Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-11-29/Technology report

Previews of references
A new beta feature has been deployed which allows you to preview references by hovering over the inline footnote. Reference Previews display the reference and its type in a popup with a link to navigate to the reference. Similar functionality has been available through gadgets on several wikis, such as Navigation popups and Reference Tooltips.

Sudden script stoppages, semicolons, and other strangeness
Several userscripts stopped working suddenly on October 21, as reported on the technical Village Pump. This was due to code being deprecated and removed over a shorter timeframe than usual and without much forewarning. Following this incident, XFDcloser was made into a gadget.

The Contributions special page had its limit of 5,000 results per page decreased to just 500. The lower limit was implemented to prevent potential denial of service attacks due to the impact of certain queries with long date ranges.

Extraneous semicolons started appearing on the Watchlist and other listings on November 8. The issue arose from improvements to the mobile watchlist that unexpectedly impacted the desktop view.

Little sisters' wishes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2020 is open for voting until December 2nd. The WMF's Community Tech team, as per previous years, will work on the top wishes decided on by the community. Unlike previous years, this survey is exclusively for the smaller sister projects, with wishes for Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata specifically excluded. There are a total of 72 wishes in the survey, mostly for Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikiversity.

In brief

 * The 2019 Wikimedia Technical Conference for developer productivity was held from November 12–15 in Atlanta, Georgia. Daily summaries with links to session notes and further reading are available from the Wikitech-l mailing list: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.
 * Popular user scripts: User scripts/Most imported scripts now lists user scripts by the number of times they have been imported. Many of the top scripts are broken, obsolete, deprecated, or superseded by gadgets.
 * Gadget proposal: At the village pump, there's a proposal to make an updated version of the prosesize user script into a gadget.

Recently approved tasks

 * – Patrol redirects where periods are the only difference between the redirect title and the target
 * – WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests archival
 * – When a portal has been deleted at MFD, remove or replace links to it which are generated by one of 4 templates
 * – Assess articles that need a full B-Class checklist.
 * – Fix lint errors related to legend2
 * – Nominate for Speedy Deletion articles that are valid for CSD:G13
 * task 59 – Update various Database reports
 * task 62 – Tag talk pages that meet specific requirements as being within the `Maritime-task-force` and/or `Aviation-task-force` of wikiproject military history
 * task 47 – Help implement TfD closes
 * task 4 – Merge WikiProject banners after consensus at TfD
 * task 2 – Remove infobox requests for articles having an infobox.
 * – Adding navigation boxes in the bottom of articles.
 * – Add and maintain supported identifiers to citation templates (mostly cite journal)
 * – Adding navigation boxes in the bottom of articles.
 * – Add and maintain supported identifiers to citation templates (mostly cite journal)

Current requests for approval

 * Open:
 * – Patrol WP:EFFPR: adding messages, fixing typos or formatting, and archiving old reports
 * – Replace HTTP with HTTPS in links to HTTPS-secured sites
 * – replaces the various templates (and their redirects) with
 * – Update categories based on results of requested moves
 * In trial:
 * – Maintain CAT:UAA by removing the template from users who have had the template applied for a long time and users who are blocked
 * – Notify (on Talk page) cross language inconsistency for birthdays
 * – Automatically update football (soccer) players' career statistics
 * Trial complete:
 * – Add automatically generated short descriptions to some biographies
 * – Resolve self-redirect links in arthropod articles

Latest tech news
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2019 #45, #46, #47, & #48. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes

 * can set the default length to block a user for your wiki. You will be able to use  to set a different default block length for IP editors.
 * MediaWiki2LaTeX can create a PDF document containing pages from a Wikimedia wiki. Previously limited to around 800 pages, it now supports approximately 5,000 pages.
 * The mobile beta mode will be disabled to reduce maintenance. The developers will focus on the desktop improvements project. You can turn on advanced mobile contributions mode if you want to see the page categories. To restore the ability to return to the top of an article via a link, you can use a gadget or user script.
 * Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can report them.

Future changes

 * Wikimedia will take part in Google Code-in. This is for young students who want to help with open source software. See MediaWiki's Google Code-in page for more details. Experienced technical Wikimedians can mentor students.
 * Similar to the desktop view, in future tabs will be used in the mobile view to switch between an article and its talk page.

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 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See MediaWiki's page on the Technical Advice meeting for instructions on how to participate.