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VisualEditor News #1—2015[edit]

VisualEditor

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[edit]

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 Save page 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[edit]

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[edit]

— Elitre (WMF)

18:30, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Advice on How to attract users to my wiki[edit]

Can someone point me to some sources of advice on hw to attract users to my wiki?

Thanks,

Andrew —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.141.55.245 (talk) 09:19, 11 February 2015‎

This is page is for discussing Meta-Wiki. --Glaisher (talk) 16:03, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
Okay. Where is the right page?. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.141.55.245 (talk)
Somewhere on MediaWiki.org, I believe. Doing a Google search might also help. --Glaisher (talk) 16:20, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
mediawikiwiki: is mostly about the MediaWiki software, extensions, manual, help pages, etc., not marketing. Better chances for info about marketing might be available on Wikia community central, ignoring tips specific for wikias. The Google Webmaster Tools are a MUST even if you are not a Google friend since they have been taken over by DoubleClick—only officially it was the other way around. –Be..anyone (talk) 20:50, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Global user pages and userbox i18n[edit]

It seems that Global User Pages have just been enabled, so all of the userpages here on Meta are now heavily visible across Wikimedia sites. Perhaps now might be a good time to start setting up localization for the numerous userboxes (and other userpage templates, if there are any) on this wiki. Any translation administrators around who want to tackle this? --Yair rand (talk) 07:22, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

It would also be good if we could unify their styling - especially the size. The problem is readily apparent on User:Mike Peel, for example. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:17, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
A systematic migration/copying of common templates used on user pages (including user boxes) from the various wikis to meta might also be a good thing to consider - that's currently the main thing that's holding me back from merging all of my user pages to my meta user page. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:28, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
I've converted {{User ORCID}}, but don't know how to do {{Commonscat}}. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:25, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
I did Template:User admin / Template:User admin/translatable, not sure if it's right the right way to do it though. PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:53, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
{{User ORCID}} is now better, but still completely out of line in Andy's ad hoc table (babel box over user box). It works for {{User Monobook}} on my page, because I can just add it to the babel box, but {{User ORCID|0123-4567-7654-3210}} has a parameter, the table is necessary. An align="right" doesn't help—it's also deprecated, but nice would beat valid here.Face-smile.svg –Be..anyone (talk) 04:49, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Or is it the Babel template which is out-of-line? The ORCID template now uses {{Userbox}}, which I would expect to be fairly standard. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:44, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
On wikis other than Meta, Babel box styles are defined by CSS built into the Babel extension, which means there isn't anything we can do to change them. Instead, perhaps we should be changing other userboxes to match. (For example, we could have {{Userbox}} float to the right.) --Yair rand (talk) 13:01, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Administrators of Wikimedia projects - obsolete system of pages[edit]

Administrators of Wikimedia projects and its many subpages are horribly out of date, for example the wikisources subpage has been updated since 2008 and even on the wikipedia subpage, few of the wikipedias with less than 50 admins have been updated since 2011. I updated la.ws and added mul.ws (wikisource.org, sometimes known as oldwikisource, though that name is not liked by the locals) and they would have appeared to be the fourth and first largest wikisources, respectively, had I not changed the column headings and used active user data (which means all the other data is now wrong, in addition to being outdated. As it is, the polish wikisource appears to be the second largest wikisource because it was updated in 2014, much more recently than the larger wikisources. Closed projects are included on the list with no indication of their status (because no one has updated the whole page since before they closed).

I didn't even bother to look at the pages for wikiversities, wikinews, wikibooks, etc.

The "By languages" links only list 28 languages and, strangely, english isn't among them. Creating the missing languages would appear to be no easy task.

I see two options:
1) delete the entire system of pages, or
2) find someone to redesign the pages and create a bot to populate them, including creating the missing languages

I can only think of a handful of people with the skill to do the latter and I doubt any have the time, let alone the interest. I'm not convinced that these are at all useful pages in 2015.

Note that meta:Administrators and all of its language subpages, link to these pages as a source of lists of administrators on other (non-meta) projects.

I'm putting this here in case anyone has any better ideas, though I realize a deletion discussion may be the best course of action.

Thoughts? --Doug.(talk • contribs) 04:26, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I see no benefit to keeping them myself. Seems like trivia, and every project has automatic lists anyway. Ajraddatz (talk) 04:46, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Unless someone is interested in having a bot update this (probably not), the best solution is probably to redirect back to Meta:Administrators and replace the link there with a link to Special:ListAdmins, noting that each wiki supports it. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 18:49, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
Some subpages are kept relatively up to date and have a real value (I can think of Italian administrators), so I don't see a benefit in deletion. --Nemo 18:35, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
Nemo, can you illuminate in what way they have value? The Italian page (which has a simple list of admins, much less than was attempted on some other pages) was edited once (5 times but all on 1 day) in 2014, that's just the it.wp, it.ws hasn't been updated since 2012 and lists a blocked admin-bot and two admins (one also a crat) who were desysopped for inactivity, one in 2012. The Italian entry on the wikisource list hasn't been updated since 2008. How are these more useful than simply going to s:it:Speciale:Utenti/sysop? To whom is it useful? Even if the Italian page is valuable (and it could probably easily be updated by a bot, others would be far more complicated), why should we keep the others? Is there a place that the Italian list could be moved to preserve it, if it's truly useful?--Doug.(talk • contribs) 03:21, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
No, Meta is the place. Having a single place to look at instead of a dozen is so clearly better than I don't know what to add. --Nemo 08:36, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
OK, I understand your position, I don't understand why it's of value. Still, even if it's of value when it's up-to-date, what solution can you suggest for bringing it up-to-date, the vast majority is 3-7 years old! I'm not about to update it all, even if I had the bot skills, I wouldn't take the time. Just leaving a bunch of stale data because one project, it.wp, has theirs up-to-date, is not intuitive to me. (in fairness, it does look like the German projects are keeping all of their data up-to-date.) Should we delete the ones that are out of date or just leave them stale forever.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 16:10, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
These are statistical pages which could be of interest to people who want to know overall numbers. However it seems more like a task suited to Wikidata, where there is a burgeoning but incomplete list of pages about admins in general. From what I can see, quite a few of those pages have information about how many admins the project has, how to contact them, how to become one etc. Green Giant (talk) 20:38, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
Good call Green Giant, wikidata does make a lot more sense for this information and we could easily simply link to that from the current meta:Administrators and redirect all the current pages there.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 21:00, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Template:Authority control[edit]

Please can someone with the necessary rights import Commons:Template:Authority control together with all of its sub-templates, to this wiki? It will be useful on global user pages. The current redirect will need to be overwritten. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:36, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata and enwiki also have authority control templates. Apparently admins, bureaucrats, and importers have import rights here, there is a request page. Are copy+paste+link to source not good enough for your purposes? –Be..anyone (talk) 11:35, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
The Wikidata template is itself an import from Commons. en.Wikipedia's is far more complex, because its primary use is on articles, not user pages. Copy'n'paste would loose attribution. I'll post a request at the syspop page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:59, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Friendly spaces and the Inspire Campaign[edit]

Hello Metapedians. As some of you are aware, the WMF Community Resources team is running the Inspire Campaign (background) in March. This campaign aims to encourage, foster, and fund new ideas and approaches to the gender disparity problem on the projects.

Discussions on the projects involving gender have a history of quickly becoming divisive and heated. This is not conducive to having productive conversations about solutions. In order to mitigate some of the worst types of discussions, the Inspire team has developed a set of expectations for participants in the IdeaLab pages.

The Inspire campaign has the potential to be an important step in making the projects a more diverse and inclusive place. However, without the support of the community, these expectations are not enforceable. Feedback on the page is welcome, and, if possible, help would be appreciated to watch the IdeaLab pages for incidents of harassment and disruption. By engaging on the appropriate discussions about the Inspire campaign and modeling the positive behaviors that are laid out there, we can help educate and convince other users to consider the manner of their interactions, and whether it meets those standards. There is going to be some interesting proposals, and, hopefully, some lively, collaborative, and productive conversations about how our projects can meet this challenge. Regards, PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:36, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

  • As we're heading into the weekend in North America, staff will be reviewing any feedback, but probably not responding until Monday morning :) PEarley (WMF) (talk) 02:36, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
This is amazing! If only Wikipedia had (and enforced) these rules. harej (talk) 02:48, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
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