Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2018/January

On showing your work in 21st-century journalism

http://pressthink.org/2017/12/show-work-new-terms-trust-journalism/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:47, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-02

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

• On Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [1][2]
• Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [3]
• Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [4]
• Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of its old custom one. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [5][6]

Problems

• Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [7]
• With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [8]
• The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [9]
• Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

• Wikidata will be moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you will be able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. This includes editing the language links on other wikis. [11]
• The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [12][13]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar).
• WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [14]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 10 January at 16:00 (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.

16:19, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-3

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

• Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [15]
• There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [16]

Problems

• Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [17][18]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 January at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 17 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [19][20]

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

18:45, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

News writers union

Los Angeles Times writers vote in favor of unionizing. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:27, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Meanwhile, at The Washington Post. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:44, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-04

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

• Filters on Special:RecentChangesLinked will get the new look similar to on the recent changes page. Special:RecentChangesLinked will also get some new features. [21][22]

Problems

• With the new OOUI look menus and popups can open upwards instead of downwards. This was meant to make long dropdown menus easier to use. Sometimes these menus have been overlapped by other things. This is now fixed. [23]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 24 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted on 22 February. Some bots use this to get the recent changes feed. They need to be able to reconnect automatically or they will not work until they have been fixed. Most bots can reconnect automatically. [24]

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

23:55, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

A tiny fix

See phab:T185455. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:19, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: Curious. Was done to four pages in 16 August 2005 based on this water cooler thread: diff. Four pages were changed: MediaWiki:Previousdiff, MediaWiki:Previousrevision, MediaWiki:Nextdiff, and MediaWiki:Nextrevision. --Pi zero (talk) 12:54, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: So I'd noticed. Bizarre. In case you or someone else reading this are not familiar with HTML, the problem was that someone wrote "&rarr" instead of "→". Just a small typo: the former actually displays "&rarr" and the latter displays the arrow →. Can you please delete these? They will fall back to the default arrows. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:29, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Done --Pi zero (talk) 18:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! That has annoyed me for 12 years (almost 13)! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:38, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: What puzzles me about this is that I have found no direct evidence on this project of any such typo. The indirect evidence is so strong that I've gone back several times to the revision histories of those pages, but the typo just isn't there. --Pi zero (talk) 17:23, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Well, you can't find that anymore, since MediaWiki:Previousdiff, MediaWiki:Previousrevision, MediaWiki:Nextdiff, and MediaWiki:Nextrevision were all changed--that will change the layout of the entire site, including in revisions (just like how if you change a template now it changes all of the previous revisions if you try to review them). Does that clarify? If you're still trying to piece it together, I can help. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:39, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: I'm not sure what you mean. I have looked at each revision of each of those four pages (more than once, because it makes no sense to me that the evidence wouldn't be there somewhere). Because those pages existed when the problem was observed, the wiki software should have been showing what was in those pages, so if the phantom typo were visible, it should have been in a revision of those pages. Unless, of course, there was some sort of bug in the platform at the time; the evidence suggests some such bug. --Pi zero (talk) 18:43, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Hm. Well, I can't see the page history of course as I'm not an admin and can't see deleted pages. But it used to be the case that MediaWiki:Previousdiff had "<-" as its text. The default in MediaWiki is "←". Now, page diffs display with the proper Unicode arrow character but they used to have the ASCII hack. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:47, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: Indeed they did have the ASCII hack. And the hack was put in place because, as testified by the archived thread, somebody was getting the exact behavior one would observe if the typo were present. And, the hack eliminated the problem, just as it would if the typo were present. Except that the revision histories of those pages do not support the hypothesis that such a typo was present. Well, there's no problem now. --Pi zero (talk) 19:54, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-05

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

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 31 January at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation is working on how to get less unmaintained code on Wikimedia wikis. This could be by finding maintainers or removing unmaintained features. They are now looking for feedback on what do do with AbuseFilter, the IRC RecentChanges feed, the RelatedSites extension and TimedMediaHandler. You can leave feedback on the linked talk pages. [25]

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

17:06, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Australia criminalizing reporting on leaks

Really shocking stuff for anyone who might write for this site from down under: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/25/coalitions-security-laws-criminalise-reporting-media-companies-warn —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:28, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Pretty interesting, to say the least. Personally, I don't believe it is going to play out in the "doomsday scenario" portrayed in this article. The Aussies themselves didn't bother to write about it for a month is seems. --SVTCobra 00:48, 31 January 2018 (UTC)