Tech/News/2015/37

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2015, week 37 (Monday 07 September 2015)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users. [1]
A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support. [2]
You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version. [3]

Problems

There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed. [4]
The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed. [5][6]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters. [7]
The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page. [8][9]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours. [10]
Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places. [11][12]

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