User talk:Benzband/Archives/August 2013

VisualEditor newsletter for 06 August 2013
It's been almost two weeks since the last newsletter, and a lot of improvements have been made during that time. The main things that people have noticed are significant improvements to speed for typing into long pages, scrolling and deleting  on large pages. There have also been improvements to references, with the latest being support for list-defined references, which are s defined inside a block. Users of Opera 12 and higher have had their web browser removed from the browser black-list, mostly as a result of work by a volunteer developer. Opera has not been fully white-listed yet, so these users will get an additional warning and request to report problems.

Significant changes were made to the user interface to de-emphasize VisualEditor. This has cut the use of VisualEditor by approximately one-third. You can read about these at VisualEditor/Updates/August 1, 2013, but they include:


 * Re-ordering links to the editors to put "Edit source" first and VisualEditor second
 * Renaming the link for VisualEditor to "Editbeta"
 * Disabling the animation for section editing.
 * Changing all labels for the classic wikitext editor to say "Edit source", regardless of namespace.

There have also been many smaller fixes, including these:


 * Horizontal alignment of images working correctly on more pages
 * Categories with ':'s in their names (like Category:Wikipedia:Privacy) now work correctly
 * Magic JavaScript gadgets and tools like sortable tables will now work once the page is saved
 * Keyboard shortcut for "clear annotations" - now or
 * Fixed corruption bugs that led to duplicate categories and improper collapsing when multiple new references were added in a row.
 * Improvements to display elements: The save dialog in Monobook is restored to normal size, pop-up notices on save now look the same in VisualEditor as in wikitext editor , and the popup about using wikitext has a link to the definition of wikitext that now opens in a new window

Most of the Wikimedia Foundation staff is traveling this week and next, so no updates are expected until at least August 15th. If you're going to be in Hong Kong for Wikimania 2013, say hello to James Forrester, Philippe Beaudette, and the other members of the VisualEditor team.

As always, if you have questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at VisualEditor/Feedback and ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 23:15, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for 21 August 2013
Both VisualEditor and MediaWiki were upgraded recently. For VisualEditor, this is the long-awaited post-Wikimania update with many bug fixes and enhancements. Work also continues on speed at opening and during use, as well as on the bugs reported here and at other Wikipedias. The full report is at Mediawiki.

References are displaying properly, even when nested or in image captions (.  Reference lists are now always fully populated with references (bug 50094).  Firefox users can insert an existing reference in the first paragraph .  Opera users no longer see corruption of categories when a reference was added (bug 50385).

Stray spaces are being stripped from the start of paragraphs to end one of the common  problems. We also fixed a round-tripping bug that caused desirable whitespace in templates (used to make templates more legible, e.g., by putting each parameter in an infobox on a separate line) to get corrupted (bug 51150).

Wikilink handling was improved. Users are not allowed to create internal links to invalid titles (titles that are actually impossible due to limits on acceptable character combinations in titles, not redlinks). You can extend wikilinks, but it won't do so over a wordbreak (like a space) (bugs 49931 and 51463).

A handful of fixes to the user interface were made. The toolbar doesn't float over personal tools after opening a dialog or the inspector. Toolbars were also re-written to be collapsible/expandable, with room for more icons. Buttons in dialogs can now be activated using the Tab and Shift key commands (bug 50047). This saves time for editors, because you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard to click a button. We fixed a handful of bugs that affected only certain articles or certain browsers, including toolbar buttons in Firefox (bug 51986) and dialog panels that didn't always scroll correctly (bug 51739). Bugs with undo/redo getting confused have been fixed.

Images, in addition to getting references displaying correctly, also saw improvements with a set-empty link parameter no longer corrupted (51963). We corrected thumbnail images' display so that they look don't wrong in some contexts (bug 51995). Inserted images no longer explicitly set their alignment, but instead inherit the default position in compliance with the Manual of Style (bug 51851).

More edit notices, warnings, and metadata like information about Pending Changes on an article now appear as appropriate (bug 49699). When new articles are created, users are now shown the   message (bug 51459). VisualEditor now handles templates that set "meta" items (like a category) and nothing else better (bug 51322). If the database is locked when a user tries to save with VisualEditor, they now get a message telling them as such and an opportunity to try again, rather than a silent failure (bug 51636).

When you save the page, having the default preference set to "mark all my edits as minor by default" no longer overrides the setting in the save dialog (bug 51515). If you open VisualEditor from a section edit link, the section's title will be pre-filled in in the edit summary box when you go to save it (bug 50872). The size of the save dialog box in the Monobook skin has been fixed (bug 50058). Also, wikipage content handlers like sortable tables are re-run automatically after saving.

A very early version of the mathematics equation editor is now available for testing on mw:Mediawiki. If you would like to help improve the user interface for math editor, please test out the extension at mw:Mediawiki:Sandbox and leave your comments directly at the discussion page for the Math Node User Interface at Mediawiki. You should be able to use your regular username and password should to login to Mediawiki.

For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:30, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot's suggestions. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information on the SuggestBot study page.

IMPORTANT CHANGES: We have modified the selection of articles SuggestBot suggests and altered the design to incorporate more information about the articles, as described in this explanation.

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information.

We have changed the number of suggested articles and which categories they are selected from. The number of stubs has been greatly reduced, the number of articles needing sources doubled, and two new categories added (orphans and unencyclopaedic articles). We have also modified the layout of the suggestions and added sortable columns with various types of information about each article. The first two columns are:


 * Views/Day : Daily average number of views an article's had over the past 14 days.
 * Quality : Predicted article quality on a 1- to 3-star scale. Placing your cursor over the stars should give you a pop-up describing the article's quality (Low/Medium/High), current assessment class, and predicted assessment class.

The method we use to predict article quality also allows us to assess whether an article might need specific types of work in order to improve its quality. The work needed might not correspond to cleanup tags added to the article, since our method is not based on those. We have added five columns reflecting this work assessment, where a red X indicates improvement is needed. Placing your cursor over an X should give you a pop-up with a short description of the work needed. The five columns seek to answer the following five questions:


 * Content : Is more content needed?
 * Headings : Does this article have an appropriate section structure?
 * Images : Is the number of illustrative images about right?
 * Links : Does this article link to enough other Wikipedia articles?
 * Sources : For its length, is there an appropriate number of citations to sources in this article?

SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 11:31, 28 August 2013 (UTC)