Tech/News/2013/23

The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.

Translate frequently used templates

Recent software changes: (Not all changes will affect you.)

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf5) was added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 29. It will be enabled on the English Wikipedia on June 3, and on all other Wikipedias on June 5. [1]
The Tamil Wikipedia shared a Lua module they created to automate their Main Page. [2]
There is now a test wiki to test new features in right-to-left languages. [3]
The Thanks feature was added to the English Wikipedia; users can now thank others for individual edits. [4]
The new interface for account creation and log-in is now the default on 30 wikis, including the English Wikipedia, Commons, Meta, and Wikidata. The feature will be added to all wikis after June 5. Users can temporarily use the old look by adding ?useNew=0 to the web address. [5]
Videos are now played in pop-up windows if their size on the page is smaller than 200 pixels (800 pixels on the English Wikipedia). [6]
Opening your talk page now marks notifications as read, for wikis using the Notifications feature. (bug 47912) [7].
All autoconfirmed users can now reset transcoding of video files; previously only administrators could do this. [8]
The Nearby feature allows people who use mobile devices to see Wikipedia articles about objects and places around them. [9]

Future software changes

The PostEdit feature is now part of MediaWiki, and will work on all wikis. (bug 48726) [10]
The Narayam and WebFonts extensions will be replaced by the Universal Language Selector extension. [11]
MediaWiki will now be updated every week, starting on June 6. Thanks to this, bugs will be fixed and features will be added faster than they are now. [12]

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