Wikipedia:Haus bilong toktok
Welkom long wanpela haus bilong toktok! Dispela pes i save wanpela ples yu save toktok tu narapela manmeri yusim Wikipidia. Yu save toktok long Tok Pisin na Tok Inglis long dispela pes.
More opportunities for you to access free research databases
The quest to get editors free access to the sources they need is gaining momentum.
- Credo Reference provides full-text online versions of nearly 1200 published reference works from more than 70 publishers in every major subject, including general and subject dictionaries and encyclopedias. There are 125 full Credo 350 accounts available, with access even to 100 more references works than in Credo's original donation. All you need is a 1-year old account with 1000 edits. Sign up here.
- HighBeam Research has access to over 80 million articles from 6,500 publications including newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines and encyclopedias. Thousands of new articles are added daily, and archives date back over 25 years covering a wide range of subjects and industries. There are 250 full access 1-year accounts available. All you need is a 1-year old account with 1000 edits. Sign up here.
- Questia is an online research library for books and journal articles focusing on the humanities and social sciences. Questia has curated titles from over 300 trusted publishers including 77,000 full-text books and 4 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, as well as encyclopedia entries. There will soon be 1000 full access 1-year accounts available. All you need is a 1-year old account with 1000 edits. Sign up here.
You might also be interested in the idea to create a central Wikipedia Library where approved editors would have access to all participating resource donors. Add your feedback to the Community Fellowship proposal. Apologies for the English message (translate here). Go sign up :) --Ocaasi (talk) 02:25, 16 Ogas 2012 (UTC)
Wikidata is getting close to a first roll-out
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language.)
As some of you might already have heard Wikimedia Deutschland is working on a new Wikimedia project. It is called m:Wikidata. The goal of Wikidata is to become a central data repository for the Wikipedias, its sister projects and the world. In the future it will hold data like the number of inhabitants of a country, the date of birth of a famous person or the length of a river. These can then be used in all Wikimedia projects and outside of them.
The project is divided into three phases and "we are getting close to roll-out the first phase". The phases are:
- language links in the Wikipedias (making it possible to store the links between the language editions of an article just once in Wikidata instead of in each linked article)
- infoboxes (making it possible to store the data that is currently in infoboxes in one central place and share the data)
- lists (making it possible to create lists and similar things based on queries to Wikidata so they update automatically when new data is added or modified)
It'd be great if you could join us, test the demo version, provide feedback and take part in the development of Wikidata. You can find all the relevant information including an FAQ and sign-up links for our on-wiki newsletter on the Wikidata page on Meta.
For further discussions please use this talk page (if you are uncomfortable writing in English you can also write in your native language there) or point me to the place where your discussion is happening so I can answer there.
--Lydia Pintscher 13:40, 10 Septemba 2012 (UTC)
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Upcoming software changes - please report any problems
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language. Please consider translating it)
All Wikimedia wikis - including this one - will soon be upgraded with new and possibly disruptive code. This process starts today and finishes on October 24 (see the upgrade schedule & code details).
Please watch for problems with:
- revision diffs
- templates
- CSS and JavaScript pages (like user scripts)
- bots
- PDF export
- images, video, and sound, especially scaling sizes
- the CologneBlue skin
If you notice any problems, please report problems at our defect tracker site. You can test for possible problems at test2.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.org, which have already been updated.
Thanks! With your help we can find problems fast and get them fixed faster.
Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 03:16, 16 Oktoba 2012 (UTC)
P.S.: For the regular, smaller MediaWiki updates every two weeks, please watch this schedule.
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Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Read-only mode expected.
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language.) Next week, the Wikimedia Foundation will transition its main technical operations to a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA. This is intended to improve the technical performance and reliability of all Wikimedia sites, including this wiki. There will be some times when the site will be in read-only mode, and there may be full outages; the current target windows for the migration are January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC (see other timezones on timeanddate.com). More information is available in the full announcement.
If you would like to stay informed of future technical upgrades, consider becoming a Tech ambassador and joining the ambassadors mailing list. You will be able to help your fellow Wikimedians have a voice in technical discussions and be notified of important decisions.
Thank you for your help and your understanding.
Guillaume Paumier, via the Global message delivery system (wrong page? You can fix it.). 15:45, 19 Janueri 2013 (UTC)
Help turn ideas into grants in the new IdeaLab
I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.
- Do you have an idea for a project to improve this community or website?
- Do you think you could complete your idea if only you had some funding?
- Do you want to help other people turn their ideas into project plans or grant proposals?
Please join us in the IdeaLab, an incubator for project ideas and Individual Engagement Grant proposals.
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking new ideas and proposals for Individual Engagement Grants. These grants fund individuals or small groups to complete projects that help improve this community. If interested, please submit a completed proposal by February 15, 2013. Please visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG for more information.
Thanks! --Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation 20:55, 30 Janueri 2013 (UTC)
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Wikidata phase 1 (language links) coming to this Wikipedia
Sorry for writing in English. I hope someone can translate this locally.
Wikidata has been in development for a few months now. It is now time for the roll-out of the first part of it on your Wikipedia. Phase 1 is the support for the management of language links. It is already being used on the Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian and English Wikipedias. The next step is to enable the extension on all other Wikipedias. We have currently planned this for March 6.
What is Wikidata?
Wikidata is a central place to store data that you can usually find in infoboxes. Think of it as something like Wikimedia Commons but for data (like the number of inhabitants of a country or the length of a river) instead of multimedia. The first part of this project (centralizing language links) is being rolled out now. The more fancy things will follow later.
What is going to happen?
Language links in the sidebar are going to come from Wikidata in addition to the ones in the wiki text. To edit them, scroll to the bottom of the language links, and click edit. You no longer need to maintain these links by hand in the wiki text of the article.
Where can I find more information and ask questions?
Editors on en:wp have created a great page with all the necessary information for editors and there is also an FAQ for this deployment. Please ask questions you might have on the FAQ’s discussion page.
I want to be kept up to date about Wikidata
To stay up-to-date on everything happening around Wikidata please subscribe to the newsletter that is delivered weekly to subscribed user’s talk pages. You can see previous editions here.
--Lydia Pintscher 16:18, 21 Februeri 2013 (UTC)
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Wikidata phase 1 (language links) live on this Wikipedia
Sorry for writing in English. I hope someone can translate this locally. If you understand German better than English you can have a look at the announcement on de:Wikipedia:Kurier.
As I annonced 2 weeks ago, Wikidata phase 1 (language links) has been deployed here today. Language links in the sidebar are coming from Wikidata in addition to the ones in the wiki text. To edit them, scroll to the bottom of the language links, and click edit. You no longer need to maintain these links by hand in the wiki text of the article.
Where can I find more information and ask questions? Editors on en:wp have created a great page with all the necessary information for editors and there is also an FAQ for this deployment. It'd be great if you could bring this to this wiki if that has not already happened. Please ask questions you might have on the FAQ’s discussion page.
I want to be kept up to date about Wikidata To stay up-to-date on everything happening around Wikidata please subscribe to the newsletter that is delivered weekly to subscribed user’s talk pages.
--Lydia Pintscher 23:12, 6 Mas 2013 (UTC)
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Convert complex templates to Lua to make them faster and more powerful
(Please consider translating this message for the benefit of your fellow Wikimedians)
Greetings. As you might have seen on the Wikimedia tech blog or the tech ambassadors list, a new functionality called "Lua" is being enabled on all Wikimedia sites today. Lua is a scripting language that enables you to write faster and more powerful MediaWiki templates.
If you have questions about how to convert existing templates to Lua (or how to create new ones), we'll be holding two support sessions on IRC next week: one on Wednesday (for Oceania, Asia & America) and one on Friday (for Europe, Africa & America); see m:IRC office hours for the details. If you can't make it, you can also get help at mw:Talk:Lua scripting.
If you'd like to learn about this kind of events earlier in advance, consider becoming a Tech ambassador by subscribing to the mailing list. You will also be able to help your fellow Wikimedians have a voice in technical discussions and be notified of important decisions.
Guillaume Paumier, via the Global message delivery system. 20:27, 13 Mas 2013 (UTC) (wrong page? You can fix it.)
Wikidata phase 2 (infoboxes) coming to this Wikipedia
Sorry for writing in English. I hope someone can translate this. If you understand German better than English you can have a look at the announcement on de:Wikipedia:Kurier.
A while ago the first phase of Wikidata was enabled on this Wikipedia. This means you are getting the language links in each article from Wikidata. It is soon time to enable the second phase of Wikidata (infoboxes) here. We have already done this on the [first 11 Wikipedias] (it, he, hu, ru, tr, uk, uz, hr, bs, sr, sh) and things are looking good. The next step is English Wikipedia. This is planned for April 8. If everything works out fine we will deploy on all remaining Wikipedias on April 10. I will update this part of the FAQ if there are any issues forcing us to change this date. I will also sent another note to this village pump once the deployment is finished.
What will happen once we have phase 2 enabled here? Once it is enabled in a few days you will be able to make use of the structured data that is available on Wikidata in your articles/infoboxes. It includes things like the symbol for a chemical element, the ISBN for a book or the top level domain of a country. (None of this will happen automatically. Someone will have to change the article or infobox template for this to happen!)
How will this work? There are two ways to access the data:
- Use a parser function like {{#property:p169}} in the wiki text of the article on Yahoo!. This will return “Marissa Mayer” as she is the chief executive officer of the company.
- For more complicated things you can use Lua. The documentation for this is here.
We are working on expanding the parser function so you can for example use {{#property:chief executive officer}} instead of {{#property:p169}}. The complete plan for this is here.
Where can I test this? You can already test it on test2.
Where can I find more information and ask questions? We have collected the main questions in an FAQ for this deployment. Please ask questions you might have on the FAQ’s discussion page.
I want to be kept up to date about Wikidata To stay up-to-date on everything happening around Wikidata please subscribe to the newsletter that is delivered weekly to subscribed user’s talk pages.
--Lydia Pintscher 17:13, 5 Epril 2013 (UTC)
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(Please consider translating this message for the benefit of your fellow Wikimedians. Please also consider translating the proposal.)
Read this message in English / Lleer esti mensaxe n'asturianu / বাংলায় এই বার্তাটি পড়ুন / Llegiu aquest missatge en català / Læs denne besked på dansk / Lies diese Nachricht auf Deutsch / Leś cal mesag' chè in Emiliàn / Leer este mensaje en español / Lue tämä viesti suomeksi / Lire ce message en français / Ler esta mensaxe en galego / हिन्दी / Pročitajte ovu poruku na hrvatskom / Baca pesan ini dalam Bahasa Indonesia / Leggi questo messaggio in italiano / ಈ ಸಂದೇಶವನ್ನು ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಓದಿ / Aqra dan il-messaġġ bil-Malti / norsk (bokmål) / Lees dit bericht in het Nederlands / Przeczytaj tę wiadomość po polsku / Citiți acest mesaj în română / Прочитать это сообщение на русском / Farriintaan ku aqri Af-Soomaali / Pročitaj ovu poruku na srpskom (Прочитај ову поруку на српском) / อ่านข้อความนี้ในภาษาไทย / Прочитати це повідомлення українською мовою / Đọc thông báo bằng tiếng Việt / 使用中文阅读本信息。
Hello!
There is a new request for comment on Meta-Wiki concerning the removal of administrative rights from long-term inactive Wikimedians. Generally, this proposal from stewards would apply to wikis without an administrators' review process.
We are also compiling a list of projects with procedures for removing inactive administrators on the talk page of the request for comment. Feel free to add your project(s) to the list if you have a policy on administrator inactivity.
All input is appreciated. The discussion may close as soon as 21 May 2013 (2013-05-21), but this will be extended if needed.
Thanks, Billinghurst (thanks to all the translators!) 05:25, 24 Epril 2013 (UTC)
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Wikidata phase 2 (infoboxes) is here
Sorry for writing in English. I hope someone can translate this. If you understand German better than English you can have a look at the announcement on de:Wikipedia:Kurier.
A while ago the first phase of Wikidata was enabled on this Wikipedia. This means you are getting the language links in each article from Wikidata. We have now enabled the second phase of Wikidata (infoboxes) here. We have already done this on the [first 11 Wikipedias] (it, he, hu, ru, tr, uk, uz, hr, bs, sr, sh) a month ago and two days ago on the English Wikipedia. Today all the remaining Wikipedias followed.
What does having phase 2 enabled here mean? You are now able to make use of the structured data that is available on Wikidata in your articles/infoboxes. It includes things like the symbol for a chemical element, the ISBN for a book or the top level domain of a country. (None of this will happen automatically. Someone will have to change the article or infobox template for this to happen!) The current state is just the beginning though. It will be extended based on feedback we get from you now.
How will this work? There are two ways to access the data:
- Use a parser function like {{#property:p159}} in the wiki text of the article on Wikimedia Foundation. This will return “San Francisco” as that is the headquarter location of the non-profit.
- For more complicated things you can use Lua. The documentation for this is here.
We are working on expanding the parser function so you can for example use {{#property:headquarter location}} instead of {{#property:p159}}. The complete plan for this is here.
Where can I test this? You can test it on test2 if you don't want to do it in an article here.
Where can I find more information and ask questions? We have collected the main questions in an FAQ for this deployment. Please ask questions you might have on the FAQ’s discussion page.
I want to be kept up to date about Wikidata To stay up-to-date on everything happening around Wikidata please subscribe to the newsletter that is delivered weekly to subscribed user’s talk pages.
We are excited about taking yet another step towards allowing all Wikipedias share structured data and collect and curate it together.
--Lydia Pintscher 19:23, 24 Epril 2013 (UTC)
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[en] Change to wiki account system and account renaming
Some accounts will soon be renamed due to a technical change that the developer team at Wikimedia are making. More details on Meta.
(Distributed via global message delivery 04:14, 30 Epril 2013 (UTC). Wrong page? Correct it here.)
[en] Change to section edit links
The default position of the "edit" link in page section headers is going to change soon. The "edit" link will be positioned adjacent to the page header text rather than floating opposite it.
Section edit links will be to the immediate right of section titles, instead of on the far right. If you're an editor of one of the wikis which already implemented this change, nothing will substantially change for you; however, scripts and gadgets depending on the previous implementation of section edit links will have to be adjusted to continue working; however, nothing else should break even if they are not updated in time.
Detailed information and a timeline is available on meta.
Ideas to do this all the way to 2009 at least. It is often difficult to track which of several potential section edit links on the far right is associated with the correct section, and many readers and anonymous or new editors may even be failing to notice section edit links at all, since they read section titles, which are far away from the links.
(Distributed via global message delivery 19:03, 30 Epril 2013 (UTC). Wrong page? Correct it here.)
Tech newsletter: Subscribe to receive the next editions
- Recent software changes
- (Not all changes will affect you.)
- The latest version of MediaWiki (version 1.22/wmf4) was added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and to the English Wikipedia (with a Wikidata software update) on May 20. It will be updated on all other Wikipedia sites on May 22. [1] [2]
- A software update will perhaps result in temporary issues with images. Please report any problems you notice. [3]
- MediaWiki recognizes links in twelve new schemes. Users can now link to SSH, XMPP and Bitcoin directly from wikicode. [4]
- VisualEditor was added to all content namespaces on mediawiki.org on May 20. [5]
- A new extension ("TemplateData") was added to all Wikipedia sites on May 20. It will allow a future version of VisualEditor to edit templates. [6]
- New sites: Greek Wikivoyage and Venetian Wiktionary joined the Wikimedia family last week; the total number of project wikis is now 794. [7] [8]
- The logo of 18 Wikipedias was changed to version 2.0 in a third group of updates. [9]
- The UploadWizard on Commons now shows links to the old upload form in 55 languages (bug 33513). [10]
- Future software changes
- The next version of MediaWiki (version 1.22/wmf5) will be added to Wikimedia sites starting on May 27. [11]
- An updated version of Notifications, with new features and fewer bugs, will be added to the English Wikipedia on May 23. [12]
- The final version of the "single user login" (which allows people to use the same username on different Wikimedia wikis) is moved to August 2013. The software will automatically rename some usernames. [13]
- A new discussion system for MediaWiki, called "Flow", is under development. Wikimedia designers need your help to inform other users, test the prototype and discuss the interface. [14].
- The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring people to act as links between software developers and users for VisualEditor. [15]
If you want to continue to receive the next issues every week, please subscribe to the newsletter. You can subscribe your personal talk page and a community page like this one. The newsletter can be translated into your language.
You can also become a tech ambassador, help us write the next newsletter and tell us what to improve. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. guillom 21:17, 20 Me 2013 (UTC)Trademark discussion
Hi, apologies for posting this in English, but I wanted to alert your community to a discussion on Meta about potential changes to the Wikimedia Trademark Policy. Please translate this statement if you can. We hope that you will all participate in the discussion; we also welcome translations of the legal team’s statement into as many languages as possible and encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please see the Trademark practices discussion (on Meta-Wiki) for more information. Thank you! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk)
Free Research Accounts from Leading Medical Publisher. Come and Sign up!
gets Wikipedia editors free access to reliable sources that are behind paywalls. I want to alert you to our latest donation.
- Cochrane Collaboration is an independent medical nonprofit organization that conducts systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of health-care interventions, which it then publishes in the Cochrane Library.
- Cochrane has generously agreed to give free, full-access accounts to medical editors. Individual access would otherwise cost between $300 and $800 per account.
- If you are active as a medical editor, come and sign up :)
Cheers, 21:21, 16 Jun 2013 (UTC)
Cochrane Library Sign-up (correct link)
My apologies for the incorrect link: You can sign up for ' accounts at the . Cheers, 21:55, 16 Jun 2013 (UTC)
(Sorry for writing in English. You can translate the proposal.)
Should X!'s edit counter retain the opt-in requirement? Your input is strongly encouraged. Voice your input here.—cyberpower ChatAutomation 05:05, 23 Jun 2013 (UTC)
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Universal Language Selector will be enabled on 2013-07-09
On July 9, 2013, Universal Language Selector (ULS) will be enabled on this wiki. The ULS provides a flexible way to configure and deliver language settings like interface language, fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). Making it available here is the last phase of making ULS available on all Wikimedia wikis.
Please read the announcement on Meta-Wiki for more information. Siebrand 13:01, 4 Julai 2013 (UTC) (via Global message delivery).
Pywikipedia is migrating to git
Hello, Sorry for English but It's very important for bot operators so I hope someone translates this. Pywikipedia is migrating to Git so after July 26, SVN checkouts won't be updated If you're using Pywikipedia you have to switch to git, otherwise you will use out-dated framework and your bot might not work properly. There is a manual for doing that and a blog post explaining about this change in non-technical language. If you have question feel free to ask in mw:Manual talk:Pywikipediabot/Gerrit, mailing list, or in the IRC channel. Best Amir (via Global message delivery). 13:51, 23 Julai 2013 (UTC)
VisualEditor and your Wikipedia
(Please translate this message)
Greetings,
The Wikimedia Foundation will soon turn on VisualEditor for all users, all the time on your Wikipedia. Right now your Wikipedia does not have any local documents on VisualEditor, and we hope that your community can change that. To find out about how you can help with translations visit the TranslationCentral for VisualEditor and read the easy instructions on bringing information to your Wikipedia. The User Guide and the FAQ are very important to have in your language.
We want to find out as much as we can from you about VisualEditor and how it helps your Wikipedia, and having local pages is a great way to start. We also encourage you to leave feedback on Mediawiki where the community can offer ideas, opinions, and point out bugs that may still exist in the software that need to be reported to Bugzilla. If you are able to speak for the concerns of others in English on MediaWiki or locally I encourage you to help your community to be represented in this process.
If you can help translate the user interface for VisualEditor to your language, you can help with that as well. Translatewiki has open tasks for translating VisualEditor. A direct link to translate the user interface is here. You can see how we are doing with those translations here. You need an account on Translatewiki to translate. This account is free and easy to create.
If we can help your community in any way with this process, please let me know and I will do my best to assist your Wikipedia with this |exciting development. You can contact me on my meta talk page or by email. You can also contact Patrick Earley for help with translations and documents on Mediawiki. We look forward to working with you to bring the VisualEditor experience to your Wikipedia! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 30 Julai 2013 (UTC)
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HTTPS for users with an account
Greetings. Starting on August 21 (tomorrow), all users with an account will be using HTTPS to access Wikimedia sites. HTTPS brings better security and improves your privacy. More information is available at m:HTTPS.
If HTTPS causes problems for you, tell us on bugzilla, on IRC (in the #wikimedia-operations
channel) or on meta. If you can't use the other methods, you can also send an e-mail to https@wikimedia.org
.
Greg Grossmeier (via the Global message delivery system). 19:46, 20 Ogas 2013 (UTC) (wrong page? You can fix it.)
First, I’d like to apologize for the English. If you can, please help to translate this for other members of your community.
The legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation would greatly appreciate your input on the best way to manage the "community logo" (pictured here) to best balance protection of the projects with community support. Accordingly, they have created a “request for consultation” on Meta where they set out briefly some of the issues to be considered and the options that they perceive. Your input would be invaluable in helping guide them in how best to serve our mission.
Thank you! --Mdennis (talk) (via the Global message delivery system). 03:17, 24 Septemba 2013 (UTC) (wrong page? You can fix it.)
(This message is in English, please translate as needed)
Greetings!
Notifications will inform users about new activity that affects them on this wiki in a unified way: for example, this new tool will let you know when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the watchlist. The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this tool (code-named 'Echo') earlier this year, to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects.
We're now getting ready to bring Notifications to almost all other Wikimedia sites, and are aiming for a 22 October deployment, as outlined in this release plan. It is important that notifications is translated for all of the languages we serve.
There are three major points of translation needed to be either done or checked:
- Echo on translatewiki for user interface - you must have an account on translatewiki to translate
- Thanks on translatewiki for user interface - you must have an account on translatewiki to translate
- Notifications help on mediawiki.org. This page can be hosted after translation on mediawiki.org or we can localize it to this Wikipedia. You do not have to have an account to translate on mediawiki, but single-user login will create it for you there if you follow the link.
Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this new tool. For more information, visit this project hub and this help page. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 4 Oktoba 2013 (UTC)
- (via the Global message delivery system) (wrong page? You can fix it.)
Speak up about the trademark registration of the Community logo.
Hi all,
Please join the consultation about the Community logo that represents Meta-Wiki: m:Community Logo/Request for consultation.
This community consultation was commenced on September 24. The following day, two individuals filed a legal opposition against the registration of the Community logo.
The question is whether the Wikimedia Foundation should seek a collective membership mark with respect to this logo or abandon its registration and protection of the trademark.
We want to make sure that everyone get a chance to speak up so that we can get clear direction from the community. We would therefore really appreciate the community's help in translating this announcement from English so that everyone is able to understand it.
Thanks, Geoff & Yana 20:58, 8 Oktoba 2013 (UTC)
Introducting Beta Features
(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)
We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.
Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.
Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.
Here are the first features you can test this week:
- Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen
- VisualEditor Formulæ (for wikis with VisualEditor) — edit algebra or equations on your pages
- Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday)
Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.
After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.
Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.
Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 5 Novemba 2013 (UTC)
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Call for comments on draft trademark policy
Hi all,
The Wikimedia legal team invites you to participate in the development of the new Wikimedia trademark policy.
The current trademark policy was introduced in 2009 to protect the Wikimedia marks. We are now updating this policy to better balance permissive use of the marks with the legal requirements for preserving them for the community. The new draft trademark policy is ready for your review here, and we encourage you to discuss it here.
We would appreciate if someone would translate this message into your language so more members of your community can contribute to the conversation.
VisualEditor coming to this wiki
Hello. Please excuse the English. I would be grateful if you can translate this message!
VisualEditor is coming to this project on December 2, 2013. VisualEditor is software in development to allow people to edit pages in MediaWiki without needing to learn wikitext syntax (like typing [[ to start a link). It is already available and in use on some Wikipedia projects. Please see mw:Help:VisualEditor/FAQ for more information.
When this software arrives, you will have the option to use it or to use the current wikitext editor. When you press “edit”, you will get the new VisualEditor software. To use the wikitext editor, you can press “edit source”. For more information about how to use VisualEditor, see mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide.
We hope that this software will be useful to people in your community, and we can really use your help to make it better! Please let us know if you find any problems. If you're willing and able, please report the issue in bugzilla in the "VisualEditor" product. If you would prefer not, please explain the issue you found on the central feedback page on mediawiki.org. Once VisualEditor is made available, if there are any urgent problems, like an unexpected bug suddenly causing widespread severe problems, please e-mail James Forrester, the Product Manager, at jforrester@wikimedia.org for immediate attention.
We would also appreciate help with translation with the pages about VisualEditor here and on MediaWiki.org, and its user interface. To translate the user interface, start by creating an account at TranslateWiki. Once your account request is approved, all you need to do is select your language from this list. This will give you a list of individual lines and paragraphs. The English original will be on one side, with the option to “edit” on the other. Pressing “edit” will open an edit window where you can work.
The User Guide is another important document. To translate this, simply go to the MediaWiki.org page, and select “translate this page”. Your language should be available from the drop-down menu on the right. If you want to help with translations and would like to talk about how, please leave a message for me on my talk page.
Thank you, and happy editing! --Mdennis (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 19 Novemba 2013 (UTC)
Request for comment on Commons: Should Wikimedia support MP4 video?
I apologize for this message being only in English. Please translate it if needed to help your community.
The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks community guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. This digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC.
Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).
However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.
We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not to support MP4. Our Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.
Please join this RfC -- and share your advice.
All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.
You are also welcome to join tomorrow's Office hours chat on IRC, this Thursday, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members.
We look forward to a constructive discussion with you, so we can make a more informed decision together on this important topic. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 06:47, 16 Janueri 2014 (UTC)
Universal Language Selector will be enabled by default again on this wiki by 21 February 2014
On January 21 2014 the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector (ULS) was disabled on this wiki. A new preference was added for logged-in users to turn on ULS. This was done to prevent slow loading of pages due to ULS webfonts, a behaviour that had been observed by the Wikimedia Technical Operations team on some wikis.
We are now ready to enable ULS again. The temporary preference to enable ULS will be removed. A new checkbox has been added to the Language Panel to enable/disable font delivery. This will be unchecked by default for this wiki, but can be selected at any time by the users to enable webfonts. This is an interim solution while we improve the feature of webfonts delivery.
You can read the announcement and the development plan for more information. Apologies for writing this message only in English. Thank you. Runa
Amendment to the Terms of Use
Hello all,
Please join a discussion about a proposed amendment to the Wikimedia Terms of Use regarding undisclosed paid editing and we encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please translate this statement if you can, and we welcome you to translate the proposed amendment and introduction. Please see the discussion on Meta Wiki for more information. Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) 22:00, 21 Februeri 2014 (UTC)
Call for project ideas: funding is available for community experiments
I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.
Do you have an idea for a project that could improve your community? Individual Engagement Grants from the Wikimedia Foundation help support individuals and small teams to organize experiments for 6 months. You can get funding to try out your idea for online community organizing, outreach, tool-building, or research to help make Wikipedia better. In March, we’re looking for new project proposals.
Examples of past Individual Engagement Grant projects:
- Organizing social media for Chinese Wikipedia ($350 for materials)
- Improving gadgets for Visual Editor ($4500 for developers)
- Coordinating access to reliable sources for Wikipedians ($7500 for project management, consultants and materials)
- Building community and strategy for Wikisource (€10000 for organizing and travel)
Proposals are due by 31 March 2014. There are a number of ways to get involved!
Hope to have your participation,
--Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation 19:44, 28 Februeri 2014 (UTC)
Proposed optional changes to Terms of Use amendment
Changes to the default site typography coming soon
This week, the typography on Wikimedia sites will be updated for all readers and editors who use the default "Vector" skin. This change will involve new serif fonts for some headings, small tweaks to body content fonts, text size, text color, and spacing between elements. The schedule is:
- April 1st: non-Wikipedia projects will see this change live
- April 3rd: Wikipedias will see this change live
This change is very similar to the "Typography Update" Beta Feature that has been available on Wikimedia projects since November 2013. After several rounds of testing and with feedback from the community, this Beta Feature will be disabled and successful aspects enabled in the default site appearance. Users who are logged in may still choose to use another skin, or alter their personal CSS, if they prefer a different appearance. Local common CSS styles will also apply as normal, for issues with local styles and scripts that impact all users.
For more information:
- Summary of changes and FAQ
- Discussion page for feedback or questions
- Post on blog.wikimedia.org
-- Steven Walling (Product Manager) on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation's User Experience Design team
Using only UploadWizard for uploads
Hello! It was noted that on this wiki you have less than 10 local files. Presumably, you therefore don't have interest nor energies to have hundreds templates with the now required HTML, even less a local EDP. However, this means that users here will experience a mostly broken and/or illegal uploading. I propose to
- have local upload restricted to the "Administrators" group (for emergency uploads) and
- the sidebar point to commons:Special:UploadWizard,
so that you can avoid local maintenance and all users can have a functioning, easy upload interface in their own language. All registered users can upload on Commons and existing files will not be affected.
I'll get this done in one week from now.
- If you disagree with the proposal, just remove your wiki from the list.
- To make the UploadWizard even better, please tell your experience and ideas on commons:Commons:Upload Wizard feedback.
Media Viewer
Greetings, my apologies for writing in English.
I wanted to let you know that Media Viewer will be released to this wiki in the coming weeks. Media Viewer allows readers of Wikimedia projects to have an enhanced view of files without having to visit the file page, but with more detail than a thumbnail. You can try Media Viewer out now by turning it on in your Beta Features. If you do not enjoy Media Viewer or if it interferes with your work after it is turned on you will be able to disable Media Viewer as well in your preferences. I invite you to share what you think about Media Viewer and how it can be made better in the future.
Thank you for your time. - Keegan (WMF) 21:29, 23 Me 2014 (UTC)
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Media Viewer is now live on this wiki
Greetings— and sorry for writing in English, please translate if it will help your community,
The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team is happy to announce that Media Viewer was just released on this site today.
Media Viewer displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, to provide a better viewing experience. Users can now view images faster and more clearly, without having to jump to separate pages — and its user interface is more intuitive, offering easy access to full-resolution images and information, with links to the file repository for editing. The tool has been tested extensively across all Wikimedia wikis over the past six months as a Beta Feature and has been released to the largest Wikipedias, all language Wikisources, and the English Wikivoyage already.
If you do not like this feature, you can easily turn it off by clicking on "Disable Media Viewer" at the bottom of the screen, pulling up the information panel (or in your your preferences) whether you have an account or not. Learn more in this Media Viewer Help page.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about Media Viewer. You are invited to share your feedback in this discussion on MediaWiki.org in any language, to help improve this feature. You are also welcome to take this quick survey in English, en français, o español.
We hope you enjoy Media Viewer. Many thanks to all the community members who helped make it possible. - Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 19 Jun 2014 (UTC)
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VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014
This is a one-time mailing to projects that may need this information. Future newsletters will be available as opt-in only. To receive future newsletters (about one per month), please add your page to the subscribers' list at m:VisualEditor/Newsletter. You're welcome to translate to your language.
Did you know?
The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.
- They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
- You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
- The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type "
date"
for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and "boolean"
for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like{{citeweb}}
→{{cite web}}
) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc. - Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
- They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
- It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
- You can now add and edit
{{DISPLAYTITLE}}
and__DISAMBIG__
in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned. - The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.
Looking ahead
The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.
The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.
Supporting your wiki
Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.
If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact us if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.
VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).
If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at Meta (or at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only). Thank you! --Elitre (WMF), 22:33, 25 Jun 2014 (UTC)
IMPORTANT: Admin activity review
Hello. A new policy regarding the removal of "advanced rights" (administrator, bureaucrat, etc) was recently adopted by global community consensus (your community received a notice about the discussion). According to this policy, the stewards are reviewing administrators' activity on smaller wikis. To the best of our knowledge, your wiki does not have a formal process for removing "advanced rights" from inactive accounts. This means that the stewards will take care of this according to the new admin activity review here.
We have determined that the following users meet the inactivity criteria (no edits and no log actions for more than 2 years):
- Caffelice (administrator)
These users will receive a notification soon, asking them to start a community discussion if they want to retain some or all of their rights. If the users do not respond, then their advanced rights will be removed by the stewards.
However, if you as a community would like to create your own activity review process superseding the global one, want to make another decision about these inactive rights holders, or already have a policy that we missed, then please notify the stewards on Meta-Wiki so that we know not to proceed with the rights review on your wiki. Thanks, Rschen7754 05:55, 11 Julai 2014 (UTC)
Updates related to VisualEditor
- Please help translate this message in your language. Thanks :)
Hi, everybody. This is a reminder that we invite you to discuss VisualEditor's recent development and plans ahead during the next office hours with James Forrester (Product Manager):
If you are not able to attend but have a question for James, you can leave your question at mediawiki.org or on my talk page by the day before, and I will try to get a response. We plan to continue these monthly sessions as long as there is community interest, and to announce them through the VisualEditor global newsletter as well (please subscribe your talk page there to get the latest news about the software).
Most of the VisualEditor team will be at Wikimania in London in August! You'll be able to meet the developers during the Hackaton or at the following sessions:
- VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, Saturday, August 9;
- VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, Sunday, August 10.
WMF community liaisons will share a booth with community advocates at the Community Village and look forward to talking to you there. Thanks for your attention! --User:Elitre (WMF) 16:02, 31 Julai 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor global newsletter—July and August 2014
The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.
The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.
- Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
- You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
- All references and footnotes (
<ref>
tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Insert" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Insert" menu. - When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
- All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
- The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
- The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.
Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.
Feedback opportunities
The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30. There is a VisualEditor Translation Sprint going on during Wikimania; whether you're in London or not, any contributions are welcome!
Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).
If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! --Elitre (WMF), 14:40, 9 Ogas 2014 (UTC)
Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions
The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.
If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.
-- JurgenNL (talk) 17:35, 21 Ogas 2014 (UTC)
Process ideas for software development
’’My apologies for writing in English.’’
Hello,
I am notifying you that a brainstorming session has been started on Meta to help the Wikimedia Foundation increase and better affect community participation in software development across all wiki projects. Basically, how can you be more involved in helping to create features on Wikimedia projects? We are inviting all interested users to voice their ideas on how communities can be more involved and informed in the product development process at the Wikimedia Foundation. It would be very appreciated if you could translate this message to help inform your local communities as well.
I and the rest of my team welcome you to participate. We hope to see you on Meta.
Kind regards, -- Rdicerb (WMF) talk 22:15, 21 Ogas 2014 (UTC)
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Grants to improve your project
- Apologies for English. Please help translate this message.
Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th. Your idea could improve Wikimedia projects with a new tool or gadget, a better process to support community-building on your wiki, research on an important issue, or something else we haven't thought of yet. Whether you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your own project development time in addition to hiring others to help you.
- Submit your proposal
- Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:52, 2 Septemba 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor available on Internet Explorer 11
VisualEditor will become available to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 during today's regular software update. Support for some earlier versions of Internet Explorer is being worked on. If you encounter problems with VisualEditor on Internet Explorer, please contact the Editing team by leaving a message at VisualEditor/Feedback on Mediawiki.org. Happy editing, Elitre (WMF) 07:29, 11 Septemba 2014 (UTC).
PS. Please subscribe to the global monthly newsletter to receive further news about VisualEditor.
VisualEditor News #8—2014
Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.
There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that replaced some categories with a link to the system message MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.
Increased support for devices and browsers
Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.
Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.
TemplateData editor
The tool for editing TemplateData has been deployed to 30 more Wikipedias this week. Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template page or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.
Other changes
Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.
VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect
and mw-disambig
class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these types of links can be created.
Templates' fields can be marked as 'required
' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).
Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir
attribute but no lang
set (bug 69955).
Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.
The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.
In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.
Supporting your wiki
At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community is available. Thank you all for your work.
This was the first translatable VisualEditor newsletter, so thanks to everybody who made this possible! If it hasn't been delivered in your language, and you'd like to help with translations in the future, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre (WMF), so that you will be notified when the next issue is due.
VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.
Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)
09:49, 13 Oktoba 2014 (UTC)
Meta RfCs on two new global groups
There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would grant them autopatrolled rights on all wikis except those who opt-out. That proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.
We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.
It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at m:Stewards' noticeboard.
Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 18:05, 26 Oktoba 2014 (UTC)New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)
Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:
- DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
- Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
- Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
- British Newspaper Archive: expanded by 100+ accounts for British newspapers
- Highbeam: 100+ remaining accounts for newspaper and magazine archives
- Questia: 100+ remaining accounts for journal and social science articles
- JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team.23:19, 5 Novemba 2014 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Global AbuseFilter
AbuseFilter is a MediaWiki extension used to detect likely abusive behavior patterns, like pattern vandalism and spam. In 2013, Global AbuseFilters were enabled on a limited set of wikis including Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Wikispecies and (in early 2014) all the "small wikis". Recently, global abuse filters were enabled on "medium sized wikis" as well. These filters are currently managed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and have shown to be very effective in preventing mass spam attacks across Wikimedia projects. However, there is currently no policy on how the global AbuseFilters will be managed although there are proposals. There is an ongoing request for comment on policy governing the use of the global AbuseFilters. In the meantime, specific wikis can opt out of using the global AbuseFilter. These wikis can simply add a request to this list on Meta-Wiki. More details can be found on this page at Meta-Wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on m:Talk:Global AbuseFilter.
Thanks,
PiRSquared17, Glaisher— 17:34, 14 Novemba 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #9—2014
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.
Recent improvements
Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in them was just introduced to Wikipedias. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be added later.
To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus are now hidden behind a "More" item, such as "Underline" in the styling menu.
The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias this week, and the following week at the English Wikipedia.
The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.
VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.
The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar menus are now shown in the menus.
VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience/Design group. The appearance of dialog boxes has already changed in the mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. You are welcome to compare the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.
Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search engine could not find the page. A link inside a template to a local page that does not exist will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to an error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [16] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.
TemplateData
The tool for quickly editing TemplateData has been deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. This tool was already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData to learn more about it. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.
You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common value for that parameter. The autovalue can be overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.
In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog box in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.
Looking ahead
The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.
The user guide is being updated to add information about editing tables. The translations of the user guide for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.
You can influence VisualEditor's design! Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.
If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)
23:29, 14 Novemba 2014 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (December 2014)
Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Elsevier - science and medicine journals and books
- Royal Society of Chemistry - chemistry journals
- Pelican Books - ebook monographs
- Public Catalogue Foundation- art books
Other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team.00:22, 18 Disemba 2014 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
VisualEditor News #10—2014
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.
VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).
Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is now available. You can add and delete tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan
and colspan
elements, instead of trying to repair them.
You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ^ Ctrl
+F
or ⌘ Cmd
+F
.
You can now create and edit simple <blockquote>
paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Paragraph" into a "Block quote".
Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "*
" will make the line a bullet list; "1.
" or "#
" will make it a numbered list; "==
" will make it a section heading; ":
" will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change.
There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[
" for opening the link tool, and "{{
" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ^ Ctrl
+K
to open the link editor, still work.
If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.
You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.
Looking ahead
The current VisualEditor design will be replaced with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at mediawiki.org in late December and on other sites in early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)
The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January.
Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
- Translations of the user guide for most languages are outdated. Only Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translations are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
- Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
- File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
- The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
- If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you!
18:59, 26 Disemba 2014 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #1—2015
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.
The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins.
Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.
Recent improvements
The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action:
- starts a new task, like opening the ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽ dialog: blue ,
- takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
- might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red , or
- is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray .
The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor. (T67815, T73746.) This change fixed a couple of existing bugs and improved usability. (T73077, T73078.)
Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once.(T78234.)
Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedia requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace. (T86688, T87027.) If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
Looking ahead
The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.
We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
- Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
- Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC); information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins, and you can also contact James F. to learn more about this initiative.
- Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.
- Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
18:30, 5 Februeri 2015 (UTC)
[Global proposal] m.Wikipedia.org: (olgeta) Senisim ol pes
Hi, this message is to let you know that, on domains like tpi.m.wikipedia.org, unregistered users cannot edit. At the Wikimedia Forum, where global configuration changes are normally discussed, a few dozens users propose to restore normal editing permissions on all mobile sites. Please read and comment!
Thanks and sorry for writing in English, Nemo 22:32, 1 Mas 2015 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2015)
Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Project MUSE — humanities and social science books and journals
- DynaMed — clinical reference tool for medical topics
- Royal Pharmaceutical Society — pharmaceutical information and practice resources
- Women Writers Online — a digital humanities database focused on women's literature
- Newspapers.com — American newspapers database w/ Open Access opportunities (expansion of accounts)
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 21:14, 2 Mas 2015 (UTC)
- Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator page.
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Inspire Campaign: Improving diversity, improving content
This March, we’re organizing an Inspire Campaign to encourage and support new ideas for improving gender diversity on Wikimedia projects. Less than 20% of Wikimedia contributors are women, and many important topics are still missing in our content. We invite all Wikimedians to participate. If you have an idea that could help address this problem, please get involved today! The campaign runs until March 31.
All proposals are welcome - research projects, technical solutions, community organizing and outreach initiatives, or something completely new! Funding is available from the Wikimedia Foundation for projects that need financial support. Constructive, positive feedback on ideas is appreciated, and collaboration is encouraged - your skills and experience may help bring someone else’s project to life. Join us at the Inspire Campaign and help this project better represent the world’s knowledge!
(Sorry for the English - please translate this message!) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:02, 4 Mas 2015 (UTC)
SUL finalization update
Hi all,apologies for writing in English, please read this page for important information and an update involving SUL finalization, scheduled to take place in one month. Thanks. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 13 Mas 2015 (UTC)
Stewards confirmation rules
Hello, I made a proposal on Meta to change the rules for the steward confirmations. Currently consensus to remove is required for a steward to lose his status, however I think it's fairer to the community if every steward needed the consensus to keep. As this is an issue that affects all WMF wikis, I'm sending this notification to let people know & be able to participate. Best regards, --MF-W 16:13, 10 Epril 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #2—2015
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.
The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.
Recent improvements
VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.
The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.
Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.
Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.
The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.
You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance on the page.
The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.
Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.
Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead. (T90734)
Looking ahead
The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.
The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users at the English Wikipedia, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon. (T90666)
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
- Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language. Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
- The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
- File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
19:48, 10 Epril 2015 (UTC)
This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.
Greetings,
I am pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year the Board and the FDC Staff are looking for a diverse set of candidates from regions and projects that are traditionally under-represented on the board and in the movement as well as candidates with experience in technology, product or finance. To this end they have published letters describing what they think is needed and, recognizing that those who know the community the best are the community themselves, the election committee is accepting nominations for community members you think should run and will reach out to those nominated to provide them with information about the job and the election process.
This year, elections are being held for the following roles:
Board of Trustees
The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the board elections page.
Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC elections page.
Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud
The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC Ombudsperson elections page.
The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 20 to 23:59 UTC May 5 for the Board and from 00:00 UTCApril 20 to 23:59 UTC April 30 for the FDC and FDC Ombudsperson. This year, we are accepting both self-nominations and nominations of others. More information on this election and the nomination process can be found on the 2015 Wikimedia elections page on Meta-Wiki.
Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections -at- wikimedia.org
On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 05:03, 21 April 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help
This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.
Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2015 elections for the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and FDC Ombudsperson. Questions and discussion with the candidates for the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and FDC Ombudsperson will continue during the voting. Nominations for the Board of Trustees will be accepted until 23:59 UTC May 5.
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions on the committee being filled.
The FDC Ombudsperson receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled.
The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 3 to 23:59 UTC May 10. Click here to vote. Questions and discussion with the candidates will continue during that time. Click here to ask the FDC candidates a question. Click here to ask the FDC Ombudsperson candidates a question. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 FDC election page, the 2015 FDC Ombudsperson election page, and the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.
On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Volunteer Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 03:45, 4 May 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2015)
Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!
Today The Wikipedia Library announces signups for more free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- MIT Press Journals — scholarly journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences (200 accounts)
- Loeb Classical Library — Harvard University Press versions of Classical Greek and Latin literature with commentary and annotation (25 accounts)
- RIPM — music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966 (20 accounts)
- Sage Stats — social science data for geographies within the United States (10 accounts)
- HeinOnline — an extensive legal research database, including 2000 law-related journals as well as international legal history materials (25 accounts)
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, JSTOR, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 22:12, 4 Me 2015 (UTC)
- We need your help! Help coordinate Wikipedia Library's account distribution and global development! Please join our team at Global our new coordinator signup.
- This message was delivered via the Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List
This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.
Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Questions and discussion with the candidates for the Board will continue during the voting.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation manages many diverse projects such as Wikipedia and Commons.
The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 17 to 23:59 UTC May 31. Click here to vote. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.
On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Volunteer Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 17:20, 17 May 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help
Pywikibot compat will no longer be supported - Please migrate to pywikibot core
Sorry for English, I hope someone translates this.
Pywikibot (then "Pywikipediabot") was started back in 2002. In 2007 a new branch (formerly known as "rewrite", now called "core") was started from scratch using the MediaWiki API. The developers of Pywikibot have decided to stop supporting the compat version of Pywikibot due to bad performance and architectural errors that make it hard to update, compared to core. If you are using pywikibot compat it is likely your code will break due to upcoming MediaWiki API changes (e.g. T101524). It is highly recommended you migrate to the core framework. There is a migration guide, and please contact us if you have any problem.
There is an upcoming MediaWiki API breaking change that compat will not be updated for. If your bot's name is in this list, your bot will most likely break.
Thank you,
The Pywikibot development team, 19:30, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
Pywikibot compat will no longer be supported - Please migrate to pywikibot core
Sorry for English, I hope someone translates this.
Pywikibot (then "Pywikipediabot") was started back in 2002. In 2007 a new branch (formerly known as "rewrite", now called "core") was started from scratch using the MediaWiki API. The developers of Pywikibot have decided to stop supporting the compat version of Pywikibot due to bad performance and architectural errors that make it hard to update, compared to core. If you are using pywikibot compat it is likely your code will break due to upcoming MediaWiki API changes (e.g. T101524). It is highly recommended you migrate to the core framework. There is a migration guide, and please contact us if you have any problem.
There is an upcoming MediaWiki API breaking change that compat will not be updated for. If your bot's name is in this list, your bot will most likely break.
Thank you,
The Pywikibot development team, 19:30, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
Content Translation beta-feature now available
Hello, Content Translation has now been enabled as an opt-in beta feature on the Tok Pisin Wikipedia. To start translating:
- Please enable the Beta feature in your preferences and check the box for Content Translation.
- Visit the page Special:ContentTranslation or to your contributions page to open the tool.
- Click on the blue button to create a new translation.
- A dialog will be displayed. In the From section select the language of the original article and the article name, and the language you would like to translate to. Also add the title of the new article (or the original title will be inserted) and click on Translate to begin. Your language preferences will be remembered for the next time.
- You will see a screen consisting of three columns. The left column contains the text of the source language and the middle column is for the translated text. Using the right column you can perform several actions such as insert source text, remove the inserted text source text, add or remove links etc.
- After you translate the article, you can publish it directly as a new page on the Tok Pisin Wikipedia by using the publish button that appears. In case the article gets created by another user while you were translating, you will see an option to save the newly published translation under your user namespace.
- The number of published pages can be seen on the Content Translation stats page.
Since, this is the first time we have installed the tool on this Wikipedia, there are chances that there may be some problems or service disruptions which we are not yet aware of. We will be monitoring the usage to check for any failures or issues, but please do let us know on the Content Translation talk page or through Phabricator if you spot any problems that prevent you from using the tool. For more information, please read the information available in the User Guide. You can also view a short screencast on how to use Content Translation. Our announcement is written only in English, and we would really appreciate if this message can be translated to reach more users of this Wikipedia. Thank you.--Runab WMF (talk) 15:46, 9 Jun 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #3—2015
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools and fixed many bugs and changed some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.
A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.
Recent improvements
Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-auto⧽, ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-manual⧽, or ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-reuse⧽). The cite button is now labeled with the word "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "⧼Citoid-citeFromIDDialog-lookup-button⧽", for the submit button.
The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages (where applicable). Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector. (T98085)
The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter. (T70425)
Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "⧼visualeditor-dialog-transclusion-add-param⧽" each time they want to add another parameter. (T95696) The team added a new property for TemplateData, "Example", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter. (T53049)
The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.
The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
- The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the VisualEditor Q4 blocker project with the bug.
- If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
- If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
- The team is planning the second VisualEditor-related "translathon" for July. Please follow this task on Phabricator for details and updates! Announcements will follow in due course.
Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
10:44, 13 Jun 2015 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (June 2015)
Hello Wikimedians!
Today The Wikipedia Library announces signups for more free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Taylor & Francis — academic publisher of journals. The pilot includes two subject collections: Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences. (30 accounts)
- World Bank eLibrary — digital platform containing all books, working papers, and journal articles published by the World Bank from the 1990s to the present. (100 accounts)
- AAAS — general interest science publisher, who publishes the journal Science among other sources (50 accounts)
New French-Language Branch!
- Érudit (en Francais) — Érudit is a French-Canadian scholarly aggregator primarily, humanities and social sciences, and contains sources in both English and French. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (50 accounts).
- Cairn.info (en Francais) — Cairn.info is a Switzerland based online web portal of scholarly materials in the humanities and social sciences. Most sources are in French, but some also in English. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (100 accounts).
- L'Harmattan — French language publisher across a wide range of non-fiction and fiction, with a strong selection of francophone African materials (1000 accounts).
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including an expansion of accounts for Royal Society journals and remaining accounts on Project MUSE, JSTOR, DeGruyter, Highbeam Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. If you have suggestions for journals or databases we should seek access to make a request! Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 22:08, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
- We need your help! Help coordinate Wikipedia Library's account distribution and global development! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List
HTTPS
Apologies for writing in English.
Hi everyone.
Over the last few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working towards enabling HTTPS by default for all users, including unregistered ones, for better privacy and security for both readers and editors. This has taken a long time, as there were different aspects to take into account. Our servers haven't been ready to handle it. The Wikimedia Foundation has had to balance sometimes conflicting goals.
Forced HTTPS has just been implemented on all Wikimedia projects. Some of you might already be aware of this, as a few Wikipedia language versions were converted to HTTPS last week and the then affected communities were notified.
Most of Wikimedia editors shouldn't be affected at all. If you edit as registered user, you've probably already had to log in through HTTPS. We'll keep an eye on this to make sure everything is working as it should. Do get in touch with us if you have any problems after this change or contact me if you have any other questions.
22:01, 19 Jun 2015 (UTC)
Proposal to create PNG thumbnails of static GIF images
There is a proposal at the Commons Village Pump requesting feedback about the thumbnails of static GIF images: It states that static GIF files should have their thumbnails created in PNG. The advantages of PNG over GIF would be visible especially with GIF images using an alpha channel. (compare the thumbnails on the side)
This change would affect all wikis, so if you support/oppose or want to give general feedback/concerns, please post them to the proposal page. Thank you. --McZusatz (talk) & MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:08, 24 Julai 2015 (UTC)
What does a Healthy Community look like to you?
Hi,
The Community Engagement department at the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a new learning campaign. The WMF wants to record community impressions about what makes a healthy online community.
Share your views and/or create a drawing and take a chance to win a Wikimania 2016 scholarship!
Join the WMF as we begin a conversation about Community Health. Contribute a drawing or answer the questions on the campaign's page.
Why get involved?
The world is changing. The way we relate to knowledge is transforming. As the next billion people come online, the Wikimedia movement is working to bring more users on the wiki projects. The way we interact and collaborate online are key to building sustainable projects. How accessible are Wikimedia projects to newcomers today? Are we helping each other learn?
Share your views on this matter that affects us all!
We invite everyone to take part in this learning campaign. Wikimedia Foundation will distribute one Wikimania Scholarship 2016 among those participants who are eligible.
More information
- All participants must have a registered user of at least one month antiquity on any Wikimedia project before the starting date of the campaign.
- All eligible contributions must be done until August 23, 2015 at 23:59 UTC
- Wiki link: Community Health learning campaign
- URL https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Community_Health_learning_campaign
- Contact: María Cruz / Twitter: Templet:@WikiEval #CommunityHealth / email: evalTemplet:@wikimedia · org
Happy editing!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:43, 31 Julai 2015 (UTC)
What does a Healthy Community look like to you?
Hi,
The Community Engagement department at the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a new learning campaign. The WMF wants to record community impressions about what makes a healthy online community.
Share your views and/or create a drawing and take a chance to win a Wikimania 2016 scholarship!
Join the WMF as we begin a conversation about Community Health. Contribute a drawing or answer the questions on the campaign's page.
Why get involved?
The world is changing. The way we relate to knowledge is transforming. As the next billion people come online, the Wikimedia movement is working to bring more users on the wiki projects. The way we interact and collaborate online are key to building sustainable projects. How accessible are Wikimedia projects to newcomers today? Are we helping each other learn?
Share your views on this matter that affects us all!
We invite everyone to take part in this learning campaign. Wikimedia Foundation will distribute one Wikimania Scholarship 2016 among those participants who are eligible.
More information
- All participants must have a registered user of at least one month antiquity on any Wikimedia project before the starting date of the campaign.
- All eligible contributions must be done until August 23, 2015 at 23:59 UTC
- Wiki link: Community Health learning campaign
- URL https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Community_Health_learning_campaign
- Contact: María Cruz / Twitter: Templet:@WikiEval #CommunityHealth / email: evalTemplet:@wikimedia · org
Happy editing!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:56, 1 Ogas 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata: Access to data from arbitrary items is coming
(Sorry for writing in English)
When using data from Wikidata on Wikipedia and other sister projects, there is currently a limitation in place that hinders some use cases: data can only be accessed from the corresponding item. So, for example, the Wikipedia article about Berlin can only get data from the Wikidata item about Berlin but not from the item about Germany. This had technical reasons. We are now removing this limitation. It is already done for many projects. Your project is one of the next ones. We will roll out this feature here on August 12.
We invite you to play around with this new feature if you are one of the people who have been waiting for this for a long time. If you have technical issues/questions with this you can come to d:Wikidata:Contact the development team.
A note of caution: Please be careful with how many items you use for a single page. If it is too many pages, loading might get slow. We will have to see how the feature behaves in production to see where we need to tweak and how.
How to use it, once it is enabled:
- Parser function: {{#property:P36|from=Q183}} to get the capital from the item about Germany
- Lua: see mw:Extension:Wikibase Client/Lua
Cheers Lydia Pintscher MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:46, 3 Ogas 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata: Access to data from arbitrary items is here
(Sorry for writing in English)
Hi everyone,
As I have previously announced here we have now enabled the arbitrary access feature here. This means from now on you can make use of data from any Wikidata item in any article here. Before you could for example only access data about Berlin in the article about Berlin. If you want to find out more or have questions please come to d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access. I hope this will open up great possibilities for you and make your work easier. Cheers Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:32, 12 Ogas 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #4—2015
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.
Wikimania
The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about VisualEditor and the future of editing.
Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince, जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.
For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).
For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%). There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).
We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. We thank the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.
Recent improvements
Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.
Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.
Future changes
The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.
On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page is now using Flow instead of LiquidThreads.
- Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mediawiki.org if you can help.
- If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
- Please file requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
- The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
- The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
—Elitre (WMF), 22:28, 14 Ogas 2015 (UTC)
How can we improve Wikimedia grants to support you better?
My apologies for posting this message in English. Please help translate it if you can.
Hello,
The Wikimedia Foundation would like your feedback about how we can reimagine Wikimedia Foundation grants, to better support people and ideas in your Wikimedia project. Ways to participate:
- Respond to questions on the discussion page of the idea.
- Join a small group conversation.
- Learn more about this consultation.
Feedback is welcome in any language.
With thanks,
I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation.
(Opt-out Instructions) This message was sent by I JethroBT (WMF) through MediaWiki message delivery. 00:07, 19 Ogas 2015 (UTC)
Introducing the Wikimedia public policy site
Hi all,
We are excited to introduce a new Wikimedia Public Policy site. The site includes resources and position statements on access, copyright, censorship, intermediary liability, and privacy. The site explains how good public policy supports the Wikimedia projects, editors, and mission.
Visit the public policy portal: https://policy.wikimedia.org/
Please help translate the statements on Meta Wiki. You can read more on the Wikimedia blog.
Thanks,
Yana and Stephen (Talk) 18:13, 2 Septemba 2015 (UTC)
(Sent with the Global message delivery system)
Open call for Individual Engagement Grants
My apologies for posting this message in English. Please help translate it if you can.
Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals until September 29th to fund new tools, community-building processes, and other experimental ideas that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), Individual Engagement Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.
- Submit a grant request
- Get help with your proposal in IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants
Thanks,
I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 20:53, 4 Septemba 2015 (UTC)
(Opt-out Instructions) This message was sent by I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) through MediaWiki message delivery.
New Wikipedia Library Database Access (September 2015)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- EBSCOHost - this is one of our largest access donations so far: access to a wide variety of academic, newspaper and magazine sources through their Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete and MasterFILE Complete
- Newspaperarchive.com - historical newspapers from the United States, Canada, UK and 20 other countries, and includes an Open Access "clipping" feature (1000 accounts)
- IMF Elibary- a digital collection of the IMF's reports, studies and research on global economics and development (50 accounts)
- Sabinet - one of the largest African digital publishers, based in South Africa, with a wide range of content in English and other European and African languages (10 accounts)
- Numérique Premium - a French language social science and humanities ebook database, with topical collections on a wide range of topics (100)
- Al Manhal - an Arabic and English database with a wide range of sources, largely focused on or published in the Middle East (60 accounts)
- Jamalon - an Arabic book distributor, who is providing targeted book delivery to volunteers (50 editors)
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including expanded accounts for Elsevier ScienceDirect, British Medical Journal and Dynamed and additional accounts for Project MUSE, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com, Highbeam and HeinOnline. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 19:42, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- We need help! Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
New Wikipedia Library Database Access (September 2015)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- EBSCOHost - this is one of our largest access donations so far: access to a wide variety of academic, newspaper and magazine sources through their Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete and MasterFILE Complete
- Newspaperarchive.com - historical newspapers from the United States, Canada, UK and 20 other countries, and includes an Open Access "clipping" feature (1000 accounts)
- IMF Elibary- a digital collection of the IMF's reports, studies and research on global economics and development (50 accounts)
- Sabinet - one of the largest African digital publishers, based in South Africa, with a wide range of content in English and other European and African languages (10 accounts)
- Numérique Premium - a French language social science and humanities ebook database, with topical collections on a wide range of topics (100)
- Al Manhal - an Arabic and English database with a wide range of sources, largely focused on or published in the Middle East (60 accounts)
- Jamalon - an Arabic book distributor, who is providing targeted book delivery to volunteers (50 editors)
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including expanded accounts for Elsevier ScienceDirect, British Medical Journal and Dynamed and additional accounts for Project MUSE, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com, Highbeam and HeinOnline. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 19:42, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
- We need help! Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Only one week left for Individual Engagement Grant proposals!
(Apologies for using English below, please help translate if you are able.)
There is still one week left to submit Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) proposals before the September 29th deadline. If you have ideas for new tools, community-building processes, and other experimental projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.
- Submit a grant request
- Get help with your proposal in IdeaLab
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants
I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources 21:01, 22 Septemba 2015 (UTC)
Reimagining WMF grants report
(My apologies for using English here, please help translate if you are able.)
Last month, we asked for community feedback on a proposal to change the structure of WMF grant programs. Thanks to the 200+ people who participated! A report on what we learned and changed based on this consultation is now available.
Come read about the findings and next steps as WMF’s Community Resources team begins to implement changes based on your feedback. Your questions and comments are welcome on the outcomes discussion page.
With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 16:57, 28 Septemba 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #5—2015
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.
Recent improvements
Educational features: The first time ever you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.
Links: It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558) These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.
Uploads: Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.
Mobile: Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use it on all devices regardless of size if they wish. (T85630) Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.
Rich editing tools: You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925) There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227, T113354) When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.
On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.
Future changes
You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Senisim" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Senisim" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Senisim" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.
Let's work together
- Share your ideas and ask questions at VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page uses Flow for discussions.
- Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).
- Local admins can set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki. If you need help, then please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
- The weekly task triage meetings are open to volunteers. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
—Elitre (WMF), 18:17, 30 Oktoba 2015 (UTC)
Community Wishlist Survey
Hi everyone! Apologies for posting in English. Translations are very welcome.
The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on building improved curation and moderation tools for experienced Wikimedia contributors. We're now starting a Community Wishlist Survey to find the most useful projects that we can work on.
For phase 1 of the survey, we're inviting all active contributors to submit brief proposals, explaining the project that you'd like us to work on, and why it's important. Phase 1 will last for 2 weeks. In phase 2, we'll ask you to vote on the proposals. Afterwards, we'll analyze the top 10 proposals and create a prioritized wishlist.
While most of this process will be conducted in English, we're inviting people from any Wikimedia wiki to submit proposals. We'll also invite volunteer translators to help translate proposals into English.
Your proposal should include: the problem that you want to solve, who would benefit, and a proposed solution, if you have one. You can submit your proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey page, using the entry field and the big blue button. We will be accepting proposals for 2 weeks, ending on November 23.
We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!
Wikimania 2016 scholarships ambassadors needed
Hello! Wikimania 2016 scholarships will soon be open; by the end of the week we'll form the committee and we need your help, see Scholarship committee for details.
If you want to carefully review nearly a thousand applications in January, you might be a perfect committee member. Otherwise, you can volunteer as "ambassador": you will observe all the committee activities, ensure that people from your language or project manage to apply for a scholarship, translate scholarship applications written in your language to English and so on. Ambassadors are allowed to ask for a scholarship, unlike committee members.
Wikimania 2016 scholarships subteam 10:48, 10 Novemba 2015 (UTC)
Harassment consultation
Please help translate to your language
The Community Advocacy team the Wikimedia Foundation has opened a consultation on the topic of harassment on Meta. The consultation period is intended to run for one month from today, November 16, and end on December 17. Please share your thoughts there on harassment-related issues facing our communities and potential solutions. (Note: this consultation is not intended to evaluate specific cases of harassment, but rather to discuss the problem of harassment itself.)
This is a message regarding the proposed 2015 Free Bassel banner. Translations are available.
Hi everyone,
This is to inform all Wikimedia contributors that a straw poll seeking your involvement has just been started on Meta-Wiki.
As some of your might be aware, a small group of Wikimedia volunteers have proposed a banner campaign informing Wikipedia readers about the urgent situation of our fellow Wikipedian, open source software developer and Creative Commons activist, Bassel Khartabil. An exemplary banner and an explanatory page have now been prepared, and translated into about half a dozen languages by volunteer translators.
We are seeking your involvement to decide if the global Wikimedia community approves starting a banner campaign asking Wikipedia readers to call on the Syrian government to release Bassel from prison. We understand that a campaign like this would be unprecedented in Wikipedia's history, which is why we're seeking the widest possible consensus among the community.
Given Bassel's urgent situation and the resulting tight schedule, we ask everyone to get involved with the poll and the discussion to the widest possible extent, and to promote it among your communities as soon as possible.
(Apologies for writing in English; please kindly translate this message into your own language.)
Thank you for your participation!
Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help
Community Wishlist Survey
Hi everyone! Apologies for posting this in English. Translations are very welcome.
We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.
Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.
The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!
Community Tech via
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:38, 1 Disemba 2015 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (December 2015)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Gale - multidisciplinary periodicals, newspapers, and reference sources - 10 accounts
- Brill - academic e-books and journals in English, Dutch, and other languages - 25 accounts
- Finnish Literature Society (in Finnish)
- Magiran (in Farsi) - scientific journal articles - 100 articles
- Civilica (in Farsi) - Iranian journal articles, seminars, and conferences - 50 accounts
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including EBSCO, DeGruyter, and Newspaperarchive.com. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 01:01, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
- Help us a start Wikipedia Library in your language! Email us at wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.
As many of you know, January 15 is Wikipedia’s 15th Birthday!
People around the world are getting involved in the celebration and have started adding their events on Meta Page. While we are celebrating Wikipedia's birthday, we hope that all projects and affiliates will be able to utilize this celebration to raise awareness of our community's efforts.
Haven’t started planning? Don’t worry, there’s lots of ways to get involved. Here are some ideas:
- Join/host an event. We already have more than 80, and hope to have many more.
- Talk to local press. In the past 15 years, Wikipedia has accomplished extraordinary things. We’ve made a handy summary of milestones and encourage you to add your own. More resources, including a press release template and resources on working with the media, are also available.
- Design a Wikipedia 15 logo. In place of a single icon for Wikipedia 15, we’re making dozens. Add your own with something fun and representative of your community. Just use the visual guide so they share a common sensibility.
- Share a message on social media. Tell the world what Wikipedia means to you, and add #wikipedia15 to the post. We might re-tweet or share your message!
Everything is linked on the Wikipedia 15 Meta page. You’ll find a set of ten data visualization works that you can show at your events, and a list of all the Wikipedia 15 logos that community members have already designed.
If you have any questions, please contact Zachary McCune or Joe Sutherland.
Thanks and Happy nearly Wikipedia 15!
-The Wikimedia Foundation Communications team
Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery, 20:58, 18 Disemba 2015 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Halivim mi
VisualEditor News #6—2015
Did you know?
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the visual editor team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.
Recent improvements
You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.
Future changes
The single edit tab project will combine the "Senisim" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Senisim" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398, T58337) Initially, the "Senisim" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Senisim tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.
In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)
Testing opportunities
- Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
- Remember my last editor,
- Always give me the visual editor if possible,
- Always give me the source editor, and
- Show me both editor tabs. (This is the current state for people already using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
- Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
Elitre (WMF), 00:06, 25 Disemba 2015 (UTC)
Wikimania 2016 Scholarships - Deadline soon!
- Please help translate to your language
A reminder - applications for scholarships for Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, Italy, are closing soon! Please get your applications in by January 9th. To apply, visit the page below:
Patrick Earley (WMF) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:49, 5 Janueri 2016 (UTC)
2016 WMF Strategy consultation
- Please help translate to your language
Hello, all.
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has launched a consultation to help create and prioritize WMF strategy beginning July 2016 and for the 12 to 24 months thereafter. This consultation will be open, on Meta, from 18 January to 26 February, after which the Foundation will also use these ideas to help inform its Annual Plan. (More on our timeline can be found on that Meta page.)
Your input is welcome (and greatly desired) at the Meta discussion, 2016 Strategy/Community consultation.
Apologies for English, where this is posted on a non-English project. We thought it was more important to get the consultation translated as much as possible, and good headway has been made there in some languages. There is still much to do, however! We created m:2016 Strategy/Translations to try to help coordinate what needs translation and what progress is being made. :)
If you have questions, please reach out to me on my talk page or on the strategy consultation's talk page or by email to mdennis@wikimedia.org.
I hope you'll join us! Maggie Dennis via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:06, 18 Janueri 2016 (UTC)
Tok Pisin is missing
Tok Pisin is missing from this page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/There_is_also_a_Wikipedia_in_your_language
More than 100 languages are now listed.
Thank you, Varlaam (talk) 16:48, 22 Janueri 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks very much for your help! Varlaam (talk) 19:09, 11 Februeri 2016 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #1—2016
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.
Recent changes
You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.
Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.
The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.
Future changes
The single edit tab project will combine the "Senisim" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Senisim" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Senisim" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Senisim tab of Special:Preferences:
- Remember my last editor,
- Always give me the visual editor if possible,
- Always give me the source editor, and
- Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)
The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. This will affect the following languages, amongst others: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic.
Let's work together
- Please try out the newest version of the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You may need to restore the default preferences (at the bottom of test2wiki:Special:Preferences) to see the initial prompt for options. Were you able to find a preference setting that will work for your own editing? Did you see the large preferences dialog box when you started editing an article there?
- Can you read and type in Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic, or Han scripts? Does typing in these languages feels natural in the visual editor? Language engineer David Chan needs to know. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Join the Tech Talk about "Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it" with Sebastian Karcher on 29 February 2016.
If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
Elitre (WMF), 20:21, 26 Februeri 2016 (UTC)
Completion suggestor
Updates to wiki search auto completion are arriving 10 March
Hello!
Please help translate to your language. Thank you!
The completion suggester beta feature will become the default at the first group of wikis on Thursday, 10 March. This initial rollout will start with some of the smaller wikis to ensure the change happens in an organized way. The remaining wikis will receive the update on Wednesday, 16 March. This update brings three major improvements to search. Improved search result ordering, a tolerance for a small number of spelling errors, and suggests fewer typos.
Since December 2015, 19,000 editors have already opted into the completion suggester beta feature. Contributors are encouraged to try out the feature ahead of the release. Please share any comments on the Completion Suggester discussion page in any language.
To learn more about the work of the Discovery department and other improvements to search, please check out the Wikimedia blog. Read about CirrusSearch, the MediaWiki extension that makes wiki search possible.- User:CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 7 Mas 2016 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2016)
Apologies for writing in English. Please help translate to your language
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for access to research materials from:
- Cambridge University Press - a major publisher of academic journals and e-books in a variety of subject areas. Access includes both Cambridge Journals Online and Cambridge Books. 25 accounts.
- Alexander Street Academic Video Online - a large academic video collection good for a wide range of subjects, including news programs (such as PBS and BBC), music and theatre, lectures and demonstrations, and documentaries. 25 accounts.
- Baylor University Press - a publisher of academic e-books primarily in religious studies and the humanities. 50 accounts.
- Future Science Group - a publisher of medical, biotechnological and scientific research. 30 accounts.
- Annual Reviews - a publisher of review articles in the biomedical sciences. 100 accounts.
- Miramar Ship Index - an index to ships and their histories since the early 19th century. 30 accounts.
Non-English
- Noormags - Farsi-language aggregator of academic and professional journals and magazines. 30 accounts.
- Kotobna - Arabic-language ebook publishing platform. 20 accounts.
Expansions
- Gale - aggregator of newspapers, magazines and journals. 50 accounts.
- Elsevier ScienceDirect - an academic publishing company that publishes medical and scientific literature. 100 accounts.
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, De Gruyter, EBSCO, Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 20:30, 17 Mas 2016 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Open Call for Individual Engagement Grants
Please help translate to your language:
Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program is accepting proposals until April 12th to fund new tools, research, outreach efforts, and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), IEGs can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.
- Submit a grant request or draft your proposal in IdeaLab
- Get help with your proposal in an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants
With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:47, 31 Mas 2016 (UTC)
Server switch 2016
The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
- You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped.
Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April.
No non-essential code deployments will take place.
This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 17 Epril 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia to the Moon
Hello! Sorry that this is in English only, but we are using village pump messaging in order to reach as many language communities as possible. Wrong page? Please fix it here.
This is an invitation to all Wikipedians: Wikimedia Deutschland has been given data space to include Wikipedia content in an upcoming mission to the Moon. (No joke!) We have launched a community discussion about how to do that, because we feel that this is for the global community of editors. Please, join the discussion on Meta-Wiki (and translate this invitation to your language community)! Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 15:35, 21 Epril 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia to the Moon: voting has begun
Hello, after six weeks of community discussion about Wikipedia to the Moon, there are now 10 different proposals for content for the mission. Starting today, you can vote for them on Meta-Wiki, and decide what we will work on: a Wikipedia canon, different lists, the Moon in 300 languages, an astronomy editathon, featured articles, articles about technology, endangered things, or DNA-related topics. You can even vote against community involvement. Voting is open until 24 June. Sorry that this message is again in English only, but we are using village pumps to reach as many communities as possible, so that everyone knows they can vote. Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 15:31, 10 Jun 2016 (UTC)
Compact Links coming soon to this wiki
Please help translate to your language
Hello, I wanted to give a heads up about an upcoming feature for this wiki, which you may already seen in the latest issue of Tech News. Compact Language Links has been available as a beta-feature on all Wikimedia wikis since 2014. With compact language links enabled, users are shown a much shorter list of languages on the interlanguage link section of an article (see image). This will be enabled as a feature in the coming week for all users, which can be turned on or off using a preference setting. We look forward to your feedback and please do let us know if you have any questions. Details about Compact Language Links can be read in the project documentation.
Due to the large scale enablement of this feature, we have had to use MassMessage for this announcement and as a result it is only written in English. We will really appreciate if this message can be translated for other users of this wiki. Thank you. On behalf of the Wikimedia Language team: Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 14:01, 24 Jun 2016 (UTC)
Compact Language Links enabled in this wiki today
Please help translate to your language
Compact Language Links has been available as a beta-feature on all Wikimedia wikis since 2014. With compact language links enabled, users are shown a much shorter list of languages on the interlanguage link section of an article (see image). Based on several factors, this shorter list of languages is expected to be more relevant for them and valuable for finding similar content in a language known to them. More information about compact language links can be found in the documentation.
From today onwards, compact language links has been enabled as the default listing of interlanguage links on this wiki. However, using the button at the bottom, you will be able to see a longer list of all the languages the article has been written in. The setting for this compact list can be changed by using the checkbox under User Preferences -> Appearance -> Languages
The compact language links feature has been tested extensively by the Wikimedia Language team, which developed it. However, in case there are any problems or other feedback please let us know on the project talk page. It is to be noted that on some wikis the presence of an existing older gadget that was used for a similar purpose may cause an interference for compact language list. We would like to bring this to the attention of the admins of this wiki. Full details are on this phabricator ticket (in English).
Due to the large scale enablement of this feature, we have had to use MassMessage for this announcement and as a result it is only written in English. We will really appreciate if this message can be translated for other users of this wiki. Thank you. On behalf of the Wikimedia Language team: Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk)-04:21, 28 Jun 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia to the Moon: invitation to edit
Three weeks ago, you were invited to vote on how to take Wikipedia articles to the Moon. Community voting is over and the winning idea is to send all ‘’featured articles and lists’’ to the Moon. This decision means that, starting today, Wikipedians from all language communities are warmly invited to intensively work on their best articles and lists, and submit them to Wikipedia to the Moon. The central site to coordinate between communities will be Meta-Wiki. You will find an overview and more information there. Hopefully, we will be able to represent as many languages as possible, to show Wikipedia’s diversity. Please feel kindly invited to edit on behalf of your community and tell us about your work on featured content!
Best, Moon team at Wikimedia Deutschland 14:10, 1 Julai 2016 (UTC)
Editing News #2—2016
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Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.
Recent changes
The visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.
The single edit tab feature combines the "Senisim" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Senisim" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Senisim" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.
Future changes
The "Raitim pes" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.
The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together
- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Watch the Tech Talk by Sebastian Karcher for more information.
If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
m:User:Elitre (WMF), 17:20, 3 Julai 2016 (UTC)
Open call for Project Grants
Please help translate to your language:
- Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from July 1st to August 2nd to fund new tools, research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers.
- Whether you need a small or large amount of funds, Project Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.
- Submit a grant request or draft your proposal in IdeaLab
- Get help with your proposal in an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants or Project and Event Grants
- Also accepting candidates to join the Project Grants Committee through July 15.
- With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:25, 5 Julai 2016 (UTC)
Save/Publish
The Editing team is planning to change the name of the “Raitim pes” button to “Publish page” and “Publish changes”. “Publish page” will be used when you create a new page. “Publish changes” will be used when you change an existing page. The names will be consistent in all editing environments.[17][18]
This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016. The change will be announced in Tech News when it happens.
If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net for “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.
The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some new editors believed that “Raitim pes” would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information after it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the “Raitim pes” button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.
Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.
Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. On wiki pages, you can use the wikitext codes {{int:Publishpage}}
and {{int:Publishchanges}}
to display the new labels in the user's preferred language. For the language settings in your account preferences, these wikitext codes produce “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.
Please share this news with community members who teach new editors and with others who may be interested.
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 9 Ogas 2016 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library accounts available now (August 2016)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our publisher donation program. You can now sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Nomos – Primarily German-language publisher of law and social sciences books and journals - 25 accounts
- World Scientific – Scientific, technical, and medical journals - 50 accounts
- Edinburgh University Press – Humanities and social sciences journals - 25 accounts
- American Psychological Association – Psychology books and journals - 10 accounts
- Emerald – Journals on a range of topics including business, education, health care, and engineering - 10 accounts
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, DeGruyter, Gale and Newspaperarchive.com.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:39, 30 Ogas 2016 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language! Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
RevisionSlider
Birgit Müller (WMDE) 15:08, 12 Septemba 2016 (UTC)
Grants to improve your project
Please help translate to your language:
Greetings! The Project Grants program is currently accepting proposals for funding. There is just over a week left to submit before the October 11 deadline. If you have ideas for software, offline outreach, research, online community organizing, or other projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.
- Submit a grant request
- Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants or Project and Event Grants
I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 30 Septemba 2016 (UTC)
Creative Commons 4.0
Hello! I'm writing from the Wikimedia Foundation to invite you to give your feedback on a proposed move from CC BY-SA 3.0 to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license across all Wikimedia projects. The consultation will run from October 5 to November 8, and we hope to receive a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. Please, if you are interested, take part in the discussion on Meta-Wiki.
Apologies that this message is only in English. This message can be read and translated in more languages here. Joe Sutherland (talk) 01:34, 6 Oktoba 2016 (UTC)
Editing News #3—2016
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.
Recent changes
- You can now set text as small or big.[19]
- Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[20] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[21]
- Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[22]
- At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.[23]
- The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[24] In the future, the "Raitim pes" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
- Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[25]
Future changes
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together
- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
17:50, 15 Oktoba 2016 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (November 2016)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- Foreign Affairs - Journal of international relations and U.S. foreign policy
- OpenEdition - Journals in the social sciences and humanities
- Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences - French and English language scientific journals
- ASHA - Speech–language–hearing journals
- Tilastopaja - Athletics statistics
Expansions
- EBSCO - Many new databases added
- Taylor & Francis - Strategic, Defence & Security Studies collection
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:30, 1 Novemba 2016 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Password reset
I apologise that this message is in English. ⧼Centralnotice-shared-help-translate⧽
We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.
Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.
In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.
Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (toktok) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:59, 13 Novemba 2016 (UTC)
Adding to the above section (Password reset)
Please accept my apologies - that first line should read "Help with translations!". Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 14 Novemba 2016 (UTC)
New way to edit wikitext
Summary: There's a new opt-in Beta Feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. Please go try it out.
We in the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing department are responsible for making editing better for all our editors, new and experienced alike. We've been slowly improving the visual editor based on feedback, user tests, and feature requests. However, that doesn't work for all our user needs: whether you need to edit a wikitext talk page, create a template, or fix some broken reference syntax, sometimes you need to use wikitext, and many experienced editors prefer it.
Consequently, we've planned a "wikitext mode" for the visual editor for a long time. It provides as much of the visual editor's features as possible, for those times that you need or want wikitext. It has the same user interface as the visual editor, including the same toolbar across the top with the same buttons. It provides access to the citoid service for formatting citations, integrated search options for inserting images, and the ability to add new templates in a simple dialog. Like in the visual editor, if you paste in formatted text copied from another page, then formatting (such as bolding) will automatically be converted into wikitext.
All wikis now have access to this mode as a Beta Feature. When enabled, it replaces your existing wikitext editor everywhere. If you don't like it, you can reverse this at any time by turning off the Beta Feature in your preferences. We don't want to surprise anyone, so it's strictly an opt-in-only Beta Feature. It won't switch on automatically for anyone, even if you have previously checked the box to "Automatically enable most beta features".
The new wikitext edit mode is based on the visual editor, so it requires JavaScript (as does the current wikitext editor). It doesn't work with gadgets that have only been designed for the older one (and vice versa), so some users will miss gadgets they find important. We're happy to work with gadget authors to help them update their code to work with both editors. We're not planning to get rid of the current main wikitext editor on desktop in the foreseeable future. We're also not going to remove the existing ability to edit plain wikitext without JavaScript. Finally, though it should go without saying, if you prefer to continue using the current wikitext editor, then you may so do.
This is an early version, and we'd love to know what you think so we can make it better. Please leave feedback about the new mode on the feedback page. You may write comments in any language. Thank you.
James Forrester (Product Manager, Editing department, Wikimedia Foundation) --19:32, 14 Disemba 2016 (UTC)
Review of initial updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process
Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. Message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.
The Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. For 15 years, Wikimedians have worked together to build the largest free knowledge resource in human history. During this time, we've grown from a small group of editors to a diverse network of editors, developers, affiliates, readers, donors, and partners. Today, we are more than a group of websites. We are a movement rooted in values and a powerful vision: all knowledge for all people. As a movement, we have an opportunity to decide where we go from here.
This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve. We hope to design an inclusive process that makes space for everyone: editors, community leaders, affiliates, developers, readers, donors, technology platforms, institutional partners, and people we have yet to reach. There will be multiple ways to participate including on-wiki, in private spaces, and in-person meetings. You are warmly invited to join and make your voice heard.
The immediate goal is to have a strategic direction by Wikimania 2017 to help frame a discussion on how we work together toward that strategic direction.
Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Beginning with this message, monthly reviews of these updates will be sent to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.
Here is a review of the updates that have been sent so far:
- Update 1 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (15 December 2016)
- Introduction to process and information about budget spending resolution to support it
- Update 2 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (23 December 2016)
- Start of search for Lead Architect for movement strategy process
- Update 3 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (8 January 2017)
- Plans for strategy sessions at upcoming Wikimedia Conference 2017
- Update 4 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (11 January 2017)
- Introduction of williamsworks
- Update 5 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 February 2017)
- The core movement strategy team, team tracks being developed, introduction of the Community Process Steering Committee, discussions at WikiIndaba conference 2017 and the Wikimedia movement affiliates executive directors gathering in Switzerland
- Update 6 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (10 February 2017)
- Tracks A & B process prototypes and providing feedback, updates on development of all four Tracks
More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.
Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 20:32, 15 Februeri 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help
Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process
Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.
As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.
Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.
Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:
- Update 7 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (16 February 2017)
- Development of documentation for Tracks A & B
- Update 8 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (24 February 2017)
- Introduction of Track Leads for all four audience tracks
- Update 9 on Wikimedia movement strategy process (2 March 2017)
- Seeking feedback on documents being used to help facilitate upcoming community discussions
More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.
Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:43, 9 Mas 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help
We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)
- This message, "We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)", was sent through multiple channels by Gregory Varnum on 15 and 16 of March 2017 to village pumps, affiliate talk pages, movement mailing lists, and MassMessage groups. A similar message was sent by Nicole Ebber to organized groups and their mailing lists on 15 of March 2017. This version of the message is available for translation and documentation purposes
Dear Wikimedians/Wikipedians:
Today we are starting a broad discussion to define Wikimedia's future role in the world and develop a collaborative strategy to fulfill that role. You are warmly invited to join the conversation.
There are many ways to participate, by joining an existing conversation or starting your own:
Track A (organized groups): Discussions with your affiliate, committee or other organized group (these are groups that support the Wikimedia movement).
Track B (individual contributors): On Meta or your local language or project wiki.
This is the first of three conversations, and it will run between now and April 15. The purpose of cycle 1 is to discuss the future of the movement and generate major themes around potential directions. What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?
We welcome you, as we create this conversation together, and look forward to broad and diverse participation from all parts of our movement.
- Find out more about the movement strategy process
- Learn more about volunteering to be a Discussion Coordinator
Sincerely,
Nicole Ebber (Track A Lead), Jaime Anstee (Track B Lead), & the engagement support teams05:09, 18 Mas 2017 (UTC)
Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.
The Board of Trustees (Board) is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. More information about this role can be found on Meta-Wiki. Please read the letter from the Board of Trustees calling for candidates.
The candidacy submission phase will last from April 7 (00:00 UTC) to April 20 (23:59 UTC).
We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates from April 7 to April 20. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki.
Once the questions submission period has ended on April 20, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to beginning on April 21.
The goal of this process is to fill the three community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The election results will be used by the Board itself to select its new members.
The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.
- April 7 (00:00 UTC) – April 20 (23:59 UTC) – Board nominations
- April 7 – April 20 – Board candidates questions submission period
- April 21 – April 30 – Board candidates answer questions
- May 1 – May 14 – Board voting period
- May 15–19 – Board vote checking
- May 20 – Board result announcement goal
In addition to the Board elections, we will also soon be holding elections for the following roles:
- Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
- There are five positions being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.
- Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson (Ombuds)
- One position is being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.
Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.
More information on this year's elections can be found on Meta-Wiki. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the election talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-electionswikimedia.org.
On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation
Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language
The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
- You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
- If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:34, 11 Epril 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata description editing in the Wikipedia Android app
Wikidata description editing is a new experiment being rolled out on the Wikipedia app for Android. While this primarily impacts Wikidata, the changes are also addressing a concern about the mobile versions of Wikipedia, so that mobile users will be able to edit directly the descriptions shown under the title of the page and in the search results.
We began by rolling out this feature several weeks ago to a pilot group of Wikipedias (Russian, Hebrew, and Catalan), and have seen very positive results including numerous quality contributions in the form of new and updated descriptions, and a low rate of vandalism.
We are now ready for the next phase of rolling out this feature, which is to enable it in a few days for all Wikipedias except the top ten by usage within the app (i.e. except English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese). We will enable the feature for those languages instead at some point in the future, as we closely monitor user engagement with our expanded set of pilot communities. As always, if have any concerns, please reach out to us on wiki at the talk page for this project or by email at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks!
New Page previews feature
New Page previews feature
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language
Hello,
The Reading web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working to enable Page previews, a beta feature known previously as Hovercards, as opt-in behavior for logged-in users and the default behavior for logged-out users across Wikipedia projects. Page previews provide a preview of any linked article, giving readers a quick understanding of a related article without leaving the current page. For this project, we are expecting to collect feedback over the following few weeks and tentatively enable the feature in early May, 2017.
A quick note on the implementation:
- For logged-in users who are not currently testing out the beta feature, Page previews will be off by default. Users may turn them on from their user preferences page.
- For logged-out users, the feature will be on by default. Users may disable it at any time by selecting the setting cog available in each preview.
- For users of the Navigation popups gadget, you will not be able to turn on the Page previews feature while using navigational popups. If you would like to try out the Page preview feature, make sure to first turn Navigation popups off prior to turning Page previews on.
You can read more about the feature and the tests we used to evaluate performance, try it out by enabling it from the beta features page, and leave feedback or questions on the talk page.
Thank you, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:52, 19 Epril 2017 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2017)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:
- American Psychiatric Association – Psychiatry books and journals
- Bloomsbury – Who's Who, Drama Online, Berg Fashion Library, and Whitaker's
- Gaudeamus – Finnish humanities and social sciences
- Ympäristö-lehti – The Finnish Environment Institute's Ympäristö-lehti magazine
Expansions
- Gale – Biography In Context database added
- Adam Matthew – all 53 databases now available
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, Taylor & Francis and Newspaperarchive.com.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:52, 2 Me 2017 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Aaron.
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2017 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation manages many diverse projects such as Wikipedia and Commons.
The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 1 to 23:59 UTC May 14. Click here to vote. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2017 Board of Trustees election page on Meta-Wiki.
On behalf of the Elections Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation
19:14, 3 Me 2017 (UTC)
Beta Feature Two Column Edit Conflict View
Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:41, 8 Me 2017 (UTC)
Editing News #1—2017
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and adding the new visual diff tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving the visual diff tool.
Recent changes
- A new wikitext editing mode is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. The 2017 wikitext editor has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures to enable the ⧼Visualeditor-preference-newwikitexteditor-label⧽.
- A new visual diff tool is available in VisualEditor's visual mode. You can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. More features will be added to this later. In the future, this tool may be integrated into other MediaWiki components. [26]
- The team have added multi-column support for lists of footnotes. The
<references />
block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. You can request multi-column support for your wiki. [27] - You can now use your web browser's function to switch typing direction in the new wikitext mode. This is particularly helpful for RTL language users like Urdu or Hebrew who have to write JavaScript or CSS. You can use Command+Shift+X or Control+Shift+X to trigger this. [28]
- The way to switch between the visual editing mode and the wikitext editing mode is now consistent. There is a drop-down menu that shows the two options. This is now the same in desktop and mobile web editing, and inside things that embed editing, such as Flow. [29]
- The Categories item has been moved to the top of the Page options menu (from clicking on the "hamburger" icon) for quicker access. [30] There is also now a "Templates used on this page" feature there. [31]
- You can now create
<chem>
tags (sometimes used as<ce>
) for chemical formulas inside the visual editor. [32] - Tables can be set as collapsed or un-collapsed. [33]
- The Special character menu now includes characters for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and angle quotation marks (‹› and ⟨⟩) . The team thanks the volunteer developer, Tpt. [34]
- A bug caused some section edit conflicts to blank the rest of the page. This has been fixed. The team are sorry for the disruption. [35]
- There is a new keyboard shortcut for citations:
Control
+Shift
+K
on a PC, orCommand
+Shift
+K
on a Mac. It is based on the keyboard shortcut for making links, which isControl
+K
orCommand
+K
respectively. [36]
Future changes
- The team is working on a syntax highlighting tool. It will highlight matching pairs of
<ref>
tags and other types of wikitext syntax. You will be able to turn it on and off. It will first become available in VisualEditor's built-in wikitext mode, maybe late in 2017. [37] - The kind of button used to Soim pes wantaim senis (pastaim long raitim), Soim ol senis, and finish an edit will change in all WMF-supported wikitext editors. The new buttons will use OOjs UI. The buttons will be larger, brighter, and easier to read. The labels will remain the same. You can test the new button by editing a page and adding
&ooui=1
to the end of the URL, like this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Sandbox?action=edit&ooui=1 The old appearance will no longer be possible, even with local CSS changes. [38] - The outdated 2006 wikitext editor will be removed later this year. It is used by approximately 0.03% of active editors. See a list of editing tools on mediawiki.org if you are uncertain which one you use. [39]
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!
18:07, 12 Me 2017 (UTC)
Prototype for editing Wikidata infoboxes on Wikipedia
Hello,
I’m sorry for writing in English. It’d be great if someone could translate this message if necessary.
One of the most requested features for Wikidata is to enable editing of Wikidata’s data directly from Wikipedia, so the editors can continue their workflow without switching websites.
The Wikidata development team has been working on a tool to achieve this goal: fill and edit the Wikipedia infoboxes with information from Wikidata, directly on Wikipedia, via the Visual Editor.
We already asked for feedback in 2015, and collected some interesting ideas which we shared with you in this thesis. Now we would like to present to you our first prototype and collect your feedback, in order to improve and continue the development of this feature.
We present this work to you very early, so we can include your feedback before and all along the development. You are the core users of this feature, so we want to make sure that it fits your needs and editing processes.
You will find the prototype, description of the features, and a demo video, on this page. Feel free to add any comment or feedback on the talk page. The page is currently not translated in every languages, but you can add your contribution by helping to translate it.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to follow all the discussions on Wikipedia, so if you want to be sure that your feedback is read, please add it on the Wikidata page, in your favorite language. Thanks for your understanding.
Thanks, Lea Lacroix (WMDE)
RevisionSlider
Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:44, 16 Me 2017 (UTC)
The Wikimedia movement strategy core team and working groups have completed reviewing the more than 1800 thematic statements we received from the first discussion. They have identified 5 themes that were consistent across all the conversations - each with their own set of sub-themes. These are not the final themes, just an initial working draft of the core concepts.
You are invited to join the online and offline discussions taking place on these 5 themes. This round of discussions will take place between now and June 12th. You can discuss as many as you like; we ask you to participate in the ones that are most (or least) important to you.
Here are the five themes, each has a page on Meta-Wiki with more information about the theme and how to participate in that theme's discussion:
- Healthy, Inclusive Communities
- The Augmented Age
- A Truly Global Movement
- The Most Respected Source of Knowledge
- Engaging in the Knowledge Ecosystem
On the movement strategy portal on Meta-Wiki, you can find more information about each of these themes, their discussions, and how to participate.
Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation • Please help translate to your language • Get help21:10, 16 Me 2017 (UTC)
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, we are pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee and Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson elections. Please read the letter from the Wikimedia Foundation calling for candidates at on the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation elections portal.
Funds Dissemination Committee
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC elections page.
Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson
The Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC Ombudsperson elections page.
The candidacy submission phase will last until May 28 (23:59 UTC).
We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates until May 28. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki. Once the questions submission period has ended on May 28, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to.
The goal of this process is to fill the five community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee and the community-selected ombudsperson. The election results will be used by the Board itself to make the appointments.
The full schedule for the FDC elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.
- May 15 (00:00 UTC) – May 28 (23:59 UTC) – Nominations
- May 15 – May 28 – Candidates questions submission period
- May 29 – June 2 – Candidates answer questions
- June 3 – June 11 – Voting period
- June 12–14 – Vote checking
- June 15 – Goal date for announcing election results
More information on this year's elections can be found at the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation elections portal.
Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-electionswikimedia.org.
On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation
21:05, 23 Me 2017 (UTC)
Accessible editing buttons
You can see and use the old and new versions now. Most editors will only notice that some buttons are slightly larger and have different colors.
-
Buttons before the change
-
Buttons after the change
However, this change also affects some user scripts and gadgets. Unfortunately, some of them may not work well in the new system. If you maintain any user scripts or gadgets that are used for editing, please see mw:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons for information on how to test and fix your scripts. Outdated scripts can be tested and fixed now.
This change will probably reach this wiki on Tuesday, 18 July 2017. Please leave a note at mw:Talk:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons if you need help.Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 10 Julai 2017 (UTC)
Page Previews (Hovercards) update
Hello,
A quick update on the progress of enabling Page Previews (previously named Hovercards) on this project. Page Previews provide a preview of any linked article, giving readers a quick understanding of a related article without leaving the current page. As mentioned in December we're preparing to remove the feature from Beta and make it the default behavior for logged-out users. We have recently made a large update to the code which fixes most outstanding bugs.
Due to some issues with our instrumentation, we delayed our deployment by a few months. We are finally ready to deploy the feature. Page Previews will be off by default and available in the user preferences page for logged-in users the week of July 24th. The feature will be on by default for current beta users and logged-out users. If you would like to preview the feature, you can enable it as a beta feature. For more information see Page Previews. Questions can be left on the talk page in your preferred language.
Thank you again.
CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:32, 20 Julai 2017 (UTC)
RfC regarding "Interlinking of accounts involved with paid editing to decrease impersonation"
There is currently a RfC open on Meta regarding "requiring those involved with paid editing on Wikipedia to link on their user page to all other active accounts through which they advertise paid Wikipedia editing business."
Note this is to apply to Wikipedia and not necessarily other sister projects, this is only to apply to websites where people are specifically advertising that they will edit Wikipedia for pay and not any other personal, professional, or social media accounts a person may have.
Please comment on meta. Thanks. Send on behalf of User:Doc James.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:06, 17 Septemba 2017 (UTC)
Discussion on synced reading lists
Discussion on synced reading lists
Hello,
The Reading Infrastructure team at the Wikimedia Foundation is developing a cross-platform reading list service for the mobile Wikipedia app. Reading lists are like bookmark folders in your web browser. They allow readers using the Wikipedia app to bookmark pages into folders to read later. This includes reading offline. Reading lists do not create or alter content in any way.To create Reading Lists, app users will register an account and marked pages will be tied to that account. Reading List account preferences sync between devices. You can read the same pages on different mobile platforms (tablets, phones). This is the first time we are syncing preference data between devices in such a way. We want to hear and address concerns about privacy and data security. We also want to explain why the current watchlist system is not being adapted for this purpose.
Background
In 2016 the Android team replaced the simple Saved Pages feature with Reading Lists. Reading Lists allow users to bookmark pages into folders and for reading offline. The intent of this feature was to allow "syncing" of these lists for users with many devices. Due to overlap with the Gather feature and related community concerns, this part was put on hold.
The Android team has identified this lack of synching as a major area of complaint from users. They expect lists to sync. The iOS team has held off implementing Reading Lists, as syncing was seen as a "must have" for this feature. A recent technical RfC has allowed these user stories and needs to be unblocked. Initially for Android, then iOS, and with web to potentially follow.
Reading lists are private, stored as part of a user's account, not as a public wiki page. There is no sharing or publishing ability for reading lists. No planned work to make these public. The target audience are people that read Wikipedia and want to bookmark and organize that content in the app. There is a potential for the feature to be available on the web in the future.
Why not watchlists
Watchlists offer similar functionality to Reading Lists. The Reading Infrastructure team evaluated watchlist infrastructure before exploring other options. In general, the needs of watchlists differ from Reading Lists in a few key ways:
- Reading lists focus on Reading articles, not the monitoring of changes.
- Watchlists are focused on monitoring changes of pages/revisions.
- The Watchlist infrastructure is key to our contributor community for monitoring content changes manually and through the use of automated tools (bots). Because of these needs, expanding the scope of Watchlists to reading purposes will only make the project harder to maintain and add more constraints.
- By keeping the projects separate it is easier to scale resources. We can serve these two different audiences and prioritize the work accordingly. Reading Lists are, by their nature, less critical to the health of Wikipedia/MediaWiki.
- Multi-project support. Reading Lists are by design cross-wiki/project. Watchlists are tied to specific wikis. While there have been many discussion for making them cross-wiki, resolution is not in the near term.
More information can be found on MediaWiki.org where feedback and ideas are welcome.
Thank you
CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:35, 20 Septemba 2017 (UTC)
Changes to the global ban policy
New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers
New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers
The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website.
Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas from the research done by the New Readers team in Mexico, Nigeria, and India. The teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated by user research and community feedback. The prototype evaluation received positive feedback and results, so development continued.
For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome browsers on Android. Support for other mobile browsers to come in the future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print functionality. Users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF. Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal readability for smaller screens.
The feature is available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org.
Thank you!
CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 20 Novemba 2017 (UTC)
Call for Wikimania 2018 Scholarships
Hi all,
We wanted to inform you that scholarship applications for Wikimania 2018 which is being held in Cape Town, South Africa on July 18–22, 2018 are now being accepted. Applications are open until Monday, 22 January 2018 23:59 UTC.
Applicants will be able to apply for a partial or full scholarship. A full scholarship will cover the cost of an individual's round-trip travel, shared accommodation, and conference registration fees as arranged by the Wikimedia Foundation. A partial scholarship will cover conference registration fees and shared accommodation. Applicants will be rated using a pre-determined selection process and selection criteria established by the Scholarship Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation, who will determine which applications are successful. To learn more about Wikimania 2018 scholarships, please visit: wm2018:Scholarships.
To apply for a scholarship, fill out the multi-language application form on: https://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply
It is highly recommended that applicants review all the material on the Scholarships page and the associated FAQ before submitting an application. If you have any questions, please contact: wikimania-scholarships at wikimedia.org or leave a message at: wm2018:Talk:Scholarships. Please help us spread the word and translate pages!
Best regards, David Richfield and Martin Rulsch for the Scholarship Committee 19:24, 20 Disemba 2017 (UTC)
User group for Military Historians
Greetings,
"Military history" is one of the most important subjects when speak of sum of all human knowledge. To support contributors interested in the area over various language Wikipedias, we intend to form a user group. It also provides a platform to share the best practices between military historians, and various military related projects on Wikipedias. An initial discussion was has been done between the coordinators and members of WikiProject Military History on English Wikipedia. Now this discussion has been taken to Meta-Wiki. Contributors intrested in the area of military history are requested to share their feedback and give suggestions at Talk:Discussion to incubate a user group for Wikipedia Military Historians.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:46, 21 Disemba 2017 (UTC)
Editing News #1—2018
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode, which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and improving the visual diff tool. Their work board is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor, and improving the visual diff tool.
Recent changes
- The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
- The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges. [40]
- Wikitext syntax highlighting is available as a Beta Feature for both the 2017 wikitext editor and the 2010 wikitext editor. [41]
- The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be a bit tricky to set up. Your wiki can have this service. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.
Let's work together
- The team will talk about editing tools at an upcoming Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting.
- Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
- The
<references />
block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. You can request multi-column support for your wiki. [42] - If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
20:56, 2 Mas 2018 (UTC)
AdvancedSearch
Birgit Müller (WMDE) 14:54, 7 Me 2018 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2018)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to research and tools as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials on the Library Card platform:
- Rock's Backpages – Music articles and interviews from the 1950s onwards - 50 accounts
- Invaluable – Database of more than 50 million auctions and over 500,000 artists - 15 accounts
- Termsoup – Translation tool
Expansions
- Fold3 – Available content has more than doubled, now including new military collections from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
- Oxford University Press – The Scholarship collection now includes Electronic Enlightenment
- Alexander Street Press – Women and Social Movements Library now available
- Cambridge University Press – Orlando Collection now available
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Baylor University Press, Loeb Classical Library, Cairn, Gale and Bloomsbury.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:03, 30 Me 2018 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Notice of a proposal to CLOSE this Wikipedia: please read!
Please translate this to your community's local language. Thank you.
Hello. My name is Christian, and I am a user of the Simple English Wikipedia. I am writing to you today to notify you that I intend to propose that this Wikipedia version be closed due to human inactivity and lack of interest. I have reviewed your "recent changes" and find only one human edit on an actual article (not anti-vandalism work) in the last 30 days. There have been 27 edits in total in the last month, and despite your long existence, there are less than 1500 articles here.
It is clear that the long standing notice asking for help to revive this Wikipedia hasn't worked, and that you have no active community beyond visits from Stewards and the SWMT doing anti-vandal patrol. The proposal can be found here: meta:Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure of Tok_Pisin_Wikipedia_(1). Thank you for your time. DaneGeld (talk) 22:36, 5 Julai 2018 (UTC)
Global preferences are available
Global preferences are now available, you can set them by visiting your new global preferences page. Visit mediawiki.org for information on how to use them and leave feedback. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk)
19:20, 10 Julai 2018 (UTC)
New user group for editing sitewide CSS / JS
(Please help translate to your language)
Hi all!
To improve the security of our readers and editors, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css
and MediaWiki:Vector.js
which contain code that is executed in the browsers of users of the site.)
A new user group, interface-admin
, has been created.
Starting four weeks from now, only members of this group will be able edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css
or .js
that is either in the MediaWiki:
namespace or is another user's user subpage).
You can learn more about the motivation behind the change here.
Please add users who need to edit CSS/JS to the new group (this can be done the same way new administrators are added, by stewards or local bureaucrats). This is a dangerous permission; a malicious user or a hacker taking over the account of a careless interface-admin can abuse it in far worse ways than admin permissions could be abused. Please only assign it to users who need it, who are trusted by the community, and who follow common basic password and computer security practices (use strong passwords, do not reuse passwords, use two-factor authentication if possible, do not install software of questionable origin on your machine, use antivirus software if that's a standard thing in your environment).
Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 17:45, 30 Julai 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)
Editing of sitewide CSS/JS is only possible for interface administrators from now
(Please help translate to your language)
Hi all,
as announced previously, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed: only members of the interface-admin
(Interface administrators) group, and a few highly privileged global groups such as stewards, can edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage). This is done to improve the security of readers and editors of Wikimedia projects. More information is available at Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS. If you encounter any unexpected problems, please contact me or file a bug.
Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 12:40, 27 Ogas 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)
Read-only mode for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October
Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language
The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 12 September 2018. On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop when we switch. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
- You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday, 12 September and Wednesday, 10 October. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 13 September and Thursday 11 October).
- If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be code freezes for the weeks of 10 September 2018 and 8 October 2018. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Johan(WMF) (talk)
13:33, 6 Septemba 2018 (UTC)
Editing News #2—2018
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Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has wrapped up most of their work on the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual diff tool. The team has begun investigating the needs of editors who use mobile devices. Their work board is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are fixing bugs and improving mobile editing.
Recent changes
- The Editing team has published an initial report about mobile editing.
- The Editing team has begun a design study of visual editing on the mobile website. New editors have trouble doing basic tasks on a smartphone, such as adding links to Wikipedia articles. You can read the report.
- The Reading team is working on a separate mobile-based contributions project.
- The 2006 wikitext editor is no longer supported. If you used that toolbar, then you will no longer see any toolbar. You may choose another editing tool in your editing preferences, local gadgets, or beta features.
- The Editing team described the history and status of VisualEditor in this recorded public presentation (starting at 29 minutes, 30 seconds).
- The Language team released a new version of Content Translation (CX2) last month, on International Translation Day. It integrates the visual editor to support templates, tables, and images. It also produces better wikitext when the translated article is published. [43]
Let's work together
- The Editing team wants to improve visual editing on the mobile website. Please read their ideas and tell the team what you think would help editors who use the mobile site.
- The Community Wishlist Survey begins next week.
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!
14:17, 2 Novemba 2018 (UTC)
Change coming to how certain templates will appear on the mobile web
Change coming to how certain templates will appear on the mobile web
Please help translate to your language
Hello,
In a few weeks the Readers web team will be changing how some templates look on the mobile web site. We will make these templates more noticeable when viewing the article. We ask for your help in updating any templates that don't look correct.
What kind of templates? Specifically templates that notify readers and contributors about issues with the content of an article – the text and information in the article. Examples like Template:Unreferenced or Template:More citations needed. Right now these notifications are hidden behind a link under the title of an article. We will format templates like these (mostly those that use Template:Ambox or message box templates in general) to show a short summary under the page title. You can tap on the "Learn more" link to get more information.
For template editors we have some recommendations on how to make templates that are mobile-friendly and also further documentation on our work so far.
If you have questions about formatting templates for mobile, please leave a note on the project talk page or file a task in Phabricator and we will help you.
Thank you!
CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 13 Novemba 2018 (UTC)
Advanced Search
Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 11:03, 26 Novemba 2018 (UTC)
New Wikimedia password policy and requirements
Please help translate to your language
The Wikimedia Foundation security team is implementing a new password policy and requirements. You can learn more about the project on MediaWiki.org.
These new requirements will apply to new accounts and privileged accounts. New accounts will be required to create a password with a minimum length of 8 characters. Privileged accounts will be prompted to update their password to one that is at least 10 characters in length.
These changes are planned to be in effect on December 13th. If you think your work or tools will be affected by this change, please let us know on the talk page.
Thank you!
CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 6 Disemba 2018 (UTC)
Invitation from Wiki Loves Love 2019
Please help translate to your language
Love is an important subject for humanity and it is expressed in different cultures and regions in different ways across the world through different gestures, ceremonies, festivals and to document expression of this rich and beautiful emotion, we need your help so we can share and spread the depth of cultures that each region has, the best of how people of that region, celebrate love.
Wiki Loves Love (WLL) is an international photography competition of Wikimedia Commons with the subject love testimonials happening in the month of February.
The primary goal of the competition is to document love testimonials through human cultural diversity such as monuments, ceremonies, snapshot of tender gesture, and miscellaneous objects used as symbol of love; to illustrate articles in the worldwide free encyclopedia Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects.
The theme of 2019 iteration is Celebrations, Festivals, Ceremonies and rituals of love.
Sign up your affiliate or individually at Participants page.
To know more about the contest, check out our Commons Page and FAQs
There are several prizes to grab. Hope to see you spreading love this February with Wiki Loves Love!
Kind regards,
Imagine... the sum of all love!
--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:13, 27 Disemba 2018 (UTC)
FileExporter beta feature
A new beta feature will soon be released on all wikis: The FileExporter. It allows exports of files from a local wiki to Wikimedia Commons, including their file history and page history. Which files can be exported is defined by each wiki's community: Please check your wiki's configuration file if you want to use this feature.
The FileExporter has already been a beta feature on mediawiki.org, meta.wikimedia, deWP, faWP, arWP, koWP and on wikisource.org. After some functionality was added, it's now becoming a beta feature on all wikis. Deployment is planned for January 16. More information can be found on the project page.
As always, feedback is highly appreciated. If you want to test the FileExporter, please activate it in your user preferences. The best place for feedback is the central talk page. Thank you from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes project.
Johanna Strodt (WMDE) 09:41, 14 Janueri 2019 (UTC)
No editing for 30 minutes on 17 January
18:55, 16 Janueri 2019 (UTC)
Talk to us about talking
The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.
We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.
We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.
We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.
We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.
You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:
- First, sign up your group here.
- Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group. This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
- Then ask people what they think about communication processes. We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki. Please consider asking these five questions:
- When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
- What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
- What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
- What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
- What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
- Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group. Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.
You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.
Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.
You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.
Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you.
Trizek (WMF) 15:01, 21 Februeri 2019 (UTC)
New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2019)
Hello Wikimedians!
The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access, accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials on the Library Card platform:
- Kinige – Primarily Indian-language ebooks - 10 books per month
- Gale – Times Digital Archive collection added (covering 1785-2013)
- JSTOR – New applications now being taken again
Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Baylor University Press, Taylor & Francis, Cairn, Annual Reviews and Bloomsbury. You can request new partnerships on our Suggestions page.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 17:40, 13 Mas 2019 (UTC)
- You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).
- This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.
Read-only mode for up to 30 minutes on 11 April
10:56, 8 Epril 2019 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Medium-Term Plan feedback request
Please help translate to your language
Editing News #1—July 2019
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Welcome back to the Editing newsletter.
Since the last newsletter, the team has released two new features for the mobile visual editor and has started developing three more. All of this work is part of the team's goal to make editing on mobile web simpler.
Before talking about the team's recent releases, we have a question for you:
Are you willing to try a new way to add and change links?
If you are interested, we would value your input! You can try this new link tool in the mobile visual editor on a separate wiki.
Follow these instructions and share your experience:
Recent releases
The mobile visual editor is a simpler editing tool, for smartphones and tablets using the mobile site. The Editing team recently launched two new features to improve the mobile visual editor:
- Section editing
- The purpose is to help contributors focus on their edits.
- The team studied this with an A/B test. This test showed that contributors who could use section editing were 1% more likely to publish the edits they started than people with only full-page editing.
- Loading overlay
- The purpose is to smooth the transition between reading and editing.
Section editing and the new loading overlay are now available to everyone using the mobile visual editor.
New and active projects
This is a list of our most active projects. Watch these pages to learn about project updates and to share your input on new designs, prototypes and research findings.
- Edit cards: This is a clearer way to add and edit links, citations, images, templates, etc. in articles. You can try this feature now. Go here to see how: 📲 Try Edit Cards.
- Mobile toolbar refresh: This project will learn if contributors are more successful when the editing tools are easier to recognize.
- Mobile visual editor availability: This A/B test asks: Are newer contributors more successful if they use the mobile visual editor? We are collaborating with 20 Wikipedias to answer this question.
- Usability improvements: This project will make the mobile visual editor easier to use. The goal is to let contributors stay focused on editing and to feel more confident in the editing tools.
Looking ahead
- Wikimania: Several members of the Editing Team will be attending Wikimania in August 2019. They will lead a session about mobile editing in the Community Growth space. Talk to the team about how editing can be improved.
- Talk Pages: In the coming months, the Editing Team will begin improving talk pages and communication on the wikis.
Learning more
The VisualEditor on mobile is a good place to learn more about the projects we are working on. The team wants to talk with you about anything related to editing. If you have something to say or ask, please leave a message at Talk:VisualEditor on mobile.
18:32, 23 Julai 2019 (UTC)
Update on the consultation about office actions
Hello all,
Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation's Trust & Safety team announced a future consultation about partial and/or temporary office actions. We want to let you know that the draft version of this consultation has now been posted on Meta.
This is a draft. It is not intended to be the consultation itself, which will be posted on Meta likely in early September. Please do not treat this draft as a consultation. Instead, we ask your assistance in forming the final language for the consultation.
For that end, we would like your input over the next couple of weeks about what questions the consultation should ask about partial and temporary Foundation office action bans and how it should be formatted. Please post it on the draft talk page. Our goal is to provide space for the community to discuss all the aspects of these office actions that need to be discussed, and we want to ensure with your feedback that the consultation is presented in the best way to encourage frank and constructive conversation.
Please visit the consultation draft on Meta-wiki and leave your comments on the draft’s talk page about what the consultation should look like and what questions it should ask.
Thank you for your input! -- The Trust & Safety team 08:03, 16 Ogas 2019 (UTC)
New tools and IP masking
Hey everyone,
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to work on two things that affect how we patrol changes and handle vandalism and harassment. We want to make the tools that are used to handle bad edits better. We also want to get better privacy for unregistered users so their IP addresses are no longer shown to everyone in the world. We would not hide IP addresses until we have better tools for patrolling.
We have an idea of what tools could be working better and how a more limited access to IP addresses would change things, but we need to hear from more wikis. You can read more about the project on Meta and post comments and feedback. Now is when we need to hear from you to be able to give you better tools to handle vandalism, spam and harassment.
You can post in your language if you can't write in English.
Johan (WMF)14:18, 21 Ogas 2019 (UTC)
The consultation on partial and temporary Foundation bans just started
Hello,
In a recent statement, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees requested that staff hold a consultation to "re-evaluat[e] or add community input to the two new office action policy tools (temporary and partial Foundation bans)".
Accordingly, the Foundation's Trust & Safety team invites all Wikimedians to join this consultation and give their feedback from 30 September to 30 October.
How can you help?
- Suggest how partial and temporary Foundation bans should be used, if they should (eg: On all projects, or only on a subset);
- Give ideas about how partial and temporary Foundation bans should ideally implemented, if they should be; and/or
- Propose changes to the existing Office Actions policy on partial and temporary bans.
We offer our thanks in advance for your contributions, and we hope to get as much input as possible from community members during this consultation!
-- Kbrown (WMF) 17:14, 30 Septemba 2019 (UTC)
Feedback wanted on Desktop Improvements project
Please help translate to your language
Hello. The Readers Web team at the WMF will work on some improvements to the desktop interface over the next couple of years. The goal is to increase usability without removing any functionality. We have been inspired by changes made by volunteers, but that currently only exist as local gadgets and user scripts, prototypes, and volunteer-led skins. We would like to begin the process of bringing some of these changes into the default experience on all Wikimedia projects.
We are currently in the research stage of this project and are looking for ideas for improvements, as well as feedback on our current ideas and mockups. So far, we have performed interviews with community members at Wikimania. We have gathered lists of previous volunteer and WMF work in this a