Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2022/January

Community Wishlist Survey 2022

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is now open!

This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 23 January, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 28 January and 11 February.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-02

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

• A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools. [1]
• Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget. [2]
• Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages. [3]
• Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS. [4]
• At wikis where the Mentorship system is configured, you can now use the Action API to get a list of a mentor's mentees. [5]
• The heading on the main page can now be configured using MediaWiki:Mainpage-title-loggedin for logged-in users and MediaWiki:Mainpage-title for logged-out users. Any CSS that was previously used to hide the heading should be removed. [6] [7]
• Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows. [8]
• The sticky header has been deployed for 50% of logged-in users on more than 10 wikis. This is part of the Desktop Improvements. See how to take part in the project.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

01:23, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Call for Feedback about the Board of Trustees elections is now open

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

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The Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections is now open and will close on 7 February 2022.

With this Call for Feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team is taking a different approach. This approach incorporates community feedback from 2021. Instead of leading with proposals, the Call is framed around key questions from the Board of Trustees. The key questions came from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election. The intention is to inspire collective conversation and collaborative proposal development about these key questions.

Join the conversation.

Best,

Movement Strategy and Governance--SOyeyele (WMF) (talk) 23:46, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

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 using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
• You can automatically subscribe to all of the talk page discussions that you start or comment in using DiscussionTools. You will receive notifications when another editor replies. This is available at most wikis. Go to your Preferences and turn on "Automatically subscribe to topics". [9]
• When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

• Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

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

19:55, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech

Hello

We, the team working on the Community Wishlist Survey, would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. It will take place on 19 January (Wednesday), 18:00 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. This external system is not subject to the WMF Privacy Policy. Click here to join.

Agenda

• Bring drafts of your proposals and talk to to a member of the Community Tech Team about your questions on how to improve the proposal

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes without attribution will be taken and published on Meta-Wiki. The presentation (all points in the agenda except for the questions and answers) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, Spanish, and German. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the Community Wishlist Survey talk page or send to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Natalia Rodriguez (the Community Tech manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

• Join online
• Meeting ID: 85804347114
• Dial by your location

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Things.............

....have gone SERIOUSLY dead around here. What's up, people?!--Bddpaux (talk) 15:48, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikinews has had very little activity for a decade and one of our real power-users died several months ago (RIP, User:Pi zero). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:38, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

The loss of Brian and John are devastating. I feel like Wikinews died with them. --Ixfd64 (talk) 20:30, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I have returned here to look around after a long absence and it appears very dead. When you have articles waiting for review for 6 days like I have just marked as stale it doesn't inspire people to contribute - Cartman02au (Talk)(AU Portal) 12:35, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Agreed: wikis really rely on network effects and in particularly, if you are doing news, it has to be assembled and published quickly. If news isn't published for a week, it's no longer news. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:33, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

The reality is the review model consistently does not work in a news wiki. It does not provide the necessary instant gratification to reinforce participation in a severely time-limited project.

At one point the project abandoned the review model in favor of an instant-unpublish model - any reader could instantly unpublish any article for any reason. This caused stress. It encouraged spam. It also caused engagement. And over the 18 months it was the operating model there was a steady increase in articles publish, achieving a high point of more than 30 articles published daily for more than a week.

It seems to me that 1.5 decades of whithering is long enough. If this community wants renewal, it is time to rip the bandage off and re-engage the chaos of the newsroom. - Amgine | t 19:43, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Amgine, Ixfd64: If you have proposals for how to restart this project, I'm game. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:15, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

<grumble>first we fix this project so people can edit using TOR and/or commercial vpn, by restoring the local dispensation for reasons of privacy.</grumble> The only way for a project reboot to be successful is if members of the community - especially those who are perceived to be leaders - talk about it. And the community needs to see how it *can* work. And the community needs to be reminded of why it exists - a two-part mission to A) Document current events with what is known, at a specific point in time, and B) Create and maintain an archive of what was known, when it was known. And part B is more important than part A. It is more important to be timely than right. That is a huge difference between WN and other WMF projects.

I have been away from this project too long to lead anything. But I may be happy to write. - Amgine | t 02:31, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Look at the front page, the lead article is from mid-December. Who is going to come here to get their news fix? Clearly the review model is not working when you have articles sitting in review for so long. It can be argued that it has improved the quality of articles, but it hasn't improved the quality of the project. To me, it seems the project is at a cross-roads. Like Amgine, I have been away too long to lead anything, but I may be interested in writing or helping to collaborate on articles - Cartman02au (Talk)(AU Portal) 12:38, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Also look at the stats - last month there were 13 active editors. In September there were 5 - see here. Note that in 2011 there was a discussion about this very issue Re-opening worm of cans: Radically alter or dump_the develop-review-publish process - Cartman02au (Talk)(AU Portal) 13:19, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Bddpaux, Koavf, Ixfd64, Cartman02au:Yes. Things have changed since then. There are five people who have commented here; only one has edited a content article. Of the admins, no comments, but being fair one of them has edited a content article since this discussion began. There have been quite a few edits to prepare articles for deletion, but only one to improve a submitted article and that by a new contributor.

I suggest, before this conversation can go anywhere, that we start working on a mock-up project within user spaces. Create news articles in your userspaces, and add a link to them on User:Amgine/Reboot once you think it constitutes a useful news article. Let's see if we can keep a sprint of user space articles going for a week. I am setting a personal goal of 2 articles total - other time commitments. Feel free to remove any link if you think the article is not ready for publication, add your notes to its talk page, and notify the editor(s) of its 'unpublication'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Amgine (talk • contribs) 14:21, 12 January 2022‎

Good to see this discussion taking place, especially the above writing goal. One big factor affecting activity levels is a lack of time. When I started on wikis several moons ago, I didn’t have kids, a full time job and a mortgage! I agree something needs to be done about our publishing, so I have put forward a modest proposal on the proposals subpage. [₂₄Cr][talk] 19:21, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Lets use this article as an example of why flagged revs is not working Hunga Tonga volcano erupts in Tonga. It became a good article with some collaborative edits, only to fail to be reviewed before going stale - Cartman02au (Talk)(AU Portal) 08:44, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Movement Strategy and Governance News – Issue 5

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Movement Strategy and Governance News
Issue 5, January 2022Read the full newsletter

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Welcome to the fifth issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News (formerly known as Universal Code of Conduct News)! This revamped newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the Movement Charter, Universal Code of Conduct, Movement Strategy Implementation grants, Board elections and other relevant MSG topics.

This Newsletter will be distributed quarterly, while more frequent Updates will also be delivered weekly or bi-weekly to subscribers. Please remember to subscribe here if you would like to receive these updates.

• Call for Feedback about the Board elections - We invite you to give your feedback on the upcoming WMF Board of Trustees election. This call for feedback went live on 10th January 2022 and will be concluded on 7th February 2022. (continue reading)
• Universal Code of Conduct Ratification - In 2021, the WMF asked communities about how to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct policy text. The revised draft of the enforcement guidelines should be ready for community vote in March. (continue reading)
• Movement Strategy Implementation Grants - As we continue to review several interesting proposals, we encourage and welcome more proposals and ideas that target a specific initiative from the Movement Strategy recommendations. (continue reading)
• The New Direction for the Newsletter - As the UCoC Newsletter transitions into MSG Newsletter, join the facilitation team in envisioning and deciding on the new directions for this newsletter. (continue reading)
• Diff Blogs - Check out the most recent publications about MSG on Wikimedia Diff. (continue reading)

--SOyeyele (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
• The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
• You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [10]

Events

• You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
• You can translate, promote, or comment on the proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey. Voting will begin on 28 January.

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

21:38, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Desktop Improvements update and Office Hours invitation

Hello. I wanted to give you an update about the Desktop Improvements project, which the Wikimedia Foundation Web team has been working on for the past few years.

The goals of the project are to make the interface more welcoming and comfortable for readers and useful for advanced users. The project consists of a series of feature improvements which make it easier to read and learn, navigate within the page, search, switch between languages, use article tabs and the user menu, and more.

The improvements are already visible by default for readers and editors on 24 wikis, including Wikipedias in French, Portuguese, and Persian.

The changes apply to the Vector skin only. Monobook or Timeless users are not affected.

Features deployed since our last update

• User menu - focused on making the navigation more intuitive by visually highlighting the structure of user links and their purpose.
• Sticky header - focused on allowing access to important functionality (logging in/out, history, talk pages, etc.) without requiring people to scroll to the top of the page.

For a full list of the features the project includes, please visit our project page. We also invite you to our Updates page.

The features deployed already and the table of contents that's currently under development

How to enable the improvements

Global preferences

• It is possible to opt-in individually in the appearance tab within the preferences by unchecking the "Use Legacy Vector" box. (It has to be empty.) Also, it is possible to opt-in on all wikis using the global preferences.
• If you think this would be good as a default for all readers and editors of this wiki, feel free to start a conversation with the community and contact me.
• On wikis where the changes are visible by default for all, logged-in users can always opt-out to the Legacy Vector. There is an easily accessible link in the sidebar of the new Vector.

Learn more and join our events

If you would like to follow the progress of our project, you can subscribe to our newsletter.

You can read the pages of the project, check our FAQ, write on the project talk page, and join an online meeting with us (27 January (Thursday), 15:00 UTC).

How to join our online meeting

• Join online
• Meeting ID: 89205402895
• Dial by your location

Thank you!!

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

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

Recent changes

• If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [11]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

• A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

• You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 28 January and 11 February. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.

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

17:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)