Tech/News/2014/16
The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe and contribute.
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
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Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
- MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome. [1] [2] [3]
- Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [4] [5]
VisualEditor news
- You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click. [6]
- The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
- The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen. [7] [8]
Future software changes
- The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17. [9] [10]
- Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot). [11]
- You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [12] [13] [14] [15]
- Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list. [16]
- You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [17] [18]
- The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [19] [20]
- An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [21]
Problems
- Wikimedia Foundation servers were updated after a security bug called Heartbleed was discovered last week. You should change your password as an extra precaution. [22]
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