Collaboration/Newsletter/Issues/2018/04

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Latest news from the Wikimedia Collaboration team, about Map improvements 2018, Notifications, Structured discussions and Edit Review Improvements. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.

What's new?

• Collaboration Team will release map internationalization this week for testing on testwiki. When it’s ready, we’ll post a note in the Updates section of the maps project page to let you know.
• Meanwhile, you might like to check out the update on the Map Improvements 2018 project page: Special Update on Map Internationalization. It includes a lot of information on the feature status, how it will work, how we imagine it might be useful, what the known limitations are, etc. We’re looking forward to getting your input on this challenging but important feature; the best place to leave your ideas and questions is on the project talk page.
• We told the English Wikipedia community to expect release of the mapframe feature, which creates embedded maps on a wiki page, by the end of the April. As of this writing, we are expecting release on Monday, April 30th.

Map improvements 2018 [More information]

Recent changes

• The team announced that we plan to to release mapframe to most Wikipedias that currently lack the feature. A lot of the tasks we've been working on for the maps project relate to our goal of making maps technology more stable and maintainable.
• Nine Wikipedias won't get mapframe at this time. These are wikis that use the strict version of Flagged Revisions, which is not compatible with mapframe.
• Two display bugs from the Kartographer Improvements Community Wishlist proposal have been fixed: show "hand" mouse icon on unclickable objects and reduce the clickable area around icons added to a map. [1][2]

Problems

• As map internationalization moves closer to release, we're seeing and addressing a number limitations to the feature, mostly having to do with the variability of multilingual label data in OpenStreetMap, the open-source mapping project that powers our maps. As one might expect, the number of labels that are available for which languages varies from location to location and language to language. We've also seen issues related to inconsistency in labeling. We're working on strategies to mitigate the impacts of these inconsistencies. E.g., we've a new parameter for mapframe: lang="xx" (where xx would be the language code). This will enable users to specify the language in which they want a given map to display, or, using the value lang="local", to revert to a non-internationalized map, should that be more advantageous for a particular place and language. Read more about it on the Map Improvements 2018 page, under Updates.

Edit Review Improvements [ More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

• Patrolled edits now have three states instead of two. Recent changes filters are updated to show unpatrolled, autopatrolled and manually patrolled edits. [3]
• Tags created by communities are sometimes in a language written in a different direction than the language chosen by the user. Those tags were displayed badly, this has been fixed. [4]
• The icon to access saved filters were missing. This has been fixed. [5]
• Multiple styling fixes have been made for the filters interface. [6]

Notifications [ More information • Help pages]

• Thank messages now allow gender on all messages on History pages. [7]

Structured discussions [ More information • Help pages]

Recent changes

• Numbered external link were not showing properly in Structured Discussion diffs. This has been fixed. [8]
• In Special:Preferences, the preference "Reload the watchlist automatically whenever a filter is changed (JavaScript required)" is now only visible for users who have opt-out the New Filters for the Watchlist. [9]

Future changes

• More styling options will be added to Structured discussions' toolbar. [10]
• Based on the community whishlist to have new ways to thank people, it is possible to thank people who have resolved or reopend a topic. [11]

Other projects

Miscellaneous

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