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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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2014, week 17 (Monday 21 April 2014)

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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.

Tech News updates

• You can now subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed to read Tech News in your news aggregator. The newsletter will now also show on the English Planet Wikimedia every Monday. [1]
• We are looking for contributors to help write a new issue every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf1) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 22, and all Wikipedias on April 24 (calendar).
• CirrusSearch was enabled as a beta feature on 27 new wikis on April 18. [2] [3]
• Problems with various fonts in SVG files were fixed last week. Files that use DejaVu Sans Condensed, DejaVu Serif Condensed, DejaVu Sans Light, Kochi Gothic and Kochi Mincho fonts now show correctly. [4] [5] [6] [7]
• The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [8]
• You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [9]

VisualEditor news

• If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [10] [11]
• VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [12] [13]
• You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [14] [15] [16]

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Czech (cs), Estonian (et), Finnish (fi), Hebrew (he), Polish (pl), Romanian (ro), Slovak (sk), Thai (th) and Vietnamese (vi) Wikipedias on April 24. Feedback is welcome. [17]
• Edits by anonymous users will now be marked with a new CSS class (mw-anonuserlink). This way, you can easily make those edits use a different color, font or background. [18] [19]
• The user preference to remember login will soon be removed from all wikis. The edit review preferences will be moved to the recent changes tab, and the preference for the WikiLove tool will be moved to the editing tab. [20] [21] [22] [23]
• You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [24] [25]
• You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [26] [27]
• It is now proposed to replace Bugzilla, Gerrit and other tools by a single tool called Phabricator. You can test Phabricator and add your opinion on MediaWiki.org. [28]
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on April 22 at 03:30 AM UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [29]

Problems

• For about 40 minutes on April 17, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.
• There is a problem with the rendering of formulas with MathJax. If you enabled MathJax in your preferences, you might need to turn it off and on again. [30]

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