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

Limiting your digital footprint in a surveillance state

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/technology/personaltech/digital-footprint-surveillance.html —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:48, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Looks interesting though a few days old. Thanks Justin! Gryllida (talk) 07:27, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

No problem. It's stale as a news story but perennially useful for tips for journalists in dystopian hellscapes. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 08:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-10

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

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (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 6 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can give feedback on the future of talk pages.
• The mobile website will use the standard fonts on your computer or phone instead of a generic font. This will make it easier to read text in many scripts. [1][2]

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

16:37, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

On liberal journalism

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the-new-york-times.php/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:10, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-11

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

• Pages can use geocoordinates from Wikidata with the mw.wikibase.entity:formatStatements Lua function or the #statements parser function. If they do, they will now be shown using a Kartographer <maplink> if the wiki can use Kartographer. You can report bugs or ask questions on Phabricator.
• There is now an EventStream to see when links are added or removed on Wikimedia wikis. You can read the discussions and plans.

Problems

• Some wikis will not be able to edit for a short period of time on 19 March (UTC). This will start at 15:00 UTC. It will last up to 15 minutes but probably shorter. You can see the list of affected wikis. This is because of network maintenance. You can still read the wikis.
• Editors who use Firefox to edit with the visual editor had a problem with copying text. When they tried to select text that included footnotes, templates or block images in the middle they would often only get part of the text. This has now been fixed. [3]
• Some maps didn't work for a while on 8 March. This has been fixed. [4][5]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (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 13 March 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.

19:28, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-12

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

• When you use rollback you will be able to get a confirmation prompt on most wikis. It asks you if you wanted to do the rollback. This is to avoid misclicks. You will have to opt in to get it. On German Wikipedia it will be an opt-out feature from 28 March. [6][7]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (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 20 March at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Admins will be able to block someone from editing a page or a namespace. This already works on a few Wikimedia wikis. You can read more. If your wiki wants to be an early tester of this, you can tell the developers. [8]
• Toolforge will shut down the Ubuntu Trusty job grid. This will happen the week of 25 March. Tools that use this grid needs to be moved to the new Debian Stretch job grid. If they haven't, they will be taken offline. Maintainers can restart the tools later. Users may not be able to use them in the meanwhile. You can see a list of affected tools.

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19:43, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

WMF proposes rebranding Wikinews as a Wikipedia project

WMF found studies indicating that Wikimedia is not well understand and that "Wikipedia" is the most recognized. It is planning to change "Wikinews" into Wikipedia News. You people should go to meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 research and planning and its subpage about the rest of the proposal. For feedback, you may email to either brandprojectwikimedia.org or go to a discussion page. --George Ho (talk) 08:48, 12 March 2019 (UTC); amended, 09:58, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the notification.

I oppose this change. News is not a subproject of an encyclopedia. I did not understand where to leave this feedback in public.

I've written to the email with this content,

Wikinews is not Wikipedia News.

The differences are in that

- It allows original research in the form of original reporting,

- The assumption of good faith is replaced with 'never assume' for the sake of critical thinking,

- Many language editions require peer review for publication,

- Events which occurred over 3 days ago are not publishable (wikipedia home page often has 'news' items from 4 or 5 or more days ago)

To whom do I write about this for this proposal to make an impact? Do we need consensus on the project to prevent the rename from occurring?

In the case the rename proceeds, are we allowed to keep the old brand name still?

Here is a relevant discussion:

https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/miscellaneous#WMF_proposes_rebranding_Wikinews_into_Wikipedia_News

I hope to receive a reply soon. Gryllida (talk) 08:59, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

For public feedback, you may go to meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 research and planning/community review (which I previously piped). --George Ho (talk) 09:45, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

here. `Gryllida (talk) 09:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

I reread the proposal and couldn't confirm whether it would change to "Wikipedia News", but it plans to brand Wikinews as a Wikipedia project. Therefore, I changed the section title to reflect that. --George Ho (talk) 09:57, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Is it just a name change or would it have any substantial effect on the work we do around here? Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:14, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Reading the comments page, I see a lot of proposals for "Let individual Wikimedia projects decide whether or not they want to be rebranded." There is a lot of opposition to this from the other projects. But I think the majority of people just won't notice. Darkfrog24 (talk) 12:52, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

To call this insanity, or even idiocy, seems far too weak. Strangely, today isn't even April 1. Saying Wikinews is as different from Wikipedia as it is possible to be and still be a wiki should be unnecessary at the Foundation level; anyone who doesn't already know that has no business even talking about branding. --Pi zero (talk) 13:52, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Ahh, Yair rand. :-)  And thanks, Darkfrog24, for your supportive comment there. (I'm giving thought myself to what remark I might usefully insert there; clearly, I think, neither "me too!" nor "I'm outraged!" would be useful.) --Pi zero (talk) 14:20, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Whatever else may be going on, we all support this project. I concur about "outrage." If this really is just a name change then "eyeroll" might be better.

I think the biggest place where a name-change might affect us is when contacting sources for original reporting. "Wikinews" might not be well known but "Wikipedia" is a mixed bag. It could help or hurt. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:29, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

I didn't mean to suggest outrage would be an inappropriate reaction; on the contrary, we have a hard-earned reputation that Wikipedia has not earned, and lumping us in with Wikipedia would be an insult to Wikinews and giving undeserved credit to Wikipedia. I was merely observing that it would not, by itself, be a useful comment on that page. --Pi zero (talk) 18:56, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Tech News: 2019-13

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 new version of the content translation tool will be used for all new translations. The older version will still be used for translations that were started with it. Most users won’t see any change. More than 80% of the published translations are already using the new version. [9]

Problems

• There was a problem with editing with Safari on iOS. When you wrote an edit summary you couldn't save the edit. This has now been fixed. [10]
• The editing toolbar sometimes disappears when you scroll on iOS devices. This will be fixed soon. [11]
• Wikis can over-ride interface messages on-wiki. A problem meant that sometimes an old versions of any changed messages were shown instead. This included the sitenotice and other important parts of the interface. This was fixed at around 2019-03-22 16:00 (UTC). Logged-out users may still get the wrong message. Purging the page should fix it for them. [12]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (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 27 March 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.

18:04, 25 March 2019 (UTC)