User talk:DGButterworth/Archive 4

Tech News: 2016-41
 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
 * You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using . You can now use tag filters by using.
 * The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one.
 * Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight.

Changes this week
 * Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 11 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week is CREDITS files. The meeting will be on 12 October at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like  must be replaced. You will have to write   instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-42
 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
 * There is a new newsletter from the Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation. It will have more details about for example Flow and notifications. You can read the first issue.

Problems
 * Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning.
 * Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version.

Changes this week
 * There will be no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes
 * The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:43, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-43
 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
 * The abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
 * The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia".
 * About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it.
 * Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:39, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-44
 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
 * Now you can include Commons video films with subtitles in your wiki language. Before you could see translated videos on file page at Commons only.
 * Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester.
 * The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3rd (calendar).
 * Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "" field when editing templates.
 * Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29.

Miscellaneous
 * The Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Collaboration Guideline is available for community review. Any feedback welcome, in any language.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-45
 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
 * Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation.
 * First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available.
 * Octicons-tools.svg for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using.
 * Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability.

Changes this week
 * The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 7 November.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 8th. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 9th. It will be on all wikis from November 10th (calendar).
 * Special:ActiveUsers will allow users groups selection.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * RevisionSlider will be enabled by default on all beta wikis, on testwiki, testwiki2, mediawikiwiki and de.wikipedia.org.
 * Upcoming holidays will impact deployments. The schedule has been published.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  23:01, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-46
 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
 * When you edit with the visual editor you can use  +   +   to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
 * In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Magic links might not work in the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:18, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-47


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
 * Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone.
 * You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has.
 * The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems
 * A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication.

Changes this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
 * RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this.
 * Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:33, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-48
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week
 * When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals.
 * When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
 * Octicons-tools.svg Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using . You should now use   instead.   in old gadgets should be changed to.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg Tool Labs could get two new policies. One would be to be able to adopt tools without an active developer. The other would be a right to fork. There is a request for comment on Meta.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:17, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-49
<section begin="technews-2016-W49"/> 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
 * You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers.
 * Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message.
 * ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits.

Changes this week
 * You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. You vote for wishes on the survey page until 12 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2015 results page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2016-W49"/> 18:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-50
<section begin="technews-2016-W50"/> 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
 * Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it.
 * You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention.
 * Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour.

Problems
 * Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2016-W50"/> 19:30, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-51
<section begin="technews-2016-W51"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News
 * Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2017.
 * The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes
 * Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function  to get formatted data. You can also use   to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua.

Problems
 * Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November.

Changes this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.

Future changes
 * The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey is done. It decides what the Community Tech team will work on during 2017. You can see the results.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2016-W51"/> 20:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02
<section begin="technews-2017-W02"/> 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
 * You can now use datasets on Commons. You can see an example that is using this source.
 * There is a new opt-in beta feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. You can try it out.
 * When you update a page with translations on wikis with the Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed.
 * The new version of MediaWiki was released to all wikis last week (calendar).
 * MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The  option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated.

Problems
 * Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter  in the address bar and set   to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox.

Changes this week
 * There is no new version of MediaWiki this week because of the Wikimedia Developer Summit.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W02"/> 19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-03
<section begin="technews-2017-W03"/> 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
 * You can now upload WebP files to Commons.

Problems
 * video2commons was down for two weeks. This was because of a problem with Commons video transcoders. It is now back up.

Changes this week
 * There is a new magic word called . It returns the language of the page you are at. This can be used on wikis with more than one language to make it easier for translators.
 * When an admin blocks a user or deletes or protects a page they give a reason why. They can now get suggestions when they write. The suggestions will be based on the messages in the dropdown menu.
 * You will be able to use  to write chemical formulas. Before you could use  .   should be replaced by.
 * You now can add exceptions for categories which shouldn't be shown on Special:UncategorizedCategories. The list is at MediaWiki:Uncategorized-categories-exceptionlist.
 * The "Columns" and "Rows" settings will be removed from the Editing tab in Preferences. If you wish to keep what the "Rows" setting did you can add this code to your personal CSS:  You can change the number   to make it look like you want to.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Sometimes edits in MediaWiki by mistake are shown coming from private IP addresses such as 127.0.0.1. Edits and other contributions logged to these IP addresses will be blocked and shown the reason from MediaWiki:Softblockrangesreason. This should not affect most users. Bots and other tools running on Wikimedia Labs, including Tool Labs will receive a "blocked" error if they try to edit without being logged in.
 * When you edit with the visual editor categories will be on the top of the page options menu.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 January 17 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W03"/> 23:24, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-04
<section begin="technews-2017-W04"/> 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
 * You can see a list of the templates on a page you edit with the visual editor.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W04"/> 20:15, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-05
<section begin="technews-2017-W05"/> 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 OAuth management interfaces now look slightly different.

Changes this week
 * ElectronPdfService will be enabled by default on Meta and German Wikipedia. This is a new way to get articles as PDF files you can download. It will come to more wikis later.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 31. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from February 1. It will be on all wikis from February 2 (calendar).

Future changes
 * The Community Tech team will develop more tools to handle harassment of Wikimedia editors. The goal is to give the communities better tools to find, report and evaluate harassment. They will also work on more effective blocking tools.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Wikimedia technical community is doing a Developer Wishlist survey. Developers can propose ideas before 31 January 23:59 UTC. This is soon.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W05"/> 18:45, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-06
<section begin="technews-2017-W06"/> 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
 * The block log sometimes showed blocks as being much longer than they were. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Wikimedia pages will now be better at showing pictures when you share them on social media. The descriptions will be different too. You can see an example of before and after.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There are some changes to the OOjs UI. Some old functions will not work anymore or not work as they used to. This could be a breaking change.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 7 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg Tidy will be replaced later this year. Instead, the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This will cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. You can see if your wiki still has something to fix here for one of the HTML problems. This list does not cover all problems. You can read about more problems.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W06"/> 19:46, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-07
<section begin="technews-2017-W07"/> 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
 * Octicons-tools.svg EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. For now it works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July.

Problems
 * The Firefox add-on Firefogg can cause problems with the Upload Wizard. This will not be fixed, because Firefox will not support Firefogg in the future. The Upload Wizard will no longer work with Firefogg.
 * Tool Labs and Wikimedia Labs databases will be under maintenance on 15 February. This will start at 17:00 (UTC) and last for about six hours. Some tools could have problems during or after this.

Changes this week
 * The TwoColConflict extension is a new way to solve edit conflicts. It makes it easier to copy and paste the relevant text to the text field. It will come to Meta and German Wikipedia this week. It is already available on MediaWiki.org. It will come to more wikis later.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 14 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on the Catalan, Greek, Russian, and Italian Wikipedias in the middle of February. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. It will come to more wikis later this spring.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Developer Wishlist is a list where developers prioritize tools they need. The voting closes at 14 February 23:59 (UTC). This process is only for developers.

Review
 * You can read the 2016 product summary from the Wikimedia Foundation Product group to see what they did with things they said they would work on in the annual plan.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W07"/> 18:06, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-08
<section begin="technews-2017-W08"/> 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 edit summary box is now a little bit bigger. This is to make it follow the Wikimedia design guide.

Changes this week
 * Page Previews will be updated on 23 February. This fixes many bugs. Page Previews can be turned on as the Beta Feature called Hovercards.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There has been a problem where the CSS of gadgets has been loading twice. The Gadgets extension has two new options:  and  . The   option solves this problem. You can use   to create gadgets with more than one style module. Read more about type and peers.
 * Octicons-tools.svg OAuth will handle blocked users in a more consistent way.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 21 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W08"/> 19:25, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-09
<section begin="technews-2017-W09"/> 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
 * On 22 February the wikipedia.org portal did not work for an hour. This was because of a problem with a JavaScript file.

Changes this week
 * You will be able to use  to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 28 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You can soon upload 3D files to Commons. The file formats are AMF and STL. The plan is for this to work later this week but it could be later.
 * The name "Wikipedia" will be more obvious at the top of the page when you read Wikipedia in the mobile view. This is because many readers don't realize they are on Wikipedia.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W09"/> 19:56, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-10
<section begin="technews-2017-W10"/> 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
 * You can now search on English, French, Hebrew and Greek wikis and find words even if you forget the diacritics. It also works if you use diacritics in your search but the wiki doesn't.
 * When you use the mobile view and click on a link to an article in another language you will see that article in the mobile view. Previously it changed to the desktop view.

Problems
 * Some watchlist gadgets didn't work for a period of time last week. This has now been fixed.
 * Admins who click on "mass delete" on a user's Special:Contributions will be taken directly to a list pages created by that user. It has worked like this before, but not lately.

Changes this week
 * The way you switch between wikitext and the visual editors in the desktop view has changed. It is now a drop-down menu. This is the same as in the mobile view.
 * The "flag the edit in the abuse log" checkbox will be removed from the abuse filter interface. This is because the edits are always flagged in the abuse log.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 7 March at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Clarification
 * The 2017/09 issue of Tech News mentioned 3D file formats you can soon upload to Commons. The AMF format will be available later.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W10"/> 23:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-11
<section begin="technews-2017-W11"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week
 * You will be able to show references from  tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use   tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 14 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Some old web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis in the future. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version.
 * Octicons-tools.svg CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W11"/> 15:26, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-12
<section begin="technews-2017-W12"/> 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  button now says   or   on the Wikimedia wikis except for Wikipedias and Wikinewses. This change will come to Wikipedias later. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately.   is when you save a new page and   when you edit an existing page.
 * DMOZ no longer works. Templates that use DMOZ can be redirected to archive.org or another mirror. DMOZ has been removed from the RelatedSites extension on Wikivoyage.
 * You can see monthly page views when you click on  in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API.
 * The Linter extension is now on smaller Wikimedia wikis. It helps editors find some wikitext errors so they can be fixed. It will come to other Wikimedia wikis later. The extension will be able to find more errors later.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers.

Problems
 * On 15 March some interwiki links to other languages were not correctly sorted. This has been fixed. If you still see pages where the interwiki links are not sorted as they should be, they should be fixed automatically with time or you can edit the page and save it without changing anything. If this doesn't work, please report it.

Changes this week
 * When you edit with the visual editor, you will be able to switch the direction you write in from right-to-left to left-to-right as you are editing. This is especially important for editors who edit in languages that write from right to left. You can do this with a tool in the editing menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut + +  on PCs or  + +  on Macs.
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 21 March at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W12"/> 22:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-13
<section begin="technews-2017-W13"/> 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
 * When you edit with the visual editor, you can see a visual diff as well as a wikitext diff when you review your changes.

Problems
 * Special:AllPages was disabled for two days due to some performance issues. It is back, but the filter for redirects is gone as the cause of the performance problem. It still needs to be fixed.

Changes this week
 * New filters for Recent changes will be released on Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias and MediaWikiwiki on March 28. Other wikis will get it progressively. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and, on certain wikis, user intent prediction.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from March 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from March 29. It will be on all wikis from March 30 (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W13"/> 14:46, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-14
<section begin="technews-2017-W14"/> 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  button now says   or   on most Wikipedias. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately.   is when you save a new page and   when you edit an existing page.
 * The tracking category    : is now added when a template loop is found. A template loop is for example when a template tries to use a second template that uses the first template.
 * English Wikipedia now has cookie blocks. It will come to more wikis in the future. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again.

Problems
 * Wikidata descriptions, aliases and labels that used some characters could not be saved. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 4 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on 5 April at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Czech and Hebrew Wikipedia on 11 April. The new filters include filtering, highlighting and user intent prediction. User intent prediction means the filter tries to help editors determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W14"/> 17:53, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15
<section begin="technews-2017-W15"/> 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
 * Octicons-tools.svg Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it.

Changes this week
 * Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version.
 * New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later.
 * The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
 * RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W15"/> 18:35, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-16
<section begin="technews-2017-W16"/> 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
 * You can add  to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example:  . This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them.
 * You can now see a list of all autoblocks on Special:AutoblockList.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from . If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way.

Problems
 * Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this. This will also happen on 3 May.

Changes this week
 * There is no new Mediawiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * stats.wikimedia.org will be replaced. You can see the new prototype. You can leave feedback on this change.
 * Page Previews will be turned on for logged-out users on a large number of wikis in May. It could be postponed and happen later. Page Previews shows readers a short part of a linked article when they rest their mouse pointer on the link. This is to help them understand what it is about without leaving the article they are reading. Page Previews used to be called Hovercards. Users who have tested the feature can give feedback.
 * Octicons-tools.svg From next week, user scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions will show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W16"/> 19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-17
<section begin="technews-2017-W17"/> 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
 * New filters for recent changes are now available as a beta feature on most wikis. You can turn it on in your preferences. Remaining wikis will have the new filters on 9 May.
 * When administrators, bureaucrats and stewards make a user a member of a user group they can now set an expiry date. A user group is for example "administrators" or "bots". This means that they can give someone user rights for a limited time. This is similar to how blocks and page protections can be limited in time. Special:UserRights will have new options for this. You can read more about user groups.

Problems
 * Since the data centre test last week the content translation tool has been disabled. This is because of a database problem. It will be back as soon as the problem has been solved.

Changes this week
 * The GuidedTour extension will be enabled on all wikis. This is a tool to explain to new users how to edit.
 * Wiktionary will handle interlanguage links in a new way. The Cognate extension will automatically link pages with the same title between Wiktionaries. For this to work all old interlanguage links have to be removed. You can read more about this.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 25 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W17"/> 16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-18
<section begin="technews-2017-W18"/> 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 content translation tool works again. It was turned off because of a database problem.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. This is the same thing as Tech News wrote about in issue 2017/16. You need to add  block for your scripts also, or add   dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition.

Problems
 * Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.

Changes this week
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week. This is because of the data centre test.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg 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 2 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * All Wikimedia wikis will have cookie blocks from May 8. This is an extension to the autoblock system so when a user is blocked, the next time they visit the wiki a cookie will be set. This means that even if the user switches accounts and to a new IP address the cookie will block them again.
 * The,   and   buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding   to the URL.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W18"/> 19:50, 1 May 2017 (UTC)