Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2019/June

A proposal for WikiJournals to become a new sister project

Over the last few years, the WikiJournal User Group has been building and testing a set of peer reviewed academic journals on a mediawiki platform. The main types of articles are:

• Existing Wikipedia articles submitted for external review and feedback (example)
• From-scratch articles that, after review, are imported to Wikipedia (example)
• Original research articles that are not imported to Wikipedia (example)

Proposal: WikiJournals as a new sister project

From a Wikipedian point of view, this is a complementary system to Featured article review, but bridging the gap with external experts, implementing established scholarly practices, and generating citable, doi-linked publications.

Please take a look and support/oppose/comment! Evolution and evolvability (talk) 04:25, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-23

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 now write all special letters in all African Wikipedia languages. This works in the desktop version. [1]
• There is now a field called depicts on Commons. This is a way to show what is in a picture with the help of Wikidata. It is still in development. [2]
• Some tools on Toolforge may break on or after 3 June because of database changes. Maintainers should update their tools to use the new schema. [3][4]

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [5]

Changes later this week

• Some wikis have one tab for the visual editor and one tab for a wikitext editor. Others wikis just have one tab. If your wiki has two tabs, clicking a link to create a new page has always opened a wikitext editor. It will now open the editor you used the last time you edited. [6]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 5 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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15:24, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Google favors accuracy

Bearing in mind that 1.) we are still a completely marginal player in the news world and 2.) you shouldn't use Google products, this is an encouraging trend in Web search that reliability in reporting is rewarded: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/08/google-rewards-reputable-reporting-more-than-left-wing-politics —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:39, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-24

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

• When you create a PDF from a page on the wiki this is now done by Proton. Before this we used Electron. It should look the same but work better. Both use Chromium. This is a different system from when you collect several articles into a book and make a PDF from them. [7][8]
• The Flagged Revisions extension now uses the standard OOUI icons. There will be additional minor fixes for positioning in the next deployment. [9]
• Bots and other scripts that do not set an identifiable User-Agent may find their requests strictly rate-limited until they identify themselves properly. [10]

Problems

• Please check if the Flagged Revisions configuration on your wiki is as you expect (or as it was a few weeks ago). If not, please report it. [11]

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 12 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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17:07, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-25

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

Problems

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for 30 minutes on 19 June at 05:00 (UTC). This is to fix a hardware problem. [12]

Changes later this week

• MIDI files can soon be played without the Score extension. You can then add them with [[File:Filename.midi]]. Later override_midi and override_audio will stop working. Instead you will need to add the MIDI file below the music score. [13]
• A new video player will soon replace the old one. You will be able to enable it as a beta feature in your preferences. It will later be enabled for everyone if there are no big problems. [14]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 June. It will be on all wikis from 20 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 19 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Some gadgets and user scripts still use the old wgEnableAPI and wgEnableWriteAPI values. These values are always true. They will soon be removed. This might break the gadgets and scripts. You should fix your gadgets to not use these values. [15]

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20:38, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata

After severa^l years of a kind of Wikinews hiatus I recently began to write Wikinews articles in the German WP, what is good. However I wasn't able to figure out if Wikinewsians create a Wikidata entry

• only if needed for the prupose of interwiki
• only for categories
• whatsoever.

Which is actually best practice here in this wiki? --Matthiasb (talk) 23:11, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

@Matthiasb: I, for one, have never favored having Wikidata items for articles; it seems to me that no two articles, whether in the same language or different languages, are ever about exactly the same story, unless maybe one of them is a straight translation of the other. When we voted here on being hooked up to Wikidata —not that we actually had any choice, when the Foundation gets fixated on something— as I recall they tried to placate me with a claim that of course they were only doing Wikinews categories; but I don't recall anyone asking us later whether it was okay to have wikidata items for articles too, they just did it. There's seems to be this expectation floating around that centralization is always a good thing, which I find baffling since, between too much centralization and too little, too much seems to me at least as major a source of misery in the world as too little. Here on en.wn, btw, we do help maintain wikidata items for topic categories, but we don't remove the local interwiki markup once pages are linked at wikidata. --Pi zero (talk) 23:38, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-26

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

Problems

• The new version of MediaWiki for last week was not fully released due to issues. It was removed from most wikis on Tuesday and from test wikis on Thursday. [16]
• Most wikis were slow and then briefly read-only last week due to one of the database servers having a problem. It is now replaced. [17]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 June. It will be on all wikis from 27 June (calendar).

Meetings

• You can watch or join the next Wikimedia Language showcase. It will be about the usage of Machine Translation in Wikimedia projects. The showcase will be on 26 June at 13:00 (UTC). A recording will be kept for later viewing
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 26 June at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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17:30, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Article on Mitch Murray, Songwriter

I’m hoping someone can help me. My Wikipedia page, edited - I believe- by Derek Bullamore - has a very basic piece of incorrect information due to a mistaken entry in the London Gazette, nearly a month ago, when I was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

I changed my legal name by Deed Poll in 1968 from Lionel Michael Stitcher to Mitch Murray, and my CBE honour is actually in the name of Mitch Murray, not my birth name. I have the original Change Of Name Deed and this was supplied to the Cabinet Office at the time I accepted the award. They tell me they supplied the correct information to the Gazette, but somehow the wrong information was printed.

I am quite happy to supply a copy of the Deed to whoever wishes to see it I will also arrange for the London Gazette to confirm the correct name, Mitch Murray CBE, which is now on file officially.

I understand why whoever edited my page did so, using the entry in the London Gazette, but the name Lionel Michael Stitcher has not been my legal name for 51 years, and I am happy to prove this and verify it with documentation and backup from the Gazette or the Cabinet Office.

I am finding the incorrect entry a complication to my professional ‘brand’ - much worse than the wrong ‘Spouse’ entry (we were actually Divorced in 1980).

Could someone please help me with this problem?

Many thanks

Mitch Murray CBE (honest)

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 78.151.149.35 (talk • contribs) 19:49, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

The appropriate first place to raise this concern is the talk page of the article in question. --Pi zero (talk) 19:56, 29 June 2019 (UTC)