Tollens

Tech News: 2024-41

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

Weekly highlight

• Communities can now request installation of Automoderator on their wiki. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool that reverts bad edits based on scores from the new "Revert Risk" machine learning model. You can read details about the necessary steps for installation and configuration. [1]

Updates for editors

• Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now customize their articles suggestion list from 41 filtering options when using the tool. This topic-based article suggestion feature makes it easy for translators to self-discover relevant articles based on their area of interest and translate them. You can try it with your mobile device. [2]
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• It is now possible for <syntaxhighlight> code blocks to offer readers a "Copy" button if the copy=1 attribute is set on the tag. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [3]
• Customized copyright footer messages on all wikis will be updated. The new versions will use wikitext markup instead of requiring editing raw HTML. [4]
• Later this month, temporary accounts will be rolled out on several pilot wikis. The final list of the wikis will be published in the second half of the month. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 11 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available.
• Rate limiting has been enabled for the code review tools Gerrit and GitLab to address ongoing issues caused by malicious traffic and scraping. Clients that open too many concurrent connections will be restricted for a few minutes. This rate limiting is managed through nftables firewall rules. For more details, see Wikitech's pages on Firewall, GitLab limits and Gerrit operations.
• Five new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Komering (w:kge:) [5]
  • a Wikipedia in Mooré (m:mos:) [6]
  • a Wiktionary in Madurese (wikt:mad:) [7]
  • a Wikiquote in Gorontalo (q:gor:) [8]
  • a Wikinews in Shan (n:shn:) [9]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:39, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Crisfeela (11:59, 10 October 2024)

Hi Tollens, I have a doubt regarding Wikepedia adventure section. I was going through my first section and suddenly after my profile have created, the adventure tracking was gone. Can you please help me with how can I complete the same. Thanks. --Crisfeela (talk) 11:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Crisfeela! It looks like you should be able to use the links on your user talk page to continue where you left off. It looks to me like you will be in the right place if you click the "Mission 2" button there. Tollens (talk) 03:14, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @Tollens, I was able to find the same after a while by hovering around all areas. I am glad that you have found your time for the response. Thanks much and will be finishing up Wikipedia adventure soon. Crisfeela (talk) 04:42, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Dark Theme

Hey Tollens, where did you get the dark theme! 77.77.219.225 (talk) 18:14, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi! I made it myself using a computer language called CSS – the code that creates the theme is at User:Tollens/darkTheme.css if you are interested. If you're asking how to install it for yourself, you will need to first create an account, then you can follow the instructions at User:Tollens/darkTheme. Tollens (talk) 19:02, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you 77.77.219.225 (talk) 19:09, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-42

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

Updates for editors

• The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is starting to be removed. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. A first set of wikis are being contacted. These wikis are invited to stop using Flow, and to move all Flow boards to sub-pages, as archives. At these wikis, a script will move all Flow pages that aren't a sub-page to a sub-page automatically, starting on 22 October 2024. On 28 October 2024, all Flow boards at these wikis will be set in read-only mode. [10][11]
• WMF's Search Platform team is working on making it easier for readers to perform text searches in their language. A change last week on over 30 languages makes it easier to find words with accents and other diacritics. This applies to both full-text search and to types of advanced search such as the hastemplate and incategory keywords. More technical details (including a few other minor search upgrades) are available. [12]
• View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, EditCheck was installed at Russian Wikipedia, and fixes were made for some missing user interface styles.

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors who use the Toolforge tool Earwig's Copyright Violation Detector will now be required to log in with their Wikimedia account before running checks using the "search engine" option. This change is needed to help prevent external bots from misusing the system. Thanks to Chlod for these improvements. [13]
• Phabricator users can create tickets and add comments on existing tickets via Email again. Sending email to Phabricator has been fixed. [14]
• Some HTML elements in the interface are now wrapped with a <bdi> element, to make our HTML output more aligned with Web standards. More changes like this will be coming in future weeks. This change might break some tools that rely on the previous HTML structure of the interface. Note that relying on the HTML structure of the interface is not recommended and might break at any time. [15]

In depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes: updates on Wikimedia's authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, updates on Parser Unification and MathML rollout, and more.
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition include: research about improving topic suggestions related to countries, improvements to PHPUnit tests, and more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 21:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

IPv4 Support for your IP contrib userscript?

Heyo, I was looking around for a Gadget/userscript that would let me check the contributions of (most of) an IP range, and I was directed to your subnetContribs.js userscript. It works as advertised, it lets me check the /64 range of IPv6 addresses! I was wondering, could you please add IPv4 support for that as well? If not that, then could you guide me on how to add that to my local userscript? IPv4 is still very common and I find myself needing to check those as much as IPv6 when doing vandalism reverts. Sirocco745 (talk) 03:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi - I see that Teahouse section, I'll reply there to keep discussion in one place. Tollens (talk) 19:46, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Aaaa183472 (11:50, 15 October 2024)

Hi, I was wondering for contentious topics, if new users are allowed to use the "talk" tab to discuss changes? --Aaaa183472 (talk) 11:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Aaaa183472 – it depends on the specific contentious topic, some have different rules than others. Based on the messages on your talk page, I assume you're asking about the restrictions related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which do include the restriction that editors who have not both made 500 edits and held an account for 30 days may not make edits of any kind related to the topic area, the one exception being to make edit requests on talk pages (asking me about the restriction is fine, don't worry). That exception does not include discussion – you may make a request as described at Wikipedia:Edit requests (note especially that requests must be specific and uncontroversial, like typos or obvious mistakes), but you aren't allowed to participate in existing discussions or start discussions about general topics or anything you believe might be controversial.

Keep in mind that 500 edits and 30 days is not an especially high bar: if you contribute to Wikipedia in other areas it's likely you'll reach that mark fairly quickly (I see your account is already more than 30 days old). The restriction is mostly to make sure that editors who want to participate in especially controversial areas have a good understanding of Wikipedia's rules and processes before they jump into what are probably the most complicated and emotionally charged areas of the project.

My apologies that your introduction to Wikipedia was with a contentious topic: the atmosphere surrounding them can be a little combative for obvious reasons, though we try our absolute best to avoid that. If you're interested in participating in less controversial topics, please do – I suspect you'll find both that people will be a bit more relaxed and that the rules will be easier to grasp. Tollens (talk) 01:18, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh okay, thanks Aaaa183472 (talk) 11:00, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Scripting Barnstar
		Thank you for your high quality patches to Twinkle. Easy to review :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:00, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, happy to help out! Hope to do some more work there in the future, it's a great tool which I use quite a lot – thank you very much for adopting it over the last couple years! Tollens (talk) 01:37, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Gurmeetkrupa (21:09, 17 October 2024)

How to shift a writeup from sand box to article --Gurmeetkrupa (talk) 21:09, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Gurmeetkrupa, you can submit a draft by placing the text {{subst:submit}} at the top of your draft while in source editing mode (click the pencil icon next to the publish changes button to enter that mode), then publishing that change. Another editor will then review your draft (though this may take some time) and move it to an article page if it meets Wikipedia's standards for new articles. Currently, it would not be accepted due to its lack of references: all Wikipedia articles must demonstrate that their topic is what we call notable by including multiple (a common suggestion is at least three) citations to reliable sources that are independent of the subject and contain significant coverage of the topic (not just passing mentions). Common examples of sources meeting those criteria include news reports about the topic or books which include information about the topic. This rule about required sources is especially strict for biographies of living people, which have higher standards for required citations – this is to protect the subjects of those articles by helping make sure that what is written about them is true. Tollens (talk) 22:19, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from নাদিম শেখ (01:50, 19 October 2024)

Hmm --নাদিম শেখ (talk) 01:50, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Dumhandibiryani1 (09:14, 21 October 2024)

hello how to post article --Dumhandibiryani1 (talk) 09:14, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

Weekly highlight

• The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

• Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
• Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [16][17][18][19][20]
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "6 November 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [21][22]
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [23]
• The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [24]

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
• The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-44

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

Updates for editors

• Later in November, the Charts extension will be deployed to the test wikis in order to help identify and fix any issue. A security review is underway to then enable deployment to pilot wikis for broader testing. You can read the October project update and see the latest documentation and examples on Beta Wikipedia.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pediapress.com, an external service that creates books from Wikipedia, can now use Wikimedia Maps to include existing pre-rendered infobox map images in their printed books on Wikipedia. [25]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikis can use the Guided Tour extension to help newcomers understand how to edit. The Guided Tours extension now works with dark mode. Guided Tour maintainers can check their tours to see that nothing looks odd. They can also set emitTransitionOnStep to true to fix an old bug. They can use the new flag allowAutomaticBack to avoid back-buttons they don't want. [26]
• Administrators in the Wikimedia projects who use the Nuke Extension will notice that mass deletions done with this tool have the "Nuke" tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. [27]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:54, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Question from Lydia Sith (19:20, 29 October 2024)

How do I make a link to a different article? --Lydia Sith (talk) 19:20, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Lydia Sith! You can add a link by clicking edit on the page you want to add the link to, then there will be an icon that looks like a chain link in the toolbar at the top of that window which lets you add links. You might be interested in Help:Introduction, or more specifically this part of that introduction which goes over editing tools. Tollens (talk) 18:06, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Question from Ukulele to take ditto on Help:Getting started (08:57, 1 November 2024)

How can I use this app --Ukulele to take ditto (talk) 08:58, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ukulele to take ditto, is there something specific I might be able to help with? Wikipedia is quite a broad topic so it's difficult to give you a useful answer. You might be interested in Help:Introduction, if you haven't seen it already. Tollens (talk) 18:07, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Question from UnKnOwNpErSoN75 on Taikyoku shogi (08:12, 3 November 2024)

Hello! Can you help me with the "Mountain Stag" part of this article to make the table wider to be the same as the others? Thank you! --UnKnOwNpErSoN75 (talk) 08:12, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi AWikipedian25, it looks like you have figured this out on your own. If you still need help, please do ask and I'll be happy to assist. Tollens (talk) 18:11, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes. I have figured it out on my own. Thank you! AWikipedian25 (talk) 06:55, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – November 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

Administrator changes

• Crisco 1492

• Babajobu
• Daniel
• Elf
• Jayron32
• Thue
• Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

Maxim

Oversighter changes

Maxim

Guideline and policy news

• Following a discussion, the discussion-only period proposal that went for a trial to refine the requests for adminship (RfA) process has been discontinued.
• Following a request for comment, Administrator recall is adopted as a policy.

Technical news

• Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

• RoySmith, Barkeep49 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2024 Arbitration Committee Elections. ThadeusOfNazereth and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.
• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate from 3 November 2024 until 12 November 2024 to stand in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections.
• The Arbitration Committee is seeking volunteers for roles such as clerks, access to the COI queue, checkuser, and oversight.

Miscellaneous

• An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

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• Discuss this newsletter
• Subscribe
• Archive

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:22, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [28]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [29]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [30]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:48, 4 November 2024 (UTC)