User talk:Davidwr/Archives/Archive 30

Tech News: 2017-16
 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.  19:32, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-17
 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.  16:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

WGYV Greenville
This radio station is currently doing the Classic Hits thing. Been hearing that format, over the past year now. Tried to contact them directly to see when the format was flipped. So far, no response from them. Checked out the shows, they once carried and this station is no longer listed as an affiliate. I live in Selma Alabama, which is about a hour north and west of that community. I can get the station, when the winds are blowing right. I made the change because of what I've heard on air. Even sent off the update to Alabama Broadcast Media Page. They took me at face value and made the change. The web site you had for them, is now outdated because the format has changed. I have yet to find any info online about them changing to Classic Hits. Saw a newspaper ad for their sister station, WKWL and it did say this station was doing Classic Hits now. I'm not trying to be a spammer. Want to keep your readers up to date, with some of the stations, I tend to check out and monitor. I understand that my updates to WGYV needed more proof and for that I say I'm sorry for the mistake and hope you'll understand. Soon as I find out more about WGYV and their flip to this current format. will let you know about it. And if you're able to, I give you permission to fix up a page for my new LPFM radio station, I have here in Selma Alabama. It's WPJB-LP, 93.3 FM, Selma Alabama, Jesus Radio, Selma's Christian Music Leader. We're doing Christian Variety Hits. Just signed on and now working on getting everything established. I'm Dan Presley and I approve of this note.

Dan Presley from Selma Alabama <>< 2600:6C58:700B:300:B89D:CDE:48FD:9B99 (talk) 19:18, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-18
 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.  19:50, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-19
 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
 * Some users have a problem with the watchlist. Some changes in categories make the watchlist a blank page. The developers are working on this. Until this is fixed you can try some things that have helped other editors if you have this problem. You can turn on  in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off   in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw.
 * There was a problem with the visual editor for several days. You could not save edits that triggered a CAPTCHA. This would for example be when a new user added external links in references. This was fixed on 2 May.

Changes this week
 * When you edit you can switch between the visual editor and the wikitext editor. This works if the wiki you edit has the visual editor. The menu will now say  and   instead of   and  . This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (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 9 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You will be able to get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. This will come to Wikivoyage on 9 May. If there are no problems it will come to most Wikipedias on 30 May. It will come to other projects and English, French and German Wikipedia later in the summer. It will be opt-in for existing users and opt-out for new users.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If  is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use   for transclusions and   in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use   in a template:  . This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  02:25, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-20
 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 ISBNs to automatically generate citations in the visual editor. This works on wikis that have enabled Citoid.
 * The Two Column Edit Conflict View is available as a beta feature on all wikis. It is a new interface for the edit conflict resolution page.

Problems
 * The  library does not load automatically any more. Your Special:MyPage/common.js may use it. If you have technical problems that started a couple of weeks ago you can try adding   as the first line in the file and   as a last one. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/18 issue.

Changes this week
 * The RevisionSlider extension will be a default feature on all wikis. RevisionSlider is an easier way to move between changes in the page history. It has been a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia and a beta feature on all wikis. You will be able to turn it off in your preferences.
 * There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Future changes
 * Administrators will soon be able to search through deleted pages.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. Tech News wrote about this last week. If   is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use   for transclusions and   in web addresses. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. You can now see the full list of wikis with this problem and help fix them to avoid that things break later this month. You might find false positives. You can read more about what to fix.

Older unreported changes
 * Your Meta user page is shown on all wikis where you don't have a local user page. You can now add the magic word  to your Meta user page to stop this.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:48, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

New Page Review - Newsletter No.4
Hello ,

Since rolling out the right in November, just 6 months ago, we now have reviewers, but the backlog is still mysteriously growing fast. If every reviewer did just reviews, the  backlog would be gone, in a flash, schwoop, just like that!

But do remember: Rather than speed, quality and depth of patrolling and the use of correct CSD criteria are essential to good reviewing. Do not over-tag. Make use of the message feature to let the creator know about your maintenance tags. See the tutorial again HERE. Get help HERE.

Stay up to date with recent new page developments and have your say, read THIS PAGE. If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:43, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-21
 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
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
 * Octicons-tools.svg There will be a  tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  22:14, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-22
 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
 * Last week’s MediaWiki version was rolled back from some wikis because of a problem. This means planned changes did not happen.

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 30 May at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You will be able to control who can notify you on the Wikimedia wikis. You will have a user blacklist. When you add a user to the blacklist you will not get a notification when they mention you. You can test this on Beta Wikipedia. You can read more and give feedback on Meta.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  12:18, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-23
 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 new files on Special:NewFiles. You can now pick which dates you want to see files from.
 * When you read Wikipedia on a mobile device the first paragraph now comes before the infobox.
 * You can now remove navigation elements from your results when you search. This could for example be part of an infobox that is only there to help you find the previous or next article.
 * New users on Wikivoyages and Wikipedias (except French, English and German) now get a notification when a page they created is connected to Wikidata. Other wikis will get it 13 June.

Problems
 * The MediaWiki version from two weeks ago was rolled back. It was fixed late last week. Changes that were planned to go out last week did not happen.

Changes this week
 * Wikimedia wikis can show fewer links to articles in other languages. This is to make it easier to find the languages likely to be useful to the reader or editor. Everyone can still click to see the full list. Logged-in users who use the compact language links will see languages they have in their Babel box on their user page in the first, shorter list. You can turn the compact language list off or on in your preferences.
 * You can choose what dates to look at when you look at a user's contributions.
 * When you click on your watchlist in the mobile view you get a list of all pages in the watchlist instead of the latest changes to them. Logged-in users with at least ten edits will now get the latest changes instead.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
 * Octicons-tools.svg String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules.

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 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The 2006 wikitext editor will be removed the week of 27 June. This is the old toolbar with small square blue buttons. You can see a picture of it. 0.03% of active Wikimedia editors use this old tool. They will not see a toolbar at all.
 * Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron already works on German Wikipedia. It will be on English Wikipedia later this week so you can test it there too.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:04, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-24
<section begin="technews-2017-W24"/> 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
 * Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long.
 * When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. You see them next to the search results.

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

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account.
 * Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects.
 * Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding  to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W24"/> 15:29, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-25
<section begin="technews-2017-W25"/> 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
 * ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down.
 * Octicons-tools.svg  will be an entry point for machine-readable page data.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W25"/> 15:44, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-26
<section begin="technews-2017-W26"/> 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 <inputbox> has a new  parameter. You can add values like  . It will add that to the user's search query.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
 * Users will be able to choose whether they want to see Wikidata changes in enhanced watchlist/recent changes. Previously, this was disabled for everyone.

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * You can join the next WMF Language team office hour, an open session to talk about Wikimedia Language projects. The meeting will be on 27 June at 13:00 UTC.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W26"/> 15:38, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-27
<section begin="technews-2017-W27"/> 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 was a problem with maps on Wikimedia wikis that used <mapframe> when you clicked on the link to another map service. Open Street Map or Google Maps are examples of other map services. If you had marked a place on the map the marker would not be in the same place on the other map service. It was in the middle of the map. This has now been fixed.

Changes this week
 * Very old and inactive unpublished translations in the Content Translation database will be removed. This is because of technical maintenance. If you have not worked on a translation after 1 January 2016 you will lose it after 6 July. If you want to keep the unfinished translation you need to open it before 6 July with the Content Translation tool. You can continue working on it later. Translations that were started or have been worked on after 1 January 2016 will not be affected.
 * There is no new Mediawiki version this week.
 * Octicons-tools.svg EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. 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. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W27"/> 15:32, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-28
<section begin="technews-2017-W28"/> 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 are sometimes links to pages about the same thing on other Wikimedia projects. A Wikipedia article about Berlin can link to the Wikivoyage guide or Wiktionary entry about Berlin. You can now see when that page has a badge. A badge could be the star that shows that an article is a featured article.

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

Meetings
 * Octicons-sync.svg You can join the next meeting with the Editing 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
 * Mobile users will be able to edit Wikipedia without JavaScript. This will make it possible to edit the wikis from older mobile phones. This will probably happen on 18 July for most wikis.
 * We will not use Tidy on Wikimedia wikis in the future. It will be replaced by June 2018. It could be earlier. Editors will need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2017-W28"/> 15:07, 10 July 2017 (UTC)