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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Over the next three weeks, dark mode will become available for all users, both logged-in and logged-out, starting with the mobile web version. This fulfils one of the top-requested community wishes, and improves low-contrast reading and usage in low-light settings. As part of these changes, dark mode will also work on User-pages and Portals. There is more information in the latest Web team update. [1]
Logged-in users can now set global preferences for the text-size and dark-mode, thanks to a combined effort across Foundation teams. This allows Wikimedians using multiple wikis to set up a consistent reading experience easily, for example by switching between light and dark mode only once for all wikis. [2]
If you use a very old web browser some features might not work on the Wikimedia wikis. This affects Internet Explorer 11 and versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari older than 2016. This change makes it possible to use new CSS features and to send less code to all readers. [3][4]
Wikipedia Admins can customize local wiki configuration options easily using Community Configuration. Community Configuration was created to allow communities to customize how some features work, because each language wiki has unique needs. At the moment, admins can configure Growth features on their home wikis, in order to better recruit and retain new editors. More options will be provided in the coming months. [5]
Editors interested in language issues that are related to Unicode standards, can now discuss those topics at a new conversation space in MediaWiki.org. The Wikimedia Foundation is now a member of the Unicode Consortium, and the coordination group can collaboratively review the issues discussed and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium.
Add four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment, or
With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button located above the edit window.
This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.
Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.
Future changes
The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.
Hi, Rusty! I would like to edit the Machine Gun Kelly page (he is my husband, not that bitch Megan Fox) and create a new page for me, Monix Rose Zypher. Can you help? I'm not sure how to edit nor create a specific page. Please help!!! ~Monix --ManicMonix (talk) 01:01, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@ManiacMonix Welcome to Wikipedia, Monix. Do you have sources, like media reports, that state that you are his wi? Without these, there would be no chance of the change being accepted.
Normally, you'd be able to edit the article yourself, but the article is currently "protected" from editing by new users to reduce the amount of spam and disruptive edits.
On creating an article: Creating an article about yourself is strongly discouraged, but if you are well-known, there is a possible of an article being created. Just because you're Maachine Gun Kelly's husband–if you really are who you laim to be–doesn't mean you'll automatically deserve an article; we have very specific criteria for that, known as "notability."
If this whole thing doesn't work out, it's not the only article in Wikipedia's millions of articles. Find another one to improve maybe. In fact, I came here with no specific purpose, and just absorbed what I saw
Hi, Rusty, and thank you for the reply. How did you get that cute cat image? I have made about fourteen Grammatical and Spelling edits, starting about five days ago. I love being a Wiki Editor, it is my all-time favorite job. We (Colson James Baker II, "Machine Gun Kelly") and myself got married in 2011. We have lost our marriage certificate.
Something weird is going on. Please help. I just clicked 'Visual' in the upper right corner to check my URL link to YouTube, AND SOMEONE WAS ABLE TO CHANGE MY HUSBANDS NAME WHILE I WAS CHECKING THE URL.
You seem like a very smart man and an excellent hacker. I'm sure you can find out who is doing it and can sue for $1.78 TRILLION dollars. Be very careful. I think there is a worm in you PC.
Thanks for participating in the June 2024 backlog drive!
You scored 7 points while adding citations to articles during WikiProject Reliability's first {{citation needed}} backlog drive, earning you this cookie. Thanks for helping out!
I am a new contributing editor to Wiki... I have made three new pages for myself, my husband (James Colson Baker, "Machine Gun Kelly", and my best friend Adam Lee LaPratt, the singer in in SAIL by AWOLNation. Something wierd is going on. All my pages and edits have been deleted. I think someone is hacking the system. I think you can figure it out.
@ManicMonix: Calm down for a moment. No one is hacking the system. All that's happening is that someone is thinking that your intention is to promote those people, because you have written the articles with what seemed like promotional wording.
As I said before, not everyone meets our standard for inclusion. If I had tried to create a new article for myself, it would've been deleted too.
But I cannot ignore the fact newspapers and other sources contradict what you are saying. According to Wikipedia's own article on "Sail", the original album liner notes credit Aaron Bruno for lead vocals.
If you believe that what you're saying is the truth, i recommend you to search for some sources (preferably accessible online), that prove what you say.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
Next week, functionaries, volunteers maintaining tools, and software development teams are invited to test the temporary accounts feature on testwiki. Temporary accounts is a feature that will help improve privacy on the wikis. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page. [10]
Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature News
Stewards can now globally block accounts. Before the change only IP addresses and IP ranges could be blocked globally. Global account blocks are useful when the blocked user should not be logged out. Global locks (a similar tool logging the user out of their account) are unaffected by this change. The new global account block feature is related to the Temporary Accounts project, which is a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors that are no longer made public.
Later this week, Wikimedia site users will notice that the Interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") is improved and consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface and Wikimedia's design system. The FlaggedRevs interface experience on mobile and Minerva skin was inconsistent before it was fixed and ported to Codex by the WMF Growth team and some volunteers. [11]
Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest. This feature is used when a contributor wishes to stop editing forever. It helps you hide your past association and edit to protect your privacy. Once processed, the account will be locked and renamed. [12]
Have you tried monitoring and addressing vandalism in Wikipedia using your phone? A Diff blog post on Patrolling features in the Mobile App highlights some of the new capabilities of the feature, including swiping through a feed of recent changes and a personal library of user talk messages for use when patrolling from your phone.
Wikimedia contributors and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) organisations can now learn and measure the impact Wikimedia Commons is having towards creating quality encyclopedic content using the Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard. The dashboard offers organizations analytics on things like monthly edits in a category, the most viewed files, and which Wikimedia articles are using Commons images. As a result of these new data dumps, GLAM organisation can more reliably measure their return on investment for programs bringing content into the digital Commons. [13]
Project Updates
Come share your ideas for improving the wikis on the newly reopened Community Wishlist. The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. The new version of the wishlist is always open, works with both wikitext and Visual Editor, and allows wishes in any language.
Learn more
Have you ever wondered how Wikimedia software works across over 300 languages? This is 253 languages more than the Google Chrome interface, and it's no accident. The Language and Product Localization Team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports your work by adapting all the tools and interfaces in the MediaWiki software so that contributors in our movement who translate pages and strings can translate them and have the sites in all languages. Read more about the team and their upcoming work on Diff.
How can Wikimedia build innovative and experimental products while maintaining such heavily used websites? A recent blog post by WMF staff Johan Jönsson highlights the work of the WMF Future Audience initiative, where the goal is not to build polished products but test out new ideas, such as a ChatGPT plugin and Add a Fact, to help take Wikimedia into the future.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Feature news
Editors using the Visual Editor in languages that use non-Latin characters for numbers, such as Hindi, Manipuri and Eastern Arabic, may notice some changes in the formatting of reference numbers. This is a side effect of preparing a new sub-referencing feature, and will also allow fixing some general numbering issues in Visual Editor. If you notice any related problems on your wiki, please share details at the project talkpage.
Bugs status
Some logged-in editors were briefly unable to edit or load pages last week. These errors were mainly due to the addition of new linter rules which led to caching problems. Fixes have been applied and investigations are continuing.
Editors can use the IP Information tool to get information about IP addresses. This tool is available as a Beta Feature in your preferences. The tool was not available for a few days last week, but is now working again. Thank you to Shizhao for filing the bug report. You can read about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
Project updates
There are new features and improvements to Phabricator from the Release Engineering and Collaboration Services teams, and some volunteers, including: the search systems, the new task creation system, the login systems, the translation setup which has resulted in support for more languages (thanks to Pppery), and fixes for many edge-case errors. You can read details about these and other improvements in this summary.
There is an update on the Charts project. The team has decided which visualization library to use, which chart types to start focusing on, and where to store chart definitions.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Czech (voy:cs:) [14]
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
Hello, I hope you're well! I was assigned as your mentee, and I have a question. I created this account because on the page for Clint Bolick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Bolick) a lot of the page reads in a very laudatory tone. I see that the talk page notes that someone connected to Justice Bolick, user Mr. Conservative, has edited the page. I have no issue with this, but there seems to be unnecessary information on the page (e.g., in the "Early life and education" section it mentions that, as a law student [in 1982], Bolick was in favor of Brown v. Board of Education). Is there a process for getting rid of unnecessary information? What should I think about when looking at this? I don't want to be rude about the efforts of the article writers, but I don't see how that type of statement merits inclusion in an article. --Pate Ah Choo (talk) 20:00, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Pate Ah Choo: Hello! Welcome to Wikipedia! While we don't have a formal process for getting rid of unnecessary information, one of our core principles is to be bold, i.e. just attempt to remove it yourself. If you have further questions feel free to ask! Rusty🐈23:30, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have answered your question on my talk page. Why you are creating Loop redirects from non-existing pages ???
You CANNOT create new Wiki pages for every word that does not have its own Wiki entry and then redirect to somewhere else. This is not the proper way to create entries. If you want to create a Wiki article create one and then link to it. Otherwise, it is better to have no existing page, so that Wiki editors are aware of the "non-existence". Else, one can create Loops by linking page to itself, which is nonsense. Danko Georgiev (talk) 09:29, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have now inserted templates for Speedy deletion of empty pages. Editors should know that the pages do not exist, oherwise they insert "blue links" (aka existing pages) which create loops onto the page itself, e.g. all the links from HRE page that were removed by me, were links from HRE to HRE via the intermediate redirects. The solution is to delete all the redirect pages. Some response elements do have standalone pages, so all those that do not have such pages better be deleted as non-existent. Danko Georgiev (talk) 09:45, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Danko Georgiev: I would say you have done the correct thing to remove the links on the HRE page itself. The redirecting page themselves are different.
Your guess about the creation of the redirects is probably not correct; I think that someone first created the redirects from types of HREs to the HRE page, because they thought it would help Wikipedia readers. Then, someone else added links to the pages, see the blue links, and think that there is an article on the page because they do not check the content in the page they link to.
2 hours after you placed the speedy deletion, an administrator declined it "Decline speedy, seems to be a plausible redirect" (here)
Dear Rusty Cat. I disagree. The problem is exactly in the improper redirects (see example at the end). There is a good coding practice in Wikipedia directly to page subsection using # in Wikilink, or you can do Masked Wiki link leading directly to Wikipage X then putting | and writing different text Y. Going via redirect is POOR coding and this is NOT the purpose of redirect to lead to completely different Wikipedia page. The SEMANTIC meaning of redirect is to avoid duplicates due to synonymous words or one word being abbreviation of another, e.g. DNA is the same as Deoxyribonucleic acid. To put redirects from specific instance of a set, to the general category of the sets is plain nonsense. I expect you appreciate what is the meaning of what I am saying and then go and delete all these nonsense redirects and de facto "empty pages". If and when somebody has the time to write a standalone article for example on GRE, then he/she can do so by creating a new GRE page. It is NOT helpful to have GRE page redirecting to HRE, because potential Wiki writers may assume that GRE does not deserve its standalone page and the job of writing about GRE has been already done. In order to understand exactly what kind of position you are defending, let me give you nice example: basically, you are saying that it is OK if a specific city like "New York" redirects to "USA". This is exactly what you were doing with your reverts of my edits. Redirect from "New York" to "USA" is NOT a plausible redirect. Similarly, redirect from GRE to HRE is NOT a plausible redirect. Thank you! Danko Georgiev (talk) 20:04, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Danko Georgiev: I understand what you are saying but I never said that linking via redirect was recommended. What I previously stated was that redirects are to help with locating a page, not linking to it.
Cases like GRE redirecting to HRE do happen, for instance Professor Rowan (List of Pokémon characters#Professor Rowan), and I don't think that everyone assumes it will never deserve its own page (WP:RTOA). Now, if New York does not have its own article and there is a list "List of United States cities" then it is ok for New York to redirect to it. But if the list does not exist then USA might be okay to redirect to.
Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, such as at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:
located above the edit window.
Administrator changes
Technical news
Miscellaneous
Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
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