Tech/News/2020/03

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

You can no longer read Wikimedia wikis if your browser use very old TLS. This is because it is a security problem for everyone. It can lead to downgrade attacks. Since 9 December you just see a warning. Soon the browser will not connect to the wikis at all. Most are users on Android systems older than 4.4. You can read the browser recommendations. [1]
Special:LinkSearch has been moved from the "Redirecting special pages" section on Special:SpecialPages to the "Lists of pages" section. [2]

Changes later this week

Wikis can protect pages so that only some users can edit them. The standard protection levels are Allow only autoconfirmed users and Allow only administrators. If your wiki use more protection levels the technical name might be renamed for standardisation. This doesn't affect what users see. [3]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 January. It will be on all wikis from 16 January (calendar).

Future changes

Deepcat and Catgraph will stop working. This will happen at the end of January. This is because you can now use the normal search function instead. [4]
You can use <ref follow="…"> to merge footnotes that follow each other. It is meant to be used for digitised books on Wikisource. If the order of the footnotes is wrong no error was shown but the bad <ref> was shown outside the <references /> list. This will change and you will see an error message instead. [5]

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