User talk:Inkbug/Archive 1

Tech news: 2013-24

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 6, and to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10. It will be enabled on all Wikipedias on June 13. [1]
• An alpha version of the VisualEditor was enabled on all Wikipedias on June 6. Please test it and report problems. [2]
• Several VisualEditor bugs have been fixed; users can now add, edit and remove categories using the editor's "Page settings" menu.
• Wikimedia error messages will no longer link to the #wikipedia IRC channel on Freenode. [3]
• The logo of 16 Wikipedias was changed to version 2.0 in a fourth group of updates. [4]
• A test instance of Wikidata is now available at test.wikidata.org. [5]
• Users can now patrol the first version of a newly created page if they visit it from Special:NewPages or Special:RecentChanges. [6]
• Translation pages will no longer include edit section links (bug #40713). [7]

Future software changes

• A report on mobile upload errors was published, and software changes to reduce their number will come soon. [8]
• A request for comments on updating MediaWiki to use RDFa version 1.1 was started on MediaWiki.org (Gerrit change #67608).

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Unsubscribe.

20:15, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #62

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Noteworthy Stuff
  • Geocoordinates can now be entered in Wikidata and language links can now be edited without JavaScript
  • The folks at OCLC did a great intro video to Wikidata and VIAF/authority files
  • And here's some interesting analysis on the most unique Wikipedias according to Wikidata
  • Magnus updated his tool to add missing properties to an item
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: battle/war (P607), exhibition history (P608), terminus location (P609), exhibition history (P608), terminus location (P609), highest point (P610), religious order (P611), mother house (P612), OS grid reference (P613), CHRC (P616), yard number (P617), source of energy (P618), spacecraft launch date (P619), spacecraft landing date (P620), spacecraft decay date (P621), spacecraft docking/undocking dates (P622), crew photo (P623), guidance system (P624), coordinate location (P625), Sandbox-GeoCoordinateValue (P626), IUCN-ID (P627)
  • If you're interested in a specific topic then the task forces are a good place to find like-minded people. Can't find one for your interest? Start one!
• Development
  • More progress on supporting links to sisterprojects
  • Fixing issues with geocoordinate datatype that popped up after deployment
  • Selenium tests for time and geocoordinate interface
  • EditEntity Refactoring (added parameter “new”)
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment"
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:01, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-25

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 13. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on June 17, and on all Wikipedias on June 20. [9]
• The Narayam and WebFonts extensions were successfully replaced by Universal Language Selector on June 11. [10]
• VisualEditor news:
  • VisualEditor was temporarily disabled on Wikipedia sites on June 14 due to an issue that inserted a lot of HTML code. The issue is now fixed and VisualEditor works as before.
  • Users can now use VisualEditor to add images and other media items from their local wikis and Wikimedia Commons. [11].
  • VisualEditor also allows editing references. [12]
• The new Disambiguator extension, which was previously part of MediaWiki itself, was enabled on test wikis. It adds the magic word __DISAMBIG__ to mark disambiguation pages. [13]
• The newly enabled Campaigns extension allows Wikimedia Foundation data analysts to track account creations that result from a specific outreach campaign.

Future software changes

• Universal Language Selector will be added to the Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Persian (fa), Finnish (fi), Norwegian Bokmål (no), Portuguese (pt), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Waray-Waray (war) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias on June 18. [14]
• Starting on June 18, VisualEditor will be randomly enabled by default for half of newly created accounts on the English Wikipedia to test stability, performance and features. [15]
• Two new webfonts (UnifrakturMaguntia and Linux Libertine) will be added to wikis that use Universal Language Selector. [16] [17]
• It will now be possible to hide the sidebar while using the Translate extension to reduce distractions (bug #45836). [18]
• A patrolling link will now be visible for un-patrolled pages, even if users don't visit it from Special:NewPages or Special:RecentChanges (bug #49123). [19]
• A request for comments on enabling a new search engine for MediaWiki was started.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Unsubscribe.

EdwardsBot (talk) 22:39, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #63

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Final vote on the "Guidelines for sourcing statements" till June 24.
  • Work started on a policy regarding information about living people
  • Feedback needed on a proposal by the development team for how to support Wiktionary
  • RfC about sockpuppetry guidelines
  • RfC about personal names
• Events/Press
  • Wikidata, le Wikipédia que vous utiliserez bientôt tous
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: E number (P628), edition of (P629), Paris city digital code (P630), structural engineer (P631), cultural properties of Belarus reference number (P632), Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec identifier (P633), captain (P634), ISTAT ID (P635), route of administration (P636), Protein ID (P637), PDB ID (P638), RNA ID (P639), Léonore ID (P640), sport (P641), of (P642), Genloc Chr (P643), Genloc Start (P644), Genloc End (P645), Freebase identifier (P646), drafted by (P647), Open Library identifier (P648), NRHP (P649), RKDartists (P650), BPN (P651), UNII (P652), PubMed Health (P653), direction relative to location (P654)
• Development
  • Worked on site-link group editing to make it possible to link to sisterprojects
  • Further work on input validation
  • Further work on handling invalid data gracefully
  • Use Serializers for generating API results
  • Finished selenium tests for TimeUI and CoordinateUI
  • Changed globe coordinate value input to use backend coordinate parser
  • Fixed issues with data type definitions not being available in the frontend
  • Wrote a little hack so that on statements with a long list of values you will always be able to see the name of the property of the current section you are in (since the label moves when scrolling the page)
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment"
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:55, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-26

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 20. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on June 24, and on all Wikipedias on June 27. [20]
• Universal Language Selector was successfully enabled on the Catalan (ca), Cebuano (ceb), Persian (fa), Finnish (fi), Norwegian Bokmål (no), Portuguese (pt), Ukrainian (uk), Vietnamese (vi), Waray-Waray (war) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias. [21]
• The new interface for account creation and log–in is now the default on all Wikimedia wikis. The old look is no longer available (bug #46333). [22]
• The TimedMediaHandler extension now supports native FLAC files. A discussion to allow this file type is taking place on Commons (bug #49505). [23]
• After a test period, the Disambiguator extension was enabled on the English Wikipedia on June 18. [24]
• VisualEditor news:
  • A VisualEditor bug temporarily made all new accounts unusable. The issue is now fixed and account creation works as before (bug #49727).
  • A high importance file insertion bug has been fixed, but the feature does not work perfectly yet. [25]
• It is now possible to synchronise local CSS and JavaScript files with the beta cluster. This should make it easier to test software features before they are enabled on live wikis. [26]

Future software changes

• The default link to a help page on editing, visible below the editing window, will change on almost 600 Wikimedia wikis and will now link to MediaWiki.org (bug #45977). [27]
• Universal Language Selector will be enabled on wikis without language versions (such as Wikisource and Wikispecies) on June 25. [28]
• The AbuseFilter extension will allow filtering links and HTML code for page creations. [29]
• The related changes special page will now include upload log entries. [30]
• It will soon be possible to choose the language of SVG files that contain translations. [31]
• MediaWiki will now allow converting audio files from one format to another. [32]
• The Wikidata technical team has started a discussion about how Wikidata can support Wiktionary. [33]
• The search feature on Wikimedia sites is planned to be modified to use Solr on all wikis by the end of 2013. [34]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:18, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #64

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Development team published a proposal how to make use of Wikidata for Commons
  • Community proposal for how Wikidata could support Wikisource
  • RfC on source items and supporting Wikipedia sources
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • d:User:Byrial is creating database reports that are useful to find issues in the current data
  • Denny created a map of all geocoordinates currently in Wikidata (normal and huge version - updated daily)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: RTECS number (P657), RefSeq (P656), translator (P655)
• Development
  • The Wikidata bug report with the most votes was closed (bugzilla:36729 - updating the link on Wikidata automatically when a page on Wikipedia is moved)
  • Wikipedia pages will soon have a link named "Data item" in the toolbox section of the sidebar that links to the Wikidata item that is connected to the page (bugzilla:49105 - You can already see it on the main page of test2.wikipedia.org for example.)
  • Calendar names displayed for time values can now be translated (bugzilla:49080)
  • Added serializers for the Ask query language
  • Buuuugfixes and testing
  • Refactoring
  • Worked on better handling of bad values (= values that don't fit the datatype they should have)
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate one of the help pages to make it easier for newcomers
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:54, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-27

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

(Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf9) was added to test wikis on June 27. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 8, and on all Wikipedias on July 11.
• On Wikisource, the canonical names of the "Index" and "Page" namespaces in the Proofread Page extension are no longer localized (bug #47596). Please check scripts that depend on $wgCanonicalNamespace. [35]
• A JavaScript problem caused the "View history" and "Add topic" tabs in the Vector skin to be moved into the drop-down menu on right-to-left wikis. The issue is now fixed and links are visible as before (bug #50196). [36]
• There was a short site outage on June 28.
• The automated Category:User pages with broken file links now includes broken file links inserted inside the <gallery /> tag (bug #50119). [37]
• The Nearby feature is now enabled on Commons and shows images in a user's area. [38]
• There is now a special page listing disambiguation pages for wikis that use the Disambiguator extension (bug #44040). [39]
• The old version of the Article feedback tool (version 4) was removed from wikis that still used it. [40]
• VisualEditor news:
  • Many bugs that caused text to be removed or damaged have been fixed, including one related to copy-paste (bug #49816).
  • VisualEditor now offers a visual interface to edit references.
  • In preparation for enabling the VisualEditor on a wider scale, new documentation has been created, including a list of frequently-asked questions and a user guide with many images. Please help with translations.
  • Several problems related to overlapping of elements with the VisualEditor toolbar have been fixed (bug #50096, #50159, #50324).
  • TemplateData information is now displayed for templates that are added to a page (bug #49778).
  • Section edit links now show links to both VisualEditor and the old (source) editor (bug #49666).
  • Images are now loaded securely when using HTTPS (bug #43015). [41]

Future software changes

• VisualEditor will be enabled for all logged-in English Wikipedia users on July 1, and for all users on July 8.
• From July 8, it will be possible to upload WAV and native FLAC files to Commons, and use them directly on wiki pages (bug #49505). [42]
• The Universal Language Selector will be added to the English Wikipedia on July 2, and to remaining wikis on July 9. [43]

Erratum

• Tech news #26 incorrectly reported that audio transcoding was added to TimedMediaHandler; it was actually statistics about audio transcoding that were added. [44]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:33, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #65

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Alternative proposal for Wiktionary support
  • RfC on the sourcing requirements for bots
  • Project chat discussion about creating a new Requests for mergers page
  • One of our Google Summer of Code students is looking for feedback on mockups for Wikidata mobile
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: MeSH Code (P672), Mouse Genome Informatics ID (P671), street number (P670)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikivoyage deployment planned to start July 22nd, see the coordination page here
  • Addshore joins the Wikidata development team as an intern (project chat)
  • Byrial creates Statistics showing the namespaces used in item site links
  • Proposal for a new Wikimedia Foundation Sister project called 'Global Economic Map' that could use Wikidata at its core (on meta.)
• Development
  • Very rough and tentative timeline for the next month of development: mw:Roadmap#Wikidata deployment
  • Continued work on validation and handling of partially invalid data
  • Breaking change for 'wbeditentity' in the API fixing (bugzilla:49526) - when creating new items the 'new' parameter must now be given
  • Improved handling of broken UTF-8 encoding
  • Made it possible to enter the direction in a geocoordinate also at the beginning now (for example 52°31′N 13°23′E can soon also be entered as N 52°31′ E 13°23′)
  • Introduced PropertyInfoStore for quick access to meta-info about properties
  • Deserialization of Description objects in Ask
  • Lots of bugfixing
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate one of the help pages to make it easier for newcomers
  • Update and expand Wikidata:Contribute to provide more information for newcomers
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:55, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-28

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)

• VisualEditor news:
  • VisualEditor deployment has been delayed by a week. It is now planned to enable the editor for logged–in editors on chosen Wikipedias on July 22, and on all Wikipedias on July 29.
  • A bug that made it impossible to save VisualEditor edits that triggered a CAPTCHA has been fixed. [45]
  • Several bugs that occurred on right–to–left wikis have been fixed last week (bug #49416, bug #49613, bug #50543).
• Uploading files has been restricted on Meta Wiki to administrators and the newly created uploader group. An exemption doctrine policy is being developed (bug #50287). [46]
• Emergency priority CentralNotice banners will always be shown unless users have hidden them, ignoring cookies set for lower priority banners. [47]

Future software changes

• MediaWiki will allow choosing a specific page of a PDF document or a thumbnail of a video file to show up inside the

tag (bug #8480). [48]

• It will now be possible to create empty MediaWiki: messages, for instance in order to disable them (bug #50124). [49]
• The Nearby feature will soon be enabled on Wikivoyage wikis again. [50]
• The Notifications extension messages will now include a direct link to diffs on wiki as well as in notification e-mails (bug #48183). [51]
• Table of contents will now use the HTML <div /> element instead of <table />, fixing a nine–year–old bug #658. [52]
• First mock–ups of a mobile Wikidata application have been published by Pragun Bhutani as part of his Google Summer of Code project. [53]
• A discussion on minimum documentation practices in MediaWiki code has been started and awaits comments from the community.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:44, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #66

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • A request for comment on defining administrator activity
  • A request for comment on image properties
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • A personal note and secret from Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)
  • Denny's map gets an upgrade, take a look at the amazing visualisations!
  • Browser search plugins for wikidata have beeen created.
  • Byrial's database reports have been updated from the 2013-07-10 dump! These can be seen here.
• Development
  • Support for badges in the process of being added to the DataModel.
  • Created further UI mockups for Wikidata Mobile.
  • Front end performance improvements in a few areas (including multiple edits on pages).
  • The bug in wbeditentity where aliases were removed has been fixed.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: eMedicine (P673), a list of (P674), Google Books identifier (P675), lyrics by (P676), ÚSOP code (P677), incertae sedis (P678), ZVG number (P679), molecular function (P680), cell component (P681), biological process (P682), ChEBI ID (P683), ortholog (P684), NCBI Taxonomy ID (P685), Gene Ontology ID (P686)
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate one of the help pages to make it easier for newcomers
  • Update and expand Wikidata:Contribute to provide more information for newcomers
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 14:58, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf10) was added to test wikis on July 11. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 15, and on all Wikipedias on July 18. [54]
• The Disambiguator extension was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis on July 9 (bug #50174). To use it, add the __DISAMBIG__ code to disambiguation templates (see example). [55]
• The Universal Language Selector was added to all remaining wikis on July 9, finishing the process of replacing the Narayam and WebFonts extensions. [56]
• The CommonsDelinker bot is now on-line and operating again, after a password problem was fixed (bug #51016).
• VisualEditor news:
  • According to the schedule, VisualEditor will be available to all users on the English Wikipedia on July 15.
  • Users should add TemplateData to templates to prepare for VisualEditor. A tutorial is available.
  • Parameters marked as "required" in TemplateData are now auto-added when you add a template (bug #50747).
  • Warnings are now displayed in VisualEditor when users edit pages that are protected or have edit notices (bug #50415).
  • Many other bugs have been fixed in VisualEditor during the past two weeks.
• The Wikimedia technical report for June has been published, with a summary that can be translated.

Future software changes

• A new version of the Single User Login system for global accounts will be enabled on July 17. Users will now automatically go back to the previous page instead of seeing the "Login success" page with logos. [57]
• The software that resizes images on all wikis will change on July 18. Resizing of big images will be faster and more reliable, and the resolution limit for GIF, PNG and TIFF files (currently set at 50 megapixels) will be removed. [58]
• Edit tags (mostly used by AbuseFilter) will now also be on diff pages. They include a link to Special:Tags before the edit summary. Wikis that use links in tag messages should remove them. [59] [60]
• Global edit filters are currently in testing and will be added to wikis later. [61]
• Wikivoyage wikis will start to use Wikidata for interwiki links on July 22. [62]
• A new image gallery design has been proposed by Brian Wolff; comments and feedback are welcome.
• An IRC discussion about Bugzilla is planned for July 16, at 16:00 (UTC) on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [63]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:46, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #67

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • A request for comment for exclusion criteria in wikipedia namespace.
  • Images for the Main Page proposed and discussed on project chat.
  • Discussion on Wikivoyage notability and changes to WD:N.
  • Request for comment on sockpuppetry guidelines closes.
• Events/Press
  • Watson has received the Feigenbaum Prize which has been donated to Wikimedia and Wikidata.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Kemler ID (P700), Disease Ontology ID (P699), Pubmed ID (PMID) (P698) , Ex taxon author(s) (P697)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The fourteen-millionth item, about Huangjue, a village in China, is created.
  • 239 Million language links removed from the Wikipedias, almost 5GB of text. (2012 vs 2013).
  • Saskia joins the Wikidata team to analyze the proposals for Wiktionary in Wikidata.
  • Wikivoyage deployment planned to start July 23rd, see the coordination page here.
• Development
  • Wmf11 has been deployed to test.wikidata.org!
  • Wikidata is moving from a Squid to a Varnish cache system!
  • Search ranking has been improved ready for the next deployment where Wikivoyage support will also be added.
  • Optional title normalization added to 'wbgetentities'
  • Fixed broken XML result for wbeditentity.
  • Fixed broken link to anchor in sitelinks section.
  • Templates no longer parsed in labels.
  • Technical documentation improved for Ask and WikibaseQueryEngine.
  • Work started on EntitiesByPropertyValue API module.
  • Work on ChangeOps and API module edit summaries.
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate one of the help pages to make it easier for newcomers
  • Update and expand Wikidata:Contribute to provide more information for newcomers
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property
  • Hack on one of these

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:34, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-30

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Translations are available.

Recent software changes (Not all changes will affect you.)

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 18. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 22, and on all Wikipedias on July 25. [64]
• A new version of the Flow Prototype can be tested on Wikimedia Labs. [65]
• VisualEditor news:
  • The schedule to add VisualEditor to non-English Wikipedias has been changed: the new editor will be available for logged-in users on the German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Dutch (nl), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) and Swedish (sv) Wikipedias on July 24, and for all users on those wikis on July 29. [66]
  • A warning is now displayed if an edit made with VisualEditor matches an edit filter (bug #50472).
  • SpamBlacklist messages are also supported (bug #50826).
  • Users can now edit <nowiki>...</nowiki> blocks (bug #47678).
  • When a user types text at the end of a link, the link now expands to that text. [67]
• Freely-licensed fonts for the Cree, Inuktitut and Urdu languages were added to Universal Language Selector, fixing bug #42421 and bug #46693.
• A Wikidata search plugin for the Firefox web browser was released by Jeroen De Dauw and can be downloaded from the Mozilla add-ons website.

Future software changes

• The change of the Wikimedia image scaling system from ImageMagick to VipsScaler (announced in the previous issue) has been postponed until bug #51370 is fixed. [68]
• Administrators will no longer see an unblock link for autoblocked IP addresses on the contributions page (bug #46457). [69]
• A request for comments on site-wide CSS was started on MediaWiki.org. [70]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:17, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #68

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • New UI Mockup suggested for Wikidata Mobile. Please give feedback.
• Events/Press
  • Next office hour on August 26
  • upcoming: COSCUP
  • upcoming: Wikimania (including hackathon)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata learns to travel - language link support for Wikivoyage has been enabled and it was concluded that Wikivoyagers are pretty awesome
  • There is now a gadget you can use to see a map of a geocoordinate on Wikidata
  • Picture of the week could use some more input
  • Top 20 items on Wikidata that are covered in a lot of Wikipedias? Here you go.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Dodis (P701), encoded by (P702), found in taxon (P703), Ensembl Transcript ID (P704), Ensembl Protein ID (P705), located on terrain feature (P706), Satellite bus (P707), diocese (P708), Historic Scotland ID (P709), participant (P710), Strunz 8 (P711), Strunz 9 (P712), Strunz 10 (P713), Dana 8th edition (P714), Drugbank ID (P715), JPL Small-Body Database identifier (P716), Minor Planet Center observatory code (P717), Canmore ID (P718), Notable Incident (P719)
  • Newest task forces: Global Economic Map task force
• Development
  • When a page is moved on Wikipedia or Wikivoyage the link on Wikidata is now updated (bugzilla:36729)
  • Ranking of the search results has been improved
  • Worked on URL data type
  • Added coveralls.io support for most of our components (test coverage)
  • Fixed some minor bugs related to site-links editing
  • Fixed bugzilla:52023, where multiple anon warning bubbles are displayed at once
  • Worked on SpamBlacklist to filter URL values in Wikibase
  • Improved handling of corrupt data from the database
  • Made tests more reliable
  • Made regular undo via the API work with Wikibase
  • Worked on Time value formatter
  • Error handling for ByPropertyValue API module
  • Work on implementing QueryEntity
• Open Tasks for You
  • Add some data about Hong Kong and related things. Denny promises nice visualizations ;-)
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:47, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-31

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes; not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 25. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 29, and on all Wikipedias on August 1. [71]
• Wikivoyage was offline for around 40 minutes on July 24. [72]
• Pywikipediabot moved their code from SVN to git; bot owners need to update their tools. [73]
• The Notifications and Thanks extensions were added to Meta-Wiki on July 26; other wikis will get them soon. [74]
• It is now possible to add edit summaries on Wikidata using the API; the feature will be added to user interface soon. [75]
• The software that resizes large PNG images on all wikis was changed on July 25. Resizing of PNG files bigger than 35 megapixels should be faster and more reliable now. [76]
• Three new webfonts (Gentium, Old Persian and Shapour) will be added to Universal Language Selector. [77], [78], [79]
• Special:MIMESearch, which gives a list of files by type, will be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis with MediaWiki version 1.22/wmf12 (bug #13438). [80]
• A mailing list to discuss multimedia features was started; users are encouraged to sign up.
• VisualEditor news:
  • On July 24, VisualEditor was added for logged-in users on the German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Hebrew (he), Italian (it), Polish (pl), Russian (ru) and Swedish (sv) Wikipedias; it will be added for all users on those wikis on July 29. [81]
  • A preference to completely disable VisualEditor while it is in beta phase was added on July 24. [82]
  • Many bugs were fixed in right-to-left languages. [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88]
  • It is possible again to scroll down in the template editing window (bug #51739).
  • VisualEditor now works with the FlaggedRevisions extension. (bug #49699)
  • If the user opens VisualEditor using a section edit link, the title of the section is added to the edit summary (bug #50872).
  • Invisible templates now can't be deleted by accident or on purpose (bug #51322).

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:59, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #69

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Request for comment on defining CheckUsers.
  • Request for comment on class ⇄ instance relationship in Wikidata
  • The d:Wikidata:Global Economic Map task force is starting its property list. Please go there to propose important properties about economics for countries, regions or companies.
• Events/Press
  • Next office hour on August 26
  • COSCUP this weekend, Taipei (August 3-4, 2013)
  • Wikimania is nearly here!, Hong Kong (August 7-11, 2013)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The list of interwiki links has been updated with more infomation and now also includes wikivoyage!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: removed feature, introduced feature, Parent company
  • Newest task forces: Global Economic Map task force
• Development
  • Custom edit-summaries added for the majority of API modules
  • Started working on implementation for ordering qualifiers in the JavaScript user interface
  • ChangeOps for wbsetclaimvalue, wbcreateclaim, wbremoveclaims and refactoring of wbremoveclaim
  • Fix handling of '0' value in API response
  • Solved bugs related to copyright notice
  • Some minor UI speed improvements
  • EditEntity refactored
  • Test cases improved
  • Further work on URLs
  • Work on implementing QueryEntity
• Open Tasks for You
  • Add some data about Hong Kong and related things. Denny promises nice visualizations ;-)
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:25, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #70

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Request for comment on Property proposal organisation reform to a more Model
  • Request for comment on VCards for Wikivoyage
  • Requests for bot approval has many requests that need further discussion!
  • Many property proposals still need input!
• Events/Press
  • Wikimania continues! If you are around make sure you come and say Hi!
  • Wikidata meetup in the chapters village on Saturday at 1 PM at Wikimania.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Following numerous discussions we are happy to present the new version of the proposal that would lead to Wikidata supporting structured data for the Wiktionaries.
  • There are now only an estimated 1,000,000 articles remaining with inter language links, down from the previous 26,000,000!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: LAU (local administrative unit), Sikart (identifier in SIKART), symptoms (the possible symptoms of a medical condition)
  • Frequently used for cities and other places, P17 ("country") indicates the sovereign state an item relates to. There now at least 100 items for most present day sovereign states. Leading is China (Q148) with 607,817 items, followed by Iran (!794) with 105,875 items and the United States of America (Q30) with 99,243 items. China rose from just 5266 items a month ago.
• Development
  • Changeops implemented for all Api modules
  • All Api modules now have better auto comments and custom summaries
  • Work on claim ordering started
  • Work on refactoring Api Tests
  • Bug Fixes!!
• Open Tasks for You
  • Add some data about Hong Kong and related things. Denny promises nice visualizations ;-)
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 14:38, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #71

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • COSCUP (Wikidata intro slides)
  • Wikimania (State of Wikidata presentation, Tech behind Wikidata presentation, Wiktionary discussion)
  • Wikidata babel multi-language easter egg
  • The Occitan Wikipedia and Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikivoyage is scheduled to get access to Wikidata data (aka phase 2) on August 26th.
  • Listen to and watch beautiful Wikidata edits
  • To support the inclusion of geographical coordinates in Wikidata, just about two months a new data type came available and d:Property:P625 "coordinate location" was created. Already 565,000 pairs of coordinates are now available on WikiData. Compare this to 870,000 coordinates on English Wikipedia or 1,500,000 items with d:Property:P17 "country", likely to have coordinates. Have a look at them on a map.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: approved by (P790), ISIL ID (P791), chapter (P792), Key event (P793), as (P794), distance along (P795), geo datum (P796), executing authority (P797), mission design series designation (P798), air ministry specification (P799), work (P800), notable work (P801), student (P802), professorship (P803), GNIS Antarctica ID (P804), subject of (P805). Italian cadastre code (P806) In Addition new properties to describe mushrooms were created: hymenium type (P783), mushroom cap shape (P784), hymenium attachment (P785), stipe character (P786), spore print color (P787), mushroom ecological type (P789), edibility (P789). These will allow to build the data for a mushroom infobox (as w:Template:Mycomorphbox).
  • Newest task forces: Physics task force
  • Wikidata helped remove 240,000,000 language links from Wikipedia's wiki text.
• Development
  • Want to get an overview of what Pragun, our Google Summer of Code student working on Wikidata for mobile, is doing? Check here
  • Worked on simple special page to make a query (bugzilla:52385)
  • Worked on ability to move qualifiers
  • Started improving API and Special Page tests
  • Fixed links to Special:SetSiteLink in non-JavaScript interface (bugzilla:51914)
  • ChangeOps, custom summaries and autocomments for SetStatementRank API module
  • Fixed displaying “0” as label/description in autocomments
  • Some minor fixes for rare crashes of editing UI
  • Worked on moving Selenium tests to Cucumber
• Open Tasks for You
  • See if you can connect some of these Wikivoyage pages to their item on Wikidata.
  • Check if some of the items on this and this list can be merged. But be careful to only merge if they are really about the same topic! Help about merging is at d:Help:Merge.
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:00, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #72

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion started about improving the RfC process
  • d:Wikidata:Requests for comment/References and sources has been closed
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Report from Wikimania
  • Wikidata meets Incubator
  • Office hour on 26th
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Average edits per page is nearly 5 now.
  • Wikivoyage is still scheduled to get access to data on Wikidata (aka phase 2) on August 26.
  • Developers are working hard to also make the URL datatype available by August 26 but there are factors that are not in their hands so it might have to be delayed until the next deployment in 2 weeks. URL as a datatype will soon be available on test.wikidata.org. Please give it some thorough testing and report bugs.
  • Outsch! (Help collect and fix paper cuts.)
• Did you know?
  • 20 undescribed monsters
  • Newest properties: separated from (P807), code Bien de Interés Cultural (P808), WPDA id (P809), academic minor (P811), academic major (P812), date retrieved (P813), IUCN protected areas category (P814), ITIS TSN (P815), decays to (P816), decay mode (P817)
• Development
  • Prepared deployment of phase 2 on Wikivoyage
  • Worked on ability to sort qualifiers and references inside a statement
  • Started work on an api module to merge items
  • Worked on special page to query for items with one specific property and value
  • Cleaned up code for handling recent change entries from Wikidata in the clients (Wikipedia/Wikivoyage)
  • Worked on generic script for populating sites table and better integration with WMF process for creating new wikis
  • Setup new git repo for WikibaseMobile skin and extension
  • Fixed SetClaim api module to properly mark bot edits in recent changes and advised pywikipedia maintainers about adding support for the module. SetClaim can be used to create claims with references in a single edit.
  • Reviewed code for Google Summer of Code students
  • Updated doxygen documentation
• Open Tasks for You
  • Report a paper cut (see above).
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:52, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-34;

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• The previous version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 15. It was enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 22. [89]
• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on August 22. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia sites on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 29. [90]
• You can now use new styles of galleries. Please give feedback to User:Bawolff. [91]
• You can now visit a random page in a category, for example Special:RandomInCategory/Science. (25931) [92]
• You can now use the <wbr> HTML5 tag to say where a word can be cut. (52468) [93]
• Gadget authors: you can now use the wikipage.content hook, so that your scripts are re-run when a page is changed after the document-ready event (for example using Ajax). (30713) [94]

Problems fixed

• There was a bug where file redirects didn't work when a file was renamed; it is now fixed. There is still an issue with purging, but it should be fixed soon. (52200)
• Maintenance reports provided by special pages will now all be updated on each wiki every six months. This will for example give you recent information on uncategorized pages, unused templates and most wanted pages (see details).
• There was a bug that caused false positives for anti-blanking edit filters; it is now fixed. (52077) [95]

VisualEditor news

• The "edit" and "edit source" tabs and section edit links can now be changed more easily; for example, some wikis are using "edit source" for wikitext editing, and "edit ^beta" for VisualEditor. You can ask for the same change in bugzilla.
• You can now edit references that are added inside a <references> block. (51741)
• You can now test on mediawiki.org new basic tools to add and edit struck text (with the button for the <s> tag), lower text ( for <sub>), upper text ( for <sup>), underlined text ( for <u>), computer code ( for </code> and <tt>), math text ( for <math>), Egyptian hieroglyphs ( for <hiero>), and to say that text is in another language ( for lang="ar" dir="rtl"). (51609, 51612, 51611, 51590, 51610, 52352)
• You can now use VisualEditor with the Opera browser. [96]

Future

• Starting on August 26, you will be able to use data from Wikidata on Wikivoyage sites. [97]
• Starting on August 27, you will also get notifications on the mobile site if you're logged in to a wiki using notifications. [98]
• Starting on August 28, all users with an account will be using HTTPS to access Wikimedia sites. HTTPS brings better security and improves your privacy. Some countries (like China) will not use HTTPS. If HTTPS causes problems for you, tell us on meta. [99]
• Starting on August 29, you will get the code editor interface to edit JavaScript and CSS pages on all wikis. [100]
• The plan to use Solr for search in MediaWiki was changed; instead, Elasticsearch is now planned. [101]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:14, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #73

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Request for comment on Geo Coordinates for people
  • Request for comment on reuse of data from DBpedia
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • State of the Map (September 6-8, 2013)
  • Recent office hour logs now availible.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Abraham, Denny and Lydia sat down for an evening trying to capture what Wikidata is about in a video.
  • Deployment! Wikivoyage now has access to the wikidata dataset and various other bugs have also been fixed (including the copyright warning)!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: interchange station (P833), public holiday (P832), parent club (P831), Encyclopedia of Life (P830), OEIS ID (P829), possible causes (P828), BBC programme identifier (P827), tonality (P826), dedicated to (P825), Meteoritical Bulletin Database ID (P824)
  • Newest task forces: Wikidata:País Valencià task force
• Development
  • Work on allowing API module editentities to edit claims
  • Work on entity / item redirects
  • Work on support for moving qualifiers in API and Frontend
  • Adding coordinates to diff display and improving diff display code
  • Allowing site groups for language links on clients to be configurable (needed for commons)
  • EntityId changes, we are now working on 0.5!
  • Show snaktype in summary for novalue and somevalue snaks
  • Further work on merge module for the API
  • Wrote missing tests for various jQuery widgets
  • Work on value formatters
  • Continue on moving tests to cucumber
  • Bug fixes for coordinates following the latest deployment
• Open Tasks for You
  • Report a paper cut (see above).
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:34, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #74

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Saskia has finished her analysis of the different Wiktionary proposals and projects
  • Oversight nomination for Ajraddatz
  • Request for input by ontology experts
  • Help Sven compile a list of major accomplishments of Wikidata to date
  • RfC about the Guidelines for the RfC process
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • State of the Map
  • Dbpedia-Wikidata workshop
  • 10 questions about VIAF, Wikidata and the world
  • Wikidata quality and quantity
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Potentially useful Coursera course about metadata and information started
  • URL datatype needs more testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: GSS code (2011) (P836), BioLib ID (P838), IMSLP ID (P839), narrative set in (P840), Paleobiology Database Identifier (P842), SIRUTA code (P843), UBIGEO code (P844). A set of properties to build calenders: public holiday (P832), day in year for periodic occurrence (P837) and feast day (P841). A proposal for "reoccurring date in machine readable format" is still under review.
• Development
  • mlazowik has put in more work to getting support for batches (featured article and so on) to Wikidata
  • Jeroen gave a presentation on clean functions
  • More work on the URL datatype to make it ready for deployment
  • Continuous work on cucumber & moving browser tests to saucelabs/cloudbees
  • Simple query special page
  • DataValues reorganization
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:05, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #75

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • State of the Map
  • Dbpedia-Wikidata workshop
  • Slides for a Wikidata intro in French and English
  • Speaker needed for a Wikidata talk in Slovakia
  • Blog post by Denny: A categorical imperative?
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The URL datatype is now available. Go and add all the sources ;-)
  • Sourcerer gadget by Magnus to help you add URLs from Wikipedia articles for claims
  • Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to get interwiki links via Wikidata on 23rd of September
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Saskatchewan Register of Heritage Property identifier (P845), Global Biodiversity Information Facility ID (P846), United States Navy aircraft designation (P847), Japanese military aircraft designation (P849), World Register of Marine Species identifier (P850), ESRB rating (P852), CERO rating (P853), URL (P854), Sandbox-URL (P855), official website (P856), CNKI (P857), ESPN SCRUM ID (P858), sponsor (P859), e-archiv.li ID (P860), premiershiprugby.com ID (P861), Operational Requirement of the UK Air Ministry (P862), InPhO identifier (P863), ACM Digital Library author identifier (P864), BMLO (P865), Perlentaucher (P866), ROME Occupation Code (P867), foods traditionally associated (P868), instrumentation (P870), printed by (P872), phase point (P873), UN class (P874), UN code classification (P875), UN packaging group (P876), NFPA Other (P877), avionics (P878), pennant number (P879), CPU (P880), Variable type (P881), FIPS 6-4 (US counties) (P882), FIPS 5-2 (code for US states) (P883), State Water Register Code (Russia) (P884), origin of the watercourse (P885), LIR (P886), based on heuristic (P887), JSTOR (P888), Mathematical Reviews identifier (P889), Request for Comments number (IETF) (P892), Social Science Research Network (P893)
  • Newest task forces: Occupations and professions task force
• Development
  • Breaking change to the API in the last deployment
  • Started work on number data type
  • Worked on simple query special page
  • Worked more on moving (ordering) of qualifiers
  • Worked on JSON dumps
  • Continued working on allowing editentities API module to allow editing of claims
  • Continued work on the merge items API module
  • Worked on fixing the way Claim GUIDs are used throughout the code
  • Worked on TableDefinitionReaders for Database component
  • Unified and improved rendering of property values in summaries, diffs, wiki-pages, etc.
  • Continued moving to new browsertests framework
  • Bugfixes on autosummaries
  • Worked with GSoC student on mobile skin
  • Worked on refactoring of how we serialize and provide data about used entities on a page (e.g. entity pages or certain special pages) to the frontend
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 16:43, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #76

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • upcoming: UK Wikidata Training
  • Magnus blogged about the Wikidata Query tool
  • Gerard did an interview with Emw about the heady stuff of Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • 30 percent of all items are categorized in 6 large groups (main type (GND) (P107)). Most are items about geographic features (1.7 million items), some of these already have coordinates (0.5 million). Items about persons are fairly frequent too (1.3 million), many already with gender (0.9 million), a few with DOB (0.05 million) or DOD (0.04 million). Other groups include: creative works (305,000), terms, organizations, and events.
  • The first 2 Wikidata oversighters are elected, Ajraddatz and Rschen7754. Please contact the email at the above page, and do not post requests onwiki. Two more candidates are running: Stryn and Sven Manguard.
  • Neat new gadget to semi-automatically import labels, aliases and descriptions based on Wikipedia article introductions
  • New search backend on testwikidata needs testing
  • Commons is still scheduled to get interwiki links via Wikidata on Monday and can also be tested on test.wikidata.org
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: GSRR rating, filming location, USK rating, notation, facility, South African municipality code, topic's main category, Nova Scotia Register of Historic Places identifier, PEGI rating, AMG Game ID, Libris, PORT identifier
• Development
  • Wikimedia Deutschland is looking for a software developer with a focus on frontend development with Java Script to work on Wikidata among other things. Apply!
  • Paper Cut: Display the ID of an item or property page next to the label (bugzilla:53462)
  • Paper Cut: Fix value field not loading for some properties (bugzilla:53157)
  • Paper Cut: Work on supporting non-earth globes in the UI (bugzilla:54097)
  • Worked on quantity data type implementation in backend and frontend
  • Work on a build and release tool for the Wikidata software
  • More work on sorting of references and qualifiers
  • Work on database schema modification functionality to be used by the query store
  • Prepare deployment for Wikimedia Commons (including improving script for populating sites table, adding support for Wikimedia Commons)
  • Work on making entity data available in the Mobile Wikibase skin
  • new Cirrus Search (Elastic Search) backend enabled on test.wikidata.org
  • Finished up cucumber tests for sitelinks
  • Hotfixes for coordinates autosummaries
  • Worked on simplifying process of defining wb.fetchedEntities
  • Finished working on wbeditentity
  • Worked on MySQL and SQLite table definition readers
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:26, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #77

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • upcoming: UK Wikidata Training
  • What can Wikidata, the collaboratively edited knowledge base, do for Wikipedia?
  • “Allow me to reintroduce myself,” say those in Wikidata and VIAF
  • Importing data from the Polish Wikipedia
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Denny's last day on the development team was today. He has a few closing remarks in this blog post.
  • Wikimedia Commons now gets language links via Wikidata
  • Stryn's request for oversight flag
  • Individual Engagement Grants Proposal: Understanding Wikidata
  • Terminator now also has most linked-to items with no label in language X
  • Draft for Wikidata support of Wikiquote
  • Open position for a JavaScript developer to work on Wikidata - please spread the word
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: KSH code, FishBase species identifier, work location, Commons gallery, heritagefoundation.ca ID, PMCID, city served, type of electrification, color space, activating neurotransmitter, anatomical location, postsynaptic connection, presynaptic connection, possible treatments, possible examinations, magnetic ordering, main topic of creative work, Spanish subject headings for public libraries, SOC Occupation Code, NOC Occupation Code, GRAU index
• Development
  • Said Good Bye to Denny - *sob*
  • Improved layout for commons sitelink table
  • More work on sorting
  • Worked on statements UI tests
  • Fixed failing QUnit tests
  • Deployed new code and updated sites for Commons deployment
  • Fixed a number of small bugs
  • Code review for Google Summer of Code student projects
  • Work to automate creating deployment branches and builds of Wikibase with its dependencies
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:44, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-40

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• Special:Listfiles can now display old versions of files a user has uploaded. A new link was also added (Special:AllMyFiles) that gives a list of all files the current user has ever uploaded (that haven't been deleted).
• There is now an Android application to contribute to translatewiki.net from mobile devices. [102]

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor now has a new toolbar with drop-down menus for advanced tools. [103]
• Many bugs were fixed, some related to copy-and-paste. [104]
• You can now move references, list of references, templates and other elements with the mouse ("drag-and-drop"). [105]
• You are invited to comment on designs for the interface to add references in VisualEditor.

Future

• Developers are looking for ideas of small technical projects that new developers could work on. Please add your ideas. [106]
• Developers are looking for wikis who would accept to try using secure links (HTTPS) for all users. [107]
• You can join an IRC discussion about "Beta features", a tool to try new features, on October 3. [108]
• You can join an IRC discussion about Flow, the new wiki discussion tool, on October 17.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:18, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #78

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • 3 Individual Engagement Grants related to Wikidata are looking for feedback and endorsements: Understanding Wikidata, Wikidata Toolkit and Wikintelligence
  • Request for Comments on linking Wikimedia Commons
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • UK Wikidata training
  • Pushing Wikidata to the Next Level
  • Hello, Good-bye at Wikidata
  • Google Summer of Code 2013 - Let's Mobilize Wikidata! - A Summary
  • Wikidata Query updates
  • Blog: Wikidata qualifiers
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Tempo-spatial display (events in Wikidata on a map)
  • Canned queries (for queries that help find missing information)
  • Wikidata Browse (pretty slideshow of random Wikidata items, their pictures, labels in various languages and statements)
  • Wikidata generic tree (displays a tree of data in Wikidata)
  • We've crossed ID 15000000: d:Q15000000 (Category:Sternorsidis)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Code of nomenclature, programmer, theme music, inspired by, GHS precautionary statements
• Development
  • Finished initial version of the build tool (= tool that creates one tarball/git repository from all our extensions and their dependencies for deployment)
  • Continued work on numbers data type
  • Continued work on Formatters (for autosummaries, diffs, etc)
  • Fixed RDF serialization issue
  • Merged merge API module
  • Finished up database schema updating code
  • Added validation for precision in globe coordinate value
  • Finished and released Diff extension version 0.9
  • Polishing work on Wikibase QueryEngine
  • Some cleanup of EntityView
• Open Tasks for You
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Hack on one of these.
• Note from Lydia about the future of the weekly summaries
  • I've been compiling the weekly summaries for Wikidata for the past 1.5 years. It is time to give this into the hands of a few capable community members now that I have moved on to product management. Starting next week I will not be compiling the weekly summaries anymore. I am happy to help anyone who wants to take over get up to speed of course. Please contact me if you'd like to take this over.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:26, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #79

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over how Property metadata should be stored within Wikidata
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata sends goodies to Google Summer of Code 2013 volunteers
  • A Wikidata interview with Lydia
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Statistics about sourcing on Wikidata
  • Help the development team prioritise!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Wikivoyage banner, RSL identifier, ISIN
• Development
  • Added index removal and addition support to Wikibase Database
  • Improved initialization code of Wikibase Query
  • Added database setup code to Wikibase Query
  • Added schema updating support to Wikibase QueryEngine
  • Added SimpleQuery special page to Wikibase Query. This page allows users to find entities by a property value pair
  • Formatters for snaks/values are now used throughtout Wikibase
  • Some progress on DecimalValues and QuantitiyValues
  • Started work to include the data type of snaks in the JSON dumps
  • Worked on cleaning up inconsistent handling of Claim GUIDs vs hashes.
  • Implemented more convenient user interface for Special:SimpleQuery.
  • MergeAPI module and claim editing from wbeditentity to be deployed
  • Further work on a build step to make deployment easier
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 17:45, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #80

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over the implementation of 'showcase items'
  • Requests for comment over restructuring user rights
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Lydia gives a talk at Latinoware about Wikidata
  • Talk at UCBerkeley about Wikidata
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • This week the 80 millionth edit was made to Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: street address, e-mail, guest of honor, MusicBrainz label ID, burial plot reference, Austrian municipality key, streaming media URL, MycoBank taxon name identifier, IPNI taxon name identifier, Tropicos taxon name identifier, MSW species identifier, section, verse, or paragraph, ISBN-10, IBNR identifier, full text available at, ISCO code, NSZL identifier, BNE identifier, NLI (Israel) identifier
  • Newest task forces: International relations task force
• Development
  • Further development on WikibaseDatabase
  • IE8 is working again
  • JSON socumentation created and merged
  • Lots of work carried out on the quantity datavalues
  • Papercut: mouseover input suggestions messes up input. Fixes bug 44896
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Respond to a "Request for Comment".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 20:17, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-42

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• You can now choose which language to show for SVG files that contain several languages, using the "lang" option, like [[File:Gerrit_patchset_25838_test.svg|lang=de]] for the German layer of File:Gerrit patchset 25838 test.svg.
• Developers are looking for wiki communities to try the new search system. [109]

VisualEditor news

• You can now create and edit references inside media captions. [110]
• You now need to press the "delete" key twice to delete a template, reference or image; the first time, they only become selected, to avoid accidental deletion of infoboxes and similar content. [111]
• When you resize images, you will now still see them, and their size will also be seen in the center. [112] [113]

Future

• The new notifications system ("Echo") will be added to almost all wikis that don't already have it on October 22. It will notify you of changes and events that affect you. [114]
• MediaWiki 1.22wmf22 was added to test wikis on October 17. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on October 21 and all Wikipedia wikis on October 24 (calendar).
• The interface to reset your password will soon be changed. [115]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:36, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #81

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over whether to split three properties into six more specific ones
  • Closed: Exclusion criteria for Wikipedia: namespace items
  • Closed:Place of property documentation
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Gerard wrote about Wikipedia's place as a source within Wikidata
  • Semantic MediaWiki Conference (SMWCon) will be held next week, Monday to Wednesday, in Berlin.
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Echo has been enabled on Wikidata
  • Magnus created some queries for Wikidata
  • Wikidata is 1 year on October 29th! Stay tuned for some 'surprises'
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Philippine Standard Geographic Code, IOC country code, MusicBrainz area ID, BAG-code for Dutch villages, code for weekend and holiday homes (Sweden), Pastoratkod (Sweden), code for parishes in the Church of Sweden, Civil parish code/ATA-code in Sweden, Minor urban area code in Sweden, Urban area code in Sweden, tributary, described in URL, catalogue, category combines topics, neurological function
• Development
  • Lazowik worked on API support for editing badges
  • Bene added a keyboard shortcut to get from an article to the item it is connected to on Wikidata (bugzilla:46538)
  • Bene worked on a table of content for items (bugzilla:44876)
  • Bene improved Special:ItemDisambiguation (bugzilla:55466)
  • Bene added ftp as an allowed protocol for the URL datatype (bugzilla:54103)
  • Linked sitelinks in diffs (bugzilla:53471)
  • Cleaned up and added tests in client that are necessary for improving the recent changes integration and for supporting enhanced changes
  • Worked on the user interface for simple queries
  • Worked on the user interface for the numbers datatype
  • Continued work on ordering statement groups in the user interface
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve some road items in your country by adding some statements to them.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:09, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• The "Toolbox" section in the site sidebar is now called "Tools" in English. You can do the same in your language by editing the interface text on translatewiki.net. Someone else may have already done it. [116]

VisualEditor news

• On wikis with VisualEditor, you can now use it on pages in the File, Help and Category spaces. [117]

Problems

• On October 22 (UTC), an error in the site settings caused *.wikimedia.org sites (like Meta-Wiki and Commons) to redirect to wikimediafoundation.org for a few hours. [118]

Future

• MediaWiki 1.23wmf1 was added to test wikis on October 24. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on October 28 and all Wikipedia wikis on October 31 (calendar).
• In the next days, servers in San Francisco will start providing (cached) content to users located in Oceania. If you are in that area and notice problems, please tell us. [119]
• You will soon be able to test new features easily using the "Beta Features" view. VisualEditor will be in the list on sites where it works and isn't automatically enabled. Another example is a set of changes in the article text style.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:05, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #82

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata celebrates its first birthday!
  • Wikidata presentation at the Open Knowledge Workshop Day on November 4th by Wikimedia Suomi
  • Interview with Magnus, a Wikimedia tool creator
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • record held, the one-thousandth property, is created.
  • Wikidata could be a multilingual picture dictionary
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: Lattes Platform number, NTA PPN identifier, PTBNP identifier, MusicBrainz Place ID, NLR (Romania) identifier, engine configuration, belongs to jurisdiction, record held, ARICNS, dmoz, scan file, NFPA Reactivity, NFPA Fire, NFPA Health, function/mission, elected holder, voice recording, spoken text audio
  • Newest task forces: Railways task force
• Development
  • Create and remove claim diffs will now show a diff for the WHOLE claim, bug 53142
  • Sitelinks in diffs now have a link to the article
  • ByPropertyLists now also accept lower case propertyids as keys instead of just uppercase
  • WikibaseDatabase extension released to version 0.1
  • Entity descriptions are now included in the search index text
  • Sitelink titles are also included in search index text
  • Further developments on Quantities
  • Fixed the hiding of the remove button when adding a new statement
  • Serialization options have been cleaned up
  • Escape titles on revision history and diff pages
  • Further work on Query and QueryEngine
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve some road items in your country by adding some statements to them.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:05, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-44

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• The style and colors for warning boxes, error messages, and success messages in all skins of MediaWiki has been changed. [120]

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to switch from editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext directly without having to save the page. You can't yet switch from wikitext to VisualEditor but developers hope to make it possible in the future. [121]

Problems

• There was a problem on October 31 during the activation of MediaWiki 1.22wmf2 on test wikis. mediawiki.org was also broken, and if you had problems logging in, it was probably because of this as well.

Future

• Because of the problem with MediaWiki 1.22wmf2, the calendar has changed. It will be added to mediawiki.org and non-Wikipedia sites on November 4, and all Wikipedia sites on November 7.

JavaScript / Gadget developers

• Due to a recent change, gadgets and user scripts that use jQuery UI should explicitly load the appropriate modules, as they may not be loaded by default. [122]
• Developers have started to remove long-deprecated methods. You should check the JavaScript console (in debug=true mode) and look for deprecation warnings and their stack trace. [123]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:55, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #83

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed: Restructure of minor user rights
  • Lua enhancements discussion
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata IRC Office hour on Wednesday November 13th in #wikimedia-office
  • On November 10th, Gerard Meijssen will discuss Wikidata at the Wikimedia Diversity Conference
  • Lydia makes a guest appearance at the Metric and activities meeting to discuss Wikidata's growth
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource deployment planned to start January 13th, 2014, see the coordination page here
  • Magnus discusses Wikidata items and Wikipedia entries
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: BIBSYS identifier, Arts & Architecture Thesaurus ID, criterion used, including, excluding
  • Newest task forces: Athletics task force
  • You can now thank users for their contributions on Wikidata
• Development
  • Sitelinks in diff views now link to the article
  • Bene* worked on adding a table of contents to item pages (bugzilla:44876)
  • More work on badges by mlazowik
  • Creating and removing claims with references and qualifiers now show full diffs
  • Fixed invalid diffs which display 'diff=0' as a parameter (bugzilla:49434)
  • Fixed cases where diff pages arew caches and display in incorrect languages (bugzilla:55667)
  • Added ability to ignore conflicts in merge items API module
  • Worked on adding the datatype in the json output
  • Fix validation of wbsetreference
  • Wikibase Query now listens to entity changes of Wikibase Repo
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve biology, help out the Molecular biology task force.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-45

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• You can now use the "Autonym" font of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) to display the name of languages (for example in navigation templates) in their correct script. To do this, add the CSS class "autonym" to the elements that include language names. Note that this font only works for the name of languages, not for any other text. [124]

Problems

• There was a problem with Parsoid (the program used by VisualEditor to convert wikitext to annotated HTML) on November 4, between 19:40 and 20:40 (UTC). Encoding issues caused non-ASCII characters (including those with diacritics, like "é") to be broken when converted to wikitext and saved to the page. [125]

Future

• The Beta Features tool is now available on Commons and Meta-Wiki. With it, you can test new features before they're added for everyone. The plan is to add this tool to all wikis on November 21. [126]
• MediaWiki 1.23wmf3 was added to test wikis on November 7. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on November 12 and all Wikipedia wikis on November 14 (calendar). [127]
• The MassMessage tool will be added to all wikis on November 14. It will make it simpler to send messages across wikis. [128]
• The button of the Search page will soon be changed to be blue and bigger (see the difference). [129]
• You will soon be able to add a page name as parameter for {{REVISIONID}}, {{REVISIONUSER}} and {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}} and similar functions, by writing for example {{REVISIONID:Apple}}. [130]
• In the future, when you hide a CentralNotice banner on a wiki, it will also be hidden on other Wikimedia sites. [131]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:28, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #84

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Closed: Geocoordinates on people
  • Instances of human
  • Dimensions and units for the quantity datatype
  • Discussion started by Tom Morris over Wikidata and Wikinews
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Digitale Bibliothek 2013 is taking place, November 21st to November 22nd
  • Wikidata office hour logs are available here
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Magnus creates a Wikidata search add-on for Wikipedia
  • Freebase-Wikidata mappings are produced by Google
  • The Wikidata IRC channel is moving from #wikimedia-wikidata to #wikidata.
  • Magnus and the Wikidata created redlink lists
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: feed URL, language regulatory body, BAV (Vatican Library) identifier, asteroid taxonomy
  • Newest task forces:
• Development
  • Added a keyboard shortcut to get from an article to its associated item on Wikidata (bugzilla:bug 46538)
  • Fixed bugzilla:49434 (Support diff=0 in Wikibase)
  • Worked on Lua improvements including bugzilla:54324 (sequence in Lua should start with 1)
  • Started making improvements to the loading time of items
  • Started creating a special page to show the items with the most sitelinks (bugzilla:46217)
  • More work on ranks for statements
  • Worked on putting the datatype into the JSON output
  • Worked more on support for enhanced changes format in client
  • Cleaned up code that handles Wikibase entries in client recent changes
  • Added tests for recent changes formatting code in MediaWiki code
  • Updated Wikibase to maintain compatibility with changes in Universal Language Selector
  • Removed many deprecates method usages related to EntityId
  • Improved Special:SetSiteLink page
  • Removed obsolete EntityCache code from Wikibase Client
  • Removed obsolete SearchEntityArtefacts script from Wikibase Repo
  • Updated usages of EntityId to usages of ItemId and PropertyId where applicable
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Create a mineral species, help out the Mineralogy task force by forming new new statements today!
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-46

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• There was a problem caused by too many requests to the database on November 14. [132]

Future

• MediaWiki 1.23wmf4 was added to test wikis on November 14. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on November 19 and all Wikipedia wikis on November 21 (calendar).
• The new Search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added to *.wikimedia.org, Wikimania and Wikisource wikis on November 19, and Wiktionary wikis on November 21 (except where it's already available). Once it is added, you can test it by adding &srbackend=CirrusSearch to the address of the search results page. It will become the main search engine on Wikivoyage wikis on November 21. [133]
• The MassMessage tool will be added to all wikis on November 19 instead of November 14. It will make it simpler to send messages across wikis. [134]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:05, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #85

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Improve handling of deleted items and labels in archives
  • Closed: Commons links
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • An interview with Denny Vrandečić
  • WikiCon 2013
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Reasonator now supports cities and locations
  • The quantities datatype is available for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: main food source, GHS signal word, Digital Rights Management system, legal citation, light characteristic of a lighthouse, crew member, donated by, awarded by, doctoral thesis, SUDOC catalog (editions only), SBFI occupation code, SBC-2010 occupation code, CNO-11 occupation code, KldB-2010 occupation code
• Development
  • Refactored Api output
  • Collect tasks for Google Code In
  • Make wbeditentity accept serialization with the id and type keys
  • Start setting up ‘automated’ part of the Wikidata build script
  • Released version 1.0 of the Ask library https://github.com/wmde/Ask
  • Fixed dependency injection issue in Wikibase Query
  • Started work on providing a new serialization library that does not have the design issues of the current data model serialization code and can be used as standalone PHP library
  • Moved quantity data type out of experimental and enabled on https://test.wikidata.org
  • Improved Wikibase Lua code
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve some road items in your country by adding some statements to them.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• The Beta Features announced before are now available on all Wikimedia wikis. You can test new features easily by changing your Beta preferences. VisualEditor is one of those features on sites where it works and isn't automatically enabled. There is also a new media viewer and changes in the article text style. [135]
• Tools developers can now create tools that use the OAuth protocol to connect to accounts on Wikimedia sites. As a user, you can use those tools to make edits and other changes with your account without giving the tool your password. [136]

Problems

• Wikis that are currently testing CirrusSearch had problems with search results on November 18 from 16:00 to 20:00 UTC.

Future

• There will be no major code changes on the week of November 25 because many developers will be on holiday for Thanksgiving.
• The editing interface of Page: pages on Wikisource (working with the Proofread Page extension) will soon also work without JavaScript. [137]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by Global message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:02, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #86

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Showcase items - take 2
  • Verified statements
  • Closed: VCards for Wikivoyage
  • Closed: Image properties
  • Closed: Proposals for the 'Place' related properties
  • Closed: Source items and supporting Wikipedia sources
  • Closed: Constraint violation technical bases
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • The Wikidata Concept Cloud
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Quantities datatype is available for testing
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ZDB identifier, sockets supported, film editor, type of kinship, relative, manager/director, Dewey Decimal Classification, honorific suffix
  • Newest task forces: Sports results task force
• Development
  • Ranks are nearing completion (bugzilla:49120)
  • Quantities got some more love (improved diff, added scientific notation and simple localisation and made it possible to show/not show + for positive values - bugzilla:54318)
  • Ordering of statement groups is nearing completion
  • Avoid loading all referenced items in EntityView to improve loading time of items
  • Finalizing the inclusion of data types in JSON output
  • Fixed 2 XML errors on test.wikidata.org ready for deployment
  • Started work on a Wikibase-independent serialization component for DataValues
  • Worked on making Lua arrays start with 1 instead of 0 (bugzilla:54324)
  • Released the Datavalues library
  • Improved enhanced changes code in core, to better allow Wikibase (and Flow) to support that format
  • Defined permissions for Simple Queries
  • First Google Code-In task completed (meaning Special:SetSitelink now retains POSTed infomation after an error so you don't have to enter it again)
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve some road items in your country by adding some statements to them.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:41, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #87

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Change the resysopping process
  • Inactive administrators
  • Open RfBs: The Anonymouse
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Gerard blogs about the Italian Wikipedia search updates (See the Polish Wikipedia's update too)
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Italian and Polish Wikipedia now display Wikidata results in their searches
  • A few new features which require your testing!
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NCL identifier, Catholic Hierarchy ID, discovery method, Sycomore ID, SWB editions, IDEO Job ID, ZDB identifier
  • Newest task forces: Periodicals task force
  • Showcase items: Douglas Adams, ethanol
• Development
  • Finalized localization of quantity values
  • Worked on support for scientific notation in quantities
  • More work on improving diffs
  • Worked on ranks and grouping of statements of the same rank
  • Improved performance of AuthorityControl gadget by a factor of 5
  • Finished work on initial version of ordering of statements
  • Bene* finished the API part of badges support (user interface part is still needed)
  • Database performance improvements
  • Released DataValues Serialization 0.1 https://github.com/DataValues/Serialization/
  • Released Ask Serialization 1.0 https://github.com/wmde/AskSerialization
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Improve some road items in your country by adding some statements to them.
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:22, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

This newsletter is now posted using MediaWiki message delivery.

New features

• The CommonsMetadata feature was added to all wikis. It creates metadata information about multimedia files (like their license) that can be read automatically by computer programs. It not only works for Commons, but for all wikis, and you can use it for files on your wiki by editing templates used to describe metadata. [138]
• JavaScript code used on Wikimedia sites is now saved locally on your computer to load faster. [139]

VisualEditor

• You can now paste formatted content copied from external sources (not just as plain text) into VisualEditor; this includes copy/pasting from other VisualEditor windows. [140]
• You can now open VisualEditor by adding ?veaction=edit to the page URL, regardless of your user preferences. [141]
• Many bugs have been fixed, and VisualEditor should also look faster, for example when you save a page. [142]

Problems

• Due to issues, the new search tool ("CirrusSearch") was recently removed from wikis where it was enabled, then added again. [143]

Future

• MediaWiki 1.23wmf6 was added to test wikis on December 5. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on December 10 and all Wikipedia wikis on December 12 (calendar).
• The old Etherpad tool (replaced by a new version) will be removed on December 30, 2013. You can still save old pads before that date using the old address: https://etherpad-old.wikimedia.org. [144]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:38, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #88

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Guidelines about ordering
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Succu becomes the first non-bot user with more than 1000000 edits in Wikidata
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ResearcherID, Portuguese Job Code CPP-2010, PSH id, medical condition
  • Newest task forces: Political geography task force
  • Showcase items: Barack Obama, Hubble Space Telescope
  • Fun Fact: Q12345 is Count von Count (ah ah ah)
• Development
  • Made improvements to lower database load
  • Deployed ordering, ranks and a table of contents and fixed issues with those after deployment (mainly performance-related)
  • Worked on preventing import of wikitext into item and property namespace
  • Started working on a new DataModel serialization component which will be usable loose from Wikibase. Both authors and people analysing dumps will thus finally have the deserialization task solved for them.
  • Started working on a version of DataModel that works with the new DataValues components
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Use the rails, help out the Railways task force!
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-50

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

New features

• You can now see a legend on Special:RecentChanges and Special:Watchlist that explains the symbols used. [145]
• If your wiki is testing the new search tool ("CirrusSearch"), you can now test it by adding "New search" in your Beta features preferences. [146]

VisualEditor

• The toolbar is now simpler; all text styles (bold, italics, underline, subscript, etc.) are in the same menu, and the "More" menu is called "Insert". [147]
• You can now use a basic tool to add special characters to your text. You can add more characters (useful in your language) by editing the MediaWiki interface on translatewiki.net.
• The tool to add and edit mathematical text is now called "formula". [148]

Problems

• There was a problem with the "Create a book" tool (Collection); books could only be exported to PDF format. The change has been undone. [149]
• The log-in system for external tools ("OAuth") was broken on wikis that tested the new search tool. It was fixed last week. [150] [151]
• Because of a bug, this newsletter is delivered to users using the new MediaWiki message delivery, and to community pages using the old EdwardsBot. [152]

Future

• MediaWiki 1.23wmf7 was added to test wikis on December 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on December 17 and all Wikipedia wikis on December 19 (calendar).
• You will soon be able to select the language of SVG images that have translations using a drop-down menu on the image page. (see example) [153]
• GLAMToolset, a tool to help GLAM groups (like museums) upload many pictures to Commons, will be added to Commons on December 17. [154]
• A Draft namespace will be added to the English Wikipedia to make it easier to create new pages. You will be able to use VisualEditor for drafts if you have enabled it. [155] [156]

Other

• You can read the summary of the technical report for November 2013 to learn more about VisualEditor, Mobile and other features. [157]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:24, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #89

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over the notability of the new Draft namespace on the English Wikipedia
  • Discussion over the notability of template documentation items
  • RfC: Notability of item for all special pages
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource is still scheduled to get language links via Wikidata on January 14th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: NLM ID, NDL editions
  • Showcase items: Douglas Adams
  • Fun Fact: The Mayan calendar (Q2012) did not correctly predict the end of the world nor the end of Q items as Wikidata (Q2013) went on to host Wikipedia links this year.
• Development
  • Happy Holidays from the dev team! Have a great time and continue being awesome ;-)
  • Improved and added a lot of tests
  • Worked on displaying qualifiers in the non-JavaScript UI
  • No longer displaying the table of contents from item/property pages if there would be less than 3 entries in it
  • Caching and database improvements
  • Worked on preventing the import of wikitext into the main and property namespace
  • More work on quantities UI
• Open Tasks for You
  • Update, expand and translate d:Wikidata:Introduction to make it easier for newcomers to understand what Wikidata is all about.
  • Use the rails, help out the Railways task force!
  • Help fix formatting and value issues for a property.
  • Build a bot for one of the "bot requests".
  • Hack on one of these.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:12, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on December 19. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on December 31 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 2, 2014 (calendar).
• You can now test the new search tool ("CirrusSearch") on all Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikimedia chapter wikis hosted on Foundation servers. Enable "New search" in your Beta features preferences. [158]
• There was a bug where notifications were not sent when the signature of the user leaving the message linked to a translated namespace. The problem was fixed in the software and will soon be fixed on Wikimedia sites. [159] [160]
• You can now use the log-in system for external tools (OAuth) on all Wikimedia wikis that use the unified login. [161]
• If your wiki adds stars or other icons to interwiki links for featured articles in other languages, you may need to change the JavaScript code. [162]
• You can thank other users for their edits even if your browser does not have JavaScript. [163] [164]
• All edits made through Flow, the new discussion system for MediaWiki, are now visible in user's contributions. You can test it on the Flow talk page on MediaWiki.org. [165] [166]
• You can test a visual tool that shows edits made to an article over time. It only works for English Wikipedia pages for now and is slow on long articles. [167]
• You can test the first version of the new mobile Wikipedia app for Android and iOS. [168]
• Translatewiki.net, the site where you can translate the MediaWiki software, now has a new main page for users without an account. [169]

Future software changes

• There will be no technical changes this week (December 23 to December 29) due to end-of-year holidays.
• When someone deletes, restores, uploads, or moves a file on Commons, pages on all wikis that use that file will be refreshed. [170] [171]
• New users will soon have their user and talk pages added to their watchlist as soon as they create an account. [172] [173].
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will not show the text of versions of a page that have been hidden. [174] [175]
• You will soon be able to see the raw HTML created by some wikitext by using the Special:ExpandTemplates tool. [176] [177]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:22, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #90

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over handling of items
  • RfC: Interwiki links for subpages (Notability based discussion)
  • Closed: Inactive administrators
  • Closed: Bot policy
  • Closed RfA: Matěj Suchánek (Successful)
  • Open RfA: GerardM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Add the file and translate namespaces to the list of namespaces excluded from Wikibase Client's linking functionality and enable the "Add links" dialog for pages without language links on commons. (#58903)
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: chromosome, produces
• Development
  • Redesign and improvement of toollabs:bene/itemsbycat/. You can also use short urls like toollabs:bene/itemsbycat/enwiki/Wikidata.
  • Worked on reorganizing our git repositories and splitting quite a few of them
  • Worked more on parser cache to be able to cache more content (this failed during the last deployment)
  • Some progress on redirects
  • Tests, tests, tests
  • Vacations \o/
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Public holiday (P832) propery
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Help translate on of Bene*'s tools!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:48, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-01

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• You can now see the text of DjVu and PDF files in search results on wikis testing the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [178] [179]
• With the new version of the Wikibase DataModel extension, you can install it outside Wikimedia wikis. [180]

VisualEditor news

• Images are now shown inside VisualEditor as HTML5 <figure /> elements. Comments are welcome. [181]
• You can now test a basic version of VisualEditor on mobile devices; see this article as an example.

Problems

• On December 23, Wikimedia Labs was broken for 4 hours due to an NFS problem. [182]

Future software changes

• CirrusSearch will be added as the second search method for Spanish (es), French (fr), Portuguese (pt) and Russian (ru) wikis on December 30. Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies and Wikinews users will also be able to enable it in their Beta Features options.
• AbuseFilter log entries will be visible in CheckUser tool reports. [183] [184]
• It will soon be possible to search for log entries done by users without an account. [185] [186]
• It will no longer be possible to globally hide users with more than 1,000 edits. [187] [188]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:40, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #91

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about the RfD process
  • Discussion about Notability of Wikisource on Wikidata
  • Open RfAs: Lymantria, Lavallen
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikidata reached 100000000 edits
  • d:User:Dexbot is the first bot to reach 10000000 edits
  • Wikisource is due to receive Wikidata Phase 1 on January the 14th
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: none
  • Newest task forces: MediaWiki task force
  • Showcase items: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Q309988)
  • Fun Fact: According to Wikidata, this is the year of 2004 (Q2014)
• DevelopmentWord from John
  • To give this section some life, since the development team had their holidays last week meaning nothing really got done (let them have one week off at least), I'll say a few words. 2014 is a new year and thus a new start, over the last year Wikidata celebrated its first birthday which brought reflection over what Wikidata had accomplish. Therefore I want to use the start of 2014 to reflect what Wikidata can do. For my personal over view see this page. For the summary, while it is meant to be a weekly simple update, I feel this can be used a lot more effective to put across not only what happened on Wikidata but things about Wikidata on other wikis, I am hoping to start a section over this within the next few weeks. If you have any suggestions for the summary, feel free to drop me a message at meta or Wikidata. Thanks.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Public holiday (P832) propery
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 21:50, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 2. It will be enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on January 7 and on all Wikipedia wikis on January 9 (calendar).
• The old note-taking site (Etherpad) was removed on December 30, 2013. You can see most of the documents on the new site. [189]

Problems

• On January 2, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage projects were broken for 2 hours due to language cache update issues.
• On the same day, it was not possible to edit most wikis for about 30 minutes, due to a database replication problem.

Future software changes

• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the default search method for Italian Wikipedia, French Wikisource, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage sites, and as a second search method for the German Wikipedia and all Wikibooks sites on January 6. [190]
• Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedia users will also be able to enable CirrusSearch in their Beta Features options. [191]
• Plural form rules for some languages will be changed. Many translations of the user interface for Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian and other languages will need to be changed. [192] [193] [194]
• You will see a warning when you try to delete a page linked to from other pages. [195] [196]
• You will be able to hide redirect pages on the list of protected pages. [197] [198]
• You will be able to use keyboard shortcuts in the Translate tool, by pressing Alt+1 and similar key groups. [199] [200]
• E-mails sent by MediaWiki will include the name of the site in their From: line. You will be able to change this name on your wiki by editing the MediaWiki:Emailsender page. [201] [202]
• Images viewed in the Beta Features media viewer will load faster. [203] [204]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:34, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #92

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over Wikisource's notability within Wikidata
  • Make Symmetric & Inverse Property addition automatic and bidirectional
  • Closed RfAs: Lymantria (Successful), Lavallen (Successful)
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Presentation about Wikidata at Aldil, Lyon, France
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource is deployed to testwikidata
  • A group of students is working on suggestions to make it easier to add missing information. They published a status report and a rough first demo.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: track gauge, pathogen transmission process, CVR, ERA Journal ID
  • Newest task forces: Manga and Anime task force
  • Showcase items: Douglas Adams
  • Fun Fact: Does not exist (Q404)
  • Wikidata's presence: The Dutch Wikipedia have a category for coordinating coordinates on Wikidata (Categorie:Wikipedia:Coördinaten niet op Wikidata)
• Development
  • Adrian Lang joins the team
  • Cirrus Search is now the default search on Wikidata and should improve d:Special:Search's handlich of special characters for example
  • Made the “in other languages” box also show up for people who have not configured a babel box (bugzilla:49079)
  • No longer showing a table of content when it has less than 3 items in it to prevent it from showing up on property pages (bugzilla:58422)
  • More performance improvement work
  • Finishing touches on quantities datatype user interface
  • Display qualifiers in non-Java Script user interface
  • Prevented import of wikitext into the main namespace (bugzilla:47070)
  • Split the DataValues component into more clearly defined libraries and switched Wikibase over to use these
  • Switched Wikibase to use Wikibase DataModel 0.6
  • Changed development and installation workflows to make use of the dependency manager Composer (more details)
  • Made tests run with less warnings (especially in Firefox)
  • Started replacing wikibase.fetchedEntities with a proper entity store
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the Public holiday (P832) propery
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 09:34, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

You can read a recent blog post about how Tech News is put together, translated and sent to you across wikis each week.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 9. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 14, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 16 (calendar).
• Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons may be slow due to a search engine issue. [205]

VisualEditor news

• VisualEditor will be added for all users on several Wikipedias on January 13. [206]
• You can now add and remove __NOTOC__, __FORCETOC__ and __NOEDITSECTION__ in the page metadata menu. [207] [208] [209]

Problems

• For a few hours on January 6, it was not possible to edit pages using the Translate tool on Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimania 2013 wiki, due to a settings error. [210] [211]
• For about 20 minutes on January 9, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

• Wikidata will be added to all Wikisource wikis on January 14. [212]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the second search method for the English Wikipedia on January 13. On Wikibooks and the German Wikipedia, you will also be able to test it by adding it in your Beta Features options.
• You will soon be able to export page collections into other formats than PDF. [213]
• It will soon be possible to upload groups of photos from Flickr using UploadWizard. [214] [215]
• The Wikimedia Foundation has shared a multimedia vision for 2016. You are invited to comment. [216]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #93

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events
  • upcoming: FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource now gets its language links via Wikidata
  • Reasonator gets extended functionality
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: PlantList-ID, Danemark Job Code (DISCO-08), Instruction Set, Thailand central administrative unit code, student of, archive URL
  • Showcase items: ethanol
  • Fun Fact: A Space Odyssey (Q2001)
• Development
  • Enabled language links for Wikisource
  • Move more part of an item page from JS to HTML to improve performance and non-JS interface
  • Database performance improvements
  • Work on forward compatibility for new entity types
  • Introducing the EntityStore service to improve modularity
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:22, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
• You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [217]
• As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [218] [219]
• You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [220]
• You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [221]

VisualEditor news

• In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
• You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [222]
• You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [223]
• When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [224]
• When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [225] [226]
• The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [227]
• Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [228]

Problems

• There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [229]
• There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [230]
• On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [231]

Future software changes

Orange bar with new messages

• If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [232] [233]
• You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [234]
• You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [235]
• You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [236] [237]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:21, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #94

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about using 'instance of' specific for animals
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Next Wikidata IRC office hour on Monday, February 3rd
  • FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Development Plan for 2014+ has been published
  • Wikidata stats now also includes statistics for ranks
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ICTV virus ID, rector, fictional analog of, writable file format, readable file format, place made
  • Showcase items: Cactaceae
• Development
  • Daniel and Katie took part in the MediaWiki Architecture Summit in San Francisco
  • Bugzilla:60027 Add language to label and description field to make it less likely that people enter a label or description in a wrong language
  • Bugzilla:58394 Avoid throwing out of bounds error when adding new claims
  • Bugzilla:50570 API now reveals qualifier hashes
  • Bugzilla:57213 API now reveals data type ids
  • Bugzilla:57754 Die if wbeditentity tries to clear from an old revision id
  • Bugzilla:55795 Add API option to show snaks in a list rather than grouped by property
  • Refactor of ChangeOp remove functionality
  • Continued to move parsing and validating of values from the frontend into the backend to improve performance and make the non-JS user interface more useful
  • Finished the Wikidata build script (We use it to pull together code from various git repositories into a single one for deployment)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:57, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video. [238]
• The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff. [239]
• The Special:ActiveUsers page will be removed because it's too slow. [240]
• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).

Problems

• On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved. [241]
• For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

• You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [242]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:46, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #95

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over P31 as a qualifier
  • Open RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata is at FOSDEM in Brussels, Februrary 1st-2nd
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Quantities released on Wikidata!
  • Wikisource phase 2 coming Februrary 25th.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: attendance, refractive index, electronegativity, proportion, sandbox-quantity, number of pages, number of platforms , flattening, floors above ground, number of cylinders, masts, number of speakers, g-factor, orbital eccentricity, gross tonnage, total produced, redshift, Mohs' hardness, ELO rating, atomic number, LibraryThing work identifier, EUL control number, capacity, population, Human Development Index, from narrative, launch contractor, valvetrain configuration, KOATUU identifier
• Development
  • Deployed quantities to Wikidata! :)
  • Made patch to make wbmergeitems more reliable Bugzilla::55960
  • Wikidata edit permissions now included in wikimedia OAuth edit groups
  • Moved Diff repo to Github
  • Work put into make the frontend use backend formatters through the api
  • Refactoring of the ValueView extension
  • MergeItems special page merged as an experimental feature
  • Our easy RDF fork is now included using composer
  • Fixed wbmergeitems issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:37, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
• Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis. [243] [244]
• The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles. [245] [246]
• You can now link to diffs using [[Special:Diff/12345]] and similar links. [247]
• There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages. [248]
• Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. [249]
• All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons. [250]

VisualEditor news

• You can now see a list of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Ctrl+/ inside VisualEditor. [251]

Future software changes

• Edits and files hidden with the Oversight tool will be moved to the RevisionDelete system. The Oversight tool will then be removed from Wikimedia wikis. [252] [253] [254]
• For languages where not all sister projects exist, you will be able to link to other language projects using double interwikis (:ko:v, :v:ko, etc.). [255]
• It will soon be possible to use the GettingStarted tool on other wikis than the English Wikipedia. You can translate it on Translatewiki.net. [256]
• You will soon be able to include the Special:Contributions page into other pages. [257]
• You will be able to see where a file is used inside MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [258] [259]
• It will soon be possible to send MassMessage messages using the API. [260]
• You will soon see audio statistics on the Special:TimedMediaHandler page. [261]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #96

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over the naming of people
  • Discussion over population
  • Successful RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • See the office hours logs at meta
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • See the FOSDEM slides
  • Thiemo joins the Wikidata development team
• Development
  • More work on badges by Bene*
  • Lots of Lua improvements by hoo (separate announcement with details soon)
  • Created backend Time parsers (yet another necessary step towards doing more in the backend instead of in Java Script in the frontend)
  • Automatic builds created, tested and deployed to beta labs every day!
  • Investigate Elastic Search as possible backend for queries
  • Made Wikibase Query work with our new component structure
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
• The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [262] [263] [264] [265] [266]
• You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [267]

VisualEditor news

• You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [268] [269]
• The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [270] [271] [272]

Problems

• On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [273]
• On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes

• Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [274] [275]
• You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [276]
• You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [277] [278]
• The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster. [279]
• Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [280] [281]
• It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [282]
• You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [283]
• You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [284] [285]
• If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode. [286]
• Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas. [287]
• bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest. [288]
• The <poem> tag will be renamed to <lines>. The old tag will still work. [289]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #97

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Let's redesign Wikidata's interface
• Reasonator
  • By hovering over a wikilink you will see the first paragraph.
  • The "personal settings" allow you to import your Babel info from Wikidata. This can be used to restrict the random items you will get.
  • The first iteration of "on the fly" text generation for English. It works for "humans" and, is completely based on the available Wikidata information.
  • You can now add labels in your language from within Reasonator. Technically oAuth is used. It now takes just one click to add a label in your language.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: IAAF ID, Lagrangian point
  • Showcase items: Vesta (Q3030)
• Development
  • Wrote performance tests so we can track performance improvements better
  • Did a code review of all gadgets that are enabled by default in Wikidata. Found and fixed a performance bottleneck.
  • Work on making the interface more responsive, e. g. live preview when editing labels and updating the watchlist star when saving.
  • Started refactoring and fixing issues with automatically created summaries that are, for example, created by bots via API calls.
  • Fixed an issue with OAuth on Wikidata because of permissions
  • Started code review of the code the student team is working on for suggestions
  • Discussed updates to the data model document to be able to update it to the actual implementation
  • Did a technical debt analysis and design review of Wikibase.git, with initial focus on WikibaseLib
  • Got (backend) EntityStore on the way, so we can test API modules without touching the database
  • Further work on TimeParsers move to the backend
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 13:24, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
• You can now use the list of active users again. [290] [291]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [292]
• You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [293]
• You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014. [294]

Problems

• On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem. [295]
• On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue. [296]
• On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
• There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
• On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news

• The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [297]
• You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [298]
• Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [299]
• You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [300] [301] [302]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #98

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource will receive access to the data in Wikidata on February 25th. Planning is taking place at d:Wikidata:Wikisource.
  • 1 week left to give initial input for the user interface redesign
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: impact factor, Municipality code (Denmark), USB ID, Home world, Cardinality of the group, Internet media type, Bluebook abbreviation, Z39.5 abbreviation, ISO 4 abbreviation, CODEN, landing site, US Congress Bio identifier, Scopus Source ID, Scopus Affiliation ID, Scopus EID, Scopus Author ID, IPTC Media Topic, topic's main portal, Regensburg Classification, Library of Congress Classification, neutron number
  • Fun Fact: Wikidata has reached 30 million statements
• Development
  • Refactored the suggestions drop-downs when entering properties for better performance
  • Fixed a misdirected arrow in left-to-right languages (bugzilla:61308)
  • Worked on an Apache redirect issue (bugzilla:54273)
  • Found and started fixing an issue that asked users for additional languages they don't want according to their Babel box (bugzilla:61446)
  • Table-of-contents link to the statements section of an item was broken
  • Kept poking TimeParsers
  • Made WikibaseDatabase feature complete for use with WikibaseQueryEngine
  • Work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
  • Investigate using ElasticSearch as term index backend to take some load of the most-used database table
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher 13:58, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 27 (calendar).
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) was added to the Italian Wikiquote and all Wikiversity projects. Users can now enable it in their Beta options. [303] [304]
• The Universal Language Selector was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis again. You can enable web fonts in your ULS options (see how).

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to add and edit __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__ in the page settings menu. [305] [306] [307]
• You will soon be able to use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘+Opt+S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor. [308] [309]
• You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window. [310] [311]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to use the <categorytree> tag again. [312]
• You will soon be able to post messages with the MassMessage tool in all talk namespaces. [313] [314]
• Notifications will soon work in all namespaces. [315][316][317]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:17, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #99

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about defining lists
  • Open RfAs: לערי ריינהארט, Pamputt
  • Closed RfAs: Epìdosis (Successful)
• Events/Press/Blogs
  • Wikidata scholarships for the Zürich Hackathon
  • Wikidata FOSS Outreach Program for Women
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: unemployment rate, manner of death, file extension, received signal, prevalence, connecting service, first performance, Universal Decimal Classification, Chinese Library Classification, Dharma Drum Buddhist College place ID, Dharma Drum Buddhist College person ID, MEP directory identifier, Rodovid ID, handle, Gewässerkennzahl, LIBRIS editions, numeric value, visitors per year, Geokod, approximation algorithm, transmitted signal
  • Showcase item: Why not improve Kleinmachnow (Q104192) to showcase standard?
  • Wikidata's presence: vici.org are using Wikidata identifiers in their data storage
• Development
  • Made loading items a lot faster
  • Enabled access to the data on Wikidata for Wikisource
  • Fixed the diff view sometimes showing the wrong revision
  • Attended ConFoo and learned all of the things
  • Released Wikibase DataModel Serialization 0.1
  • Continue work on caching javascript config variables in parser cache
  • Started to make Wikidata even faster by removing StaticExpert and BifidExpert
  • Started reviewing interface animations. You should be able to disable them all by setting $.fx.off = true; in your Special:MyPage/common.js.
  • Fixed Wikidata looking a bit odd when enabling the Typography refresh Beta feature.
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the MedlinePlus ID (P604) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 18:38, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-10

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
• When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts. [318]
• You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [319] [320]
• You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis. [321]
• The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list. [322]

VisualEditor news

• You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [323] [324] [325]
• If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged. [326]
• Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. [327]
• VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [328] [329] [330]

Future software changes

• The new tool for viewing media files will soon show a progress bar and a thumbnail while loading full images. [331] [332]
• You will soon be able to make user contributions show only page creations. [333] [334]
• Article Feedback Tool will be removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will also no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki. [335] [336]
• Wikis using the new search tool will come back to the old tool for a few hours starting at 00:00 UTC on March 6. [337]

Problems

• For about an hour on February 23, there were problems with page loading due to a MediaWiki bug. [338]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #100

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about enabling GuidedTours on Wikidata
  • Open RfA: ElfjeTwaalfje
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikiquote will get language links via Wikidata on April 8th. Coordination is happening at d:Wikidata:Wikiquote
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: portal's main topic, Finnish municipality number, carries scientific instrument, upper stage booster, river basin category, mode of inheritance
• Development
  • Added more details to the diffs of time and geocoordinate values (will show which globe the coordinate is on and so on now as well)
  • More work on badges by Bene* - most work left is now in the GUI part of it
  • Removed unneeded and unused permissions/rights
  • Fixed a bug concerning spaces in quantities (bugzilla:61911)
  • Started work on taking ranks into account for queries, the property parser function and Lua. (By default only preferred values should be used if available. If not available then it should use values with rank normal.)
  • test2.wikipedia.org and test.wikipedia.org now use test.wikidata.org as their data repository, instead of wikidata.org
  • Started work on WikibaseInternalSerialization component
  • Released Wikibase DataModel 0.7 - https://github.com/wmde/WikibaseDataModel/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES.md
  • Added indexes to Wikibase QueryEngine
  • Improved SQLite support in Wikibase Database
  • Started moving virtual machine instances of various test systems to the new Wikimedia Datacenter
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the sport (P641) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 15:39, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
• You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [339] [340]

VisualEditor news

• It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [341] [342]
• It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [343]
• VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [344]
• We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [345]
• You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [346] [347] [348]

Future software changes

• You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [349]
• CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages. [350] [351]
• It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript. [352]
• An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [353]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)