User:The ed17/Archives/86

VisualEditor News 2015—#1


Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.

Recent improvements
The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action: The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746). This change fixed a couple of existing bugs (T73077 and T73078) and improved usability.
 * starts a new task, like opening the dialog: blue ,
 * takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
 * might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red, or
 * is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray.

Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).

Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace (T86688, T87027). If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.

Looking ahead
The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.

We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
 * Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.

Subscribe or unsubscribe at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Translations are available through Meta. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 04 February 2015

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February 2015 GOCE newsletter
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:52, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2015
Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:58, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Texas Revolution peer review
Hi Ed. I've just opened a peer review for Texas Revolution as the final step before we try for FA status. I'd very much appreciate your opinion. Thanks! Karanacs (talk) 14:46, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, I'll try to check in tonight. :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 17:23, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Still trying to make time for this. I should be around tomorrow evening. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 21:57, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 11 February 2015

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Today's Featured Article: Notification
This is to inform you that   Brazilian battleship São Paulo, which you nominated at WP:FAC,  will appear on the Main Page  as  Today's Featured Article on 5 March 2015. The proposed main page blurb is here; you may amend if necessary. Please check for dead links and other possible faults before the appearance date. Brianboulton (talk) 22:12, 13 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I knew it had to be you when I saw a Brazilian battleship. I had to squeeze the summary down to a little over 1200 characters; was there anything I left out you'd like to see put back in? - Dank (push to talk) 03:46, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Georgios Averof
I'm working on the Pisa-class cruiser article and have one source that says Brazil originally committed to buy the ship that became GREEK CRUISER Georgios Averof, but later reneged. This would have been around 1909 and so not exactly unparalleled behavior by them, but I don't think I've ever seen anything about any Brazilian armored cruiser purchases. I'm only really familiar with their BBs, though. You know anything about this, possibly as a reaction to the Argentinian purchase of all those Garibaldi-class armored cruisers a few years earlier?--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 21:37, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, sorry about the slow reply—I didn't catch your post with the Wikimedia highlights (below) arriving so soon after. Who's saying that? I've never seen anyone even speculating about Brazil's desire for an armored cruiser, and I've looked through all of the Brazilian Navy-related Times and NY Times articles from 1907–10, many of which were wildly speculative (but none about the Pisas). Furthermore, I can't imagine why Brazil would want the ship. First, they changed their minds on ordering armored cruisers and went with dreadnoughts in 1907. Second, their first two dreadnoughts were not even a year away for most of 1909 (Minas Geraes was handed over to the Brazilians on 5 January 1910, and Sao Paolo followed in July), and they were or had just finished trying to get out of the contractually obligated third. Third, they wanted to be seen as an international power. Buying a ship with an outmoded design doesn't mesh with that goal.
 * Now, all that being said... could your source be mistaken? I could certainly see Argentina at least inquiring into the ship, given their alarm at the rapidly approaching delivery date of the Brazilian dreadnoughts, and they certainly had a history with Italian shipbuilders (very recent history, if you remember that they bid for the Argentine dreadnoughts). Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 00:39, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * My source for this is a biography of Averof by a non-naval-specialist historian, so I think that it's quite safe to say that he's mistaken. The laid down date alone, four(!) after her sisters', reinforces the account in Conways that says she was built in advance of any order. But I thought that I'd check anyway...--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 00:52, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, not the most reliable source. I'll double check next time I delve into those articles and let you know if I find anything! Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:13, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia Highlights from January 2015
Here are the highlights from the Wikimedia blog in January 2015, covering selected activities of the Wikimedia Foundation and other important events from the Wikimedia movement. (The Wikimedia Highlights issues from some recent months have not been distributed via this notice, but can be found in the archive.) About · Subscribe/unsubscribe, 23:17, 18 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia turns 14, receives prestigious Erasmus Prize 2015
 * Civility, Wikipedia, and the conversation on Gamergate
 * How high school student Jack Andraka used Wikipedia to research a new test for cancer
 * Wellcome Library donates 100,000 medical images to Wikimedia Commons
 * Senior citizens learn to edit Wikipedia in the Czech Republic
 * Try Content Translation: A quick way to create new articles from other languages
 * Weekly edit-a-thons help create new articles about women and literature in Sweden

The Signpost: 18 February 2015

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The Bugle: Issue CVII, February 2015
The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here. If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 22:50, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

GOCE March newsletter
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USS Constitution
Extend PC time? --George Ho (talk) 00:37, 23 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Hey, I've extended it for an additional three days at your request. Best, Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 00:42, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 23
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Hugh Hefner, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page David Gregory (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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The Signpost: 25 February 2015

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The Signpost: 25 February 2015

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