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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
At Special:Contributions you could see up to 5000 edits at the same time if you edited the URL. This has been lowered to 500. This is to stop requests which break the sites. [1]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use MediaWiki:ipb-default-expiry-ip to set a different default block length for IP editors. [2]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (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 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (phabricator:T236749)
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
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The Blautopf (German for Blue pot; "blau" means blue, "Topf" means pot) is a spring that serves as the source of the river Blau in the karst landscape on the Swabian Jura's southern edge, in Southern Germany.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
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
MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
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
MediaWiki2LaTeX can put different pages from a Wikimedia wiki into a PDF. It can now make a PDF with around 5000 pages. Previously this was 800 pages.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. You can read more. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
General news
Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
Mockup of guidance while doing a suggested edit, using the help panel
The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).
In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
General news
Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
Mockup of guidance while doing a suggested edit, using the help panel
The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).
In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
Please be bold and help to translation this article!
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A Quonset hut is a lightweight prefabricated structure of corrugated galvanized steel having a semicircular cross-section. The design was developed in the United States, based on the Nissen hut introduced by the British during World War I. Hundreds of thousands were produced during World War II.
(Please update the interwiki links on Wikidata of your language version of the article after each week's translation is finished so that all languages are linked to each other.)
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [3]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or global renames. [4]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
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 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 November. It will be on all wikis from 7 November (calendar).
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 November at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
