User talk:Mistbreeze/Archive 6

Wikidata weekly summary #96
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 22:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Discussion over the naming of people
 * Discussion over population
 * Successful RfA: Sjoerddebruin
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * See the office hours logs at meta
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * See the FOSDEM slides
 * Thiemo joins the Wikidata development team
 * Development
 * More work on badges by Bene*
 * Lots of Lua improvements by hoo (separate announcement with details soon)
 * Created backend Time parsers (yet another necessary step towards doing more in the backend instead of in Java Script in the frontend)
 * Automatic builds created, tested and deployed to beta labs every day!
 * Investigate Elastic Search as possible backend for queries
 * Made Wikibase Query work with our new component structure
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Tech News: 2014-07
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
 * The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/50660] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/25127] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24248] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/82100/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/99422/]
 * You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/108329/]

VisualEditor news
 * You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/38129] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/51293]
 * The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60307] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60502] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60779]

Problems
 * On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [//wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20140203-LVS]
 * On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes
 * Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60758] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110983/]
 * You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/111460/]
 * You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/44420] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/105986/]
 * The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster.
 * Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/60911] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110315/]
 * It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/52811]
 * You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/23005]
 * You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/36636] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/102866/]
 * If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode.
 * Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas.
 * bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest.
 * The  tag will be renamed to  . The old tag will still work.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 February 2014

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Wikidata weekly summary #97
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 13:24, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Let's redesign Wikidata's interface
 * Reasonator
 * By hovering over a wikilink you will see the first paragraph.
 * The "personal settings" allow you to import your Babel info from Wikidata. This can be used to restrict the random items you will get.
 * The first iteration of "on the fly" text generation for English. It works for "humans" and, is completely based on the available Wikidata information.
 * You can now add labels in your language from within Reasonator. Technically oAuth is used. It now takes just one click to add a label in your language.
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: IAAF ID, Lagrangian point
 * Showcase items: Vesta (Q3030)
 * Development
 * Wrote performance tests so we can track performance improvements better
 * Did a code review of all gadgets that are enabled by default in Wikidata. Found and fixed a performance bottleneck.
 * Work on making the interface more responsive, e. g. live preview when editing labels and updating the watchlist star when saving.
 * Started refactoring and fixing issues with automatically created summaries that are, for example, created by bots via API calls.
 * Fixed an issue with OAuth on Wikidata because of permissions
 * Started code review of the code the student team is working on for suggestions
 * Discussed updates to the data model document to be able to update it to the actual implementation
 * Did a technical debt analysis and design review of Wikibase.git, with initial focus on WikibaseLib
 * Got (backend) EntityStore on the way, so we can test API modules without touching the database
 * Further work on TimeParsers move to the backend
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Tech News: 2014-08
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
 * You can now use the list of active users again. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41078] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/111258/]
 * The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61053]
 * You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56469]
 * You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014.

Problems
 * On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem.
 * On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue.
 * On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
 * There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
 * On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news
 * The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50240]
 * You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38129]
 * Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51701]
 * You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50878] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47328] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57173]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor Newsletter—February 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some small changes to the user interface, such as moving the reference item to the top of the Insert menu, as well as some minor features and fixing bugs, especially for rich copying and pasting of references.

The biggest change was the addition of more features to the image dialog, including the ability to set alignment (left, right, center), framing options (thumbnail, frame, frameless, and none), adding alt text, and defining the size manually. There is still some work to be done here, including a quick way to set the default size.


 * The main priority is redesigning the reference dialog, with the goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs and URLs and streamlining the process. Current concept drawings are available at VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.
 * A few bugs in the existing reference dialog were fixed. The toolbar was simplified to remove galleries and lists from the reference dialog.  When you re-use references, it now correctly displays the references again, rather than just the number and name.  If you paste content into a dialog that can't fit there (e.g.   in references), it now strips out the inappropriate HTML.
 * You can now edit image galleries inside VisualEditor. At this time, the gallery tool is a very limited option that gives you access to the wikitext.  It will see significant improvements at a later date.
 * The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu is being redesigned. Your feedback on the special character inserter is still wanted, especially if you depend on Wikipedia's character inserters for your normal editing rather than using the ones built into your computer.
 * You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu (three bars next to the Cancel button).
 * If you edit categories, your changes will now display correctly after saving the page.
 * Saving the page should be faster now.
 * Any community can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData by leaving a note at.

Looking ahead: The link tool will tell you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. The warning about wikitext will hide itself after you remove the wikitext markup in that paragraph. Support for creating and editing redirects is in the pipeline. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including default and upright sizes. The developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments, some behavioral magic words like DISPLAYTITLE, and in-line language setting.

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) 04:20, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 February 2014

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Wikidata weekly summary #98
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; Lydia Pintscher 13:58, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikisource will receive access to the data in Wikidata on February 25th. Planning is taking place at d:Wikidata:Wikisource.
 * 1 week left to give initial input for the user interface redesign
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: impact factor, Municipality code (Denmark), USB ID, Home world, Cardinality of the group, Internet media type, Bluebook abbreviation, Z39.5 abbreviation, ISO 4 abbreviation, CODEN, landing site, US Congress Bio identifier, Scopus Source ID, Scopus Affiliation ID, Scopus EID, Scopus Author ID, IPTC Media Topic, topic's main portal, Regensburg Classification, Library of Congress Classification, neutron number
 * Fun Fact: Wikidata has reached 30 million statements
 * Development
 * Refactored the suggestions drop-downs when entering properties for better performance
 * Fixed a misdirected arrow in left-to-right languages (61308)
 * Worked on an Apache redirect issue (54273)
 * Found and started fixing an issue that asked users for additional languages they don't want according to their Babel box (61446)
 * Table-of-contents link to the statements section of an item was broken
 * Kept poking TimeParsers
 * Made WikibaseDatabase feature complete for use with WikibaseQueryEngine
 * Work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
 * Investigate using ElasticSearch as term index backend to take some load of the most-used database table
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Contribute to a Showcase item
 * Help develop the next summary here!

Tech News: 2014-09
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 27 (calendar).
 * The new search tool (CirrusSearch) was added to the Italian Wikiquote and all Wikiversity projects. Users can now enable it in their Beta options. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114156/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114169/]
 * The Universal Language Selector was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis again. You can enable web fonts in your ULS options (see how).

VisualEditor news
 * You will soon be able to add and edit, and in the page settings menu. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57173] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57167] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57168]
 * You will soon be able to use the Ctrl +Alt +S or <kbd class="keyboard-key nowrap" style="border:1px solid #AAA;background:#F9F9F9;padding:1px 3px">⌘ +<kbd class="keyboard-key nowrap" style="border:1px solid #AAA;background:#F9F9F9;padding:1px 3px">Opt +<kbd class="keyboard-key nowrap" style="border:1px solid #AAA;background:#F9F9F9;padding:1px 3px">S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50897] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110434/]
 * You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42139] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/112490/]

Future software changes
 * You will soon be able to use the tag again. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59798]
 * You will soon be able to post messages with the MassMessage tool in all talk namespaces. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60132] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/94698/]
 * Notifications will soon work in all namespaces. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55491][//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56311][//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/93508/]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2014-W09"/> 10:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 February 2014
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Books & Bytes, Issue 4
Books and Bytes Volume 1, Issue 4, February 2014 News for February from your Wikipedia Library. Donations drive: news on TWL's partnership efforts with publishers Open Access: Feature from Ocaasi on the intersection of the library and the open access movement American Library Association Midwinter Conference: TWL attended this year in Philadelphia Royal Society Opens Access To Journals: The UK's venerable Royal Society will give the public (and Wikipedians) full access to two of their journal titles for two days on March 4th and 5th Going Global: TWL starts work on pilot projects in other language Wikipedias Read the full newsletter MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:59, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #99
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 18:38, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Discussion about defining lists
 * Open RfAs: לערי ריינהארט, Pamputt
 * Closed RfAs: Epìdosis (Successful)
 * Events/Press/Blogs
 * Wikidata scholarships for the Zürich Hackathon
 * Wikidata FOSS Outreach Program for Women
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: unemployment rate, manner of death, file extension, received signal, prevalence, connecting service, first performance, Universal Decimal Classification, Chinese Library Classification, Dharma Drum Buddhist College place ID, Dharma Drum Buddhist College person ID, MEP directory identifier, Rodovid ID, handle, Gewässerkennzahl, LIBRIS editions, numeric value, visitors per year, Geokod, approximation algorithm, transmitted signal
 * Showcase item: Why not improve Kleinmachnow (Q104192) to showcase standard?
 * Wikidata's presence: vici.org are using Wikidata identifiers in their data storage
 * Development
 * Made loading items a lot faster
 * Enabled access to the data on Wikidata for Wikisource
 * Fixed the diff view sometimes showing the wrong revision
 * Attended ConFoo and learned all of the things
 * Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 0.1
 * Continue work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
 * Started to make Wikidata even faster by removing StaticExpert and BifidExpert
 * Started reviewing interface animations. You should be able to disable them all by setting $.fx.off = true; in your Special:MyPage/common.js.
 * Fixed Wikidata looking a bit odd when enabling the Typography refresh Beta feature.
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Tech News: 2014-10
<section begin="technews-2014-W10"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. <section begin="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Recent software changes


 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
 * When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/113876/]
 * You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to [//translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-guidedtour&filter=&language=&action=translate translate it] and ask in [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org Bugzilla]. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115824/]
 * You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115393/]
 * The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list.

VisualEditor news
 * You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47804] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50379] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114420/]
 * If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56465]
 * Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61289]
 * VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115636/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115512/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115424/]

Future software changes <section end="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Problems
 * The new tool for viewing media files will soon show a progress bar and a thumbnail while loading full images. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/113963/] [//wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/146]
 * You will soon be able to make user contributions show only page creations. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42026] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115189/]
 * Article Feedback Tool will be removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will also no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61163]
 * Wikis using the new search tool will come back to the old tool for a few hours starting at 00:00 UTC on March 6. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61879]
 * For about an hour on February 23, there were problems with page loading due to a MediaWiki bug. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114994/]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2014-W10"/> 09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #100
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 15:39, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Discussion about enabling GuidedTours on Wikidata
 * Open RfA: ElfjeTwaalfje
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikiquote will get language links via Wikidata on April 8th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikiquote
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: portal's main topic, Finnish municipality number, carries scientific instrument, upper stage booster, river basin category, mode of inheritance
 * Development
 * Added more details to the diffs of time and geocoordinate values (will show which globe the coordinate is on and so on now as well)
 * More work on badges by Bene* - most work left is now in the GUI part of it
 * Removed unneeded and unused permissions/rights
 * Fixed a bug concerning spaces in quantities (61911)
 * Started work on taking ranks into account for queries, the property parser function and Lua. (By default only preferred values should be used if available. If not available then it should use values with rank normal.)
 * test2.wikipedia.org and test.wikipedia.org now use test.wikidata.org as their data repository, instead of wikidata.org
 * Started work on WikibaseInternalSerialization component
 * Released Wikibase DataModel 0.7 - https://github.com/wmde/WikibaseDataModel/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES.md
 * Added indexes to Wikibase QueryEngine
 * Improved SQLite support in Wikibase Database
 * Started moving virtual machine instances of various test systems to the new Wikimedia Datacenter
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the sport (P641) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

(test) The Signpost: 05 March 2014
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Tech News: 2014-11
<section begin="technews-2014-W11"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. <section begin="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
 * You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116919/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116992/]

VisualEditor news
 * It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61822] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55434]
 * It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61059]
 * VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47790]
 * We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/116661/]
 * You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53356] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52140] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56453]

Future software changes <section end="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2014-W11"/> 09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
 * You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116726/]
 * CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60053] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/116896/]
 * It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/114085/]
 * An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion).

Wikidata weekly summary #101
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 22:29, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Notability of items
 * Organisation of statements, sitelinks and external identifiers
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Media Hack Days, Berlin March 22nd-23rd
 * Ateliers Wikidata, Bordeaux, France March 22nd-23rd
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Happy Pi Day
 * paper by Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: NLC authorities, Atlas ID, fuel system, supercharger, ID (General Administration of Press and Publication), ISMN, NUKAT authorities
 * Development
 * Changed the parser function and Lua’s mw.wikibase.entity.formatPropertyValues to only return the statements ranked as preferred or if none are available the ones ranked as normal (This will probably go live on April 25th.)
 * Worked on improving page load time further by reducing the number of reloads during page loading
 * Made diffs for time and geocoordinates more complete and prettier
 * Continued research for user interface redesign
 * Tpt worked on optionally showing links to other sister projects in the client’s sidebar (54374)
 * Wrote a fix for Wikidata changes not showing up in the client’s watchlist (62149)
 * Updated a major chunk of our inline code documentation
 * Continued discussing technical details about how coordinates should be stored in Wikibase
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the Léonore ID (P640) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

The Signpost: 12 March 2014
<div class="hlist" style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">
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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:45, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-12
<section begin="technews-2014-W12"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. <section begin="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf18) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 20 (calendar).
 * You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/117809/]
 * You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all [//noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=small.dblist small] wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/118482/] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/118638/]
 * You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014.

VisualEditor news
 * Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51673] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/117305/]
 * Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/117327/]
 * Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50998]

Future software changes <section end="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Problems
 * You will soon see an error message if you try to log-in or register with an invalid or taken username. [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/117437/]
 * You can now test first version of a tool that includes OpenStreetMap maps inside the UploadWizard. Comments are welcome.
 * You will soon be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature.
 * VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2014-W12"/> 07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—March 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on changes to the template and image dialogs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks was the redesign of the template dialog. The template dialog now opens in a simplified mode that lists parameters and their descriptions. (The complex multi-item transclusion mode can be reached by clicking on "Show options" from inside the simplified template dialog.) Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. With today's update, searching for template parameters will become case-insensitive, and required template parameters will display an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. In addition to making it quicker and easier to see everything when you edit typical templates, this work was necessary to prepare for the forthcoming simplified citation dialog. The main priority in the coming weeks is building this new citation dialog, with the ultimate goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs, URLs, DOIs and other quick-fills. This will add a new button on the toolbar, with the citation templates available picked by each wiki's community. Concept drawings can be seen at VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.


 * The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. Pages that exist, but are not indexed by the search engine, are treated like non-existent pages.
 * Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from the paragraph you are editing.
 * The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has been slightly redesigned, to introduce larger buttons. Your suggestions for more significant changes to the special character inserter are still wanted.
 * The page options menu (three bars, next to the Cancel button) has expanded. You can create and edit redirect pages, set page options like ,   and   , and more.  New keyboard shortcuts are listed there, and include undoing the last action, clearing formatting, and showing the shortcut help window.  If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
 * It is easier to edit images. There are more options and they are explained better.  If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size.  You can now set image sizes to the default, if another size was previously specified. Full support for upright sizing systems, which more readily adapt image sizes to the reader's screen size, is planned.
 * VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. These "slugs" are now smaller than normal blank lines, and are animated to be different from actual blank lines.
 * You can use the Ctrl or Command shortcuts to open the save window, and you can preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
 * After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed to the Interlingual Occidental Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikibooks, and the French Wikiversity.
 * Any community can ask for custom icons for their language in the character formatting menu (bold, italic, etc.) by making a request on Bugzilla or by contacting Product Manager James Forrester.

The developers apologize for a regression bug with the deployment on 6 March 2014, which caused the incorrect removal of  size definitions on a handful of pages on the English Wikipedia, among others. The root cause was fixed, and the broken pages were fixed soon after.

Looking ahead:  Several template dialogs will become more compact. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. You will be able to see the Table of Contents change live as you edit the page, rather than it being hidden. In-line language setting may be offered to a few Wikipedias soon.

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 or by joining the office hours on 19 April 2014 at 2000 UTC. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:44, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #102
<div style="margin-top:10px; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. <div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read the full report &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; John F. Lewis 15:00, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Wikiquote notability
 * Belongs to jurisdiction
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Cambridge revisited II documents how you can query Wikidata and put the results on a map.
 * Cambridge revisited V shows that maps have popups with texts generated on Wikidata statements and labels.
 * The architecture of the Wikimedia storage of the meta data of media files discusses that integration of Commons is a subset of what we can achieve when we consider the whole of media files.
 * Spaghetti Open Data, Bologna. March 28th - 30th
 * GLAM Treffen, Bremen. March 29th - 30th
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: Riksdagen person-id
 * Development
 * Continued making the UI faster
 * Fixed Wikidata changes not showing up in the watchlist on the client (Wikipedia, etc.) (62149)
 * Decided to turn off the inoperable wikidata.org language subdomains for now to reduce confusion
 * Created initial version of Wikibase Internal Serialization component
 * wbEntity and wbUsedEntities JavaScript variables are now cached in the parser cache
 * Ongoing refactoring to get rid of the previously used numeric ID numbers in favor of prefixed IDs
 * Made wbsearchentities aware of previously unquoted percent characters
 * Put some time into fixing longstanding oddities that made the developers cry from time to time
 * Worked on reducing internal usage of EntityContent, in preparation for redirect support
 * Worked on performance issues with JSON dump generation (hopefully we can start generating dumps soon)
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Fix a format or content violation for the original language (P364) property
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

The Signpost: 19 March 2014
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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:15, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-13
<section begin="technews-2014-W13"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. <section begin="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Recent software changes
 * The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf19) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 27 (calendar).

VisualEditor news
 * You can now double-click or press the <kbd class="keyboard-key nowrap" style="border:1px solid #AAA;background:#F9F9F9;padding:1px 3px">↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50996] [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54827]
 * Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37901]
 * You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50284]
 * You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51215]

Future software changes <section end="tech-newsletter-software-news"/> Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2014-W13"/> 18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Typography Refresh will be enabled for test wiki and MediaWiki.org users who use the Vector skin on March 27. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3. If you don't use Vector as your skin, you will not be affected.
 * You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
 * You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages. [//bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35486] [//gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/106625/]

The Signpost: 26 March 2014
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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:19, 29 March 2014 (UTC)