Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-06-29/Technology report

AI-assisted filters on Watchlist coming out of beta
Collaboration team is announcing plans to graduate the New Filters for Edit Review out of beta on Watchlist by late June or early July. After launch, this suite of improved edit-search tools will be standard on all wikis. Individuals who prefer the existing Watchlist interface will be able to opt out by means of a new preference.

The New Filters introduce an easier yet more powerful user interface to Watchlist as well as a whole list of filters and other tools that make reviewing edits more efficient, including live page updating, user-defined highlighting, the ability to create special-purpose filter sets and save them for re-use and (on wikis with ORES enabled) predictive filters powered by machine learning. If you’re not familiar with the New Filters, please give them a try on Watchlist by activating the New Filters beta feature. In particular, it would be very helpful if you can test the new functionality with your local gadgets and configurations. The documentation pages provide guidance on how to use the many new tools you’ll discover.

Over 70,000 people have activated the New Filters beta, which has been in testing on Watchlist for more than eight months. We feel confident that the features are stable and effective, but if you have thoughts about these tools or the beta graduation, please let us know on the project talk page. In particular, tell us if you know of a special incompatibility or other issue that makes the New Filters problematic on your wiki. We’ll examine the blocker and may delay release on your wiki until the issue can be addressed. — Kaartic correct me, if i'm wrong (adapted from VPT post)

Responsive MonoBook skin for mobile users
Thanks to a volunteer-driven initiative, the MonoBook skin is now responsive, meaning it will have a mobile-optimized view for smaller devices (similar to the new Timeless skin). This is primarily targeted more towards the needs of third-party MediaWiki users, but is also available for users of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation wikis.

The initial deployment was made on 31 May with little notice, and had an overwhelmingly negative response at the Village Pump discussion. This was mostly due to the opt-out method not working, and accessibility problems for screen readers. The change was reverted on 2 June, and redeployed the next week after fixing those immediate concerns, and lowering the threshold (viewport width) for devices being considered mobile.

If you use the MonoBook skin, you can try the responsive layout out on a desktop device by shrinking your browser window. If you don't like the new layout, you can go to the Appearance tab in your preferences, uncheck "use responsive MonoBook design", and it will revert to the normal desktop styles.

Feedback, bugs, and suggestions can be reported on the Phabricator task.

(Adapted from VPT discussion)

Update on page issues on mobile web
Hi everyone. The Readers web team has recently begun working on exposing issue templates on the mobile website. Currently, details about issues with page content are generally hidden on the mobile website. This leaves readers unaware of the reliability of the pages they are reading. The goal of this project is to improve awareness of particular issues within an article on the mobile web. We will do this by changing the visual styling of page issues.

So far, we have drafted a proposal on the design and implementation of the project. We were also able to run user testing on the proposed designs. The tests so far have positive results. Here is a quick summary of what we learned: Our next step would be to start implementing these changes. We wanted to reach out to you for any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions you might have before beginning development. Please visit the project page where we have more information and mockups of how this may look. Please leave feedback on the talk page. —CKoerner (WMF) (talk) (adapted from VPT post)
 * The new treatment increases awareness of page issues among participants. This is true particularly when they are in a more evaluative/critical mode.
 * Page issues make sense to readers and they understand how they work
 * Readers care about page issues and consider them important
 * Readers had overwhelmingly positive sentiments towards Wikipedia associated with learning about page issues

Potentially untagged misspellings report
is a newish database report that lists potentially untagged misspellings. For example, Angolan War of Independance is currently not tagged with and it should be.

Any and all help evaluating and tagging these potential misspellings is welcome. Once these redirects are appropriately identified and categorized, other database reports such as can then highlight instances where we are currently linking to these misspellings, so that the misspellings can be fixed.

This report has some false positives and the list of misspelling pairs needs a lot of expansion. If you have additional pairs that we should be scanning for or you have other feedback about this report, that is also welcome. — MZMcBride (talk) (adapted from VPT post)

Read-only for 30 minutes on July 18
Because of maintenance work, English Wikipedia will be read-only for up to 30 minutes on 18 July, at 06:00 UTC. Everyone will be able to read it, but you can’t edit. This is just to give you an early warning. If everything goes well, this should just take a few minutes, but prepare for 30 minutes to be on the safe side. You can read more in the tasks linked to from T197134. — /Johan (WMF) (talk) (adapted from VPT post)

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

 * Unsigned helper (source)  by Anomie – Adds &#123;&#123;unsigned&#125;&#125; to the Edit tools box to assist in signing unsigned comments.
 * Arbitration Requests Buddy (source)  by Bellezzasolo – Adds a Twinkle menu for discretionary sanction notices, as well as more Arbcom-themed functions.
 * by Bellezzasolo – Adds AJAX rollback links next to the ordinary, offers edit summaries.
 * by Sam Sailor – adds a link next to an article's title to open a Wikipedia Reference Search for that title in a new tab.
 * by Amorymeltzer – Animum's EasyBlock, but tweaked to work properly with the Modern skin.
 * by Amorymeltzer – a modified version of Bellezzasolo's User Highlighter, to highlight checkusers, oversighters, bureaucrats, and ArbCom members.
 * by Amorymeltzer – Updated version of Splarka's AfD age detector.

Recently approved tasks

 * Approved 23:29, 25 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 20:41, 21 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 19:24, 19 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 16:41, 18 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 00:43, 18 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 17:03, 11 June 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 23:52, 28 May 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 18:12, 26 May 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)
 * Approved 17:13, 26 May 2018 (UTC) (bot has flag)

Current requests for approval

 * Texvc2LaTeXBot (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Texvc2LaTeXBot B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:Texvc2LaTeXBot F]) – Open
 * Bot0612 10 (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Bot0612 B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:Bot0612 F]) – Open
 * DeprecatedFixerBot 5 (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:DeprecatedFixerBot B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:DeprecatedFixerBot F]) – Open
 * Yobot 59 (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Yobot B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:Yobot F]) – In trial
 * Pi's Bot (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Pi%27s%20Bot B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:Pi%27s%20Bot F]) – Trial complete
 * Usernamekiran BOT 2 (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:Usernamekiran%20BOT B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:Usernamekiran%20BOT F]) – Trial complete
 * GreenC bot 5 (T|C|[/wiki/Special:Log/block?page=User:GreenC%20bot B]|[/wiki/Special:Log/rights?page=User:GreenC%20bot F]) – Trial complete

Latest tech news
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #22, #23, #24, #25, & #26. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes

 * You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki. Global preferences will come to the Wikipedias later this week.
 * It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.
 * Wikidata now supports lexicographical data. This helps describe words.
 * There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
 * Some rare invisible Unicode characters have recently been banned from page titles. This includes soft hyphens (U+00AD) and left-to-right (U+2066) and right-to-left (U+2067) isolate markers. Existing pages with these characters will soon be moved by a script.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There's a new Wikimedia Foundation team to support the Wikimedia technical communities. It's called the Technical Engagement team. Most of the team members did similar work in other teams before this. More details in this issue's News and notes.
 * There will be a new special page named PasswordPolicies. This page gives information about the password rules for each user group on that wiki.
 * A new way to see moved paragraphs in diffs is coming to most wikis. This is to make it easier to find the moved paragraphs and the changes in them.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis can enable Citoid to provide automatic reference look-up in the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. This is complex. The tool will now disable itself if the configuration isn't correct. It has warned about this in the JavaScript console since February. Check that your wiki is configured correctly. You can ask for help if you need it.
 * Planet Wikimedia collects blogs about Wikimedia. It will now use the Rawdog feed aggregator to do this instead of Planet.
 * Redirect links in Special:WhatLinksHere now link to the original page and not the target page. This was done earlier and changed the used messages on some pages. This was a problem for wikis that customized the message. A new change fixed this by using the old messages with one more parameter for customization. Wikis that already changed their customized messages will have to move the customization back again.
 * In the Wikipedia app for Android or iOS users can create reading lists. The reading lists can be seen on different devices if you are logged in to your account. There is now a browser extension so you can add pages to your reading list from a web browser. At the moment it works with Firefox and Chrome.
 * Octicons-tools.svg There is a new version of Pywikibot. Pywikibot is a tool to automate tasks on MediaWiki wikis.
 * Octicons-tools.svg PAWS, our JupyterHub system, got an upgrade and a logo. Several bugs should be fixed.

Problems

 * Some translatable pages are showing old translations instead of latest ones. The cause of this issue has been fixed. We will update all pages automatically to show the latest translations.
 * When a link text was in italics or had other formatting you could sometimes not edit it in the visual editor. This has now been fixed.

Future changes

 * It could become easier to reference different pages of a book in an article.
 * Content Translation drafts which have not been updated in over a year will be removed. This allows other users to translate those articles.
 * A survey is collecting information on what users think about how Wikimedia wiki pages are loaded. This information could be used in future development.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. Wikis with fewer than 100 linter issues in the main namespace in all high-priority linter categories were switched on 30 May and 13 June. This included Wikidata. Tidy will probably be removed on all wikis in the first week of July.
 * You will be able to move local wiki files to Commons and keep their original data intact. This is planned to come to the first wikis in June. The legacy tools should still work, as long as they are maintained (three of five are actually deprecated already). The new built-in feature will probably become the preferred method since it will keep the page history and file history intact, including the move to Commons (and who moved it).
 * Content translation users who use the translation dashboard to translate between any two of Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Russian will be asked to be part of a research project. This is to create better tools for translating articles.

Meetings

 * Octicons-sync.svg Octicons-tools.svg You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3 to 4 pm UTC. See how to join.