User talk:Martijn Hoekstra/Archives/2015/June

Tech News: 2015-23
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * Many wikis were slow for a few hours on Wednesday due to a code error. Sometimes the pages did not load at all and showed an error.
 * Some tools in Labs were broken on Wednesday and Thursday.
 * Edit tags added by the software were broken on all wikis from May 23 to May 28.

Changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since May 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 3 (calendar).
 * You won't be able to use e-mail lists for a few hours on Tuesday.

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 3 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:46, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #3—2015
Did you know?

When you click on a link to an article, you now see more information: The link tool has been re-designed: There are separate tabs for linking to internal and external pages.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools, as well as fixing many bugs and changing some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.

Recent improvements
Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (,, or ). The cite button is now labeled with the word "" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "", for the submit button.

The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and/or appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages. Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector (T98085).

The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter (T70425).

Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "" each time they want to add another parameter (T95696). The team added a new property for TemplateData, "", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter (T53049).

The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.

The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.  You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker.  Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug.
 * If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
 * If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 June 2015

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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:16, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-24
 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
 * The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 9. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 11 (calendar).
 * If you use the Monobook skin, the buttons and other controls now look more the same in VisualEditor and other tools.
 * When you edit links and other items in VisualEditor, you now need to apply your change before closing the tool.
 * The title of dialogs is now easier to see when it is near long buttons.

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 9 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * You can join a meeting with the Language team. The meeting will be on June 10 at 14:30 (UTC).

Future changes
 * If you have a bot, you may need to fix it. The default continuation mode of the API for  will change at the end of June.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:18, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 June 2015

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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:09, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-25
 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 have created more than 5000 articles with the new translation tool.
 * Editing a page is now faster. This is because some statistics about edit filters were removed.

Changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 17 June. It will be on all Wikipedias from 18 June (calendar).

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 16 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on June 19 at 16:00 (UTC).

Future changes
 * Developers are working on a new tool to get and send newsletters. If you read or write a newsletter, share your ideas about it.
 * If you use Pywikibot, soon you won't be able to use anymore.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 June 2015

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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:48, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-26
 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 can now be used only with HTTPS. This includes the English, Russian and Chinese Wikipedias, among others. Soon all wikis will use only HTTPS for all users.
 * You can't use HTTPS wikis with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. You need to use another browser.

Problems
 * On June 15, search was broken on all wikis for several hours.
 * On June 16, images were broken for several hours on wikis that use InstantCommons.
 * Many Labs tools were broken for several days. Almost all of them are back now. They may be missing some data for the last 10 days.

Changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from June 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from June 25 (calendar).

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 23 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:24, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 June 2015

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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:13, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-27
 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
 * Long lines in code blocks now look better.
 * You can now see graphs in VisualEditor.
 * When you read a page on the mobile site, you can now see a link to go to its talk page.
 * The code coloring tool has changed. You can now use many more languages. It now also works on mobile.
 * You can look at a new site to learn how to reuse data from Wikimedia sites.

Problems
 * JavaScript was broken on some wikis due to a code error. VisualEditor and other tools that use JavaScript were broken.

Changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from June 30. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from July 1. It will be on all Wikipedias from July 2 (calendar).
 * You can now use a tool in VisualEditor to add and edit code in color.
 * When you edit a sentence in the Translate tool, it can show you older translations. They help you save time if they look alike. The older translations should now work better. If you see problems, you should report them.
 * If you are an admin or have other special rights, you now need a strong password.
 * Bot and JavaScript coders: The old continuation mode of the API for  doesn't work any more.

Meetings
 * You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on June 30 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future
 * When you create a new account, it will also create one on Meta-Wiki and mediawiki.org.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:56, 29 June 2015 (UTC)