Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-04/Technology report



Draft Technical Collaboration Guideline
A Technical Collaboration Guideline (TCG) has been drafted by the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Collaboration team, led by Keegan Peterzell. The TCG documents best practices for involving the Wikimedia communities in technical developments and deployments. It focuses on communication and collaboration, rather than software creation processes, as development plans, goals, and expectations can vary between projects. The draft TCG has sections on software development principles, prioritisation, private planning, milestone communication, translation, and community decisions.

The initial TCG draft was based on discussions with the WMF's Community Liaisons and Product managers, reflecting on how to encourage collaboration, and past communication success and failures. Over the past few years, there have been multiple controversial product deployments, such as the VisualEditor (see previous Signpost coverage) and Media Viewer (see previous Signpost coverage).

The community is invited to review the proposed guideline and leave feedback. Discussion to date has focused on managing the translation load. E

Citation templates now better at flagging free-access content
Citation templates form an integral part of Wikipedia and are intimately linked to our policies on verifiability through reliable sources. Citation templates are currently used on more than 3,000,000 articles on the English Wikipedia. They are used to quickly format references and benefit from advanced logic that provides additional functionality; they facilitate both error-checking and bot-assistance maintenance, and integrate themselves with tools that allow for the automated filling of these templates based on external bibliographic databases such as CrossRef. For instance, * will display the following fully formatted, machine-readable reference:

Over the past few months, Trappist the monk, Pintoch, Headbomb, and many commenters have toiled on citation templates to facilitate the flagging of freely accessible content, in line with Wikipedia's commitment to promoting free culture and open access where possible. As part of the overhaul, access icons have been designed to be displayed for various levels of access:
 * Lock-green.svg – for a full version of a source that is freely accessible, with no conditions
 * Lock-yellow.svg – for a full version of a source that is freely accessible, with some conditions (e.g. free registration is required, only the first 5 reads are free, etc.)
 * Lock-red.svg – for a full version of a source that is not freely accessible (e.g. paid subscription is required).

The appearance of these icons is currently under debate, and should not yet be considered final or set in stone. The access icons are supported by both Citation Style 1 (like cite book and cite journal) and Citation Style 2 (citation) templates. Identifier templates like arxiv, bibcode, and doi will be updated to match the behaviour of the citation templates so that manually formatted references can benefit from the new locks. The exact behaviour of the citation templates as to when those locks should be displayed is also currently under debate. What is presented below is the as-of-writing behaviour of the template, after the first round of updates, and should not yet be considered final.

Because links from url are normally freely available, non-free links (given in url) can now be flagged as restricted/non-free via url-access
 * URL
 * free – unsupported, per the convention that unflagged URLs should be free. If it does become supported, it will display a green open lock, for when full versions are freely accessible to everyone
 * registration – will display a yellow dashed lock, for when a free registration is required to access the full version of an article
 * limited – will display a yellow dashed lock, for when free access is provided on a limited basis, for example if only the first few views of an article are free
 * subscription – will display a red closed lock, for when payment is required to access the source.

The yes and yes options are now discouraged, and should be replaced with registration and subscription, respectively. This will resolve the ambiguity of the message in a case like: where it is unclear which link requires registration; whereas the new style will make it clear:
 * (old) Smith, J. (2016). "Fictitious title". Fictitious Journal. 1 (2): 3. . . (registration required (help ))
 * (new)

Whether the templates should support free to display green locks after the primary link is currently under debate. The full deprecation of yes and yes will depend on the outcome of the RFC.

Several identifiers, namely: will always link to freely available sources, and will automatically display the green open lock.
 * Always-free identifiers
 * arxiv – for arXiv preprints like ,
 * biorxiv (new!) – for bioRxiv preprints ,
 * citeseerx (new!) – for papers available on CiteSeerX like ,
 * pmc – for papers available on PubMed Central like ,
 * rfc – for Request for Comments like ,
 * ssrn – for papers available on the Social Science Research Network like ,

Identifiers that link to sometimes freely available full versions can now be flagged with free, where  stands for the associated identifier parameter. That is:
 * Sometimes-free identifiers
 * free – to flag a free bibcode like ,
 * free – to flag a free doi like ,
 * free – to flag a free hdl like ,
 * free – to flag a free jstor like ,
 * free – to flag a free ol like ,
 * free – to flag a free osti like.

Whether the templates should support limited/registration/subscription to display yellow and red locks after these identifiers is currently under debate.

Non-free identifier, or identifiers that never link to full versions of the reference, remain plain. These include:
 * Always non-free identifiers
 * asin – e.g. ,
 * isbn – e.g. ISBN 0-7475-3269-9,
 * ismn – e.g. ,
 * issn – e.g. ,
 * jfm – e.g. ,
 * lccn – e.g. ,
 * mr – e.g. ,
 * oclc – e.g. ,
 * pmid – e.g. ,
 * zbl – e.g..

Whether the templates should support limited/registration/subscription to display yellow and red locks after these identifiers is currently under debate.

Flagging free-to-read identifiers (or articles that are not free-to-read) is optional: no one is required to make use of the new features of the citation templates. However, those who like to go the extra mile should easily be able to adapt to the new system.
 * But what does this mean for me?

If you cite freely accessible sources with a template like, or offline sources through templates like cite book, there is (as of now) no need to change how you do things. However, if you cite registration- or subscription-based online mainstream publications, it is best to add registration or subscription. These replace the current yes and yes (which are now discouraged and will likely be phased out over the next few months), or alternatively, the need to append registration required and subscription required templates after citations.

If you cite scientific journals with a template like, it can be tricky to determine whether the source is freely accessible, especially if you work in academia or are a college/university student. Academic institutions will often have subscriptions, and all internet traffic going through the institution's servers will be granted access. For those reasons, it is best if you verify whether a source is free to read when you are at home before adding free, unless you know the journal has an open-access policy. (The same applies for the other identifiers, like jstor and free.)

New bots like User:OAbot will be developed to make use of the new parameters (subject to trial and community consensus), while existing bots like User:Citation bot and User:Bibcode Bot can be updated to make use of them.

If you don't use citation templates, then this shouldn't affect you. However, if you do make use of identifier templates like arxiv, bibcode, and doi, those will be updated to match the behaviour of the citation templates. If they end up supporting only free, so will doi. But if they end up supporting free/limited/registration/subscription, then so too will doi.
 * I don't use citation templates. Does this affect me?

Readers interested in improving the flagging of free-to-read sources can coordinate efforts at WP:SIGNAL, a subsection of WikiProject Open Access. If you have an idea for a new bot but lack the technical skill or time to make one, you can make request for one at WP:BOTREQ. If you know of additional identifiers (especially free ones) that should be supported by citation templates, make a request at Help:CS1. H
 * Community resources and coordinated efforts



In brief
New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience Newly approved bot tasks Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #42, #43, & #44. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
 * listPageOptions (source)  by User:PerfektesChaos – Auxiliary functions for your watchlist (toggle display options; unwatch; mark as visited; hide certain types of pages and edits) and for Recent changes (toggle "group by page"; hide certain types of pages and edits).
 * WatchlistResetConfirm (source)  by User:NQ – Adds a confirmation dialogue to the "Mark all pages as visited" button and resets the watchlist faster, without refreshing the page.
 * OmniBot (task 6) – Remove requests for an infobox on article talk pages when the article in question already has an infobox.
 * PrimeBOT (approval) – Remove instances of a template which is being deleted.
 * PrimeBOT (task 2) – Convert category lists to wikilinks in draft pages.
 * BU RoBOT (task 28) – Tag articles for WikiProject Basketball.
 * Changes this week
 * Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "" field when editing templates. (Phabricator task T148324)
 * Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. (Phabricator task T12817)
 * 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.
 * The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". (Phabricator task T144640)
 * About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. (Phabricator task T146675)
 * 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.
 * 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. (Phabricator task T122737)
 * Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. (Phabricator task T148010)
 * VisualEditor is now available on all wikis that use only one language script. (Phabricator task T142589)
 * Problems
 * Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate on 13 October. The warnings reflected a problem with GlobalSign, which has now been fixed. Only a small number of users, with specific web browser/operating system combinations, got the warning. (Wikitech incident documentation)
 * Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. (Phabricator task T132834)
 * The abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed. (Phabricator task T148673)