User talk:Tom Morris/Archive 44

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 do 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. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 03:37, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #131
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 14:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Wikidata turned 2 on Wednesday! Have a look at the notes from the community and development team and add your note. Also don't forget to check out all the cool presents (a painting, speed improvements, a huge load of unconnected articles that you can help connect via the Wikidata Game, WikidataLDF, a recent changes visualisation)!
 * Wikidata II
 * Other Noteworthy Stuff
 * Wikidata is nominated for 2 Open Data Awards! \o/ Magnus and Lydia will attend the award ceremony next week. Keep your fingers crossed for us.
 * Wikidata as the central hub for open life science data
 * What is Wikipedia about? Great data viz based on Wikidata
 * Super Lachaise, a mobile app based on Wikidata for a cemetery in Paris
 * Random items without statements
 * Tutorial: How to make a “descendants of” timeline using Wikidata
 * Updated statistics on the topics with most highly-rated articles on Wikipedia
 * Did you know?
 * Newest properties: deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID, Municipality code of Brazil, Pleiades identifier, MalaCards ID, natural product of taxon, official blog, University of Barcelona authority ID, Beilstein Registry Number, Gmelin Number
 * Development
 * Worked around memory corruption in zend PHP
 * HHVM beta feature is enabled again for Wikidata
 * Fixes for various breaking changes in mediawiki core
 * Work on language fall backs for new serialization code
 * Work on fixing XML dumps
 * Work on making Special:Version correct again for Wikidata extensions
 * Implemented LabelLookup to improve performance further
 * Worked more on remaining tasks for simple queries
 * Poked remaining tasks for statements on properties
 * Further improvements to the usability and workflow of sitelink editing
 * Wrote browser tests for authority control gadget
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Tech News: 2014-45
 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 software changes
 * The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference.
 * You can no longer use the  keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later.

Problems
 * There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday.
 * Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed.
 * HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki ( 1.25wmf5 ) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
 * Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the  tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning#Page_status_indicators]
 * VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one.
 * The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes.
 * After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:TemplateData]

Future changes
 * The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)
Hello Wikimedians! The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:


 * DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
 * English signup
 * Deutsch signup
 * Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
 * Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
 * British Newspaper Archive: expanded by 100+ accounts for British newspapers
 * Highbeam: 100+ remaining accounts for newspaper and magazine archives
 *  Questia: 100+ remaining accounts for journal and social science articles
 * JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today! --The Wikipedia Library Team 23:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


 * You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
 * This message was delivered via the Mass Message to the Book & Bytes recipient list.

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014
Did you know? VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements
The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData
''' The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. '''   This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead
Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.  You can influence VisualEditor's design . Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Samaritans Radar
Hello! Your submission of Samaritans Radar at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Edwardx (talk) 10:31, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know, Edwardx. I've fixed the issue listed on the DYK nomination. —Tom Morris (talk) 10:41, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Trivial issue of course, but I find it looks better if we can find something, just to show that we've done a proper review. Edwardx (talk) 10:53, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I started an article on Tom Morris yesterday. Will put it up for DYK if I can find enough to get to 1500 chars. Edwardx (talk) 11:02, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I believe I may have a conflict of interest on that article. It would be wrong for me to use my administrative or editorial powers on Wikipedia to advance a homographic agenda. —Tom Morris (talk) 11:24, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #132
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 (WMDE) 11:05, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Discussions
 * Zero error rate - help improve the quality of Wikidata's data
 * Events/Blogs/Press
 * Wikidata won the Open Data Award by the Open Data Institute in the category Publisher \o/ (blog post by ODI, blog post by WMDE)
 * Tutorial: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries
 * Did you know?
 * Less than 23% of Wikidata items have no statement. Down from ~53% a year ago.
 * Newest properties: consecrator, Slovene Cultural Heritage designation, penalty, charge, judge, defender, prosecutor, defendant, number of casualties, deepest point, Desa code of Indonesia, Slovene Cultural Heritage Register ID, Catalan object of cultural interest ID
 * Development
 * Continued work on LabelLookup and related code to further improve performance
 * Made it possible to show references in statements on property pages. (Remaining bugs before roll-out are issues with adding/editing/removing statements on property pages.)
 * Further improvements to sitelink editing (The edit toolbar now floats so it doesn't scroll out of the page on a long list of sitelinks. An empty row for adding a new sitelink is shown by default when editing to make this faster and take less scrolling.)
 * Further adapting of simple query code so we can get it to review at the Foundation again.
 * Lots of bug fixes all over the place
 * Monthly Tasks
 * Hack on one of these.
 * Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
 * Help develop the next summary here!
 * Contribute to a Showcase item

Tech News: 2014-46
 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 software changes
 * You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata.
 * The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net.

File information cleanup
 * Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
 * You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
 * You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.

Problems
 * Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem.

Software changes this week
 * The new version of MediaWiki ( 1.25wmf7 ) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
 * You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions.
 * The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More".
 * The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)