Commons:User scripts/tech news/Archives/2016/March
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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
- Files on Wikimedia Commons can now be 2 GB big. The old limit was 1 GB. [1]
- Welcome notifications now have a different symbol. English Wikipedia already had this one. [2]
- The Wikimedia memory cache servers in the Eqiad cluster have now been upgraded to Debian 8 (Jessie). Some users might have had to log in again because of this. [3]
- It is now easier to categorize images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the Commons Android app. [4]
Bare attributes in tags now parse according to the HTML5 specifications. <pages from= to= section=1>will parse as<pages from="to=" section="1">instead of<pages from="" to="" section="1">as it used to. Please use<pages from="" to="" section=1>or<pages section=1>instead. This is mostly likely to affect pages on Wikisource projects. [5]
Problems
- Phabricator has been a bit unstable lately. This should be fixed now. [6]
- The PageView API shows wrong data between 23 February and 29 February for pages with special characters in their title. [7]
- The parsing change mentioned above caused a large number of pages to break, especially on Wikisource. [8]
- You may see falsely formatted edit links on both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices can also show incorrect formatted table of contents. This should be fixed soon. [9]
- Templates using TemplateData that were edited with the visual editor might have some problems in wikitext mode. This can be fixed by editing and saving the page by using the visual editor without making any changes. [10]
Changes this week
- Cross-wiki notifications will be enabled as a beta feature on all wikis on 10 March. You will be able to get notifications when something happens on another Wikimedia wiki. [11]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).- Wikivoyages will get the Kartographer extension. Kartographer will allow
<mapframe>and<maplink>tags in an article to insert an interactive map and overlay it with different markers. You can add ideas and suggestions to the Maps talk page. If you find any bugs, you can report them in Phabricator. [12]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [13]
- The Wikimedia technical operations team plans to do some server work on 22 March. This could cause some problems, for example make it possible to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a short period of time. The date for this might change. [14]
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20:24, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
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 mobile web interface no longer suggests HiDPI thumbnails. This is to take up less bandwidth on slow or expensive connections. [15]
- The search engine on wikipedia.org has been updated. [16]
Changes this week
- Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. Because of planned work on this, you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for a short period of time on both 22 March and 24 March. This could be postponed to April 18. You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. Because of a test, there will also be a couple of minutes where you can't edit the wikis on 15 March starting 07:00 UTC. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
- Administrators and other users with advanced permissions will need to have an 8-byte long passwords. This change takes place on 15 March. Users with too short passwords will be asked to change password the next time they log in. This was decided in a discussion on Meta and is because they can use tools that can hurt the wikis. [17]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
- The buttons in interfaces will be simplified. Instead of white, red, green and blue buttons, in future there will only be white, red and blue ones. [18]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are backlog and thumb API. The meeting will be on 16 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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18:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
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
- Wikimedia has a new backup data center in Dallas. The Wikimedia Technology department planned to test it this week. This will take place the week of April 18 instead. You can read more about the server work. There will be more notifications and updates about this.
- In Firefox, the visual editor would sometimes just jump down to the bottom of the page when you double-clicked on a table cell. This has now been fixed. [19]
Changes this week
- It will now be easier to list IP addresses that don't have to solve CAPTCHAs. [20]
- You will now be able to mark Echo notifications as unread. [21]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- URLs in the recent changes IRC feed will no longer be rewritten to unencrypted HTTP. This could be a breaking change for bots dependent on the IRC feed. This will happen on May 2. [22]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:04, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
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
- MediaWiki now supports the semantic web standards of Microdata and RDFa 1.0. On Wikimedia projects, a configuration change must be requested in order to enable RDFa 1.0. [23] [24]
Problems
- Adding references with Citoid was broken for approximately 6 hours on 24 March. This was fixed. [25]
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
- You will be able to remove the header and footer style from User language (babel) boxes. This will make it easier to use them with other userboxes. [26]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with part of the Architecture committee, which will discuss a few topics. The meeting will be on 30 March at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- The Architecture committee has sent a summary of new and ongoing RFC discussions.
Future changes
- Commons will soon have improved access to Wikidata's data. It will then be possible to access data about any concept on any page on Commons. Assistance with testing this on the beta cluster is appreciated. [27]
- Wikibits.js will not be loaded by default anymore starting April 2016. Gadget and script authors should have already updated their code since the previous announcements, but there is another migration path available if needed. See wikitech-l for details.
Corrections
- Last week Tech News said the new MediaWiki version would come to wikis from 21 March to 23 March. The right dates were 22 March to 24 March.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
19:43, 28 March 2016 (UTC)