Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-01-17/Technology report



Data sets on Commons powering tables, maps, and interactive graphs
Data sets, consisting of either tabular or map data, can now be stored on Commons, and accessed from any wiki. The data can even be localised, with different labels for different languages. The interactive map above, showing GDP by US state, is generated from the data table at Data:Bea.gov/GDP_by_state.tab on Commons.

Raw data can be accessed using Lua, filtered, converted, mixed, and formatted. Lists, or other wikimarkup, can be generated from the data. For example, the same monthly climate data for New York can be shown as either a typical weather box...

...or as an interactive graph:

Map data, stored as GeoJSON, can be displayed over a map based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. comes from the data at Data:ecos.fws.gov/Endangered habitat 58938/Plethodon neomexicanus.map on Commons. However, such data pages aren't needed for roads and other shapes already defined in OSM – for example,. And.

Data is stored as pages with a  or   extension, in the Data: namespace on Commons. Pages are generally prefixed by their origin, such as commons:Data:Naturalearthdata.com/US states.map; sandboxes or test pages can be created with titles like. The only licence currently allowed is the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. A thread on the Commons Village Pump, now archived, discussed whether more licences should be supported, and if database rights (which exits in some countries, but not the United States) should be respected.

Future plans include a spreadsheet-like editor for tabular data, tracking cross-wiki data usage through "What links here", data redirects, and supporting external data feeds. The original announcement was on the Wikitech-l mailing list. Documentation is available on MediaWiki.org for tabular data and map data. E

2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit
MediaWiki developers met in San Francisco earlier this week for the fourth annual Wikimedia Developer Summit. The first two days were filled with pre-planned sessions, and the third was a unconference-style “Get stuff done day” for hacking.

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki, delivered the first day’s keynote, titled “Has our success made it hard to see your own contribution”. He used one slide for the entire keynote, aiming for 10 minutes of speaking and 50 minutes of questions, though he was ultimately unsuccessful in that timing. The second day featured a Q&A with newly hired CTO, Victoria Coleman, and the VP of Product, Wes Moran, with questions coming from an All Our Ideas survey as well as those asked in person. Notes from other sessions are available on mediawiki.org, and videos should be posted shortly. L

This is what we wished for
The Community Tech team's 2016 Community Wishlist Survey was held last month, and the results are in! There were 265 proposals for tools, bots, and the other features to help the Wikimedia projects and their core contributors. The proposals were discussed and voted on by 1132 contributors, and 5037 support votes were cast in total. The top ten proposals, which the Community Tech team will investigate and address, are:
 * 10 – User rights expiration
 * Currently, Stewards may grant temporary user rights, but these have to be manually removed when the approved time period has expired. The proposed solution is to add a new option to set a time how long rights will last when they are granted. (Phabricator task T12493)


 * 9 – Fix Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report
 * Mr.Z-bot used to automatically compile a list of the most popular pages for each WikiProject on a monthly basis – for example, WikiProject Spiders/Popular pages. The bot, which stopped working in April 2016, was limited to desktop pageviews and the English Wikipedia. (Phabricator task T141154)


 * 8 – Automatic archive for new external links
 * External webpages may disappear, leaving behind dead links. Preventing link rot by using a web archiving service is additional work for editors, that could instead be completed by a bot. Whilst similar to a 2015 wish to migrate dead external links to archives, this proposal includes preemptive archiving of new external links, before they become dead. (Phabricator task T153354)


 * 7 – Warning on unsuccessful login attempts
 * Hackers may attack user accounts by testing popular passwords. This proposal is to alert users of unsuccessful login attempts through the Notifications system. (Phabricator task T11838)


 * 6 – Wikitext editor syntax highlighting
 * Syntax highlighting would make wikitext easier to edit. There are common use-cases for articles and templates, such as distinguising  tags and contents from surrounding text in a paragraph, or making sure the correct number of braces are present for code such as  . While syntax highlighting can be implemented through user scripts, this proposal is for integration into MediaWiki for faster loading and theme-friendly colours. (Phabricator task T101246)


 * 5 – Rewrite Xtools
 * Xtools (tools developed by User:X!) provide detailed information on users and articles. These include the Edit Counter (with detailed breakdowns of edits), Article Blamer (which shows who inserted specific text into an article), and several others. The Xtools are being completely written to provide stability and maintainability, which the current tools lack; this proposal is for assistance with rewriting and testing. (Phabricator task T153112)


 * 4 – Global settings
 * For users active on multiple wikis, the settings in Special:Preferences must be set on each wiki individually. This must be repeated each time new options are added, such as for compact interlanguage links, editor selection, and MediaViewer. (Phabricator task T16950)


 * 3 – Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages
 * Non-Latin section headings are handled poorly, in the display of the anchor portion of the url. For example, on the Russian Wikipedia, the section "Биология" on the article "Кошка" will display the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#.D0.91.D0.B8.D0.BE.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.B3.D0.B8.D1.8F &thinsp;, and cannot be reached from the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#Биология &thinsp;. (Phabricator task T75092)


 * 2 – Edit summary length for non-Latin languages
 * Edit summaries in non-Latin-based language have fewer characters available than compared to English or other languages with a Latin alphabet – about half or even a third as many characters. This is because edit summaries are measured in bytes. While Latin characters take up one byte, non-latin characters require two or three. It is proposed that the edit summary length be measured in terms of characters rather than bytes. (Phabricator task T6715)


 * 1 – Global gadgets
 * Popular gadgets such as HotCat, wikEd, navigation popups, and WikiMiniAtlas, have to be maintained as separate forked scripts on each wiki they are available on. The proposed global gadgets would, from a single centralised copy, be available as gadgets on each WMF wiki. (Phabricator task T22153)

Some wishes that didn't make it into the top ten will also be worked on by the Community Tech team, to support smaller user groups without large voter numbers. Other wishes may be worked on by volunteer developers, the WMDE Technical Wishes team, or other Wikimedia Foundation product teams. E



In brief
New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience Newly approved bot tasks Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #51 & 2017 #2. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
 * Toolbar link addition scripts by User:Lourdes
 * AfDs Closing (source)  – Adds an "AfDs Closing" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for AfD regulars who wish to directly view deletion discussions closing today.
 * Page Curation (source)  – Adds a "Page Curation" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for new page reviewers.
 * Special:NewPages (source)  – Adds a "Special:NewPages" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for new page reviewers used to the Special:Newpages old feed.
 * TFA History Link (source)  – Adds a "TFA History" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for featured article contributors and recent changes patrollers to view recent changes to today's featured article.
 * DatBot (task 4) – Updates the statistics at Pending Changes backlog.
 * DatBot (task 6) – Resizes images in Category:Wikipedia non-free file size reduction requests to 0.1 megapixels.
 * ZackBot (task 7) – Remove deprecated Certification parameter from Infobox single.
 * AnomieBOT III (task 3) – Block IPs that hit certain URLs on the spam blacklist too frequently.
 * PrimeBOT (task 6) – Added AFD links to 600+ pages being listed for deletion
 * PrimeBOT (task 7) – Replace deprecated parameters after the merger of video game release and video game release new
 * LourdesBot (approval) – forcelinkupdates WP:TFA Title once every day
 * Recent changes
 * Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. (Phabricator task T153209)
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function  to get formatted data. You can also use   to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. (Phabricator task T152780)
 * There is a new opt-in beta feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor (see previous Signpost coverage). You can try it out.
 * When you update a page with translations on wikis with the Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed.
 * MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis. (Phabricator tasks T131340 & T60429)
 * Octicons-tools.svg The  option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated. (Phabricator task T85048)
 * Problems
 * Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. (Phabricator task T153217)
 * Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter  in the address bar and set   to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. (Phabricator task T151770)