User talk:Matthewrb/Archive/2016/July

The Signpost: 04 July 2016
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:47, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-27
 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
 * A daily email summary of notifications could be sent even when there were no notifications from the wiki. Now no email will be sent if there is no activity.

Changes this week
 * The "" button in the visual editor's toolbar will move into the "" menu except for Wikipedias, Wikibookses and Wikiversities. This is to make it less prominent on wikis that don't use it as much.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).

Meetings
 * You can take part in the next office hour for Wikidata on IRC on July 8 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:45, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

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Tech News: 2016-28
 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
 * A new image scaler fixed a number of bugs for showing SVG files. Some new problems turned up.
 * Notifications are grouped by types. They are now counted by number of notifications and not by unread groups. That change may increase the number of notifications displayed. The earlier way of counting was often incorrect. Unread notifications will also be displayed first.
 * Special:Notifications now has a maximum width for the notifications list on desktop computers. This allows long titles and descriptions to be cut properly. Notifications are now also better parsed.

Problems
 * On 5 July Wikimedia Commons had problems and could not be edited for 20 minutes. For a short while after that the recent changes log and some gadgets were not working properly. It affected administrative actions on other projects too.
 * Users who have multiple unread notifications can mark them as read by visiting Special:Notifications page on their wiki.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 July. It will be on all wikis from 14 July (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 12 July 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.  15:14, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

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Hello from another Wikipedian
Hey,

Thank you for the welcoming message and digital cookie ( I liked them ).

I would like to ask how can I be a good contributor. I created my account my account many years back but collected courage to write an article a few days back. How was the journey for you? Like you created an account and started contributing straight away.

Cheers.

Talha.anwar (talk) 05:44, 6 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Hello, . Welcome to Wikipedia!


 * My journey on Wikipedia was a bit backwards from most. I actually read Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in book form before I ever created my account.  This book showed a lot of the ins and outs of Wikipedia contributing - I recommend reading it!


 * Once I created my account, I contributed to topics that interested me. Mostly fact fixes in the beginning.  As time passed, I took on more of a maintenance role, fixing page vandalism and templates.


 * My recommendation for you is to find an area you're interested in and work on it. Don't be afraid of making mistakes, as long as you're willing to learn from them and try new things.  There are Wikiprojects for almost any topic, and the people in the projects can help you get started on a topic.


 * I'll be around if you have any other questions (I don't see myself going anywhere anytime soon ).  Best of luck! ~  Matthewrbowker  Drop me a note 20:52, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-29
 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
 * Due to the rollback, new sorting of Notifications on the Fly-Out Menus has been deployed with a delay.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Due to the rollback, the daily special patch deployment process has been changed.
 * In notifications, "Messages" are now called "".

Problems
 * On July 12 all wikis were rolled back to MediaWiki 1.28.0-wmf.8 due to a problem in the log-in system.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
 * Special:Log now has a help link.
 * The RevisionSlider can be tested on the beta cluster. From 22 July, it will be available as a beta feature at:, ,

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 19 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end". The meeting will be on 20 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * User scripts and bots can no longer use http:// to edit wiki pages.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Gerrit is going to be updated. Developers are invited to test it.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  12:01, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

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

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 23:40, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 July 2016
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Technical question
Hi Matthew,

I have a technical issue with my German main account but all the German guys involved are inactive. That's why I'm contacting you now. Please have a look at the tool that lists all the pages created by me here. There are some pages missing actually. I created a redirect (wherigo.com to Wherigo) yesterday, for example, but it doesn't show up in the list while other redirects do. can you tell me what's the problem with it all, how and when this can be fixed, and by whom? Thanks in advance!

Best regards from Hamburg, GeoTrinity (talk) 21:27, 19 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Hello, and my apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I've been on a camping trip.


 * Xtools relies on replicated databases to display its data. This means that it has access to a copy of the database produced by Mediawiki for the German Wikipedia.  Now, it appears that the copy of the database isn't up to date - see T87716 .  This is probably where you're seeing the discrepancy.


 * I will attempt to dig into it more, and see why the data isn't showing up. Unfortunately, I'm on my phone right now, so I can't do anything until tomorrow evening (US time).  Thank you for your patience! ~  Matthewrbowker  Drop me a note 20:24, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi Matt, thanks for your reply and your help with this issue. Just give me a ping if you found out something else. It seems to be a general problem, we're not in a hurry. Cheers, GeoTrinity (talk) 20:34, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-30
 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
 * Interactive maps have been enabled for Meta wiki and the Catalan, Hebrew, and Macedonian Wikipedias. Learn how to add interactive maps to wiki pages.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Last week's rollback is now documented.

Problems
 * Sometimes, the visual editor required saving twice. That problem is now fixed.

Changes this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
 * It is now possible to mark all Notifications as read on Special:Notifications, by clicking on the cog icon.
 * Wikipedia search will now detect the language of your search if 2 or fewer results are found. It will then show results from the matching language Wikipedia, if any relevant article exists. It will start to roll out in 5 languages.

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 26 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
 * Octicons-tools.svg You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is "an extension that implements an authenticated key-value store". The meeting will be on 27 July at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * The current icon for Notifications "" (in English "Notices") will be changed from a bubble-speech icon to a tray icon for consistency.
 * Special:Notifications page code will be changed to be more Mobile friendly.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

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Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

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

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. -- SuggestBot (talk) 11:55, 27 July 2016 (UTC)