Tech/News/2013/29

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

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

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf10) was added to test wikis on July 11. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 15, and on all Wikipedias on July 18. [1]
The Disambiguator extension was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis on July 9 (bug #50174). To use it, add the __DISAMBIG__ code to disambiguation templates (see example). [2]
The Universal Language Selector was added to all remaining wikis on July 9, finishing the process of replacing the Narayam and WebFonts extensions. [3]
The CommonsDelinker bot is now on-line and operating again, after a password problem was fixed (bug #51016).
VisualEditor news:
- According to the schedule, VisualEditor will be available to all users on the English Wikipedia on July 15.
- Users should add TemplateData to templates to prepare for VisualEditor. A tutorial is available.
- Parameters marked as "required" in TemplateData are now auto-added when you add a template (bug #50747).
- Warnings are now displayed in VisualEditor when users edit pages that are protected or have edit notices (bug #50415).
- Many other bugs have been fixed in VisualEditor during the past two weeks.
The Wikimedia technical report for June has been published, with a summary that can be translated.

Future software changes

A new version of the Single User Login system for global accounts will be enabled on July 17. Users will now automatically go back to the previous page instead of seeing the "Login success" page with logos. [4]
The software that resizes images on all wikis will change on July 18. Resizing of big images will be faster and more reliable, and the resolution limit for GIF, PNG and TIFF files (currently set at 50 megapixels) will be removed. [5]
Edit tags (mostly used by AbuseFilter) will now also be on diff pages. They include a link to Special:Tags before the edit summary. Wikis that use links in tag messages should remove them. [6] [7]
Global edit filters are currently in testing and will be added to wikis later. [8]
Wikivoyage wikis will start to use Wikidata for interwiki links on July 22. [9]
A new image gallery design has been proposed by Brian Wolff; comments and feedback are welcome.
An IRC discussion about Bugzilla is planned for July 16, at 16:00 (UTC) on the IRC channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [10]

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