Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [1]
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Hello! I registered for the Account Creation Tool and would love to know the typical turnaround time for reviewing new tool users. I signed up around ~12 days ago and am excited to jump in sometime soon! Thanks for your time and help—happy editing! Bsoyka (t • c • g) 18:40, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Bsoyka: unfortunately turnaround time is usually pretty lengthy for various reasons. I'm not that active on the tool at the moment either for personal reasons, so I'll say that if you've not heard anything in a few weeks, poke the tool admin's mailing list. stwalkerster (talk) 20:39, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Gotcha, I'll reach out there if needed. Thanks a ton for the quick response—hope everything goes as well as it can in your personal life! Bsoyka (t • c • g) 20:57, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Stwalkerster, I recently changed my password to my account, and ever since (it's been a couple weeks) I've been getting multiple emails daily that say "Multiple failed attempts to log in to Wikipedia as Awsomaw". I'm wondering if you could you use your checkuser privileges to see what IP is trying to log onto my account, to see if it is one of my devices or some bot/user that I don't know. Or if not, if you have any other relevant tips for me. Thanks; I really appreciate your time. Awsomaw (talk) 20:33, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Awsomaw: I'm not able to run checks on-demand like that unfortunately, and even if I could I wouldn't be allowed to disclose anything useful about the result to you.As you've already noted, it could be a few different things.
Check any phones/tablets/etc you've got in case you've got a Wikipedia app installed that might have cached credentials
Check Special:BotPasswords for anything there that you might have forgotten about
Check all browsers on all your devices - this is probably the least likely as it wouldn't automatically attempt a login.
@Stwalkerster: Thanks for the quick reply. I double checked the list you put there last night, and I am still getting notifications. I understand you are not able to tell me anything or do on demand checks. I am wondering, if I have to just continue to get these emails, or if there is anything I can do to stop the notifications. Thanks again. Awsomaw (talk) 14:56, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [2][3]
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.
Project updates
Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
Two new parser functions will be available this week: 
Technical news
Arbitration