Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2023/July
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Tech News: 2023-27
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
As part of the rolling out of the audio links that play on click wishlist proposal, small wikis will now be able to use the inline audio player that is implemented by the Phonos extension. [1]
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
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Tech News: 2023-28
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 Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
- Global abuse filters have been enabled on all Wikimedia projects, except English and Japanese Wikipedias (who opted out). This change was made following a global request for comments. [3]
- Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [4]
- The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
- The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [5]
- Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [6]
Future changes
- There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [7]
- There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
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Time for English Wikinews to be covered by global sysops?
It seems that English Wikinews admins are not particularly active at this time. I see only one who has used their admin tools in July [8]. The m:Global Sysops are around and can act if the community feels that this assistance can be of use. The GS primarily act in a limited scope, assisting with spam removals and the like. To me eyes it seems that the community has fallen into that space, and either should discuss that need or discuss activating your people to be administrators. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:01, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
- Do you see a problem with issues like spam now? I revert some occasional vandalism and general bad edits around here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:07, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
- I am seeing spam that has been around for a handful of days. I am seeing one administrator using their tools actively in July. I am reminding the community that the global sysops don't operate here. I am leaving it to the community to work out thei needs. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:29, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
- In that case, yes, I would be happy to have them step in. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:27, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
- I am seeing spam that has been around for a handful of days. I am seeing one administrator using their tools actively in July. I am reminding the community that the global sysops don't operate here. I am leaving it to the community to work out thei needs. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:29, 16 July 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-29
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
- We are now serving 1% of all global user traffic from Kubernetes (you can read more technical details). We are planning to increment this percentage regularly. You can follow the progress of this work.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
- MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create
en-caanden-gbsubpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [9] - The
action=growthsetmentorstatusAPI will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use theaction=growthmanagementorlistAPI now. [10]
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Tech News: 2023-30
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 July 18, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a survey about the technical decision making process for people who do technical work that relies on software that is maintained by the Foundation or affiliates. If this applies to you, please take part in the survey. The survey will be open for three weeks, until August 7. You can find more information in the announcement e-mail on wikitech-l.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
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Tech News: 2023-31
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 Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
- The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [11][12]
- The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [13]
Problems
- It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [14]
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
- Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [15]
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