User talk:Matthewrb/Archive/2016/October

Tech News: 2016-40
 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 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 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 4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first.


 * will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use  instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  21:30, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

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Invitation to the African Destubathon
Hi. You may be interested in participating in the African Destubathon which starts on October 15. Africa currently has over 37,000 stubs and badly needs a quality improvement editathon/contest to flesh out basic stubs. There are proposed substantial prizes to give to editors who do the most articles, and planned smaller prizes for doing to most destubs for each of the 53 African countries, so should be enjoyable! So it would be a good chance to win something for improving stubs on African sportspeople, including footballers, athletes, Olympians and Paralympians etc, particularly female ones, but also male. Even if contests aren't your thing we would be grateful if you could consider destubbing a few African articles during the drive to help the cause and help reduce the massive 37,000 + stub count, of which many are rated high importance (think Regions of countries etc). If you're interested in competing or just loosely contributing a few expanded articles on African Paralympians, Olympians and committees etc, please add your name to the Contestants/participants section. Diversity of work from a lot of people will make this that bit more special. Thanks. --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

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.  20:29, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

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Bug with X!'s Tools
Hello, it seems you are involved with (maintaining?) X!'s Tools and might be able to answer my questions: Whether there might be a certain bug in X!'s Tools (I have not found this one on Github) and, if yes, whether you can inform/ask the responsible person to fix it?

Since I do not have experience using X!'s Tools, Wikidata or Github, first I have been asking on German Wikipedia help pages de:Wikipedia:Fragen_von_Neulingen how to interpret and solve some bugs that X!'s Tools report with respect to Wikidata. There, a more experienced user than me suspected that the bug might actually not be in Wikidata but in X!'s Tools. In detail:

Let's take the Wikipedia article The_Terminator as an example. X!'s Tools provide this report on the article:, which lists three problems with Wikidata in the section "Bugs". I have tried to understand the bug "Missing basic membership properties" studying the references and help pages provided by the tool. However, for me it seems that there does exist a property P31 ("instance of") with value Q11424 ("film") on Wikidata. Therefore, we do not understand why X!'s Tools report a bug. Similar with the other reported bugs about Wikidata. Actually, on the German version of the report even one more bug is indicated. Moreover, an other user has noticed that the link "LanguageTool WikiCheck" provided on the top of the page produces a 404 page not found error.

If the above is indeed a bug in X!'s Tools (and not in Wikidata), then the importance of the problem is emphasized by the fact that on German Wikipedia each article provides a direct link to the report on its "Page Information" (German "Seiteninformationen") so that also novices like me are spending time trying to understand and fix problems on Wikidata. Therefore, in case the programmers of X!'s Tools should consider the above report page as obsolete or "will not be fixed", this would be useful to know so that German Wikipedia could consider whether to replace the direct link to the report. --85.181.49.137 (talk) 09:32, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Hello and thank you for letting me know about this! From my limited understanding of wikidata, it does appear to be a bug.  So I've filed a bug in the bug tracker ("Phabricator") and one of our maintainers will look shortly.  If you want to follow it, see  T148046.  Also, you are welcome to point people to that bug if they ask (I apologize I don't speak German so...).  Thank you again! ~  Matthewrbowker  Drop me a note 15:51, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you for confirming the bug and filing a bug report at the appropriate location. May be I will check the status occasionally. --85.181.49.137 (talk) 18:01, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 October 2016
 * Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:29, 14 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.  16:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

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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)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot
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) 11:51, 27 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)