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Tech News: 2016-37

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 Wikimedia Commons app for Android can now show nearby places that need photos. [1]
• <maplink> and <mapframe> can now use geodata from Open Street Map if Open Street Map has defined a region and given it an ID in Wikidata. You can use this to draw on the map and add information. [2][3]

Changes this week

• The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [4]
• A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [5][6]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• When you search on the Wikimedia wikis in the future you could see results from sister projects in your language. You can read more and discuss how this could work.

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

18:04, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-38

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

• Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back because of bugs. Creating new accounts did not work between 15 September 19:10 UTC and 16 September 12:50 UTC. [7][8]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is multi-content revisions. The meeting will be on 21 September at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [9]

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

22:08, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Module:HS listed building

Hi Jackmcbarn, recently, there's been an effort to move the #coordinates call that Template:Coord does separately into Module:Coordinates. This almost became stable until a compatibility issue with Module:HS listed building was noted, that the direct Module call is no longer working. I've made updates to Module:HS listed building/sandbox (testcases) and intend to sync it in a few days when the Coordinates template and module go live with the #coordinates call moved. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 20:17, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang: Why did you change it to make it go out to the parser to run Template:Coord, that will just in turn have to go back to Lua to run Module:Coordinates, when it previously just called the module directly? Your first change to just remove the parser function call while keeping the module call seemed correct. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:21, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi Jackmcbarn, this revision still caused red errors (nil global frame) at Template:HS listed building row/testcases (though let me try it one more time). I'm not well-versed enough to discern whether there's a way to call the module directly without the issues. Restored the revision you suggested, but not getting the results — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 22:24, 20 September 2016 (UTC) 22:28, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang: Ah. What's actually happening there is that Module:HS listed building has stricter bug-checking than Module:Coordinates does, so there's no problem at all in the former; rather, it's uncovered a bug in the latter, namely that there's no variable called "frame" in scope on line 657 when it tries to reference one. I'll see if I can figure that out. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:18, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang: Okay, I confirmed my theory by adding the same bug-checking to Module:Coordinates/sandbox, which made it break everywhere with that error. I found and fixed that error, so now it seems to work everywhere. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:26, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Oh wow, that's great! Thanks for looking into this. I plan on re-syncing when I'm confident that other modules don't have this coordinates situation. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 23:31, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Extended confirmed protection

Hello, Jackmcbarn. This message is intended to notify administrators of important changes to the protection policy.

Extended confirmed protection (also known as "30/500 protection") is a new level of page protection that only allows edits from accounts at least 30 days old and with 500 edits. The automatically assigned "extended confirmed" user right was created for this purpose. The protection level was created following this community discussion with the primary intention of enforcing various arbitration remedies that prohibited editors under the "30 days/500 edits" threshold to edit certain topic areas.

In July and August 2016, a request for comment established consensus for community use of the new protection level. Administrators are authorized to apply extended confirmed protection to combat any form of disruption (e.g. vandalism, sock puppetry, edit warring, etc.) on any topic, subject to the following conditions:

• Extended confirmed protection may only be used in cases where semi-protection has proven ineffective. It should not be used as a first resort.
• A bot will post a notification at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard of each use. MusikBot currently does this by updating a report, which is transcluded onto the noticeboard.

Please review the protection policy carefully before using this new level of protection on pages. Thank you.
This message was sent to the administrators' mass message list. To opt-out of future messages, please remove yourself from the list. 17:49, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-39

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

• If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can request it after a community decision. See how to request it. [10]
• When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [11]
• Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [12]

Problems

• The MediaWiki version that was supposed to come to the wikis two weeks ago was put on hold again because of new problems. The MediaWiki version after it is now on all wikis. [13][14]

Changes this week

• There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [15]

Meetings

• You can join the next office hour with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on September 27 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [16]

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

18:07, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:E Company, 506th Infantry Regiment (United States)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:E Company, 506th Infantry Regiment (United States). Legobot (talk) 04:30, 28 September 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-40

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 this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. [17]

• <slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible. [18]

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

21:30, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Precious

templates and modules

Thank you for helping newbies and biting vandals, for creating templates and modules, for concise arguments and clever solutions, - user with fluent mathematical skills, you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:15, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Three years ago, you were recipient no. 1481 of Precious, a prize of QAI! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:46, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Re: "minor" reverts of edits that aren't vandalism

[19] [20]

He explained in the summary of this other, identical edit that wasn't marked as minor that he thought these citations inappropriate as the websites are promotional in nature.

It's subjective, but "I don't think these are appropriate references" is not the same as reverting unambiguous vandalism. I don't generally like using references that weren't written by professional scholars (I think Wikipedia would be a better encyclopedia if topics not covered in scholarly literature did not get articles), but most Wikipedians, including, no doubt, Burninthruthesky, appear to disagree. And most "reliable sources" are trying to sell the audience something (that's what advertising revenue does), so the difference between what Burninthruthesky calls "references" and what he calls "promotional websites" is never going to be agreed on by everyone, which means marking those edits as minor is almost certainly inappropriate.

I only looked at the two most recent ones (where he reverted named accounts rather than IPs, mind you).

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:56, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) What!? This has never happened before when starting a new section on someone's user talk page. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:57, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I didn't see those ones. I agree with you in that case. And what was the "this" that happened when you posted here? Jackmcbarn (talk) 01:00, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Edit conflict. No idea what happened, because the diff only showed my edit not happening, and now I have two edits included in the history. It seems my comment was posted successfully but I was shown a screen that indicated I had an edit conflict, and then edited my comment to address this, but it showed up as two separate edits... Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:33, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-41

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

Recent changes

• You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}. [21]
• The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [22]
• Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight. [23]

Changes this week

• Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. --> [24]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week is CREDITS files. The meeting will be on 12 October at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [25]

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20:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

hillary

Because failing to do so just made the news:

• http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/hacker-posts-porn-hillary-clinton-wikipedia-page-article-1.2829414 (warning video autoplay)

• http://heavy.com/news/2016/10/hillary-clinton-wikipedia-page-hacked-showing-pornography-donald-trump-image-photo/ (not exactly SFW)

Someone will have to go through november 9th and drop them back down to a more reasonable level. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geni (talk • contribs) 21:31, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-42

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

Recent changes

• There is a new newsletter from the Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation. It will have more details about for example Flow and notifications. You can read the first issue.

Problems

• Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning. [26]
• Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [27]

Changes this week

• There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [28]

Future changes

• The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.

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

16:42, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-43

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

Problems

• The abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed. [29]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
• The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". [30]
• About a dozen wikis now have numerical sorting in categories. If your wiki wants numerical sorting in categories you can ask for it. [31]
• Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.

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17:39, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Some baklava for you!

Try this! Greek food is great! It's really is. Plus, I think you should try new foods. Apap04 (talk) 02:21, 26 October 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Panopticon

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Panopticon. Legobot (talk) 04:27, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-44

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

Recent changes

• Now you can include Commons video films with subtitles in your wiki language. Before you could see translated videos on file page at Commons only. [32]
• Search now has an updated preference tab to configure the search completion suggester. [33]
• The visual editor is now available on all wikis using only one language script. [34]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 1^st. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 2^nd. It will be on all wikis from November 3^rd (calendar).
• Now you can use autocomplete for page names in "Preview page with this template (what's this?)" field when editing templates. [35]
• Special:NewPages can now be filtered by page size. [36]

Future changes

• New MediaWiki deployments will be now based on MediaWiki 1.29. [37]

Miscellaneous

• The Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Collaboration Guideline is available for community review. Any feedback welcome, in any language.

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16:18, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-45

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

Recent changes

• Victoria Coleman is the new Chief technology officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. [38]
• First release candidate for MediaWiki 1.28 is now available. [39]
• .gitreview for MediaWiki branches and extensions switched from targeting a specific branch to using track=1. [40]
• Section numbers in Table of Contents boxes will use grey to improve readability. [41]

Changes this week

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey begins on 7 November.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 8th. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 9th. It will be on all wikis from November 10th (calendar).
• Special:ActiveUsers will allow users groups selection. [42]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 November 2016 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are Image Thumbnail API and allow SVG files uploaded on MediaWiki to have XHTML namespaces. The meeting will be on 9 November at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• RevisionSlider will be enabled by default on all beta wikis, on testwiki, testwiki2, mediawikiwiki and de.wiki.x.io. [43][44][45]
• Upcoming holidays will impact deployments. The schedule has been published.

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23:01, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins

Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Dear Jackmcbarn,

I was new to Wikipedia and tried to edit our company's site - Omixon. Our page was deleted. Now I know and undertstand why. May I ask you to restore it - to the original content - ignoring all my edits made on the 14th of November?

Thank you very much! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Norinagy (talk • contribs) 15:27, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-46

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

• When you edit with the visual editor you can use meta + shift + k to add a reference. The meta key is often the control key or command key. [46]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from November 15. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from November 16. It will be on all wikis from November 17 (calendar).
• In Special:Preferences you can choose which language menus and buttons will be in. If there is no translation for that language, MediaWiki has a list of fallback languages. A fallback language is a language many will understand better than English. MediaWiki will now use English when there is no Ukrainian translation. [47]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 15 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Magic links might not work in the future. [48]

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

19:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

A new user right for New Page Patrollers

Hi Jackmcbarn.

A new user group, New Page Reviewer, has been created in a move to greatly improve the standard of new page patrolling. The user right can be granted by any admin at PERM. It is highly recommended that admins look beyond the simple numerical threshold and satisfy themselves that the candidates have the required skills of communication and an advanced knowledge of notability and deletion. Admins are automatically included in this user right.

It is anticipated that this user right will significantly reduce the work load of admins who patrol the performance of the patrollers. However,due to the complexity of the rollout, some rights may have been accorded that may later need to be withdrawn, so some help will still be needed to some extent when discovering wrongly applied deletion tags or inappropriate pages that escape the attention of less experienced reviewers, and above all, hasty and bitey tagging for maintenance. User warnings are available here but very often a friendly custom message works best.

If you have any questions about this user right, don't hesitate to join us at WT:NPR. (Sent to all admins).MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:47, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

New Page Review needs your help

Hi Jackmcbarn,

As an AfC reviewer you're probably aware that a new user right has been created for patrolling new pages (you might even have been granted the right already, and admins have it automatically).

Since July there has been a very serious backlog at Special:NewPagesFeed of over 14,000 pages, by far the worst since 2011, and we need an all out drive to get this back down to just a few hundred that can be easily maintained in the future. Unlike AfC, these pages are already in mainspace, and the thought of what might be there is quite scary. There are also many good faith article creators who need a simple, gentle push to the Tea House or their pages converted to Draft rather than being deleted.

Although New Page Reviewing can occasionally be somewhat more challenging than AfC, the criteria for obtaining the right are roughly the same. The Page Curation tool is even easier to use than the Helper Script, so it's likely that most AfC reviewers already have more than enough knowledge for the task of New Page Review.

It is hoped that AfC reviewers will apply for this right at WP:PERM and lend a hand. You'll need to have read the page at WP:NPR and the new tutorial.

(Sent to all active AfC reviewers) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:33, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-47

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

• Administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers can now use two-factor authentication. This makes their Wikimedia accounts more secure. This can be turned on in Special:Preferences. There are discussions on how to best turn it on for everyone. [49]
• You can now search for file properties. For example you can search for media type, how big a file is or what resolution it has. [50]
• The latest Collaboration team products newsletter has been published. It has more details about their work than Tech News has.

Problems

• A hacker group is hacking Wikimedia accounts. They can probably do this because users have the same passwords on Wikimedia wikis as on other sites. Please have a password you use only on the Wikimedia wikis and nowhere else. This is especially important for administrators, bureaucrats, oversighters and checkusers. These users can also turn on two-factor authentication. [51]

Changes this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• RevisionSlider will be a default feature on German, Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia. This will happen on 22 November. It will come to other wikis later. [52][53][54]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• It will be possible to do cross-wiki search. The developers who work on this are looking for communities that want to test this. [55]
• Hovercards will leave the beta stage. The Wikimedia Foundation Reading Web team wants communities to set Hovercards as a default option for readers who are not logged in. Communities that are interested can say so on the Hovercards talk page. [56]

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

15:33, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

Hello, Jackmcbarn. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:The Apprentice (UK TV series)

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:The Apprentice (UK TV series). Legobot (talk) 04:31, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-48

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 this week

• When someone tries to log in to a blocked account they will be blocked by a cookie. This means their browser will be blocked even if they change their IP address. This makes it more difficult for returning vandals. [57]
• When you use Content Translation to adapt a template to a new translation it will work differently. You can adapt big templates such as infoboxes. Translators will have control over the template parameters. A first version of this is released this week. It is possible it will not work correctly with all templates. There will be more updates for this soon. [58]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
• Gadgets will have a new option called "hidden". This means you can register gadgets that can't be turned on or off from the preferences page. Hiding gadgets was already possible by using [rights=hidden]. You should now use [hidden] instead. [rights=hidden] in old gadgets should be changed to [hidden]. [59][60]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 November at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Tool Labs could get two new policies. One would be to be able to adopt tools without an active developer. The other would be a right to fork. There is a request for comment on Meta.

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

21:16, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-49

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 see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. [61]
• Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. [62]
• ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. [63]

Changes this week

• You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. [64]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 December at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. You vote for wishes on the survey page until 12 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2015 results page.

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

18:07, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

BBC 12-hour Editathon - large influx of new pages & drafts expected

AfC Reviewers are asked to be especially on the look out 08:00-20:00 UTC (that's local London time - check your USA and AUS times) on Thursday 8 December for new pages. The BBC together with Wikimedia UK is holding a large 12-hour editathon. Many new articles and drafts are expected. See BBC 100 Women 2016: How to join our edit-a-thon. Follow also on #100womenwiki, and please, don't bite the newbies :) (user:Kudpung for NPR. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:02, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-50

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

• Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. [65]
• You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. [66]
• Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. [67]

Problems

• Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. [68]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on December 13 at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

19:29, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Admin's Barnstar
	Thank you very much for unblocking me and helping me to know the principles of editing for Wikipedia! Thank you for chatting with me and helping me recognise the 'show preview' button. Pkbwcgs (talk) 19:47, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

You earn a cookie for consideration to Wikipedia and for helping out me and other people. Pkbwcgs (talk) 19:51, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Tech News: 2016-51

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 9 January 2017.
• The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2016? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

• Administrators and translation administrators can now use Special:PageLanguage on wikis with the Translate extension. This means you can say what language a page is in. The Translate extension will use that language as the source language when you translate. Previously this was always the wiki's default language. This was usually English. [69]
• Wikis connected to Wikidata can now use the parser function {{#statements: }} to get formatted data. You can also use {{#property: }} to get raw data. You can see the difference between the two statements. There are also similar new functions in Lua. [70]

Problems

• Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. [71]

Changes this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week. There will be no new MediaWiki version next week either.

Meetings

• The next meeting with the VisualEditor team will be on 3 January at 20:00 (UTC). During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. See how to join.

Future changes

• The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey is done. It decides what the Community Tech team will work on during 2017. You can see the results.

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

20:33, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

Notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is User:Pkbwcgs. Thank you. Class455 (Merry Christmas!) 16:03, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Andy Murray

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Talk:Andy Murray. Legobot (talk) 04:31, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Hello

I'm new here and just wanted to say hello. Where do I start? --BotCreat0r (talk) 13:18, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Jackmcbarn!

Happy New Year!

Jackmcbarn,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Class455 (talk | stand clear of the doors!) 17:51, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Request(s) for revision deletion

In the edit history for the page Arjun Kapoor, there is a veritable cesspool of completely inappropriate, degrading, and offensive edit summaries directed at User:Sro23. I believe that many of them meet the criterion of "Grossly insulting, degrading, or offensive material" listed on WP:RD and don't contribute to a positive experience on Wikipedia. A few that I found were https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Arjun_Kapoor&oldid=758808991, https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Arjun_Kapoor&oldid=758808471, and https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Arjun_Kapoor&oldid=758813472 goose121 (talk) 03:13, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

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