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This week's article for improvement (week 40, 2014)

Aerial photograph of George Bush Intercontinental Airport, an international airport in Houston, United States
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

International airport


Previous selections: Ancient Roman architecture • Ancient Roman architecture


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:03, 29 September 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

WikiCup 2014 September newsletter

In one month's time, we will know our WikiCup 2014 champion. Newcomer Smithsonian Institution Godot13 (submissions) has taken a strong lead with a featured list (historical coats of arms of the U.S. states from 1876) and a raft of featured pictures. Reigning champion Wales Cwmhiraeth (submissions) is in second place with a number of high-importance biology articles, including new FA Isopoda and new GA least weasel. Scotland Casliber (submissions), who is in his fifth WikiCup final, is in third, with featured articles Pictor and Epacris impressa.

Signups for the 2015 WikiCup are open. All Wikipedians, new and experienced, are warmly invited to sign up for the competition. Wikipedians interested in friendly competition may also like to sign up for the GA Cup, a new WikiCup-inspired competition which revolves around completing good article reviews. As ever, questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. J Milburn (talk · contribs) The ed17 (talk · contribs) and Miyagawa (talk · contribs) 22:11, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 October 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 41, 2014)

Seasoned and chargrilled lamb fillet steak
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Steak


Previous selections: International airport • Ancient Roman architecture


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:03, 6 October 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

Did you know?

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

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

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

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

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

Increased support for devices and browsers

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

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

TemplateData editor

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

Other changes

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

Supporting your wiki

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

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

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

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

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

The Signpost: 08 October 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 42, 2014)

Central America is the geographic region that connects North America and South America.
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Central America


Previous selections: Steak • International airport


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:04, 13 October 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

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.

Views/Day Quality Title Content Headings Images Links Sources Tagged with…
37 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start American School of Paris (talk) Please add more content Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Add sources
341 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Maruti 800 (talk) Please add more content Please add more sources Add sources
753 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: B Richard Marx (talk) Please add more images Please add more sources Add sources
2 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Start 2005–06 Bradley Braves men's basketball team (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Add sources
2 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start 2011–12 Illinois State Redbirds men's basketball team (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Add sources
2,281 Quality: High, Assessed class: B, Predicted class: A Buffalo Bills (talk) Please add more sources Add sources
124 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: List, Predicted class: C ESPN RISE Elite 11 (talk) Please add more images Please add more sources Cleanup
206 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: B EverQuest II (talk) Please add more images Please add more sources Cleanup
108 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: Start Stakhanovite movement (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more sources Cleanup
343 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Mucokinetics (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Expand
176 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: B Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Expand
3 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: C 2009–10 Tennessee Lady Volunteers basketball team (talk) Please add more content Please add more images Please add more sources Expand
767 Quality: High, Assessed class: C, Predicted class: FA Joe Flacco (talk) Unencyclopaedic
258 Quality: High, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: GA Allegations of CIA drug trafficking (talk) Please add more sources Unencyclopaedic
5 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub W Dowler & Sons (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Unencyclopaedic
108 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Bon viveur (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Merge
125 Quality: High, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: GA Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum (talk) Please add more content Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Merge
156 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: C Privacy concerns with social networking services (talk) Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Merge
202 Quality: Medium, Assessed class: List, Predicted class: B National Football League Rookie of the Year Award (talk) Please add more images Wikify
96 Quality: High, Assessed class: Start, Predicted class: GA Vishva Hindu Pariṣad (talk) Please add more images Wikify
298 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Start Extraction (chemistry) (talk) Please add more content Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Wikify
2 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub CreaTv (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
1 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub Alberta Civil Enforcement Act (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
2 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub Ali Pretty (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more wikilinks Please add more sources Orphan
31 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Unassessed, Predicted class: Stub XHX-TV (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub
9 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub XERV-TV (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub
9 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub XHAB-TV (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub
9 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub XEPM-TV (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub
5 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Stub West Point on the Eno (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more sources Stub
26 Quality: Low, Assessed class: Stub, Predicted class: Start Azteca 7 (talk) Please add more content Please create proper section headings Please add more images Please add more sources Stub

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) 23:31, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 October 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 43, 2014)

Inside an ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Ice hotel


Previous selections: Central America • Steak


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:04, 20 October 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

The Signpost: 22 October 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 44, 2014)

Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, the world's first national park
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

National park


Previous selections: Ice hotel • Central America


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:05, 27 October 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

The Signpost: 29 October 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 45, 2014)

A pizza is an oven-baked flat bread typically topped with tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Pizza


Previous selections: National park • Ice hotel


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions

WikiCup award

Awarded to Buffbills7701 for participating in the 2014 WikiCup. J Milburn (talk · contribs), The ed17 (talk · contribs) and Miyagawa (talk · contribs) 21:36, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

WikiCup 2014: The results

The 2014 WikiCup champion is Smithsonian Institution Godot13 (submissions), who flew the flag of the Smithsonian Institution. This was Godot13's first WikiCup competition and, over the 10 months of the competition, he has produced (among other contributions) two featured lists and an incredible 292 featured pictures, including architectural photographs and scans of historical documents. Wales Cwmhiraeth (submissions), 2012 and 2013 WikiCup champion, came in second, having written a large number of biology-related articles. Scotland Casliber (submissions), WikiCup finalist every year since 2010, finished in third.

A full list of our prize-winners follows:

Congratulations to everyone who has been successful in this year's WikiCup, whether you made it to the final rounds or not, and a particular congratulations to the newcomers to the WikiCup who have participated this year. We warmly invite all of you to sign up for next year's competition. Discussions and polls concerning potential rules changes are also open, and all are welcome to participate. The WikiCup judges will be back in touch over the coming months, and we hope to see you all in the 2014 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. J Milburn (talk · contribs) The ed17 (talk · contribs) and Miyagawa (talk · contribs) 22:51, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014

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

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

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

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

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

Recent improvements

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

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

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

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

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

The Signpost: 05 November 2014

This week's article for improvement (week 46, 2014)

Sleeping is part of everyday life
Hello, Buffbills7701.

The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection:

Everyday life


Previous selections: Pizza • National park


Get involved with the TAFI project! You can...
Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of EuroCarGT (talk) 00:16, 10 November 2014 (UTC)Opt-out instructions