugzilla:50570 API now reveals qualifier hashes
  • Bugzilla:57213 API now reveals data type ids
  • Bugzilla:57754 Die if wbeditentity tries to clear from an old revision id
  • Bugzilla:55795 Add API option to show snaks in a list rather than grouped by property
  • Refactor of ChangeOp remove functionality
  • Continued to move parsing and validating of values from the frontend into the backend to improve performance and make the non-JS user interface more useful
  • Finished the Wikidata build script (We use it to pull together code from various git repositories into a single one for deployment)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:57, 24 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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• EdwardsBot (talk) 00:57, 25 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

• On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved. [53]
• For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

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.

09:47, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #95

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

• Discussions
  • Discussion over P31 as a qualifier
  • Open RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata is at FOSDEM in Brussels, Februrary 1st-2nd
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Quantities released on Wikidata!
  • Wikisource phase 2 coming Februrary 25th.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: attendance, refractive index, electronegativity, proportion, sandbox-quantity, number of pages, number of platforms , flattening, floors above ground, number of cylinders, masts, number of speakers, g-factor, orbital eccentricity, gross tonnage, total produced, redshift, Mohs' hardness, ELO rating, atomic number, LibraryThing work identifier, EUL control number, capacity, population, Human Development Index, from narrative, launch contractor, valvetrain configuration, KOATUU identifier
• Development
  • Deployed quantities to Wikidata! :)
  • Made patch to make wbmergeitems more reliable Bugzilla::55960
  • Wikidata edit permissions now included in wikimedia OAuth edit groups
  • Moved Diff repo to Github
  • Work put into make the frontend use backend formatters through the api
  • Refactoring of the ValueView extension
  • MergeItems special page merged as an experimental feature
  • Our easy RDF fork is now included using composer
  • Fixed wbmergeitems issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:37, 31 January 2014 (UTC)