Tech/News

Monitoring and understanding all the technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement is a difficult and time-consuming task.
By subscribing to Tech News, you can help monitor recent software changes likely to impact Wikimedians, and receive a weekly summary on your talk page, without technical jargon.

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Write and simplify

Do add material to Tech News! Any additions are always very welcome.

Add information, even if you are not sure it's vital or important. It is better to remove something later than to miss information that should have been included.

Keep in mind while editing:

Use simple, non-technical language;
Use short, common words and the active voice for verbs;
Use <abbr> for abbreviations and acronyms;
Keep entries short (ideally no longer than two short sentences);
Link to details, ideally translatable content on a wiki, with the most important link first
Use ([[File:Octicons-sync.svg|12px|link=|class=skin-invert]]) for items that are in most issues of the newsletter (new MediaWiki version, some meetings) and ([[File:Octicons-tools.svg|15px|link=|class=skin-invert]]) for advanced items aimed at technical editors.

Monitor changes

Check the following sources of information. Choose those you understand and are comfortable with: if you understand code, you can look at the commits, for example, while summarizing mailing list discussions may be more appropriate for someone who doesn't code:

The #user-notice tag in Phabricator;
Recent wikitech-ambassadors messages;
Recent wikitech-l threads;
Upcoming deployments;
Wikimedia Foundation Tech Blog.

Select information

From those sources, select what you think is relevant:

for Wikimedians without specialized technical knowledge, who may otherwise not learn about technical changes that may affect them;
for people who relay these news to their fellow editors, like village pumps or noticeboards.

Add material to the next summary.

Any contribution is useful, even just adding a link. Other contributors can help write or simplify a longer description later.

There are more ways to add information to Tech News.

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The next issue is scheduled for publication on 2025-04-28.

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Translate and localize

All weekly summaries are translatable. If you can write in more than one language, please consider translating summaries, for the benefit of your fellow editors. The next week issue will be ready for translation on Friday, end of day UTC.

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