Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-18/Technology report

This week, the GLAMWikiToolset, or GWToolset, is being deployed to the Wikimedia Commons. It allows for GLAM organizations to batch upload content based on various metadata stored in an XML schema. In the past this has been done by various bots, but now it will be easier for GLAMs to do it directly. Users will need to be added to the 'gwtoolset' user group by an administrator before they can use the extension. For testing purposes, it is recommended that you use the Labs instance. Currently each domain must be whitelisted by a sysadmin before uploading can begin, to prevent any accidental denial-of-service attacks.

The project is being led by David Haskiya; Dan Entous and Maarten Zeinstra are the senior developers, and Kippelboy is the GLAMwiki facilitator. The entire extension has been documented on mediawiki.org, including the technical design, the implementation, and the architecture.

More information about future plans can be found on the project page.

In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
 * Flow is live: Users may test the new talk-page system (named Flow) on Mediawiki.
 * Draft namespace live: Following the closure of the RfC, a new Draft namespace has been added.
 * PHP upgrade: Wikimedia sites will soon be running a newer version of PHP; users should not experience any changes. The upgrade is intended to help with an issue where temporary files on the WMF servers are not being deleted (bug 55541).
 * New user accounts will now watch their user and talk pages by default (bug 49719).