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Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2024/September

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Announcing the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee

Original message at wikimedia-l. You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to your language

Hello all,

The scrutineers have finished reviewing the vote and the Elections Committee have certified the results for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election.

I am pleased to announce the following individual as regional members of the U4C, who will fulfill a term until 15 June 2026:

  • North America (USA and Canada)
    • Ajraddatz

The following seats were not filled during this special election:

  • Latin America and Caribbean
  • Central and East Europe (CEE)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa
  • South Asia
  • The four remaining Community-At-Large seats

Thank you again to everyone who participated in this process and much appreciation to the candidates for your leadership and dedication to the Wikimedia movement and community.

Over the next few weeks, the U4C will begin meeting and planning the 2024-25 year in supporting the implementation and review of the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines. You can follow their work on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the U4C and the Elections Committee,

RamzyM (WMF) 14:05, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Re: The Vector 2022 skin as the default in two weeks?

A two minute-long video about Vector 2022

Hello everyone, I'm reaching out on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team responsible for the MediaWiki skins. I'd like to revisit the topic of making Vector 2022 the default here on English Wikinews. I did post a message about this almost two years ago (where you can find all the details about the skin), but we didn't finalize it back then.

What happened in the meantime? We built dark mode and different options for font sizes, and made Vector 2022 the default on most wikis, including all other Wikinews. With the not-so-new V22 skin being the default, existing and coming features, like dark mode and temporary accounts respectively, will become available for logged-out users here.

So, if no large concerns are raised, we will deploy Vector 2022 here in two weeks, in the week of September 16. Do let me know if you have any questions. Thank you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

  • Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

  • Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
  • Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [2]
  • Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

  • A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:07, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Have your say: Vote for the 2024 Board of Trustees!

Hello all,

The voting period for the 2024 Board of Trustees election is now open. There are twelve (12) candidates running for four (4) seats on the Board.

Learn more about the candidates by reading their statements and their answers to community questions.

When you are ready, go to the SecurePoll voting page to vote. The vote is open from September 3rd at 00:00 UTC to September 17th at 23:59 UTC.

To check your voter eligibility, please visit the voter eligibility page.

Best regards,

The Elections Committee and Board Selection Working Group

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:13, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Future?

I am not really proposing anything here -- I am honestly just voicing some general thoughts, to be frank. I have sort of lost an understanding of what this project is/where it's going. Firstly: I just don't think we have very many customers around these parts...I just don't. I've sort of lost a lot of my motivation here. I'm not leaving. I'm not resigning. I'm just -- wriggling away a bit. People come here, write a bit, fuss a lot, stir up stuff, then maybe get a bit better at writing a bit -- and then vanish (for the most part). Personally, I think (and I don't know how it would happen) this whole business needs to be diluted down into about 4 'versions'; there are MANY languages represented in WN, with many projects being propped up by about 5 people total. That is not sustainable. I believe in Citizen journalism, I do and I have for many years. But I just don't know what we are/who we are/where we're going anymore around this place.--Bddpaux (talk) 19:04, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Bddpaux Thanks for leaving your note here, a few thoughts
  1. I think we lack commitment of an individual contributor, like me, like you to connect with another contributor to do something (reviewing or writing) together. I'm trying to test that out.
  2. And also test out the approach by a specialised topic. I'm trying to write about topics other contributors find interesting to edit together. If my topic is interesting to nobody to edit or review, then it is too much effort for me to write. (It is part of connecting with another contributor)
  3. There is a minimum number of reviewers, below which it doesn't work (if I'm not sure of something I don't have anyone to run to ask a question). In my view that's at least around 3. Ability to catch up with some other reviewer at least once a day is important to me. Is it important to you?
    • In older days there was Pi zero on IRC. Now I have you on wiki, but not on IRC. That delays some of the communication. I also have Heavy Water, but that's with what, three days turnaround time for reply? Link: Wikinews:IRC. Full time commitment is not required, suffice to have around 10-20 mins a day when you're available, preferably with a warning/note when exactly that's going to be so I can catch you and ask all my questions from my day of editing. Someone noted it's not transparent, yet I think it is important to have a chance to chat in real time for some issues. The outcomes can always later be noted on wiki.
  4. I'd've created Wikinews:Briefs/September 5, 2024 (example), but the only 'within last week' story is OR about LGQBT+ event in England, and OR seems to be excluded from Briefs. (Briefs could've helped UN secretary-general warns about rising sea levels, and England: Staffordshire town celebrates LGBTQ+ pride despite funding issues if I knew how to use them properly - the former article having insufficient details and someone noted on talk page that omitting details is not good practice when publishing, and the latter sitting to become stale if not reviewed)
    • Are Briefs also restricted to be one week fresh? Or can this be two weeks under current freshness criteria?
    • Are Briefs excluding OR?
    • "Draft submitted. Draft was not reviewed for N days. Draft received (either negative or positive) feedback" - when in this timeline do we include 'Draft published as Brief'...?
Hope it helps! Regards, -- Gryllida (talk) 01:51, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(The site got much better now at sending notifications, it is making usage of talk pages a lot easier than it was a few years ago)
My list of 'question for today' include:
  • the question about usage of Briefs (above, posted a few mins ago)
  • the question about how could one of us all please review the England story (posted at Water Cooler yesterday or the day before, no reply so far)
  • could we all look at the OR list of questions at the talk page of the aussie student visa reform article (posted around an hour ago, no reply so far)
  • what did you want to do with the Crimea story (posted at someone else's talk page a few days ago, no reply so far)
  • what did you want me to help you with in return for you doing all of the above things, is there anything I can help you with (posted just here now for the first time ever)
If there is nobody with half an hour of active time every day, then there is no chance something succeeds in the long run. I'm not sure where you went after posting the paragraph above, I feel a bit lonely and confused now (figuratively speaking). On IRC there were status updates, little notes like 'I popped in for 5 mins, now I'll do groceries, will be available for an hour later in the evening', etc). Of course they're also possible on-wiki, just takes a bit more effort to put them, plus the place where they will be put can be completely random anywhere in recent changes, wheres on irc it is only one place to track without clicking each 'view what was changed' button. I don't mind if it works on-wiki, it just got to work. Gryllida (talk) 02:15, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Bddpaux, I think there is an over-arching theme to this, which is "we have too few reviewers." A problem we are discussing at length here: Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy#After_1_week.
I am not really proposing anything here -- I am honestly just voicing some general thoughts, to be frank. I agree with your opinion and I was very hopeful your previous attempts at a radical change by fast-tracking new reviewers would ultimately be successful. But with all due respect and hopefully not too much frankness; we either need more active reviewers or serious ideas for ways to gain more active reviewers. Voicing opinions doesn't move the needle much in solving the problem and I think we have general consensus on the notion we need more active reviewers. We've had continuous articles in the review queue for months and many go stale without review. You are a reviewer. You could be a part of the solution to the immediate problem of too few active reviewers, while we try to work through the underlying cause of that problem. There is also an active request to add a new reviewer (myself).[4] You could help by commenting and/or voting on that request. Your input as a reviewer and admin matters.
I just don't think we have very many customers around these parts...I just don't. I agree. Too few readers is likely due to a lack of fresh content to consume, which is due to too few active reviewers. We don't seem to lack content to be reviewed and published. We lack the ability to consistently review and publish.
If you don't see reviewing articles yourself, and/or adding more reviewers as a part of the solution, what do you suggest we do to change the status quo?—Michael.C.Wright (Talk/Published) 16:02, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Gryllida if someone could explain to me how briefs work I'd be happy to try to make one... Me Da Wikipedian (talk) 21:11, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Me Da Wikipedian, @Michael.C.Wright, @Gryllida I remember briefs I still don't know why they don't exist anymore, maybe we can bring them back??? Cheers!!! BigKrow (talk) 00:18, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Briefs, to clarify, nowadays (there's been some abuse of the term by applying it to shorts as well in the past) are summaries of articles published in a day, perhaps along with some other features, which were used as peer-reviewed scripts for WN:Audio Wikinews/News Briefs. Shorts, which I think are what Gryllida intended to refer to, are just collections of at least three underlength stories published on a certain day (each individual short can occur on a different day, as long as they're all fresh on the day of publication). Three shorts, about one paragraph in length and answering all of the 5Ws and H, together equaled a standalone article, then required to have at least three paragraphs of more than one sentence each. Once modern review was introduced, Wikinewsies found that it was actually more taxing to review three shorts than one standalone article, and noticed that when a problem held one short up from being published, it held up the rest, even if there were no problems with any of the others. And of course, two years ago we voted to lower the length requirement for a standalone article to...one paragraph, rendering Shorts completely pointless. Heavy Water (talk) 07:31, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Heavy Water, sorry I misunderstood. BigKrow (talk) 15:36, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Heavy Water well the shorts could be under 100 words but...yeah Me Da Wikipedian (talk) 20:59, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A Reminder On How The Main Page Works

The last 5 articles published have all had, by 5 different reviewers (@Gryllida:, @Bddpaux:, @Heavy Water:, @Tom Morris:, @RockerballAustralia:) , mistakes with putting it on the front page. As a reminder, when a story is published, an excerpt from the start of the story should go in Lead Article 1. The article that was previously in Lead Article 1 should go to Lead Article 2 (possibly with a slightly shorter excerpt). The article that was previously in Lead Article 2 should go to Lead Article 3, and so on. The article that was previous in Lead Article 5 should be removed. Me Da Wikipedian (talk) 22:04, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

  • Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [5][6]
  • Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [7]

Project updates

  • Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [8]
  • Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [9]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:52, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

  •   Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
  • The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [10]
  • References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [11]
  • It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [12]
  •   Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
  • Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [13]

Technical project updates

  • Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [14]

Tech in depth

  •   The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
  •   To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
    • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
    • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:02, 17 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

 
A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature
  • Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
  • The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
  •   It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [15]
  • Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [16][17]
  • View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  •   From Wikimedia Enterprise:
    • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
    • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

  •   The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:36, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-40

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

Updates for editors

  • Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
  • Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [18]
  • For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [19]
  • The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
  • View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

  • Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

  • The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [20]

Meetings and events

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MediaWiki message delivery 22:19, 30 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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