Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-21/Technology report

Thanks to a new MediaWiki extension, editors can now use the popular LilyPond format to embed musical scores in articles. The "Score" extension, created by Alexander Klauer (GrafZahl), renders musical scores in LilyPond score notation as PNG images, and can also transform those scores into audio and MIDI files automatically. An example of the extension's output, together with the corresponding LilyPond markup, is shown below:

More details on the options provided by the extension can be found on its help page and MediaWiki description page. The LilyPond project also offers a variety of useful documentation, including an FAQ that explains how to use a keyboard or one of several score-based editors to create LilyPond markup that can be imported into Wikipedia articles.

In brief

 * VisualEditor continues to improve: Several new features have been added to VisualEditor, including automatic display of both "edit source" and "edit beta" links on sections, the ability to edit reference content directly from a list of footnotes, and support for Opera browsers. Soon to be supported are strikethrough and  markup, with mathematical markup to follow.
 * Support for new fonts: Several new fonts have recently been added to the default set available on Wikimedia projects; these include Gentium, a font meant to support Latin-script languages which use multiple diacritics; Shapour, which supports the Pahlavi script; and Old Persian, which supports, unsurprisingly, Old Persian. The fonts are not yet available on the English Wikipedia, and no date for their release has been given.
 * Innovative uses for Wikidata: Gerard Meijssen has written a series of blog posts highlighting innovative uses of Wikidata. The selected projects include automatically creating family trees, automatically filling out infoboxes, using Wikidata to identify people in pictures and even automatically-generated multilingual factsheets.
 * Tech news: As always, tech-related posts are also located on Meta.
 * PNG thumbnailing improved: The thumbnailing of PNG files larger than 35 megapixels has been improved, helping to address an issue where uploading a lossless copy of a large image would result in a failure to create a thumbnail, giving the unfortunate impression that the file was corrupted.
 * MIME search tool enabled: The MIME search tool (Special:MIMESearch), which allows users to generate lists of files according to their MIME type, has been enabled on all Wikimedia projects following a series of performance improvements.