Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2017/April

Tech News: 2017-14

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. [1]
• The tracking category Category:Pages with template loops is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template. [2]
• English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again. [3]

Problems

• Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed. [4]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech and Hebrew Wikipedia on 11 April. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and user intent prediction. User intent prediction means the filter tries to help editors determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [5]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Category

One of the journalism students posted an article about Australian Aborigines and I've been digging around for any sort of "indigenous peoples" or "Indigenous rights" category. Do we actually not have one? Darkfrog24 (talk) 11:37, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: If we had, it should be a subcat of Category:Human rights, which it isn't; also Special:Search turns up nothing relevant in category space for native or aboriginal (and, really, if it were there I'd likely have run across it at some point). --Pi zero (talk) 12:07, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Well it's good to know I don't just have category blindness. We might want to think of establishing one of those (the category, not the blindness). Although Australian and Taiwanese first nations are very different from American Indians in most ways, there are aspects of colonialism that affect them similarly. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: How does such a category relate to, say, Ireland or Scotland or Wales, or Basque Country (or for that matter Cornwall, though one doesn't hear about that so much)? Or... Israel and Palestine? --Pi zero (talk) 12:47, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

For Ireland, I don't think they do. The general understanding of "indigenous peoples" is populations of people who were displaced or similarly affected by migrations/invasions of other populations during the early modern period (colonialism). Kind of like how "Republican" refers to the American political party and "republican" to anyone who promotes republics and how Catholicism is a specific religion but being catholic just means anything inclusive or open to everyone. So technically the descendants of people living in Ireland before the Celtic migrations could be called indigenous without violating the dictionary definition, but they don't fit into modern discourse in the same way.

It sounds like what you really want to know is "How do we at Wikinews determine who is and isn't an indigenous person?" My take is that we shouldn't. We should look for and then follow established journalistic practices.

According to the United Nations, "Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them." It seems to come from José R. Martínez Cobo's "Study on the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations." I could check the AP and Economist style guides at some point to see if they have a take on this. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

@Darkfrog24: I'd imagined you had in mind a topic category, i.e., a category that published news articles would go into (rather than an internal category for people who are indigenous). A good topic category has some characteristics... I don't think I can name them all (it's more of an "i can't define it but I know if it I see it" kind of thing), but two of them are

• It should be clear what articles should and shouldn't go in it. The name of the category is part of that, and there may be a usage note field on the {{topic cat}} template to clarify.
• There should be some key words, that are quite likely to occur on articles that belong in the category and are likely to be wikilinked, so they can be made mainspace redirects to the category and thereby help to assure the category will continue to be populated with appropriate articles as they are published over time.

--15:36, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

No, I mean it would be a category for articles about indigenous peoples and the issues that affect them, not for individual people. The closest homolog I can see is CAT:LGBT. It might be more accurate to call it "Indigenous issues" but that's not what people say (which makes it hard for the article's first author to remember what to put after CAT:), and "Indigenous rights" would not be appropriate for articles about, say, a show full of indigenous art.

Hm, I guess key words would be things like "Native Americans," "American Indians," "Aborigines," maybe the names of specific indigenous peoples like "Cherokee" and "Sami." Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:48, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

The last week of the 1st cycle of Wikimedia strategy conversation

Hi, I'm Szymon, a MetaWiki Strategy Coordinator. 3 weeks ago, we invited you to join a broad discussion about Wikimedia's future role in the world. The discussion is divided into 3 cycles, and the first one ends on April, 15. So far, Wikimedians have been discussing mainly about technological improvements, multilingual support, friendly environment, cooperation with other organizations and networks.

• If you'd like to get detailed information about the discussed topics, have a look at → that page.
• If you'd like to join the discussions, please comment → on the talk page of that page or on Meta-Wiki.
• If you have any questions that weren't answered there, feel free to ask me.

I'm pinging one of 2 recently active admins. I hope you'll help me with passing along the news, maybe even join the discussion. @Bddpaux:. (Pi zero, I didn't want you to get cross-wiki spammed :)

Looking forward to your input. Thank you in advance! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Truthfully I'm not favorably disposed to the process. The Foundation's institutional objectives (not a reflection on individuals within the Foundation) are fundamentally incompatible with those of the collective volunteer community; in the long run, I see only two alternatives: either the sisterhood will find a way to get out from under the thumb of the Foundation (though atm I can't imagine how), or the sisterhood will whither and die. --Pi zero (talk) 00:45, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I understand that. The future of some projects, e.g. Wikinews, seems to be uncertain. By the way, that's actually a strategy-related comment and is perfectly eligible for being copy-pasted to one of the pages I mentioned in the second bullet point :) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:50, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): The Foundation is inherently anti-wiki; it can't help being so; and that's just as much of a problem for Wikipedia as for any other sister. I do think Wikinews is something of a bellwether: if Wikinews goes down, the rest of the sisters will fall like dominoes, with Wikipedia at the end of the row. My point is that the Foundation is singularly unqualified to make long-term plans for the sisterhood. Any plans the Foundation touches will be twisted by the nature of the Foundation. --Pi zero (talk) 01:10, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. [6]

Changes this week

• Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [7]
• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [8]
• The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [9]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
• RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:33, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-16

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• You can add ?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. [10]
• You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList. [11]
• The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. [12]

Problems

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week

• There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 18 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• stats.wikimedia.org will be replaced. You can see the new prototype. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback. [13]
• From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. [14][15]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-17

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• New filters for recent changes are now available as a beta feature on most wikis. You can turn it on in your preferences. Remaining wikis will have the new filters on 9 May. [16]
• When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups. [17]

Problems

• Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved. [18]

Changes this week

• The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit. [19]
• Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this. [20]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Two languages of Wikinews proposed for closure

Two following Wikinews are proposed for closure: Norwegian and Albanian. I invite you to those. --George Ho (talk) 21:17, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

The strategy discussion. The Cycle 2 will start on May 5

The first cycle of the Wikimedia movement strategy process recently concluded. During that period, we were discussing the main directions for the Wikimedia movement over the next 15 years. There are more than 1500 summary statements collected from the various communities, but unfortunately, none from your local discussion. The strategy facilitators and many volunteers have summarized the discussions of the previous month. A quantitative analysis of the statements will be posted on Meta for translation this week, alongside the report from the Berlin conference.

The second cycle will begin soon. It's set to begin on May 5 and run until May 31. During that period, you will be invited to dive into the main topics that emerged in the first cycle, discuss what they mean, which ones are the most important and why, and what their practical implications are. This work will be informed and complemented by research involving new voices that haven’t traditionally been included in strategy discussions, like readers, partners, and experts. Together, we will begin to make sense of all this information and organize it into a meaningful guiding document, which we will all collectively refine during the third and last cycle in June−July.

We want to help your community to be more engaged with the discussions in the next cycle. Now, we are looking for volunteers who could

• tell us where to announce the start of the Cycle 2, and how to do that, so we could be sure the majority of your community is informed and has a chance to feel committed, and
• facilitate the Cycle 2 discussions here, on Wikinews.

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Base (WMF) and SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 16:10, 27 April 2017 (UTC)