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


23:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Professor Robert Kelly goes viral!

It was great to see former Wikinews interviewee Professor Robert E Kelly go viral today! --Computron (talk) 23:11, 10 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

:-D --Pi zero (talk) 23:58, 10 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

15:25, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Upcoming changes

There are a lot of small changes happening in the next couple of weeks, and I wanted to give you all a quick heads-up about them. Please share this information with other people/languages/projects that will be interested:

  • There's a change to how columns in reference lists are handled, at the request of the German Wikipedia. This change will improve accessibility by automatically formatting long lists of <ref>s into columns, based on each reader's screen width.
    • What you need to do: Nothing visible is happening now. If your project uses the normal <references /> tag (or doesn't really use refs at all), then file a Phabricator task or just tell me, and I'll get your wiki on the list for the next config change. If your project uses a "reflist" template to create columns, then please consider deprecating it, or update the template to work with the new feature.
  • The label on the "Save changes" button will change on most projects (but not the Wikinewses) tomorrow (Wednesday) to say "Publish page". This has been discussed for years, is supported by user research, and is meant to be clearer for new contributors. (Most of us who have been editing for years don't even look at the button any more, and we all already know that all of our changes can be seen by anyone on the internet, so this doesn't really affect us.)
    • If you have questions or encounter problems (e.g., a bad translation, problems fixing the documentation, etc.), then please tell me as soon as possible.
    • It is critical that every Wikinews maintain this kind of language in the user interface.
  • As part of the ongoing, years-long user-interface standardization project, the color and shape of the "Save changes" (or now "Publish page"), "Show preview" and "Show changes" buttons on some desktop wikitext editors will change. The buttons will be bigger and easier to find, and the "Save" button will be bright blue. (phab:T111088) Unfortunately, it is not technically possible to completely override this change and restore the appearance of the old buttons for either your account or an entire site. So if you don't like it, then I'm sorry; the best I can tell you is that, in the past, most people have gotten used to similar changes after about a week or two of regular use, so there's hope that it won't continue stand out.
  • Do you remember last April, when nobody could edit for about 30 minutes twice, because of some work that Technical Ops was doing on the servers? The same kind of planned maintenance is happening again. It's currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 19th and Wednesday, May 3rd. The time of day is unknown, but it will probably afternoon in Europe and morning in North America. This will be announced repeatedly, but please mark your calendars now.

That's everything on my mind at the moment, but I may have forgotten something. If you have questions (about this or any other WMF work), then please {{ping}} me, and I'll see what I can find out for you. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 13 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Growing number of articles in the Newsroom

What to do about growing number of written news articles under development, submitted for review, and "disputed"? Besides asking for more admins, what are alternatives? About me... I don't think I am capable of being a reviewer or admin of Wikinews. --George Ho (talk) 07:26, 19 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@George Ho: It doesn't ordinarily become a problem; the only reason it's piling up right now is that I'd let it slip off my agenda since some other folks were helping out with those overhead tasks for a while, and then they weren't doing it and I haven't gotten back into the habit. (I'm hoping to have semi-automated assistance with remembering stuff like that, down the road.) I'll do some of that sort of maintenance this morning. --Pi zero (talk) 12:25, 19 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a school project going on? A lot of the articles seem to be coming from newbies. -- Zanimum (talk) 19:13, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Zanimum: Well, yes. If you notice, the username contains UoW (University of Wollongong).
acagastya 19:24, 20 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I think I remember these sprees other years from them. (The ones I helped cleanup this afternoon were written by Miorfino, Ferngirl, Meekyd.) -- Zanimum (talk) 01:20, 21 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

22:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

05:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

A local page for this at Wikinews:Wikimedia Strategy 2017 has been created, if you'd prefer to participate here instead of on Metawiki. Please let your fellow editors know, in the optimum locations for you. Looking forward to your input! :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:20, 22 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

14:46, 27 March 2017 (UTC)