Tech/News/2014/04

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

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [1]
As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [2] [3]
You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [4]
You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [5]

VisualEditor news

In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [6]
You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [7]
When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [8]
When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [9] [10]
The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [11]
Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [12]

Problems

There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [13]
There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [14]
On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [15]

Future software changes

If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [16] [17]
You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [18]
You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [19]
You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [20] [21]

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