User talk:BillHPike

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The Signpost: 8 May 2023

• News and notes: New legal "deVLOPments" in the EU

• In the media: Vivek's smelly socks, online safety, and politics

• Recent research: Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions

• Featured content: I wrote a poem for each article, I found rhymes for all the lists;
  My first featured picture of this year now finally exists!

• Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" approaches conclusion

• News from the WMF: Planning together with the Wikimedia Foundation

• Special report: There Shall Be Seasons Refreshing – Stories from WikiConference India 2023

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:23, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-19

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

• Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
• When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [1]
• The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [2]
• Preloading text to new pages/sections now supports preloading from localized MediaWiki interface messages. Here is an example at the Czech Wikipedia that uses preload=MediaWiki:July. [3]

Problems

• Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [4]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
• Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [5]

Future changes

• During the next year, MediaWiki will stop using IP addresses to identify logged-out users, and will start automatically assigning unique temporary usernames. Read more at IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation/Updates. You can join the discussion about the format of the temporary usernames. [6]
• There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [7][8]
• jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [9]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:34, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-20

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

• Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [10]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [11]

Future changes

• There is a recently formed team at the Wikimedia Foundation which will be focusing on experimenting with new tools. Currently they are building a prototype ChatGPT plugin that allows information generated by ChatGPT to be properly attributed to the Wikimedia projects.
• Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [12]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:42, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 May 2023

• News and notes: Golden parachutes: Record severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation

• In the media: History, propaganda and censorship

• Arbitration report: Final decision in "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland"

• Recent research: Create or curate, cooperate or compete? Game theory for Wikipedia editors

• Featured content: A very musical week for featured articles

• Traffic report: Coronation, chatbot, celebs

• WikiProject report: Wikipedians Convene for Queering Wikipedia 2023: The First International LGBT+ Wikipedia Conference

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:38, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-21

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 "recent edits" time period for page watchers is now 30 days. It used to be 180 days. This was a Community Wishlist Survey proposal. [13]

Changes later this week

• An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [14]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).

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

16:52, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 56

The Wikipedia Library: Books & Bytes
Issue 56, March – April 2023

• New partner:
  • Perlego
• Library access tips and tricks
• Spotlight: EveryBookItsReader

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --10:04, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-22

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

• Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [15]
• The page Special:EditWatchlist now has "Check all" options to select all the pages within a namespace. This feature request was voted #161 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [16]

Problems

• For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [17]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
• VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [18]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:59, 29 May 2023 (UTC)