User talk:Matt Heard/Archive 5

Alfred I duPont Columbia University Award
I added the 2012 and 2013 winners. Do you believe that it is necessary to maybe add a reference number next to the year headings? Like a link to the 2013 winners page on the Columbia University site next to the 2013 heading?

Cjbarnes (talk) 00:04, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Anti-Spam Barnstar

 * Nice work catching the Elance posting, thanks--Hu12 (talk) 04:41, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

E. R. Cowell
See User talk:Paulmcdonald and E. R. Cowell - I've fished out a bit of info and there is hopefully more to come... – Connormah (talk) 03:45, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Trouted
You have been trouted for: YOUR REASON HERE Yes meet

Opting in to VisualEditor
As you may know, VisualEditor ("Edit beta") is currently available on the English Wikipedia only for registered editors who choose to enable it. Since you have made 100 or more edits with VisualEditor this year, I want to make sure that you know that you can enable VisualEditor (if you haven't already done so) by going to your preferences and choosing the item, " ". This will give you the option of using VisualEditor on articles and userpages when you want to, and give you the opportunity to spot changes in the interface and suggest improvements. We value your feedback, whether positive or negative, about using VisualEditor, at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter on 16 October 2013
VisualEditor is still being updated every Thursday. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week. If you haven't done so already, you can turn on VisualEditor by going to your preferences and choosing the item, " ".

The reference dialog for all Wikipedias, especially the way it handles citation templates, is being redesigned. Please offer suggestions and opinions at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. (Use your Wikipedia username/password to login there.) You can also drag and drop references (select the reference, then hover over the selected item until your cursor turns into the drag-and-drop tool). This also works for some templates, images, and other page elements (but not yet for text or floated items). References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459).

There were a number of miscellaneous fixes made: Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Several improvements have been made to scrollable windows, panels, and menus when they don't fit on the screen or when the selected item moves off-screen. Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a chess pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog once again allows you to remove categories (bug 54727). There have been some problems with deployment scripts, including one that resulted in VisualEditor being broken for an hour or two at all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, snowmen characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

Looking ahead: Development work right now is on rich copy-and-paste abilities, quicker addition of citation templates in references, setting media items' options (such as being able to put images on the left), switching into wikitext mode, and simplifying the toolbar. A significant amount of work is being done on other languages during this month. If you speak a language other than English, you can help with translating the documentation.

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) (talk) 18:47, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Books and Bytes: The Wikipedia Library Newsletter
Books and Bytes Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2013 by , Greetings Wikipedia Library members! Welcome to the inaugural edition of Books and Bytes, TWL’s monthly newsletter. We're sending you the first edition of this opt-in newsletter, because you signed up, or applied for a free research account: HighBeam, Credo, Questia, JSTOR, or Cochrane. To receive future updates of Books and Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. There's lots of news this month for the Wikipedia Library, including new accounts, upcoming events, and new ways to get involved... New positions: Sign up to be a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, or a Volunteer Wikipedia Librarian Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Off to a roaring start this fall in the United States: 29 events are planned or have been hosted. New subscription donations: Cochrane round 2; HighBeam round 8; Questia round 4... Can we partner with NY Times and Lexis-Nexis?? New ideas: OCLC innovations in the works; VisualEditor Reference Dialog Workshop; a photo contest idea emerges News from the library world: Wikipedian joins the National Archives full time; the Getty Museum releases 4,500 images; CERN goes CC-BY Announcing WikiProject Open: WikiProject Open kicked off in October, with several brainstorming and co-working sessions New ways to get involved: Visiting scholar requirements; subject guides; room for library expansion and exploration Read the full newsletter ''Thanks for reading! All future newsletters will be opt-in only. Have an item for the next issue? Leave a note for the editor on the Suggestions page. --The Interior 20:11, 27 October 2013 (UTC)''

VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:


 * Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed.  The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
 * Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
 * Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
 * File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
 * Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
 * Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
 * Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
 * Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through   and   both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915).
 * Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
 * Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
 * Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
 * Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
 * Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
 * Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
 * Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
 * Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid ( set to true) (bug 44483).  (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)

Looking ahead: If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:12, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
 * Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions.  Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
 * In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done.  Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.

The Wikipedia Library Survey
As a subscriber to one of The Wikipedia Library's programs, we'd like to hear your thoughts about future donations and project activities in this brief survey. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasit &#124; c 14:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.
 * Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved.  This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation.  Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings).  If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control or Command  (Mac).
 * Auto-numbered external links like can now be edited just like any other link.  However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
 * Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here.  The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified.  If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
 * There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters.  Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
 * Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
 * It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally.  To do so, append  to the end of the page name.  For example, change   to   to open a random page in VisualEditor.  This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 19 December 2013 (UTC)