Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-02-20/Technology report

Paragraph-based edit conflict screen
WMDE Technical Wishes, the team behind the current two-column edit conflict beta feature, has developed a new prototype for resolving edit conflicts. It works by letting you create a merged version by resolving conflicts at the paragraph level – where for each conflicting paragraph, you choose either your edit or the conflicting edit as a basis for the merged version, and edit it as needed. Further information is available on Meta.

No thanks
[Update: This is now fixed.] As of 20 February, the "thanks" system has been malfunctioning on English Wikipedia. According to a Village pump discussion, clicking the link appeared to have no effect for one user, while the main, reproducible problem is "the thanks function is thanking the last unthanked edit in the page, regardless of which edit is chosen, so in many cases it is thanking the wrong edit/user". The links have been hidden from view, and a bug report filed on Phabricator with the highest "Unbreak now!" priority.

In brief
New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #6, #7, & #8. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
 * Automatic Referencing Assistant (source)  by User:TheJJJunk – aids users in correcting referencing errors.
 * copySectionLink (source)  by User:SoledadKabocha – a mod of User:Bility/copySectionLink fixed to work on any Wiki and to handle titles with question marks correctly
 * Status Check (source)  by User:Ale jrb – displays whether a user is on- or offline when viewing their user page, user talk page and contributions
 * NoSubmitSummary (source)  by User:Anomie – prevent the form from being submitted when hitting enter in the edit summary box.
 * enterInSummaryPreviews (source)  by User:SoledadKabocha – a mod of User:Anomie's above script.
 * previewUserboxes (source)  by User:MusikAnimal – transforms Category:Userboxes to show previews of each userbox along with the associated code.
 * AFD age detector (source)  by User:Splarka – adds a line in the format  to the top of an AFD discussion.
 * Watching Indicator (source)  by User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew – Adds an indication to your signature of whether you are watching the page.
 * Recent Changes Link (source)  by User:Anchorvale – Adds a recent changes link to your toolbar when logged in
 * Random Rootpage (source)  by User:Anchorvale – adds a link to Special:RandomRootpage, making it easier to find and improve stub articles randomly.
 * Problems
 * Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this.
 * Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed.
 * Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like   are not visible in the references list whilst editing.
 * Recent changes
 * Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to.
 * The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language.
 * Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded.
 * When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users.
 * When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like . You could use   or   instead of   but it would make no difference. You can now only use   or nothing . If you write something else, instead of treating it like , it will not work.
 * The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of  or   it will say   and  . It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public.
 * Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it.
 * TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator.
 * Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.
 * You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages.
 * The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates.
 * The abuse filter extension has a new feature  that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.
 * The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed.
 * You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table.
 * Future changes
 * The Education Program extension will be removed on 30 June. It is replaced by the Programs and Events Dashboard.
 * The way edit summaries and log comments are stored in the database is being changed. In the future this will make longer comments possible.