This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Voting for proposals in the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey, which determines what software the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team will work on next year, will take place from 8 December through 21 December. In particular, there are sections regarding administrators and anti-harassment.
Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Growth features show impact
Newcomer task experiments results
The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.
In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.
This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:
the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
the probability that they are retained as editors
the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)
We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.
The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.
Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.
Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.
News for mentors
A separate list for workshops hosts
During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Learn more about this feature.
Claiming multiple mentees at once
Mentors can use Special:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.
Community news
The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page. T261714
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
You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [1][2]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [3][4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).
User:Zvpunry/EntitySchemaHighlighter.js user script highlights the entities in the content of a Schema and shows information when hovering the link. (2020-12-07)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
We now have a central repository for wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (phab:T269102)
Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (phab:T191831)
Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (phab:T263258)
Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (phab:T268625)
Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs: Docker Image Repository, Tarball Repository
Election time: our end-of-year Election of Coordinators opened for nominations on 1 December and will close on 15 December at 23:59 (UTC). Voting opens at 00:01 the following day and will continue until 31 December at 23:59, just before Auld Lang Syne. Coordinators normally serve a six-month term and are elected on an approval basis. Self-nominations are welcome. If you've thought of helping out at the Guild, or know of another editor who would make a good coordinator, please consider standing for election or nominating them here.
December Blitz: This will run from 13 to 19 December, and will target all Requests. Sign up now.
Drive and Blitz reports
September Drive: 67 fewer articles had copy-edit templates by this month's close. Of the 27 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and 124 articles were claimed for the drive.
October Blitz: this ran from 18 to 24 October, and focused on articles tagged for copy-edit in July and August 2020, and all Requests. Of the 13 who signed up, 11 editors copy-edited at least one article. 21 articles were claimed for the blitz.
November Drive: Of the 18 editors who signed up, 15 copy-edited at least one article, and together claimed 134 articles. At the close of the drive, 67 fewer articles were in the backlog and we had dealt with 39 requests.
Other news
Progress report: As of 09:05, 3 December 2020 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors had processed 663 requests (18 from 2019) since 1 January and there were 52 requests awaiting completion on the Requests page. The backlog of articles tagged for copy-editing stood at 494 (see monthly progress graph above).
Annual Report for 2020: this roundup of the year's activity at the Guild is planned for publication in late January or early February.
It has been a productive year for New Page Patrol as we've roughly cut the size of the New Page Patrol queue in half this year. We have been fortunate to have a lot of great work done by Rosguill who was the reviewer of the most pages and redirects this past year. Thanks and credit go to JTtheOG and Onel5969 who join Rosguill in repeating in the top 10 from last year. Thanks to John B123, Hughesdarren, and Mccapra who all got the NPR permission this year and joined the top 10. Also new to the top ten is DannyS712 bot III, programmed by DannyS712 which has helped to dramatically reduce the number of redirects that have needed human patrolling by patrolling certain types of redirects (e.g. for differences in accents) and by also patrolling editors who are on on the redirect whitelist.
John B123 has been named reviewer of the year for 2020. John has held the permission for just over 6 months and in that time has helped cut into the queue by reviewing more than 18,000 articles. His talk page shows his efforts to communicate with users, upholding NPP's goal of nurturing new users and quality over quantity.
NPP Technical Achievement Award
As a special recognition and thank you DannyS712 has been awarded the first NPP Technical Achievement Award. His work programming the bot has helped us patrol redirects tremendously - more than 60,000 redirects this past year. This has been a large contribution to New Page Patrol and definitely is worthy of recognition.
Six Month Queue Data: Today – 2262 Low – 2232 High – 10271
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Template:Notebook Given name is a new template which gives for each given name a list of useful SPARQL queries. The template can be used on the talk page of given names. See Alexandre (Q16002466) for an example. Comments are Contributions are welcome.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 17 December 2020 (Add to calendar). We will have a few people share out about their project in the first half of the call and then continue our conversation from the last session about what will be a better platform for community discussions. Everyone is welcome to attend!
We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.
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
There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).
Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [6]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [7]
Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [8]
Hi SS49, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year, Thank you for all your contributions to Wikipedia, –Davey2010Talk19:38, 23 December 2020 (UTC)
Ongoing: rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see Wikipaka schedule for more details)
Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.
User:Bargioni/WikiBridge.js userscript enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video (in Italian)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now lists languages on the index page using their autonyms (language name in that language). (Source)
Bymotion, standard discretionary sanctions have been temporarily authorizedfor all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes). The effectiveness of the discretionary sanctions can be evaluated on the request by any editor after March 1, 2021 (or sooner if for a good reason).
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
You can choose to be reminded when you have not added an edit summary. This can be done in your preferences. This could conflict with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [9]
You can link to specific log entries. You can get these links for example by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry even if you had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [10]
Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type. This is similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match the empty string. New warnings will be added later. [11]
Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog. This is how the usual revision deletion works. [12]
When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it is "throttled". The most powerful actions are disabled. This is to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this "throttle".
Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences. Setting the watchlisttowatch will still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [14]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes. Most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Using QuickStatements for bulk uploading archived website data to Wikidata with Peter Chan, 12 January. Agenda
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #27 on Wikipedia20 - YouTube, Facebook, 16 January
Video: How to use WikiBridge - a userscript that enables you to add a tabbed section to Wikidata items showing some paragraphs from Wikipedias chosen by the Babel languages of the logged-in user. Demo video
Tool of the week
QueryGraph is a web tool for creating queries in SPARQL from graphs.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikibase now has a dedicated Twitter account: Follow @WikibaseHQ for updates on everything Wikibase.
You can now create and curate catalog groups on Mix’n’match, and find the most common unmatched entries between them (Source)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We focused on making it possible to query for Item values and being able to limit the number of Items in the result. We also looked into how to query for quantity values.
Changed P920’s data type from string to external identifier (phab:T269205)
Finished working on the problem of Items that have the page prop wikibase:statements set to 0 but actually do have statements (phab:T145712)
Continued work on the “Publishing” step of the Wikibase release pipeline by building and testing three components of the software suite: Wikibase (phab: T267893), Query Service frontend (phab:T268025), and Query Service backend (phab:T268022)
Continued working on the Query Builder. We continued to set up tracking for the number of queries that result in an error, timeout, etc. (phab:T269224). We als made it possible to query for Item values (phab:T268814). You can always try the current state on the test system.
Finished fixing an issue with whitespace being stripped while typing when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Worked on no error being shown when trying to save Lemma with invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Working on using Special:MyLanguage feature for more links in the Wikidata Query Service interface to redirect people to documentation in their language (phab:T267656)
Continued interviewing people to better understand how to best compare Wikidata's data against other databases in order to find mismatches that need the editors' attention
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all wikis from 21 January (calendar).
MassMessage posts could be automatically timestamped in the future. This is because MassMessage senders can now send pages using MassMessage. Pages are more difficult to sign. If there are times when a MassMessage post should not be timestamped you can let the developers know.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of international cricket centuries by Michael Hussey until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.
Past: Wikidata+Wikibase office hour happened on January 21st. See notes here (English).
Past: 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Beginner Teaching Workshop (in Chinese). Replay on YouTube 1, 2, 3, 4
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikibase, the Integrated Authority File (GND) pilot at the German National Library, and the WikiLibrary Manifesto, 26 January. Agenda
Continued working on the Query Builder: made it possible to limit the number of results in the result set, made it possible to include results from subclasses when querying for Item values, worked on negating queries and started on sharing of queries via URL. As always you can try the current state on the test system.
Making links in the Query Service redirect to the proper translations of their pages on-wiki by using Special:MyLanguage redirects (phab:T267656)
Working on fixing an issue with displaying large numbers for quantity values (phab:T268456)
Fixed a case where no error message was shown when trying to save a Lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Talked to a few more people about checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find potential errors
Continuing the Release Strategy project for Wikibase, with the following progress:
Created a “release pipeline” for Wikibase extension (phab:T267627)
Created MediaWiki docker images based off release branches (phab:T270133)
Defined format and contents of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia Germany (phab:T271194)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [20]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).
Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
Wikibase Release Strategy
Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [21]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [22]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [23][24]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [25]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [26][27]
Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read more.
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
The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [28]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [29]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [30][31]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [32]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [33]
Video: Wikidata as a PID community. By Simon Cobb - YouTube
Tool of the week
Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
Video: Wikidata editing #31 Free Software Day - YouTube, Facebook
Video: Knowledge Graphs for AI: Wikidata and beyond - YouTube
Tool of the week
UseAsRef script allows you to add references to statements using one external ID as source (see User:Bargioni/UseAsRef and this YouTube video for more information)
Public Domain Tool, developed by the Flemish Institute for Archives automates the process of determining whether their collection items could be in the public domain.
Sizes of country items (like "Portugal" (Q45)) were recently reduced by 30% to 50% by moving a few economics properties to "economy of"-items (sample: "economy of Portugal" (Q1649355)). The item "economy of Portugal" is currently larger than "Portugal". This can simplify uses of country items that previously timed-out. Infoboxes can still access the properties with the link through "economy of topic" (P8744).
Later this week, the development team will enable a rate limit for assigning new item IDs. Bots and users who successfully create items should notice no change, since the rate limit is equal to the existing limit on all edits. However, bots that often fail to create items may start to see different error messages than usual. This will hopefully reduce the problem of skipped item IDs.
Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [35][36]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [37]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[38]
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
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
The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [39]
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [41]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Upcoming: Wikidata-based Data Sprint hosted by the University of New Brunswick. One Wikidata data set will be provided on 11th March 2021 and various teams will have 2 hours to run a set of SPARQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and showcase their results.
Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
Tool of the week
EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js, is a userscript that adds Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on Lexeme pages. (It links to pages corresponding to the first lemma and puts the lexeme language's Wiktionary first, followed by languages in the user's Babel box).
Shared Citations, a proposal arising from the WikiCite project, for a central reference management database supporting all Wikimedia projects, with significant relationship to Wikidata. Seeking feedback.
Modèle:Indice de diversité de genre (Template:Gender diversity index) is a new template in the French Wikipedia which use P21 (gender property) to count the number of people by gender mentioned in an article. It helps to find articles which "forget" to cite women.
Lexeme JSON dumps are now available as a collection of individual lexeme data in the regular JSON format, separate from the regular Wikidata dumps containing Items and Properties. phab:T264883
Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.
Arequest for comment is open that proposes a process for the community to revoke administrative permissions. This follows a 2019 RfC in favor of creating one such a policy.
Arequest for comment is in progress to remove F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a, which covers immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Arequest for comment asks if sysops may place the General sanctions/Coronavirus disease 2019 editnotice template on pages in scope that do not have page-specific sanctions?
When blocking an IPv6 address with Twinkle, there is now a checkbox with the option to just block the /64 range. When doing so, you can still leave a block template on the initial, single IP address' talkpage.
When protecting a page with Twinkle, you can now add a note if doing so was in response to a request at WP:RfPP, and even link to the specific revision.
Bymotion, the discretionary sanctions originally authorized under the GamerGate case are now authorized under a new Gender and sexuality case, with sanctions authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people. Sanctions issued under GamerGate are now considered Gender and sexuality sanctions.
Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Structured tasks
Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.
Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.
Moving forward: more wikis to get the features
Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.
Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.
We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.
We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.
Variant testing
As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.
News for mentors
Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.
Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.
Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.
Following a request for comment, F7 (invalid fair-use claim) subcriterion a has been deprecated; it covered immediate deletion of non-free media with invalid fair-use tags.
Following a request for comment, page movers were granted the delete-redirect userright, which allows moving a page over a single-revision redirect, regardless of that redirect's target.
Technical news
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split and it might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. (T278350)
Code to support some very old web browsers is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. (T277803)
The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.
Arbitration
The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.
Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from the Growth team!
The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.
Structured tasks
A screenshot of "add a link" feature in development in beta.
"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.
We are currently working on a Mentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
Community configuration editing form under development
We are working on project to allow communities to manage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check out the project page and add any of your thoughts to the talk page.
Scaling
Growth features are now available on 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
A new group of Wikipedias has been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Please contact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.
Administrator changes
Andrwsc • Anetode • GoldenRing • JzG • LinguistAtLarge • Nehrams2020
Interface administrator changes
Izno
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).
There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins. You can give feedback. [13]
The Wikipedia Library
Miscellaneous
