Tech/News/2015/12

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

Recent changes

The servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [1]
You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [2]
It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [3] [4]

Problems

Wikis were broken for a few minutes on Thursday due to a code error.

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 18 (calendar).
A puzzle piece icon () now shows hidden templates in VisualEditor. You can edit the template by clicking the icon. For example, you can now edit anchor templates. [5] [6]
You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [7] [8]

Meetings

You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 18 at 23:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The list of bad user names on your wiki will no longer work. The global list will replace it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [9] [10]
You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [11]
The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [12]

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