User talk:Auric/Archive 3

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Auric, for the period August 2013 to April 2015.
Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

There is a mop reserved in your name

You are a remarkably exemplar editor.
You would be a good administrator in my opinion, and you are qualified!
You personify an Administrator without tools, and have gained my support; already!

So, what do you think? Would you like to become an admin? buff bills 7701 21:33, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Sure!--Auric talk 23:57, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Buffbills7701 would like to nominate you to become an administrator. Please visit Wikipedia:Requests for adminship to see what this process entails, and then contact Buffbills7701 to accept or decline the nomination. A page has been created for your nomination at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Auric. If you accept the nomination, you must state and sign your acceptance. You may also choose to make a statement and/or answer the optional questions to supplement the information your nominator has given. Once you are satisfied with the page, you may post your nomination for discussion, or request that your nominator do so.

Any chance I can persuade you to withdraw while you're ahead? The pile-on opposers are starting to tank the RfA (~~33%~~ 34% support rate at the time of writing). To me, the logical choice at this point would be to withdraw while you're still ahead, and try again in due time. Though we haven't had much interaction, I think you're a good editor from what I've seen, as I've scrounged through your contributions/interactions. Signalizing (talk) 21:40, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Correcting my stats. Signalizing (talk) 21:42, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I struck out my acceptance. Sorry I didn't see your message until just now. --Auric talk 02:10, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Your RfA

Hey Auric. I have taken care of closing your RfA. I am sad you didn't pass, and I wish you luck if you ever run again. Cheers! — ΛΧΣ²¹ 02:15, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Please consider me as one who wishes you the best as well. I do believe if you want the sysop user right you can become a successful candidate on your next run; but it will be because of the things you have learned from this run and the things you will learn prior to your next. RfA is extremely unforgiving to a candidate who enters the process unprepared. I say this having made that mistake and learning the hard lesson.
The largest irony regarding the process overall is that after you truly learn the ins and outs of adminship it is entirely possible that you may conclude it isn't even an endeavor that you care to pursue. One thing that is entirely clear is that you have improved this encyclopedia through your benefaction; and I thank you for that indeed. :) John Cline (talk) 03:56, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) When reviewing what I wanted to post here before pressing 'save' I saw that John Cline has already written almost exactly word for word what I had drafted. Check out the message I have left on Buffbills talk page and follow the important link in it and if you ever need any advice, don't hesitate to ask. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:10, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Close contributor

Here Talk:Paoli Dam I am inclined to remove that particular tag, since the editor has no significant edit in the article, and the three edits they made (attempt to update the pic) has been reverted. So, there the editor has no content. But, the other editor has some content who claims to be friend or well-wisher or mentor etc of the subject. --Tito☸Dutta 03:45, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Damon Matthew Wise

Thank you for joining in to clean up this article. I believe there is sufficient detail hidden inside it to pass WP:GNG, but it is well concealed. Any pruning you can do will help us find it. Fiddle Faddle 21:57, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

Fornication

It was a complete accident. What happened, is that I tried to remove a country that did not exist, and I tried to remove a reference that was not in properly. However, I messed up, and it went wrong. It is all fixed now, by you, so no one needs to worry. Also, thanks so much for the edit, you did it better than I ever could! One Of Seven Billion (talk) 20:05, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome.--Auric talk 22:19, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for 21 August 2013

Did you know? Parsoid is a tool that translates between the raw wikitext that Wikipedia articles are stored in, and the HTML/RDFa that VisualEditor uses on your screen. If you see chess pawn (♙) or snowman (☃) icons in an article, it usually means that Parsoid has encountered something confusing in the wikitext markup. Please report these problems to Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Both VisualEditor and MediaWiki were upgraded recently. For VisualEditor, this is the long-awaited post-Wikimania update with many bug fixes and enhancements. Work also continues on speed at opening and during use, as well as on the bugs reported here and at other Wikipedias. The full report is at Mediawiki.

References are displaying properly, even when nested (T52749) or in image captions (T2000. Reference lists are now always fully populated with references (bug 50094). Firefox users can insert an existing reference in the first paragraph (T54159). Opera users no longer see corruption of categories when a reference was added (bug 50385).

Stray spaces are being stripped from the start of paragraphs to end one of the common <nowiki> problems (T53462). We also fixed a round-tripping bug that caused desirable whitespace in templates (used to make templates more legible, e.g., by putting each parameter in an infobox on a separate line) to get corrupted (bug 51150).

Wikilink handling was improved. Users are not allowed to create internal links to invalid titles (titles that are actually impossible due to limits on acceptable character combinations in titles, not redlinks) (T35094). You can extend wikilinks, but it won't do so over a wordbreak (like a space) (bugs 49931 and 51463).

A handful of fixes to the user interface were made. The toolbar doesn't float over personal tools after opening a dialog or the inspector (T54441). Toolbars were also re-written to be collapsible/expandable, with room for more icons. Buttons in dialogs can now be activated using the Tab ↹ and ⇧ Shift+Tab ↹ key commands (bug 50047). This saves time for editors, because you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard to click a button. We fixed a handful of bugs that affected only certain articles or certain browsers, including toolbar buttons in Firefox (bug 51986) and dialog panels that didn't always scroll correctly (bug 51739). Bugs with undo/redo getting confused have been fixed (T54113).

Images, in addition to getting references displaying correctly, also saw improvements with a set-empty |link= parameter no longer corrupted (51963). We corrected thumbnail images' display so that they look don't wrong in some contexts (bug 51995). Inserted images no longer explicitly set their alignment, but instead inherit the default position in compliance with the Manual of Style (bug 51851).

More edit notices, warnings, and metadata like information about Pending Changes on an article now appear as appropriate (bug 49699). When new articles are created, users are now shown the <newarticletext> message (bug 51459). VisualEditor now handles templates that set "meta" items (like a category) and nothing else better (bug 51322). If the database is locked when a user tries to save with VisualEditor, they now get a message telling them as such and an opportunity to try again, rather than a silent failure (bug 51636).

When you save the page, having the default preference set to "mark all my edits as minor by default" no longer overrides the setting in the save dialog (bug 51515). If you open VisualEditor from a section edit link, the section's title will be pre-filled in in the edit summary box when you go to save it (bug 50872). The size of the save dialog box in the Monobook skin has been fixed (bug 50058). Also, wikipage content handlers like sortable tables are re-run automatically after saving (T53565).

A very early version of the mathematics equation editor is now available for testing on mw:Mediawiki. If you would like to help improve the user interface for math editor, please test out the extension at mw:Mediawiki:Sandbox and leave your comments directly at the discussion page for the Math Node User Interface at Mediawiki. You should be able to use your regular username and password should to login to Mediawiki.

For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 17:32, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for editing my page Marc Paskin. from lovecherry

VisualEditor newsletter for September 5

Did you know?

You can search for images directly in VisualEditor. Click the media icon, which looks like this:

Then type a few keywords into the search box. VisualEditor will search Commons for images or other files whose titles or descriptions contain those words, and will display thumbnail pictures of them for your review. Click one time on the image you want to insert in the article.

For more details, read VisualEditor's user guide.

This Thursday's VisualEditor update was mostly about stability and performance improvements, and some preparatory work for major planned improvements, along with bug fixes for non-English language support and right-to-left text. Everything that the English Wikipedia received today has been running on Mediawiki for a week already.

Officially, the problem with the link inspector not linking to a specific section on a page (bug 53219) was fixed in this release, although that critical patch actually appeared here earlier.

A number of bugs related to copy-and-paste functionality were fixed (48604, bug 50043, bug 53362, bug 51538, among others). Full rich copy-and-paste from external sources into VisualEditor is expected "soon".

In other fixes, you can no longer add empty ref tags (<ref/>) (bug 53345). Selecting both an image and some text, and then trying to add a link, previously deleted the selected image and the text. This was fixed in bug 50127. There was another problem related to using arrow keys to move the cursor next to an inline image that was fixed (bug 53507).

Looking ahead: The next planned upgrade is scheduled for next Thursday, and you should expect to find a redesigned toolbar with drop-down menus that include room for references, templates, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, and code formatting. There will also be keyboard shortcuts for setting the format (paragraph vs section headings).

If you are active at other Wikipedias, the next group of Wikipedias to have VisualEditor offered to all users is being determined at this time. Generally speaking, languages that depend on the input method editor are not going to receive VisualEditor this month. The current target date is Tuesday, September 24 for logged-in users only. You can help with translating the documentation. In several cases, most of the translation is already done, and it only needs to be copied over to the relevant Wikipedia. If you are interested in finding out whether a particular Wikipedia is currently on the list, you can leave a message for me at my talk page.

Inappropriate images

I saw your notice at User talk:184.97.2.11. The user seems to be merrily inserting this kind of thing all over the place (contributions). I've reverted a few that are within my usual sphere, but because of the one you noticed, I wondered whether you'd be interested in following up on any of the others, or thought this behavior might merit a notice at ANI or AIV. All the images are of sex acts or male genitals, are formatted incorrectly (they're typically inserted into the caption of an existing image on the page), and lack captions. They're not completely irrelevant, I s'pose, but seem pretty capriciously chosen. Frankly, I'm not in the mood to deal with it, but thought it would be good to have another set of eyes on the user's activities. Cynwolfe (talk) 01:25, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for September 19, 2013

Did you know?

You can edit a page's categories in VisualEditor. Click the "Page settings" button (next to Cancel/Save) in the toolbar to open the category tool. It will show you a list of the current categories for that page.

To add a category, type the name of the category you want to add in the search field. To remove an existing category, click on the category in the list and then, in the dialog that opens, click on the "Remove" icon (trash can). "Options" will allow you to set a default sorting key.

For more details, read VisualEditor's user guide.

VisualEditor has been updated twice in the last two weeks. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week.

As announced, the toolbar was redesigned to be simpler, shorter, and to have the ability to have drop-down groups with descriptions. What you see now is the initial configuration and is expected to change in response to feedback from the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias. The controls to add  (underline),  (subscript), and  (superscript), <s> (strikethrough) and <code> (computer code/monospace font) annotations to text are available to all users in the drop-down menu. At the moment, all but the most basic tools have been moved into a single drop-down menu, including the tools for inserting media, references, reference lists, and templates. The current location of all of the items in the toolbar is temporary, and your opinions about the best order are needed! Please offer suggestions at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Toolbar.

In an eagerly anticipated upgrade to the reference dialog, newly added references or reference groups no longer need the page to be saved before they can be re-used (bugs 51689 and 52000). The 'Use existing reference' button is now disabled on pages which don't yet have any references (bug 51848). The template parameter filter in the transclusion dialog now searches both parameter name and label (bug 51670).

In response to several requests, there are some new keyboard shortcuts. You can now set the block/paragraph formatting from the keyboard: Ctrl+0 sets a block as a regular paragraph; Ctrl+1 up to Ctrl+6 sets it as a Heading 1 ("Page title") to Heading 6 ("Sub-heading 4"); Ctrl+7 sets it as pre-formatted (bug 33512). Ctrl+2, which creates level 2 section headings, may be the most useful.

Some improvements were made to capitalization for links, so typing in "iPhone" will offer a link to "iPhone" as well as "IPhone" (bug 50452).

Copying and pasting within the same document should work better as of today's update, as should copying from VisualEditor into a third-party application (bug 53364, bug 52271, bug 52460). Work on copying and pasting between VisualEditor instances (for example, between two articles) and retaining formatting when copying from an external source into VisualEditor is progressing.

Major improvements to editing with input method editors (IMEs; mostly used for Indic and East Asian languages) are being deployed today. This is a complex change, so it may produce unexpected errors. On a related point, the names of languages listed in the "languages" (langlinks) panel in the Page settings dialog now display as RTL when appropriate (bug 53503).

Looking ahead: The help/'beta' menu will soon expose the build number next to the "Leave feedback" link, so users can give more specific reports about issues they encounter (bug 53050). This change will make it easier for developers to identify any cacheing issues, once it starts reporting the build number (currently, it says "Version false"). Also, inserting a link, reference or media file will put the cursor after the new content again (bug 53560). Next week’s update will likely improve how dropdowns and other selection menus behave when they do not fit on the screen, with things scrolling so the selected item is always in view.

If you are active at other Wikipedias, the next group of Wikipedias to have VisualEditor offered to all users is being finalized. About two dozen Wikipedias are on the list for Tuesday, September 24 for logged-in users only, and on Monday, September 30 for unregistered editors. You can help with translating the documentation. In several cases, most of the translation is already done, and it only needs to be copied over to the relevant Wikipedia. If you are interested in finding out whether a particular Wikipedia is currently on the list, you can leave a message for me at my talk page.

Thanks for finding that news article for the Angikuni Lake article.

Thank you for finding a version of the 1930 news article. Brian Dunning had asked in the Skeptoid episode about the lake for someone to locate a copy of the article as he suspected it was made up by the author of the Fate Magazine article.

I'm planning to overhaul the 'Urban Myth' section of the article and having a copy of what appears to be the original version of the story will be a great help.Graham1973 (talk) 03:50, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

You're very welcome.--Auric talk 16:27, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Known hacks

Hello, Auric, what to you mean with known hacks as a comment to https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=.me&diff=next&oldid=563259923 this edit? De.vos.katja (talk) 06:28, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

"Known hacks" is the header title. It is not a comment by me.--Auric talk 13:48, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

templates

Hi. Thanks for the suggestion you gave me regarding the template messages. I've been familiar with them for a while, but I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for an unregistered user to use them. I'm assuming now that it is, but I'm honestly not sure exactly how to place them on a talk page. Do you just copy-and-paste the templates with these "{ }" characters, or something like that? I hate to make myself look so stupid, but I thought I'd just ask anyway. Thanks! 108.95.130.150 (talk) 21:33, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

I've yet to see anything forbidding unregistered users from using the warning templates. I do advise you to read all the documentation you can, such as Template:Uw-vandalism1. The uw-template system is fairly complex, and as an unregistered user, some will see your use of these as malicious, so caution is certainly called for. Good luck and keep up the good work! --Auric talk 22:22, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Jihad Al Nikah

Jihad Al Nikah is a Sunni invention of a very known Sunni scholar; Muhammad Al Arefe. The Jihadist rebels in Syria are Sunni Muslims against Shia government. There is a huge belief differences between Sunnis and Shias. Shias has always been a target of Sunnis, whether it be on political or non-political basis. Tunisia, a country is also a Sunni majority country. It is better to write Man & Woman of Jihad Al Nikah from Sunni sect, so that it is not confused with Shia sect, hence I added Sunni woman and Sunni fighters against the Shia government.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.246.79.67 (talk • contribs) 07:47, October 16, 2013‎

That would have been fine, except you also added this to the title of a source. Please be more careful next time.--Auric talk 10:53, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter on 16 October 2013

Did you know?

You can create and edit multi-level lists in VisualEditor. The first two icons let you set or remove list formatting.

The last two are used to increase or decrease the indentation level. This can also be done from the keyboard, by using Tab ↹ to indent the list and ⇧ Shift+Tab ↹ to outdent it.

For more information, read Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.

VisualEditor is still being updated every Thursday. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week. If you haven't done so already, you can turn on VisualEditor by going to your preferences and choosing the item, "MediaWiki:Visualeditor-preference-enable".

The reference dialog for all Wikipedias, especially the way it handles citation templates, is being redesigned. Please offer suggestions and opinions at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. (Use your Wikipedia username/password to login there.) You can also drag and drop references (select the reference, then hover over the selected item until your cursor turns into the drag-and-drop tool). This also works for some templates, images, and other page elements (but not yet for text or floated items). References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459).

There were a number of miscellaneous fixes made: Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Several improvements have been made to scrollable windows, panels, and menus when they don't fit on the screen or when the selected item moves off-screen. Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a chess pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog once again allows you to remove categories (bug 54727). There have been some problems with deployment scripts, including one that resulted in VisualEditor being broken for an hour or two at all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, snowmen characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

Looking ahead: Development work right now is on rich copy-and-paste abilities, quicker addition of citation templates in references, setting media items' options (such as being able to put images on the left), switching into wikitext mode, and simplifying the toolbar. A significant amount of work is being done on other languages during this month. If you speak a language other than English, you can help with translating the documentation.

Schlock Mercenary

I have restored the entry for Schlock Mercenary. In regards to the two points. WP:Spoiler indicates that wikipedia does not take whether something is a spoiler into account. And since the Schlock Mercenary App which displays strips three days ahead is a verifiable source even though it requires payment.Naraht (talk) 18:05, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I see. I didn't notice anything about future strips being available on the app, but I'll take your word for it.--Auric talk 18:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry I was going to add a link, but got distracted, http://www.schlockapp.com/ , feature #3.Naraht (talk) 18:17, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. Also, on reflection, I think I should have mentioned WP:FUTURE instead, since it'll be 3 days till the information can be confirmed.--Auric talk 18:23, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Three days until someone at random can verify it, but as long as anyone who can pay can see the infomration, it is a valid reference. We've dealt with paywalls for references before.Naraht (talk) 04:27, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Sure, no problem.--Auric talk 11:56, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Vahram Zaryan

Oops, sorry, my bad; thanks for [1] 88.104.25.210 (talk) 02:40, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

P. Kalyanasundaram

The article was copy-pasted from the first source, there's no way to save the fruit of a poisoned tree. If you wanted to start from scratch, you should be aware of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/P. Kalyanasundaram. Frankly, the outcome there seems pretty dubious, but I'd recommend taking it to WP:DRV before any recreation anyhow. Wily D 16:19, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree completely, but I still like to copyedit such articles, so that an article can be judged on content and not formatting (or lack thereof).--Auric talk 21:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

If you start with a copyright violation, you can't really edit it into not a copyright violation. Editing it makes the problem harder to spot, so it's not really a good idea. Wily D 09:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I was referring to my adding proper headers and categories. Are you saying these were part of the original?--Auric talk 21:56, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Err, categories probably not, but there were some tiding edits that made it more difficult to do the text-wise comparison and see the copyvio (100% identical is a lot easier to spot than 50% identical. It's a minor point (though I'd suggest it's not worth your time to clean up an article that's about to be deleted, anyhow. Wily D 09:44, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry about that. Its been a good while since this was first deleted. I assumed this was just a copy-paste from the first text and cut out all the blatant POV. I did put the reference in the main chunk I left. Also, I do like to tidy up articles to see if they can be kept (although this article was really hopeless). Other editors like to as well; ever hear of the Article Rescue Squadron?--Auric talk 11:18, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

re

that's okay, I ll change my signature to pinyin.--chao xian de lun zi (talk) 02:49, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

That fucking cat again

the "honorary" part makes this pretty clear, I think

Never mind that the article takes plenty of other liberties with factual accuracy. Go read the Alaska Constitution and come back and tell me where "historical districts" have legal standing as municipalities. Simply put, they don't. The language is pretty simple enough to where you needn't hire a lawyer to interpret it for you. Yet, the article offers that impression, based upon the cherry-picked sources. Just because some news reporter who clearly doesn't know any better says something, I'm supposed to take that as gospel because the reporter just happens to be employed by a corporate news outlet? "Yeah, that's it! That's the ticket!". In the real world, I would have dispensed with all this verbiage and started right off the bat with some variation of "Bitch please", but I suppose that I have to think differently due to things such as WP:AGF, WP:CIVIL and the like. This is hardly the first discussion to take place on Wikipedia about the apparent belief of editors that if a certain POV posing as fact can be established through RS, it's okay to totally discount that the actual fact of the matter can also be established through RS as well. If we're creating content which leads those with firsthand knowledge of the subject matter to scoff at it, I guess that's okay, too. I can browse various talk pages/archives and see that this attitude has long prevailed, and it has resulted in editors leaving Wikipedia, never to come back. That has been going on long before I ever came along. The last "I'm leaving Wikipedia" speech I read expressed my views a lot clearer than I could myself: Wikipedia should seek to reflect reality, not influence it or control it. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 04:23, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh yeah, one more thing. If my references to and descriptions of "cherry-picked sources" seem excessive: KFAR's morning news program reported the dog attack story and segued into the next story, about the death of John T. Kelsey of Valdez, with "And now a story about a real mayor". That tells me that not everyone in the media feels the need to gush all over this like others in the media (as well as Wikipedians) appear to be doing. Of course, further delving into that inevitably leads to bringing up the larger issue of undue weight; this is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of undue weight shown towards The Simpsons, South Park, Star Trek, the Disney universe, reality television, literally fucking ad infinitum ad nauseum. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 05:25, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi there! Happy editing

Hello Auric, Eduemoni has given you a shining smiling star! You see, these things promote WikiLove and hopefully this has made your day better. Spread the Shining Smiling Star whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or someone putting up with some stick at this time. Enjoy! Eduemoni ^↑talk↓ 12:07, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013

Did you know?

VisualEditor's toolbar has a new feature (currently working only in some browsers), "Switch to source editing". By choosing this item, you can move directly into the wikitext source editor without saving. This is particularly useful if you need to make significant changes to tables, image galleries, or other elements that are not currently supported.

For more information about how to use VisualEditor, read Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or ← Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed. The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the ⇧ Shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through /wiki/Foobar?veaction=edit and /enwiki/w/index.php?title=Foobar&veaction=edit both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915).
Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching Wikipedia:TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid ($wgVisualEditorParsoidForwardCookies set to true) (bug 44483). (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)

Looking ahead:

VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions. Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done. Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:02, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Barnstar for Shukhuti's mosaic

The Georgian Culture Barnstar

I award this Barnstar to Auric for your efforts translating and sourcing the new article on Shukhuti's mosaic and the related article on the village of Shukhuti in Western Georgia. Without your efforts, the mosaic article certainly would have been deleted. Good job! - tucoxn\^talk 01:53, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Why does wikipedia allow people to post articles from Gossip sites and say they are NEWS

im attempting to remove LIES from my wikipedia page and it cites "footnotes" of "websites" that "CLAIM" to be news but are nothing more than propaganda/// every time i try and change this, some editor jumps all over me and puts the gossip, which is unsubtantiated and slanderous back.. as if there is some "other agenda" i would like to speak to someone in your legal department please— Preceding unsigned comment added by Evanseinfeld (talk • contribs) 19:22, November 22, 2013‎

I suggest you take your complaint to the WP:BLPN noticeboard. Thank you.--Auric talk 23:59, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Why would you pull my link to a Blog post that provides free genealogy charts to the novel? If you have read the book or seen the movie, you will appreciate how confusing the family relationships can be, and how helpful is a family tree chart. Please revert the post so that others can benefit from these clarifications.

Here is a page that is not a blog:

http://progenygenealogy.com/products/family-tree-charts/sample-charts/girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo.aspx

Can we use this page? Sprezzatura (talk) 13:40, 25 November 2013 (UTC) sprezzatura

I'm pretty sure this would be okay. Others may disagree, of course.--Auric talk 14:36, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Invitation to join the Ten Year Society

Dear Auric/Archive 3,

I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Ten Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for ten years or more.

Best regards, — Scott • talk 19:48, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Be glad to, Thanks.--Auric talk 20:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Not Unsuccessful!

Auric, although my edit didn't "take", it was a success. It caught your attention and hopefully you made it a permanent change. I've never attempted this before, so it was pretty much a given that it wouldn't work. I am going to create an account and find out how to edit. Thank you, kj71.197.114.120 (talk) 02:04, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Glad to hear it!

--Auric talk 02:15, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Animorphs#Secondary characters

You recently reverted an edit of mine here which removed links to pages that no longer exist (or mostly redirects to them). I don't want to re-revert, since, not being familiar with most of the series, I don't know if they should be re-targeted or something like that. Could you look at it again? Thanks, Ansh6 6 6 22:29, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I went through and removed the links, but kept the information.--Auric talk 00:38, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Okay, thanks! Ansh6 6 6 05:05, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Coast to Coast AM "criticism"

Read the talk page now, I forgot to hit submit.

If you cannot see how ridicolous the whole paragraph is then maybe you should take a deeper look next time.

Those edits were all done buy 2 or 3 IP adresses, clearly someone with intention who posted that specifically about the Art Bell incident, and the "decline in quality" holds absolutely no credibility, nothing of such is mentioned at all, go ahead and read the history.

Thanks for the heads up. I've tidied it up and removed the dated info.--Auric talk 00:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Personal info

Hi. We shouldn't publicize personal details of minors (like age), so I have reverted your addition to ANI - I hope you don't mind. I have also removed the dob info from his user page (and I'll ask someone to revdel it). -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:32, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. That's what I thought would happen.--Auric talk 15:36, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

If you knew it would be removed, why on earth did you post it in the first place? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 15:38, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I thought that someone should know about it, so Action could be taken. I can't revdel anything myself, otherwise I would have. --Auric talk 16:29, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

If you see minors revealing things about themselves that they shouldn't, you should request oversight - see Wikipedia:Oversight for details. Publicizing it on what is perhaps the most watched page on the project is really not a good thing to do. -- Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 16:32, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

I'll do that next time, thanks.--Auric talk 16:35, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Raul Julia-Levy#Son or not

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Raul Julia-Levy#Son or not. Sam Sailor ^Sing 20:26, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013

Did you know?

VisualEditor's toolbar has a new drop-down menu that contains all character formatting: bold, italics, subscript, superscript, strikethrough, computer code, underline, and the ability to remove all formatting from text.

For more information about how to use VisualEditor, read the user guide.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved. This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation. Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings). If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control+⇧ Shift+V or ⌘ Command+⇧ Shift+V (Mac).
Auto-numbered external links like [2] can now be edited just like any other link. However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here. The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified. If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters. Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally. To do so, append ?veaction=edit to the end of the page name. For example, change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?veaction=edit to open a random page in VisualEditor. This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.

Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.

BLP accusations by you, user Auric

The charge of rape against Norman Pender was found to be not proven. Yet you have said he was found guilty. This is not only incorrect, it is potentially libellous. I say potentially because of the differences of level of proof between criminal law and civil law. But still, it's wrong, you've been told it's wrong, and you apparently won't fix it.

Tech News: 2014-03

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

You can read a recent blog post about how Tech News is put together, translated and sent to you across wikis each week.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 9. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 14, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 16 (calendar).
Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons may be slow due to a search engine issue. [3]

VisualEditor news

VisualEditor will be added for all users on several Wikipedias on January 13. [4]
You can now add and remove __NOTOC__, __FORCETOC__ and __NOEDITSECTION__ in the page metadata menu. [5] [6] [7]

Problems

For a few hours on January 6, it was not possible to edit pages using the Translate tool on Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimania 2013 wiki, due to a settings error. [8] [9]
For about 20 minutes on January 9, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

Wikidata will be added to all Wikisource wikis on January 14. [10]
The new search tool (CirrusSearch) will be added as the second search method for the English Wikipedia on January 13. On Wikibooks and the German Wikipedia, you will also be able to test it by adding it in your Beta Features options.
You will soon be able to export page collections into other formats than PDF. [11]
It will soon be possible to upload groups of photos from Flickr using UploadWizard. [12] [13]
The Wikimedia Foundation has shared a multimedia vision for 2016. You are invited to comment. [14]

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

09:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for Janaury 2014

Did you know?

To add templates, go to the "Insert" menu and choose the "Transclusion" (puzzle piece) item. Enter the name of the template and click "Add template". If TemplateData exists for the template, then a list of possible parameters will appear. If not, you can add parameters yourself by typing the parameter name under "Add parameter". For unnamed parameters, use numbers ("1" for the first unnamed parameter).

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked mostly minor features and fixing bugs. A few significant bugs include working around a bug in CSSJanus that was wrongly flipping images used in some templates in right-to-left (RTL) environments (bug 50910) a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed (bug 59002), a major but quickly resolved problem due to an unannounced change in MediaWiki core, which caused VisualEditor to crash on trying to save (bug 59867). This last bugs did not appear on any Wikipedia. Additionally, significant work has been done in the background to make VisualEditor work as an independent editing system.

As of today, VisualEditor is now available as an opt-out feature to all users at 149 active Wikipedias.

The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has a very basic set of characters. The character inserter is especially important for languages that use Latin and Cyrillic alphabets with unusual characters or frequent diacritics. Your feedback on the character inserter is requested. In addition to feedback from any interested editor, the developers would particularly like to hear from anyone who speaks any of the 50+ languages listed under Phase 5 at mw:VisualEditor/Rollouts, including Breton, Mongolian, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Macedonian, and Azerbaijani.
meta:Office hours on IRC have been heavily attended recently. The next one will be held this coming Wednesday, 22 January at 23:00 UTC.
You can now edit some of the page settings in the "options" dialog – __NOTOC__ and __FORCETOC__ as selection (forced on, forced off, or default setting; bugs 56866 and 56867) and __NOEDITSECTION__ as a checkbox (bug 57166).
The automated browser tests were adjusted to speed them up and bind more correctly to list items in lists, and updated to a newer version of their ruby dependencies. You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server.
Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User guide was updated recently to show some new and upcoming features.

Looking ahead: The character formatting menu on the toolbar will get a drop-down indicator next Thursday. The reference and media items will be the first two listed in the Insert menu. The help menu will get a page listing the keyboard shortcuts. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including support for alignment (left, right, and center) and better control over image size (including default and upright sizes). The developers are also working on support for editing redirects and image galleries.

Subscriptions to this newsletter are managed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Please add or remove your name to change your subscription settings. If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:01, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-04

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [15]
As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [16] [17]
You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [18]
You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [19]

VisualEditor news

In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [20]
You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [21]
When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [22]
When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [23] [24]
The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [25]
Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [26]

Problems

There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [27]
There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [28]
On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [29]

Future software changes

If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [30] [31]
You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [32]
You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [33]
You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [34] [35]

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

10:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

upload the display picture of Govinda(actor)

hi Auric, it is my humble request for you to Please upload the display picture of Govinda(actor) on wikipedia (Link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govinda_%28actor%29). I have uploaded it so many times but everytime some issue occurs regarding license or copyright. Current display picture of Govinda is also uploaded by me and still some issue of copyright. I dont know how to fix it or upload image successfully. You can find best pictures of Govinda here http://themirchmasala.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/govinda-photoshoot.jpg

http://hamaraphotos.com/albums300_2012/wpw-20130504/hpse_normal__1644962347_%20Govinda%20photo%20shoot%20for%20designer%20Suprabha%20Jain%20%289%29.jpg

So it would be much better if you delete my picture and upload either the pictures whose link i have given above of Govinda without any licensing/copyright issue or upload any best picture of Govinda. Thank you— Preceding unsigned comment added by ‎ Amanraj6 (talk • contribs) 09:21, January 20, 2014

Done The new version is at File:Govindia by Suprabha Jain.jpg.--Auric talk 14:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks dear..thank you very very much..but still Wikipedia is showing "This work is copyrighted (or assumed to be copyrighted) and unlicensed. It does not fall into one of the blanket acceptable non-free content categories listed at Wikipedia:Non-free content#Images or Wikipedia:Non-free content#Audio clips, and it is not covered by a more specific non-free content license listed at Category:Wikipedia non-free file copyright tags. "

won't this be a problem??..i mean won't they delete this picture within seven days..as they usually do to an unlicensed picture..??

also there are some instructions shown for you(uploader)..— Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.177.1.74 (talk) 15:19, January 20, 2014‎

That is perfectly fine. See fair use. See also the text

“

However, it is believed that the use of this work:

To illustrate the subject in question
Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information
On the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,

qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Non-free content and Wikipedia:Copyrights.

”

--Auric talk 20:37, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Replaceable fair use File:Govindia by Suprabha Jain.jpg

Thanks for uploading File:Govindia by Suprabha Jain.jpg. I noticed that this file is being used under a claim of fair use. However, I think that the way it is being used fails the first non-free content criterion. This criterion states that files used under claims of fair use may have no free equivalent; in other words, if the file could be adequately covered by a freely-licensed file or by text alone, then it may not be used on Wikipedia. If you believe this file is not replaceable, please:

Go to the file description page and add the text {{di-replaceable fair use disputed|<your reason>}} below the original replaceable fair use template, replacing <your reason> with a short explanation of why the file is not replaceable.
On the file discussion page, write a full explanation of why you believe the file is not replaceable.

Alternatively, you can also choose to replace this non-free media item by finding freely licensed media of the same subject, requesting that the copyright holder release this (or similar) media under a free license, or by creating new media yourself (for example, by taking your own photograph of the subject).

If you have uploaded other non-free media, consider checking that you have specified how these media fully satisfy our non-free content criteria. You can find a list of description pages you have edited by clicking on this link. Note that even if you follow steps 1 and 2 above, non-free media which could be replaced by freely licensed alternatives will be deleted 2 days after this notification (7 days if uploaded before 13 July 2006), per the non-free content policy. If you have any questions, please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. --Geniac (talk) 01:33, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Translation

I'm not sure whether to thank you or not for taking the time to translate Bruno aleixo from Portuguese to English. I note that you have pasted the Google Translate output for this article directly, with no attempts to clean up that translation. If you'll look at Wikipedia:Translation#How to translate, you'll note that the community consensus is that such machine translations are worse than no translation at all, as they almost always leave an unintelligible mess. Better to have left it in Portuguese and let someone with expertise in the language perform the translation. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 15:13, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I've restored most of the untranslated text per your request. I've kept some minor corrections.--Auric talk 16:35, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-05

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

Recent software changes

Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video. [36]
The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff. [37]
The Special:ActiveUsers page will be removed because it's too slow. [38]
The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).

Problems

On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved. [39]
For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [40]

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

09:47, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Speedied article

Hey, I ended up deleting SCP Foundation for the reason stated, but also because it was deleted in 2012 for a lack of notability. None of the current information seemed to show that the page solved any of the issues posed in the prior AfD. I'm also a little worried about how the article also named someone because they wanted their information off the site, as I didn't see any news articles that showed why that should be mentioned. In other words, I was also slightly worried about it being used as an off-site battleground. The main reasons were because of the speedy reasons, though. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 09:41, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your polite reply. I thought that the removal should be mentioned because it seemed important. On that site, contributors can request that their content be removed, and it will be.[41] Not so on Wikipedia. A comparable case would be if you wanted out of Wikipedia and requested all your contributions be oversighted and all articles you created deleted. --Auric talk 15:48, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Kev Adams for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Kev Adams is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kev Adams until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. --I dream of horses If you reply here, please leave me a {{Talkback}} message on my talk page. @ 02:14, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-06

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis. [42] [43]
The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles. [44] [45]
You can now link to diffs using [[Special:Diff/12345]] and similar links. [46]
There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages. [47]
Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. [48]
All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons. [49]

VisualEditor news

You can now see a list of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Ctrl+/ inside VisualEditor. [50]

Future software changes

Edits and files hidden with the Oversight tool will be moved to the RevisionDelete system. The Oversight tool will then be removed from Wikimedia wikis. [51] [52] [53]
For languages where not all sister projects exist, you will be able to link to other language projects using double interwikis (:ko:v, :v:ko, etc.). [54]
It will soon be possible to use the GettingStarted tool on other wikis than the English Wikipedia. You can translate it on Translatewiki.net. [55]
You will soon be able to include the Special:Contributions page into other pages. [56]
You will be able to see where a file is used inside MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [57] [58]
It will soon be possible to send MassMessage messages using the API. [59]
You will soon see audio statistics on the Special:TimedMediaHandler page. [60]

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

08:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Can you make undoing the last two edits in List of Winx Club episodes? Aisha is called Layla in some dobs like the germany und netherland dubs. So It should be stand there if some german people looking on the page. I would make it, but its semi blocked. Best regards87.161.201.29 (talk) 15:42, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

That fact is already present in List of Winx Club characters, in her entry there. It does not need to be present on the episodes page.--Auric talk 16:06, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Bonjon

Not sure where you picked up the need to switch that source, but thanks for saving me the trouble, you may have made someone very happy. Guy (Help!) 20:51, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I've been conversing with Marici Punarvasu (talk · contribs). The sources came out of that. --Auric talk 21:00, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-07

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [61] [62] [63] [64] [65]
You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [66]

VisualEditor news

You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [67] [68]
The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [69] [70] [71]

Problems

On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [72]
On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes

Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [73] [74]
You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [75]
You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [76] [77]
The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster. [78]
Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [79] [80]
It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [81]
You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [82]
You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [83] [84]
If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode. [85]
Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas. [86]
bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest. [87]
The <poem> tag will be renamed to <lines>. The old tag will still work. [88]

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

09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Sod's law

Yeah, I wince when people misuse the word "random", I'm sure there's a law for absent-mindedly doing it myself. But the two sources given are "The Complete Edition of Murphy's Laws" on a personal website of no apparent authority and "MidEast Web Humor Pages", another personal site which looks like it's drawn from a mutated version of the first. I'd guess this was a list that was floating around on Usenet and email forwards back in the day. Nothing to suggest it comes from a reliable source. --McGeddon (talk) 18:04, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Note also the dates: one has 1999 and the other 1997. That makes these the earliest cites I could find. If you have earlier mentions, ie a Usenet post, replace them. --Auric talk 18:22, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

But none of these would be reliable sources. If the "Sodd's Law" corollaries are just anonymous, inconsistent jokes that floated around the internet a bit in the 90s, Wikipedia shouldn't be attempting to document them. --McGeddon (talk) 18:38, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I feel that they are consistent, but if you feel that strongly, then you could AFD both articles...--Auric talk 20:44, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Untitled

Thank you for tidying up my article page.Cowhen1966 (talk) 18:58, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome.--Auric talk 19:26, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Auric you are so right! You have definitely done your homework. Yes I can understand that you don't want you tube but come on! A national foreign newspaper cutting with references? What would you call that? That is just picking on someone's work because you can. Thanks. You are also right about the books. The ones I have are quite old and do not possess an ISBN number. What happened to good faith?Cowhen1966 (talk) 21:16, 16 February 2014 (UTC)thank you so muchCowhen1966 (talk) 21:16, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

I think some of your comments were meant for JoeSperrazza (talk · contribs), since I an not picking on anybody. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is based on verifiability, not good faith. Keep at it!--Auric talk 21:23, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

I know! You are only exercising your Wikipedia rights. Thank you anyway.Cowhen1966 (talk) 22:38, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Oh, this is totally unrelated but I think JoeSperrazza has deleted one of my sources. How can I prevent that? You dont have to reply if you don't want to be drawn? I just feel that the article will end up being vandalised. What do you think?Cowhen1966 (talk) 22:42, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Find a better source; by which I mean an independent source. --Auric talk 22:46, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Oh no worries! I have since removed that part of the article anyway. Regards!Cowhen1966 (talk) 01:14, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-08

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
You can now use the list of active users again. [89] [90]
The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [91]
You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [92]
You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014. [93]

Problems

On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem. [94]
On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue. [95]
On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news

The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [96]
You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [97]
Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [98]
You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [99] [100] [101]

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

08:38, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor Newsletter—February 2014

Did you know?

You can easily re-use references by going to the Insert menu, choosing "Reference", and clicking on "Use an existing reference" in the lower left corner. A list of all references, their numbers, and their ref names (if any) will be shown. You can search the list for any author, title, date, or other keyword. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some small changes to the user interface, such as moving the reference item to the top of the Insert menu, as well as some minor features and fixing bugs, especially for rich copying and pasting of references.

The biggest change was the addition of more features to the image dialog, including the ability to set alignment (left, right, center), framing options (thumbnail, frame, frameless, and none), adding alt text, and defining the size manually. There is still some work to be done here, including a quick way to set the default size.

The main priority is redesigning the reference dialog, with the goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs and URLs and streamlining the process. Current concept drawings are available at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.
A few bugs in the existing reference dialog were fixed. The toolbar was simplified to remove galleries and lists from the reference dialog. When you re-use references, it now correctly displays the references again, rather than just the number and name. If you paste content into a dialog that can't fit there (e.g. ==section headings== in references), it now strips out the inappropriate HTML.
You can now edit image galleries inside VisualEditor. At this time, the gallery tool is a very limited option that gives you access to the wikitext. It will see significant improvements at a later date.
The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu is being redesigned. Your feedback on the special character inserter is still wanted, especially if you depend on Wikipedia's character inserters for your normal editing rather than using the ones built into your computer.
You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu (three bars next to the Cancel button) (T54844).
If you edit categories, your changes will now display correctly after saving the page (T50560).
Saving the page should be faster now (T61660).
Any community can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData by leaving a note at T53734.

Looking ahead: The link tool will tell you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. The warning about wikitext will hide itself after you remove the wikitext markup in that paragraph. Support for creating and editing redirects is in the pipeline. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including default and upright sizes. The developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments, some behavioral magic words like DISPLAYTITLE, and in-line language setting (dir="rtl").

Tech News: 2014-09

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 27 (calendar).
The new search tool (CirrusSearch) was added to the Italian Wikiquote and all Wikiversity projects. Users can now enable it in their Beta options. [102] [103]
The Universal Language Selector was enabled on all Wikimedia wikis again. You can enable web fonts in your ULS options (see how).

VisualEditor news

You will soon be able to add and edit __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__ in the page settings menu. [104] [105] [106]
You will soon be able to use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘+Opt+S shortcuts to open the save window in VisualEditor. [107] [108]
You will soon be able to preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window. [109] [110]

Future software changes

You will soon be able to use the <categorytree> tag again. [111]
You will soon be able to post messages with the MassMessage tool in all talk namespaces. [112] [113]
Notifications will soon work in all namespaces. [114][115][116]

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

10:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Request

Hey Auric, can you please remove the future episode of the Winx Club Epiode List of Season 6? Cause the episode hasnt aired yet...Sorry for my bad grammer— Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.146.200.39 (talk) 04:28, March 2, 2014‎ (UTC)

Done.--Auric talk 13:12, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-10

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 6 (calendar).
When users enable web fonts by default, Universal Language Selector will now log if they don't have fonts to display pages correctly. This information will be used by developers to improve font support in the future. Read more about missing fonts. [117]
You can now use Guided tours on the Czech and Japanese Wikipedia. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [118] [119]
You can now use information from Wikidata in all Wikisource wikis. [120]
The multimedia team is now posting weekly updates on their mailing list. [121]

VisualEditor news

You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [122] [123] [124]
If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged. [125]
Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. [126]
VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [127] [128] [129]

Future software changes

The new tool for viewing media files will soon show a progress bar and a thumbnail while loading full images. [130] [131]
You will soon be able to make user contributions show only page creations. [132] [133]
Article Feedback Tool will be removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will also no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki. [134] [135]
Wikis using the new search tool will come back to the old tool for a few hours starting at 00:00 UTC on March 6. [136]

Problems

For about an hour on February 23, there were problems with page loading due to a MediaWiki bug. [137]

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

09:30, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Concerning User:125.164.45.252

Just to let you know, this IP is the latest incarnation of an IP-hopping vandal from Indonesia who constantly spams pages with inappropriate, nonexistent or inappropriate and nonexistent categories, as well as making little, yet blatantly incorrect edits (like, for example, listing the god Set as an aardvark).--Mr Fink (talk) 21:50, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know.--Auric talk 21:53, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

PRODDed

How does this work? Can you please provide me the right template on my discussion page how to motion against it? Thanks 69.165.246.181 (talk) 00:18, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Done.--Auric talk 00:48, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Appreciated69.165.246.181 (talk) 02:55, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Can you please remove the English Titel and Date of Season 6 Episode 9? 'Cause it hasn't been aired yet and we all know how Nickelodeon can changing the date and title in last minute. :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.161.194.197 (talk) 14:12, March 5, 2014‎ (UTC)

Are you sure? It says March 3 and it's March 5 today. Indications are that it's aired in Italy, so I'll just remove the March 16 date.--Auric talk 18:22, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Taj Anwar's page should be deleted

What is the right template for me to use if not the "hoax" template on Taj Anwar? Thank you.184.75.114.3 (talk) 18:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-11

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf17) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 13 (calendar).
You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all Wikiquote projects. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [138] [139]

VisualEditor news

It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [140] [141]
It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [142]
VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. They are now smaller and animated to be different from actual blank lines. [143]
We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [144]
You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [145] [146] [147]

Future software changes

You will soon be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [148]
CirrusSearch will soon automatically index newly imported pages. [149] [150]
It will soon be possible to use CSS to style buttons in templates on all Wikimedia wikis, without needing JavaScript. [151]
An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering team will take place on March 12 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [152]

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

09:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-12

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf18) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 20 (calendar).
You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels. [153]
You can now use the new search tool (CirrusSearch) on all small wikis. You can now enable it in your Beta options. [154] [155]
You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for February 2014. [156]

VisualEditor news

Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [157] [158]
Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [159]
Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [160]

Future software changes

You will soon see an error message if you try to log-in or register with an invalid or taken username. [161]
You can now test first version of a tool that includes OpenStreetMap maps inside the UploadWizard. Comments are welcome. [162]
You will soon be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature. [163]

Problems

VisualEditor was slow to load on March 13 because of an API issue. [164]

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

07:14, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

FYI

[165]. Sportfan5000 (talk) 01:13, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—March 2014

Did you know?

The template dialog has been simplified to make it faster and easier to add parameter data. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on changes to the template and image dialogs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks was the redesign of the template dialog. The template dialog now opens in a simplified mode that lists parameters and their descriptions. (The complex multi-item transclusion mode can be reached by clicking on "Show options" from inside the simplified template dialog.) Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. With today's update, searching for template parameters will become case-insensitive, and required template parameters will display an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. In addition to making it quicker and easier to see everything when you edit typical templates, this work was necessary to prepare for the forthcoming simplified citation dialog. The main priority in the coming weeks is building this new citation dialog, with the ultimate goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs, URLs, DOIs and other quick-fills. This will add a new button on the toolbar, with the citation templates available picked by each wiki's community. Concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.

The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. Pages that exist, but are not indexed by the search engine, are treated like non-existent pages (T56361).
Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from the paragraph you are editing.
The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has been slightly redesigned, to introduce larger buttons. Your suggestions for more significant changes to the special character inserter are still wanted.
The page options menu (three bars, next to the Cancel button) has expanded. You can create and edit redirect pages, set page options like __STATICREDIRECT__, __[NO]INDEX__ and __[NO]NEWEDITSECTION__, and more. New keyboard shortcuts are listed there, and include undoing the last action, clearing formatting, and showing the shortcut help window. If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
It is easier to edit images. There are more options and they are explained better. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. You can now set image sizes to the default, if another size was previously specified. Full support for upright sizing systems, which more readily adapt image sizes to the reader's screen size, is planned.
VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. These "slugs" are now smaller than normal blank lines, and are animated to be different from actual blank lines.
You can use the Ctrl+Alt+S or ⌘ Command+⌥ Option+S shortcuts to open the save window, and you can preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed to the Interlingual Occidental Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikibooks, and the French Wikiversity.
Any community can ask for custom icons for their language in the character formatting menu (bold, italic, etc.) by making a request on Bugzilla or by contacting Product Manager James Forrester.

The developers apologize for a regression bug with the deployment on 6 March 2014, which caused the incorrect removal of |upright size definitions on a handful of pages on the English Wikipedia, among others. The root cause was fixed, and the broken pages were fixed soon after.

Looking ahead: Several template dialogs will become more compact. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. You will be able to see the Table of Contents change live as you edit the page, rather than it being hidden. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") may be offered to a few Wikipedias soon.

Tech News: 2014-13

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf19) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 20. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on March 25, and all Wikipedia wikis on March 27 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [166] [167]
Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [168]
You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [169]
You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [170]

Future software changes

Typography Refresh will be enabled for test wiki and MediaWiki.org users who use the Vector skin on March 27. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3. If you don't use Vector as your skin, you will not be affected.
You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages. [171] [172]

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

18:56, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Tri-Cornered Tent Show

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.
You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Tri-Cornered Tent Show requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a band or musician, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, you can place a request here. Epeefleche (talk) 22:54, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-14

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf20) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and all Wikipedia wikis on April 3 (calendar).
Typography Refresh was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on March 27. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin. For users on non-Wikipedia wikis, it will be enabled on April 1, and for Wikipedia users on April 3.
CirrusSearch, the new search tool, was enabled as a beta feature on over 30 new wikis on March 27. [173] [174]

VisualEditor news

Blocked users now see the same messages in VisualEditor as in the wikitext editor. [175] [176]
The search box for re-using a reference in VisualEditor is now cleared after each use. [177]
New links on sub-pages no longer point to the wrong location in VisualEditor. [178]
VisualEditor's media dialog no longer breaks when opening some types of images. [179]

Future software changes

You will not be able to use the Wikitech wiki for a short period around 16:00 UTC on April 1 due to a server change. [180]
CirrusSearch will become the main search engine for all non-Wikipedia wikis except Commons, Meta and Incubator on April 2.
You will soon be able to use a new special page listing duplicate files. [181]
Deleting a version of a file or a version of its description page will soon be shown differently in the logs. [182]

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

09:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Migner and Lagacé

Hello, Auric, and thank you for your note on my talk page. I have tried to make some sense of this page, in particular by adding {{cn}} tags calling for citations to reliable sources. Without them, the page is likely to be deleted.

On the page name, "Andre Migner dit Lagace" had several faults. First, there was no accent on "André" or "Lagacé"; second, the word "dit" is not part of a name we should be using on the English language Wikipedia, because few people will understand it who are not French-speakers; and thirdly, if this man has alternative names we should use one or the other, with redirects to the page from all alternatives.

One error in the page as it is for now is that there is nothing to explain how the name "Lagacé" is connected to this man. If it came after him, we do need an explanation of how and when it was applied to him, when it was actually used, which of his descendants adopted it, and so forth. Moonraker (talk) 11:19, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought that I was clear about that. His father was Michel Mignier, his name was Andre Mignier dit Lagace, as was that of his children. His children 's children have the last name Lagace, no sign of a "dit".--Auric talk 11:49, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Pokotia Monolith

The article Pokotia Monolith has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

only a single mention in a publication of questionable reliability and completely out of its scope of its claimed area of competence

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 12:41, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I've reverted your edits. They were all fringe sources, not discussed in any reliable sources, and one was self-published. You might want to see [183] who discusses the Michael Pye book. You added a query about the reliability of the journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observer but if we get rid of that, we have nothing but the fringe sources which we can't use. Dougweller (talk) 14:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I thought I'd found some published sources I'd missed.--Auric talk 14:35, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Also, it was TRPoD who added the query, not me.--Auric talk 14:41, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Oops, missed that, apologies. We all struggle with sources at times, I've added some I regretted using later on. Dougweller (talk) 15:12, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

cite doi templates

Please do not replace good templated references with cite doi or cite jstor or any such templates. Articles are mostly watched by one or several editors, most of those templates are not watched by anyone. If they are vandalized, that would affect multiple articles without this showing up in any watchlist (because it would not be an edit to the article itself, but the template). Much better to use the cite journal template and just only add the pmid, jstor, or doi parameter and then run Citationbot, which will fill the missing fields. Whatever you decide to do, it is considered bad form to change the citation style of an article (I once spend an hour painstakingly templating a lot of references (the advantages now that we have Wikidata should be obvious) and got yelled at and was reverted (and policy supported that, so even though I was pissed, I had to let it stand). Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 19:44, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

PS: there are other disadvantages. If one uses "authorlink" or wikilinks a publisher or academic journal, then the template will display that link in bold in the articles on those subjects itself and screw up formatting. --Randykitty (talk) 19:50, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

interesting, I've never seen that happen.--Auric talk 19:54, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I've never seen vandalism either, but then, I have not a single one of these templates on my watchlist. The formatting problem I have seen repeatedly and there doesn't seem to be a way around it. --Randykitty (talk) 19:57, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

I've got a few. At one point I went through Category:Pages with DOI errors and fixed them.--Auric talk 20:12, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Typography

Hi Auric. Can you do a hard refresh on English Wikipedia here and tell me if you're still seeing major problems? We think that we have a temporary fix which could improve things. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:54, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the font in the {{Old IP warnings top}} template does look better. Thanks.--Auric talk 01:31, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Robert Shwarz

Dear Auric, I have left a message on my talk page. I am not an admin and do not want to be so there is only so much I can do, so when you say fix it yes I will do that but there is only so much I can do and I like to reach consensus. I am sorry if it felt harsh to you but I wanted to bring it to your attention, which it did. You brought it up at the first place at RfD I think, and while something is under discussion I don't change it. But the bit after the hyphen is a ridiculous fiddle that is entirely unnecesarry since Robert Shwarz is a redlink and Robert Schwartz is a DAB and at the English Wikipedia to have "Die Fenster mener Stadt" in the title of an ariticle is simply ridiculous; for an English-speaking audience they might miss the T so it should be at the DAB but it can just move to Robert Shwarz.

I can see from your talk you do lots of hard work here on WP. I sincerely thank you very much for that. I try to do the same. Si Trew (talk) 23:35, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Am I being a total idiot dummer essel? I tried to move it to Robert Schwarz and that is also a DAB: Ah, I see, it doesn't have the c in Sch. I think those DABs should be combined really, because in English we would not necessarily notice the missing T or C, that is why at RfD we discuss is it a likely search term rather than whether it is correct. Si Trew (talk) 23:51, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I moved it to Robert Schwarz (translator), as that seems to be related.--Auric talk

23:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I've tidied it up a bit but need your help with the middle section obviously I could get a crappy translation from Google andI can half translate it myself being a Latinate language but that would be rubbish. If we work on it together we could polish this up a bit but I need your help to do so. I have put the English right; no offence meant I don't speak Albanian let alone I live in Hungary and can hardly speak Hungarian! Si Trew (talk) 00:23, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

It starts off being about the weather of Tirana and then transitions to something that is possibly a statement of work.--Auric talk 01:37, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-15

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf21) was scheduled to be deployed to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 3, however it was temporarily put on hold due to localization issues. (calendar).
Typography Refresh was enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on April 1, and on all Wikipedias on April 3. You'll only see it if you use the Vector skin.
CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on over 400 non-Wikipedia wikis on April 2. [184]

Future software changes

A new special page (Special:TrackingCategories) will soon list all the tracking categories on a wiki. [185] [186]
All Wikiquote projects will start using language links from Wikidata on April 8. [187]
The Hovercards feature will soon work with right-to-left languages. [188] [189]
You will soon be able to download files directly from MediaViewer, the new multimedia tool. [190]
MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. Comments are welcome.
You can help check that users can read CAPTCHAs in your language. [191]

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

08:00, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Are you an admin? I need your help because there is an anonymous editor who keeps on removing important and legitimate information from the Winx Club page. For example, they keep on removing the plots of the movies from the "Plot" section and claim that "the show's creators never confirmed that they were meant to be part of the plot" when the movies were explicitly meant to be part of the plot by the creators.

This person keeps on reverting other editors' edits and threatens them with police or blocking when they add the information again. I also have reasons to believe that this person is the same as the user User:LoganHermann123 who was blocked for threatening people on Wikipedia. 197.225.208.190 (talk) 14:05, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

No, but I have started a sockpuppet investigation and requested page protection. Thanks for letting me know about the problem. --Auric talk 14:56, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I have unfortunately been caught in an edit war with this user who not only is so stubborn that they seem impervious to real arguments and logic, which is irritating, but they are also threatening and insulting me without no reason where I have done my best to stay as civil as possible. I hope that this issue will be resolved soon. 197.225.208.190 (talk) 15:12, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I have received another threat from this person on the Winx Club talk page. I have tried my best to remain as civil as possible despite this person's rude and illogical responses, yet they keep on insulting and threatening me. 197.224.85.215 (talk) 08:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Remember not to feed the trolls. It also would be a good idea if you registered for an account.--Auric talk 09:44, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

OK, I won't. I will consider the idea. Thank you for the help. :) 197.224.82.4 (talk) 19:10, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Bob Coy

My corrections to the Bob Coy page are needed as the information contained on the page was incorrect. The correct name of the church is Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, not Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale. I have been a member of this church since 1990. Please do not erase corrections and say I am doing bad things when all I am doing is making needed corrections. It would be better to let those who know deal with the facts and ask why they corrected items if you do not understand. 100% of my corrections are needed and are fact. Thank you— Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.221.217.242 (talk • contribs) 18:07, April 10, 2014 (UTC)

That may be, but the article title was Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale. It looked to be vandalism. I've moved it to the correct title now.--Auric talk 21:15, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

How can the title be that when it is Boy Coy's page. Next time instead of assuming vandalism it might be wise to find the facts.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.221.217.242 (talk • contribs) 18:33, April 10, 2014‎ (UTC)

You changed "Calvary Chapel of Fort Lauderdale" to "Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale", without moving the page, creating redlinks. This followed a request to be on the lookout for vandalism on Bob Coy. You can understand how your edits seemed to be disruptive.--Auric talk 21:43, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

User:Auric/Zu Shenatir

You gonna make this? Seems finished. I couldn't find any more info.WikiOriginal-9 (talk)

Yes, thanks for reminding me about it.--Auric talk 22:35, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-16

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

We are looking for contributors to help write new issues every week. If you would like to help, please contact us.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf22) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and all Wikipedias on April 17 (calendar).
MediaViewer was enabled for all users on MediaWiki.org on April 10. It will be enabled for all users on the Catalan (ca), Hungarian (hu) and Korean (ko) Wikipedias and English Wikivoyage on April 17. Comments are welcome. [192] [193] [194]
Font issues caused by Typography refresh for Windows users were fixed on April 7. [195] [196]

VisualEditor news

You will now see only three options when you try to add a template parameter in VisualEditor; you will see other options after a click. [197]
The size changing controls in VisualEditor media editing dialog were simplified further.
The wikitext editor tab will now fold into a drop-down menu in the Vector skin if there is not enough space on your screen. [198] [199]

Future software changes

The font used for body text on Wikimedia wikis will change to your system default sans-serif font. This temporary change will be enabled on all non-Wikipedia wikis on April 15, and on all Wikipedias on April 17. [200] [201]
Files from Commons seen on another wiki will soon have a tab saying "View on Wikimedia Commons". The create tab will change to "Add local description" (see screenshot). [202]
You will soon be able to hide Notification and Hovercards pop-ups by pressing the Esc key. [203] [204] [205] [206]
Shorter lists of language links will soon work in right-to-left languages. Languages that you have used before will be shown in the list. [207]
You will soon be able to send messages with the MassMessage tool to all pages in a given category. [208] [209]
The date format user preference will soon be moved to the appearance tab. [210] [211]
An IRC discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia team will take place on April 16 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on Freenode (time conversion). [212]

Problems

Wikimedia Foundation servers were updated after a security bug called Heartbleed was discovered last week. You should change your password as an extra precaution. [213]

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

07:18, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

List of winx club episodes

Could you remove the future episode of Season 6 Episode 15? The Episode hasnt aired yet and the user doent give a source about that. 87.146.207.142 (talk) 14:53, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Someone keeps on repeatedly removing important information from the Winx Club page, and their reasons for doing so is not valid. I have tried discussing with them but they seem to be impervious to any argument and keep on removing the information although it is relevant to the page. Can something be done about it? I also suspect that this person is the same individual as User:LoganHermann123. DragonFire900 (talk) 15:13, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

I also suspect the user User:KendallandLogan of being a sockpuppet of User:LoganHermann123. I know I am new here and I probably have no authority to ask for such things, but would it be possible to protect the Winx Club page indefinitely? DragonFire900 (talk) 16:05, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

I've sent off a request.--Auric talk 16:07, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. However this person's IP address is rapidly changing and they have repeatedly made edit wars against me under different IP's and perhaps sock-puppet accounts as well. They kept removing information from the Winx Club despite me citing sources because according to them "newspapers can lie and aren't official sources" and "it is forbidden to have future information", although Wikipedia's rules do state otherwise. I have attempted to discuss the situation with the other editor but they don't want to hear anything and seem to want the page to be only how they want it to be, to the point of being childishly stubborn. The revision history of the Winx Club page makes it clear. I am only trying to improve the page and make it informative, however I cannot so long as there will be such unproductive occurrences. DragonFire900 (talk) 11:07, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

"jewistan" edit on -stan page

I deleted the bullet point for Jewistan because I did not think it met the standard of "Proposed names" that it was listed under. It was listed with Sikhistan and Maronistan, which were proposed *actual* names for putative countries. Jewistan is a pejorative nickname advanced primarily by a single academic and has never been seriously proposed in the same way as Sikhistan and Maronistan. As such I do not think it reaches a standard of notability for inclusion, and if it is included should not be listed under "proposed". I am sorry for not following whatever procedures are prescribed--I rarely edit, normally just correcting spelling errors and such and am thus not familiar with procedure. I am removing it again. If you do revert it I would encourage you to put it back under a section heading which does not imply such a conceptual link with Sikhistan and Maronistan.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.109.28.148 (talk • contribs) 16:03, April 16, 2014‎ (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to explain. The entry is sourced and referenced, better than Sikhistan and Maronistan. I've moved it to the "Other" section.--Auric talk 21:10, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Sorry to bother you again about the Winx Club page but could you please add that page to your watch list? The issue with that other user appears to have been resolved for the time being but I fear that they might attempt to remove important information again from the page again after the semi-protection has expired, either anonymously or through sock-puppetry. As you can see from the list of revisions of the page as well as the Winx Club talk page and my talk page as well, the other user seems to be quite stubborn and keeps on removing information without any valid reason. I hope I am not asking too much from you but I only occasionally edit Wikipedia's pages, this case being an exception, and I probably won't be back before a long time. DragonFire900 (talk) 03:25, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Sure. I've watchlisted all the Winx-related pages. Thanks for asking.--Auric talk 12:12, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I have also reverted the page to the version it was before the edit war, which is this version as it is the most informative version in my opinion. The other user might also try reverting the page to a version from during the edit war, and they have also attempted to do so here but I reverted it. If they do it again, could you please revert that as well? DragonFire900 (talk) 11:46, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Winx Club

Could you please make DragonFire9000 Edit undo? The movies and seasons' plots should be in seperate sections, cause the 2.nd movie takes place in the middle of season 4 and the third movie will be placed after Season 6 Episode 2. Would be nice. Best regards— Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.161.212.226 (talk • contribs) 17:18, April 20, 2014‎ (UTC)

Sorry, I can't see a way to do that without disrupting the tables.--Auric talk 21:27, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Bob Coy

Once again you revert correct edits of something you know nothing about.The citied articles do not say he confessed to anything, it says according to reports. The has been no statement or confession by Pastor Coy except for the statement by Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale. Here is the statement I based my correction on. (On April 3, 2014, Bob Coy resigned as Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, effective immediately, after confessing to a moral failing in his life which disqualifies him from continuing his leadership role at the church he has led since its founding in 1985.) My information is correct. My edit should stand and be left alone. The other poster is incorrect and slanderous. Also Past Coy is NOT the President any longer. On 4/19/2014 the church took him off the board and is no longer listed as President on the state site quoted. Please as I have asked you before do not revert correct changes unless YOU take the time to know what you are doing. You are doing more harm than good.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.138.14.226 (talk • contribs) 18:50, April 20, 2014‎ (UTC)

Sorry again. I read the source and it also says "moral failings", so I've restored it. Please be WP:CIVIL. You do not WP:OWN the article.--Auric talk 21:59, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-17

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. [214]
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. [215] [216]
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. [217] [218] [219] [220]
The page view statistics site developed by Henrik (stats.grok.se) should now work faster. [221]
You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for March 2014. [222]

VisualEditor news

If you try to add a category which redirects to another category, VisualEditor will now suggest adding the target category directly. [223] [224]
VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear on Education Program pages. [225] [226]
You can now use VisualEditor on Meta-Wiki and the French Wikinews by enabling it in your preferences. [227] [228] [229]

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. [230]
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. [231] [232]
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. [233] [234] [235] [236]
You will soon be able to give parameters to preloaded templates. [237] [238]
You will soon be able to use CodeEditor in read-only mode on pages that you cannot edit. [239] [240]
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. [241]
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). [242]

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. [243]

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

08:34, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Mummy

Thanks, I got confused between two articles with virtually identical titles, one with and one without the word Wyoming. At least I added the link I meant to add! I went looking for more sources after something related got added to Kali Yuga. Dougweller (talk) 13:08, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

I thought it was something like that.--Auric talk 13:10, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014

Did you know?

You can use VisualEditor to make redirects. First, remove any unwanted content from the page. Then go to the "Page options" menu (next to "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽") and choose the "Page settings" item. Click the box to "Redirect this page to". In the box, type in the name of the page that you want to redirect this page to.

You can also set or remove categories for the redirect in the "Page options" menu. Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on performance improvements, image settings, and preparation for a simplified citation template tool in its own menu.

In an oft-requested improvement, VisualEditor now displays red links (links to non-existent pages) in the proper color. Links to sister projects and external URLs are still the same blue as local links.
You can now open templates by double-clicking them or by selecting them and pressing Return. This also works for references, images, galleries, mathematical equations, and other "nodes".
VisualEditor has been disabled for pages that were created as translations of other pages using the Translate extension (common at Meta and MediaWiki.org). If a page has been marked for translation, you will see a warning if you try to edit it using VisualEditor.
When you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor, the full protection notice and most recent log entry are displayed. Blocked users see the standard message for blocked users.
The developers fixed a bug that caused links on sub-pages to point to the wrong location.
The size-changing controls in the advanced settings section of the media or image dialog were simplified further. VisualEditor's media dialog supports more image display styles, like borderless images.
If there is not enough space on your screen to display all of the tabs (for instance, if your browser window is too narrow), the second edit tab will now fold into the drop-down menu (where the "Move" item is currently housed). On the English Wikipedia, this moves the "Edit beta" tab into the menu; on most projects, it moves the "Edit source" tab. This is only enabled in the default Vector skin, not for Monobook users. See this image for an example showing the "Edit source" and "View history" tabs after they moved into the drop-down menu.
After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed as an opt-in feature at Meta and on the French Wikinews.

Looking ahead: A new, locally controlled menu of citation templates will put citations immediately in front of users. You will soon be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) is being developed. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") will be offered as a Beta Feature soon. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Monday, 19 May 2014 at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this on your own page, subscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

About edits to Leofric, Earl of Mercia

The reason for those edits was that the info I removed was not factual, the info removed was misleading and has no Historicity, message me back if you want a longer reply as I know it is a short answer.— Preceding unsigned comment added by JoshNEWK1998 (talk • contribs) 21:02, April 23, 2014‎ (UTC)

Thank you. His mother being Alwara is mentioned also on Leofwine's article as well. I've added a fact tag to the birth date. --Auric talk 01:37, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-18

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
You can now use interwiki prefix c: to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons. [244]

VisualEditor news

You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [245]
VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [246]
VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.

Future software changes

CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome. [247]
The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [248]
CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [249] [250]
You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [251]

Problems

For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [252] [253]
On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [254] [255]

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

07:23, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Thank You, Auric

Thank You Auric for your recent edits to Rehema Ellis, They where appreciated. --ACase0000 (talk) 05:29, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Sir plz help me with this stuff

This help request has been answered. If you need more help, you can ask another question on your talk page, contact the responding user(s) directly on their user talk page, or consider visiting the Teahouse.

1. how do i get an article semi- protected and how to get a good rating 2. Some of the information which has been typed in the infobox is not being displayed. Shakeeluddin (talk) 06:19, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

I am setting the above "helpme" template to "Help me-helped", Auric, because it seems probable that it was intended to be a question for you, and this will prevent other editors who patrol "helpme" tags from spending time coming here to view it. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 16:13, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-19

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf3) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and all Wikipedias on May 8 (calendar).
The Compact Personal Bar was added as a beta feature to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 1. It will be added as a beta feature to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 6, and to all Wikipedias on May 8. To test it, you can enable it now in your preferences on MediaWiki.org. [256]
It is now easier to disable the CodeEditor tool. [257]

VisualEditor news

External links in VisualEditor are now in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. [258]
The template tool now tells you if a parameter is obsolete. [259]
You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData; VisualEditor will add them like required ones. [260]
There is a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name for file names. [261][262]
Editing formulae in VisualEditor will soon be enabled for all users. [263] [264]
You will soon be able to try a new beta feature to edit text in another language. [265] [266]

Future software changes

MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the Japanese (ja), Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Swedish (sv) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 8. Feedback is welcome. [267]
You can help translate about 100 new language names that have been added to our data source. They are used, for example, as hover text for interwiki links. Send an e-mail to Nemo if you want to help.
If you click on a redirect page in your watchlist, you will soon access the redirect itself. [268] [269]

Problems

For about 40 minutes around 00:20 UTC on April 29, there were problems with page loading due to high server load.

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

07:29, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Your help requested

Haplogroup E-V38, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:53, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-20

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf4) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 8. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 13, and all Wikipedias on May 15 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

A new citation system in VisualEditor was enabled on the English Wikipedia. It will soon be enabled on more wikis. [270]
Templates that were previously broken in VisualEditor should now appear correctly. [271]

Future software changes

It will soon be possible to move category description pages. Pages in changed categories will still have to be moved independently. [272] [273]
You will soon be able to clear your watchlist with one click or through the API. [274] [275] [276] [277]
You will soon be able to link to Flow posts and workflows with Special:Flow. [278] [279]
The jQuery JavaScript library will soon be updated. Please check that your gadgets and scripts will still work. [280]
The Vector skin will work faster, as the sidebar will no longer collapse partly after being loaded. [281] [282] [283]
MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on Wikimedia Commons on May 15. Feedback is welcome.
An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on May 14 at 18:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [284]
Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead. [285]

Problems

There were problems with generating file thumbnails for all wikis between May 3 and May 6 due to a configuration error. [286] [287]

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

06:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Rosetta Barnstar
	Way to go! Thanks.. ExpertEditor25 (talk) 05:39, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Leelynn

what did i do wrong? Leelynn (talk) 02:14, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

You replaced the names in the references. Replacing names in articles is fine, as long as you are careful to avoid the references. For example, you changed "Mukhtar Mai proves Manto right" to "Mukhtaran proves Manto right". While this may be the correct use of the name, the actual article title is different.--Auric talk 11:42, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Jenkem reference

Hi Auric, Reference 1 on the Jenkem article is to this link: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature6/index.html It's the first page of an article but the first and only mention of jenkem in the article is on page 4. So I edited the reference to point to page 4. I'm quite new to Wikipedia so if my edit is in contravention of some rules, please point me to where I can learn more about how to edit properly.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.208.7.184 (talk • contribs) 01:51, May 18, 2014‎ (UTC)

You left no edit summary indicating this, so I took it for vandalism. I've undid the edit and left a welcome on your talk page. --Auric talk 11:36, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-21

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

Tech News is one year old this week; thank you for being with us!

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf5) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 15. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 20, and all Wikipedias on May 22 (calendar).
The jQuery JavaScript library was updated on May 16. Please check that your gadgets and scripts still work. [288] [289] [290]
MediaViewer was enabled for all users on the Kannada (kn) and Telugu (te) Wikipedias on May 13. It will be enabled on the German (de), English (en), Italian (it) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias and on all Wikisource wikis on May 22. Feedback is welcome. [291] [292]
VisualEditor was added as a beta feature to Wikimedia Commons on May 15. You can enable it in your preferences. [293] [294]
You can read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for April 2014.

VisualEditor news

VisualEditor's buttons and icons can now be accessed using keyboard keys. [295] [296]
VisualEditor's new citation tool now matches templates like {{cite_web}} and not just {{Cite web}}. [297] [298]
VisualEditor's welcome message will no longer be shown to users who have already seen it. [299] [300]
VisualEditor now shows a clearer message when you cancel an edit. [301]
The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. [302] [303]

Future software changes

User ID number will no longer be visible in preferences. [304] [305]

Problems

For several hours on May 16, there were problems with loading gadgets on some wikis due to a server problem. [306]

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

07:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—May 2014

Did you know?

The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates. If your wiki has enabled the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, press "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.

There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction. This allows editors who have opted in to use the "Language" tool in the "Insert" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this: English. This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "⧼math-visualeditor-mwmathinspector-title⧽" item in the "Insert" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field. Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
TemplateData has been expanded: You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones. "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work. There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names. The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency. The message shown when you "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽" out of an edit is clearer. The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie. As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
In the "Images and media" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData. You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box. If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
There have been multiple small changes to the appearance: External links are shown in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. This is a lighter shade of blue than the internal links. The styling of the "Style text" (character formatting) drop-down menu has been synchronized with the recent font changes to the Vector skin. VisualEditor dialogs, such as the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽" dialog, now use a "loading" animation of moving lines, rather than animated GIF images. Other changes were made to the appearance upon opening a page in VisualEditor which should make the transition between reading and editing be smoother.
The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead: The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard. The "Keyboard shortcuts" link will be moved out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-22

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf6) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 22. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on May 27, and all Wikipedias on May 29 (calendar).
MediaViewer will be enabled on all Wikisource wikis on May 29, and on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.

VisualEditor news

VisualEditor's welcome message and wikitext warning now say that you can switch to source mode editing and keep your edits without saving them. [307] [308] [309] [310]
A bug that caused files not to appear after saving edits in the File: namespace was fixed last week. [311] [312]
VisualEditor tabs will no longer appear in namespaces where VisualEditor is disabled. [313] [314]
It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor; many minor bugs related to images have also been fixed. [315]
VisualEditor will no longer convert spaces to underscores inside links to pages in namespaces that include spaces in their names. [316]

Future software changes

Wikimedia Labs will stop working for about 10 minutes around 18:00 UTC on May 30 due to a server upgrade. [317]
It will soon no longer be possible to upload different files under the same name at the same time using the UploadWizard tool. [318] [319]
Links to TIFF, DjVu or PDF files created with the syntax [[File:Name.ext|thumb|page 15 is my favourite]] will now show an image caption if there is any text after page number; previously they caused the given page to appear. [320] [321] [322]
You will soon see information about global blocks for IP addresses on their contributions page on your local wiki. [323] [324]

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

08:29, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Simon Trew

Hi, Auric. As somebody who's communicated with Simon Trew recently, I was confused to see your edit here. Had the user requested deletion of his pages or of his account? I can't see it in his contributions, so why did you post as you did? I'm assuming your intentions were good, but unfortunately your edit summary in particular could be seen as baiting a user who seems to have stopped editing. Bishonen | talk 09:36, 26 May 2014 (UTC).

He blanked his pages with the summary "blanked. bye bye". I assumed he wanted to vanish, so I posted the {{vanish}} template with what seemed to the appropriate summary "so long", although I'm glad he didn't actually want to vanish. I hope this explains my actions.--Auric talk 15:36, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Transliteration

Hi! There seems to be something wrong with your transliteration of على احمد المريمي as Ali Ahmed Marian. I'm no expert on Libyan surnames, but the final root letter of this one is indubitably a mīm. I tried looking for what I thought were the most likely vocalisations (Maryami/Mariami; Muraymi/Muraimi; Marimi/Mareemi) without finding any likely match, so I left it alone. I don't know what should now be done about it, but I'm pretty certain that your reading of it as a nūn cannot be correct. Regards, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 23:27, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

I followed Google's transliteration, which I'm aware isn't always accurate. I'm open to suggestions.--Auric talk 23:42, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

That explains it. I really don't think it's a good idea to trust Google, which in this case seems to have translated مريمي as "of or to do with (the virgin) Mary", or "Marian". I suggest "Mariamy", based on this image, which is presumably authentic. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:18, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I see you've already done that. Thanks.--Auric talk 11:46, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

question

How did you find talk page of someone who insulted me? I don't think I've encountered you before. LibStar (talk) 13:31, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Could you be a little clearer? I can't quite make out what you are asking.--Auric talk 16:29, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

why are you following my edits? You added a space on the talk page of someone who has been blocked for insulting me. LibStar (talk) 16:35, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

I am not following your edits. The page was linked on WP:AN/I.--Auric talk 16:41, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Then how did you find Rozelle, New South Wales and Chitrojogot.com? LibStar (talk) 16:44, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Rozelle is linked to from your talk page, which I saw when I checked to see if this "talk page of someone who insulted [you]" was linked there. Chitrojogot.com I saw when I checked your contributions to see if the insults were linked there.--Auric talk 16:50, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

My apologies

Hello Auric,

This is Carabobo1821. I'm writing you this message as an apology.

I recently posted a hastily-compiled SPI that included your name. In retrospect, I should have spent more time making my arguments clearer and remove the names of people like you and Arctic M, who were clearly not involved.

NativeForeigner banned my previous account, which I am appealing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:NativeForeigner#This_is_Carabobo1822_and_I_am_concerned

I am not asking for your assistance in this matter, just letting you know that I am sorry for accusing you of something you are clearly not involved in :(

Carabobo1822 (talk) 00:14, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-23

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf7) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on May 29. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 3, and to all Wikipedias on June 5 (calendar).
CirrusSearch was enabled as the primary search method on all Wikipedias with less than 100,000 pages on May 30. [325]

VisualEditor news

Templates that redirect to other templates now get the TemplateData of their target. [326]
The toolbar of the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible after you save an edit with VisualEditor. [327] [328]
VisualEditor now checks if your browser supports SVG files to avoid displaying broken icons. [329]
There is now a new type for TemplateData parameters: date for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. [330]

Future software changes

MediaViewer will be enabled on the German (de) and English (en) Wikipedias on June 3. Feedback is welcome.
You will soon see a warning if you visit a contributions page for a user that does not exist. [331] [332]
The search tab will soon be removed from user preferences. You will be able to set your search preferences on Special:Search. [333] [334]
You will soon see a label next to the little triangle arrow for the Actions menu in the Vector skin (screenshot). [335] [336]

Problems

For about 20 minutes on May 29, all wikis were broken due to a configuration error. [337]

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

08:08, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-24

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [338] [339]

VisualEditor news

You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [340] [341]
The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [342] [343] [344]
You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [345] [346]

Future software changes

MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [347]
You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [348]
On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [349] [350]
You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [351] [352]
Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [353] [354] [355]
You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [356] [357]
Hovercards will no longer flicker. [358]

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

07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

How do you use the attention flag?

Auric, so far you are the only person in this discussion who admits to using Category:Articles needing attention, so I'd be interested in knowing more about how you use it. Do you mainly look at the articles for a particular wikiproject? If so, would it work for you if the flag was disabled in {{WPBannerMeta}} but inserted in the banner for that project? RockMagnetist (talk) 04:08, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Generally I use it to locate articles to edit. I usually concentrate on Biography articles, although I am currently not working on it due to a temporary brownout. There is simply too much for one person to fix. --Auric talk 17:32, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25

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

Reminder

You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu. [359]
When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference. [360] [361]
You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu. [362] [363] [364] [365]
The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct. [366] [367] [368]

Future software changes

Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome. [369]
You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time. [370]
You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis. [371] [372]
It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [373] [374]
Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17. [375]
The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages. [376]
An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department. [377]

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

07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Cory Doctorow#Cory Doctorow and Creative Commons

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Cory Doctorow#Cory Doctorow and Creative Commons. Thanks. Xb2u7Zjzc32 (talk) 01:12, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-26

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf10) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 19. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 24, and to all Wikipedias on June 26 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

You can now drag-and-drop selections of content, not just files and templates. [378] [379]
When dragging an item, you will now see a line that helps you to drop it. [380] [381]
You can now only move an image to the start of a paragraph, not to the middle of it, so you don't accidentally split it. [382] [383]
You will now be warned if you add wikitext to file captions and references. [384] [385]

Future software changes

You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [386] [387]
CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on additional 70 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Incubator, during the next week. [388]
CirrusSearch results will soon take into account categories, the first paragraph and the wikitext of a page. You will also be able to use regular expressions to search the wikitext. It will take a few days for the changes to be enabled on all wikis. [389]
You will soon be able to watch translations for e-mail notifications without receiving an e-mail when they are reviewed by another translator. [390] [391]
An IRC meeting to organize old high priority MediaWiki bug reports will take place on June 24 at 17:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [392]

Problems

On June 19, all wikis were broken for about 15 minutes due to a high server load.
Between June 13 and June 15 there were problems with the scaling of video files due to a configuration error. [393]

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

07:20, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014

Did you know?

The character formatting menu, or "Style text" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type "date" for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and "boolean" for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like {{citeweb}} → {{cite web}}) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki

Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Zu Shenatir

Hi,

I find that those sentences should be combined together since it's referring to the same thing. If you can rephrase it, please do so.173.206.10.12 (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-27

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [394] [395]
A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [396] [397]
VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [398] [399] [400] [401]
Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [402] [403]

Future software changes

You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [404] [405]
Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [406]
All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [407] [408]
Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [409]
You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [410] [411]
You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [412]

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

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-28

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

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 (1.24wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 3. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 8, and to all Wikipedias on July 10 (calendar).
CirrusSearch was enabled on July 1 as the primary search method on 36 new wikis, including the Norwegian (no), Portuguese (pt) and Ukrainian (uk) Wikipedias. [413]
It is now possible to create Atom or RSS feeds for Word of the Day, Word of the Week and similar entries on Wiktionary wikis. [414] [415]
You can now use a graphical interface to edit TemplateData information on the English (en), French (fr) and Italian (it) Wikipedias. [416] [417]

VisualEditor news

Saving an edit with VisualEditor will now be much faster. [418] [419]
You can now add a caption when you add a file to a page with VisualEditor. You can also change the file to a different one and keep the existing caption. [420] [421] [422]
When you switch to the Edit source tab, you are now asked to keep your changes. You no longer need to find the option in the menus. [423] [424] [425]
The reference tool that adds empty <ref></ref> tags is now at the bottom of the Cite menu, below references that use templates like {{Cite web}}. [426]
Context menus will no longer be shown over items that you can edit directly, for example formulæ. [427] [428] [429]

Future software changes

Starting on July 9, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. The feature was first scheduled for July 1, but was delayed due to bugs.
A plan to enable CirrusSearch as the primary search method on the 11 largest Wikimedia wikis has now been prepared. [430]
If you use references on a page, you will soon always see them at the bottom of the page, even if you forget to add the <references /> tag (or a template). [431] [432]
Black-and-white XCF images will soon display correctly. [433] [434]
Description pages of SVG files will soon always show download links for multiple resolutions (example). The links were previously shown only for SVG files in large original resolutions. [435] [436]

Problems

Between July 2-3, there were problems with loading pages on multiple wikis due to a configuration issue. [437] [438]
For a few hours on July 1, there were problems with uploading new files on Wikimedia Commons due to a configuration error. [439] [440]

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

07:07, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Informal note

Hey, I notice that you have HighBeam access and you seem to have a few topicons. That being said, if you are interested, I've created {{Wikipedia:HighBeam/Topicon}}. No reply to this message is necessary (and I won't see it unless you ping me), just wanted to let you know it was available. Happy editing! — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 00:15, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

List of British Muslims and List of British Bangladeshis

Hi, I hope you are well, I was wondering if you could be of some assistance. A sockpuppet from this investigation is now using throwaway IPs to edit war on List of British Muslims and List of British Bangladeshis.

I have tried to engage in a discussion on the talk page to resolve the matter (of which relates to both articles). However, after leaving one comment he is refusing to reply to the points I have raised on the matter and is just repeatedly reverting my edit, meaning that I cannot take the matter to WP:Third opinion to obtain a consensus as the discussion is not progressive. Is there anything you could do or keep an eye on the reverts? Thanks. Tanbircdq (talk) 21:00, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-29

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 10. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 15, and to all Wikipedias on July 17 (calendar).
It is now possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. Please go to the username changes page on Meta if you want to rename your account on all wikis. [441] [442]
You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for June 2014.
You can now read the latest issue of the Wikidata newsletter and translate it into your language.

VisualEditor news

The tool to add templates and citations will now work for templates that include HTML comments or templates in their titles. [443] [444]
The button to make images full size should now work correctly. [445] [446] [447]
References will now be shown in the default font size again. [448]

Future software changes

CirrusSearch will be enabled as the primary search method on the Dutch (nl) and Japanese (ja) Wikipedias on July 14, and on the Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias on July 16. [449]
The Special:Version page will soon show the exact version of MediaWiki and all extensions installed on your wiki (example). [450] [451]
It will soon no longer be possible to order printed books of wiki articles via PediaPress. You will still be able to create PDF files. [452]
Pages that use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''}} more than once will soon show a warning. You can use {{DISPLAYTITLE:''title''|noerror}} to hide it. [453] [454]
Pages that have the list of references added automatically will soon be added to a tracking category. Administrators will be able to configure the name of the category on their wikis. [455] [456]
Administrators will soon be able to easily merge histories of two pages using Special:MergeHistory. [457] [458]
Administrators will soon see links to delete files on Special:ListFiles. [459]

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

07:49, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

Gutter Oil

I made the deletion because it's the only reference to the practice of extracting opium alkaloids from blood on the entire internet. The likelihood that it was the inspiration for gutter oil, or that it exists at all is unlikely. 208.106.114.20 (talk) 23:47, 19 July 2014 (UTC) Texture

Thanks for pointing this out. I checked and the sources do not back up the information.--Auric talk 00:24, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-30

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 17. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 22, and to all Wikipedias on July 24 (calendar).
CirrusSearch was removed as the primary search method from Wikimedia Commons and the Spanish (es) Wikipedia due to a high server load. The plan to enable it on the Dutch (nl), Japanese (ja), Polish (pl) and Russian (ru) Wikipedias was also postponed to a later date. [460] [461] [462]
The tool that stores information about languages (CLDR) was updated to its latest version. You can still help translate language names into your own language so they can be used in the sidebar and other places. [463]
Translation memory for newly translatable pages should now offer more suggestions. [464] [465]
A tool to convert MediaWiki pages to LaTeX is now available on Tool Labs. [466]

VisualEditor news

Tablet users visiting the mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will be able to use a special version of VisualEditor starting on July 31. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu. Feedback is welcome. [467]
All windows in VisualEditor have now a new design. Main action buttons will always be located in the top bar and will use simple words rather than icons. [468]
You can now easily open links inside the link editor, for example to see their target. [469]
Several bugs related to the positioning of the cursor around some items (like images and references) were fixed last week. [470] [471] [472] [473] [474] [475]

Future software changes

It will soon be possible to watch individual discussions in the Topic namespace rather than whole pages for talk pages using Flow. [476]
You can give comments about the new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [477]
An IRC meeting to organize Pywikibot bugs will take place from July 24 to July 27 on the channel #pywikibot on freenode. [478]
A request for comments on how to improve MediaWiki API was re-started on MediaWiki.org. Your feedback is welcome.

Problems

Mailing lists were broken for about 16 hours between July 14 and July 15 due to a server problem. [479]

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

07:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Veera_Ballala_II

Hi Auric! I saw your message on my talk page in reference to the edit on Veera_Ballala_II It clearly did mention in the edit solving the disambiguation related to Kalyani. The edit summary was in line with what is mentioned. I want to bring to your notice that Kalyani was referred to as Basavakalyan in pre independence days of India. You can read more on the wiki page and satisfy self with the facts. Further, Kalyani,(Karnataka) where the Western Chaulakyas rules as their captial redirects to Basavakalyan.

Looking forward to a discussion and speedy resolution.

7Sidz (talk) 12:21, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Sorry about that. The warning is the one that assumes good faith, the rest don't. I didn't want to be scary. Your edit did delete the bottom part of the page, everything after "By virtue of this, Ballala II gained the title " (Diff). I'm sure it was unintentional, which is why I redid your fix.--Auric talk 18:06, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Oops! Didn't see the deletion of the bottom part of the page. Never has happened before!

Good to find that the dab was fixed by you. Thank! Cheers! 7Sidz (talk) 13:03, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

User:Auric/Kodomo no Kodomo

Oddly, I didn't see this draft when I began working on Kodomo no Kodomo. Sorry to jump the gun on you! — Crisco 1492 (talk) 04:42, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
- BTW, I'm pretty sure Tomoko was the one who got pregnant. Akimi just tried to help her out of a bind. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:04, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

It's okay. I was waiting until I could confirm the plot details to publish. I will probably merge some details into it, like the cast list and other details.--Auric talk 11:49, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Alright. I've formatted the cast list a bit (to keep it from dominating the article so much). I think most of the details from your draft are already in the article. BTW, I've nominated the article for WP:DYK, so you might get a credit in the next week or two. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:30, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-31

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf15) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 29, and to all Wikipedias on July 31 (calendar).
You can now download the latest version of the anti-vandalism tool Huggle.

VisualEditor news

You can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor. [480] [481]
The cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has been removed. You can still use the Read tab and the Back button in your browser to cancel your edit. [482]
If you try to use a template which has no suggested or required parameters in TemplateData, you will now be asked to add the parameters. [483] [484]
You will no longer be able to edit a page if you can't create it, for example on pages protected against recreation. [485] [486]

Future software changes

You will soon be able to filter Meta-Wiki's user rights log by wiki and user. [487] [488]
Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If your wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. [489]
It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. [490] [491]

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

08:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Article on Numeer

Hi Auric! Have a look at the "Reference" section and "External Links" section of the article Numeer Nabi. None of the link directs to a website of reliable nature. Even when it does, the name of the concerned person doesn't appear of the page. I am skeptical about the notability of the person. To me, the article looks like a piece of self promotion which should be deleted outright!

7Sidz (talk) 14:17, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

If you feel that you can't fix the article, you can WP:AFD the article. In the meantime, I've tagged the article (sources and notability.--Auric talk 14:30, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

User:Slaganwr seems to me like a "supporter" of the guy or closely related to the guy. He deleted the tags of sources and notability set by you under the pretext of adding "genuine" references but, once again those led to self publishing platforms.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 7Sidz (talk • contribs) 16:11, July 29, 2014‎ (UTC)

A beer for you!

Thanks for the fantastic clean up at Dave Horne! — Keithbob • Talk • 23:03, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Category:11th Kenyan Parliament

Category:11th Kenyan Parliament, which you created, has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 07:09, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-32

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

Tech News will be presented at the Wikimania 2014 conference in London! If you will be attending the conference, please join us in Auditorium 2 at 14:30 local time on Sunday, August 10.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, it will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [492]
You can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files. [493] [494] [495]
You can now download an update to the archive of Wikimedia Commons files (uploaded up to December 31, 2013). If you have free space on your computer, please help preserve the files. [496]
New users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file. [497] [498]

VisualEditor news

You will no longer see an edit confirmation message after making a null edit with VisualEditor. [499] [500]
VisualEditor will no longer change underscores to spaces in category sort keys. [501]
Many bugs that resulted in inserting the pawn and snowman symbols were fixed last week. [502] [503] [504] [505]
Several bugs related to the use of references were also fixed. [506] [507] [508] [509]

Future software changes

You will soon have a user option to watch pages where you revert edits. [510] [511]
All Toolserver data will be deleted in September. If you want to back up your data, contact Toolserver administrators before August 31. [512]
Pages in the Translations: namespace on wikis using the Translate extension will no longer be indexed by search engines. [513]

Problems

Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 due to a configuration problem. [514]
Some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1. The problem is now fixed. [515]

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

07:37, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Removal of Redlinks Is Not Vandalism

Since when is removal of a redlink considered an act of vandalism to be rewarded by a reversion? Is this a common practice today? Have I missed something here?99.127.230.217 (talk) 01:19, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Read WP:REDLINK. Each red link is a potential blue link. Also, your edit did more than just remove a redlink. You removed a chunk of text and not cleanly either. (read diff) This caused a table error. So be more careful next time, okay?--Auric talk 11:43, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Untitled

I see you found my pamphlet "Riley v Gable & Others..."

You can find the HTML version on my main website along with the order on the judgment

http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/riley_v_gable_1.html

I keep editing this page but it keeps getting reversed. Perhaps you can add that mention?

Aslo the citation for "Smashing Rocks" is worthless. Matthew Collins is - or was - Gable's poodle. It wouldn't surprise me if Gable wrote that himself.

Check out too my SearchlightArchive website.— Preceding unsigned comment added by VennerRoad (talk • contribs) 19:51, August 5, 2014‎ (UTC)

DYK for Kodomo no Kodomo

On 7 August 2014, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Kodomo no Kodomo, which you recently created or substantially expanded. The fact was ... that Akira Sasō's manga Kodomo no Kodomo focuses on an eleven-year-old girl who becomes pregnant? You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, live views, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:53, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—July and August 2014

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
All references and footnotes (<ref> tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Insert" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Insert" menu.
When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

MfD nomination of User talk:Auric/Kooba Cola

User talk:Auric/Kooba Cola, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User talk:Auric/Kooba Cola and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User talk:Auric/Kooba Cola during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. DexDor (talk) 15:48, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-33

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

Recent software changes

Due to the Wikimania 2014 conference, there were no MediaWiki changes this week. The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). [516]
Bureaucrats on all Wikivoyage wikis are no longer able to merge two accounts into one. [517]

VisualEditor news

Tablet users visiting the mobile version of non-Wikipedia wikis will be able to use VisualEditor starting on August 12. The feature will also be enabled on all Wikipedias on August 14. [518]

Future software changes

Internet Explorer 6 users will soon see a JavaScript-free version of Wikimedia wikis; JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work on that browser. If you use Internet Explorer 6, make sure to update to a newer browser! [519] [520] [521]
If you visit a special page that requires you to be logged-in, you will soon be automatically redirected to the log-in page instead of seeing a warning. [522] [523]
You will now always see recent changes to the source language text when editing a translation with the Translate extension. [524] [525]
An IRC meeting to discuss VisualEditor will take place on August 14 at 09:00 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). [526]

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

07:43, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Vorota beast for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Vorota beast is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vorota beast until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Tech News: 2014-34

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf17) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 19, and on all Wikipedias on August 21 (calendar).
There is a new protection level called superprotection. At the moment, only some Wikimedia Foundation employees have access to it. Administrators can't edit "superprotected" pages. [527] [528] [529]
You can now create empty pages directly. A message asks you to confirm that you want to create an empty page. [530] [531]
You can search for Wikimedia tools using a new list of tools. [532]
You can watch the first videos from Wikimania 2014. Some of them are about technical topics. More videos will come later.

Wikidata

After August 19, you can use Wikidata for inter language links on Wikinews. [533]
After August 19, you can use Wikidata for badges like "good" or "featured" articles. Next week, you will be able to show the badges in the article sidebar on Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiquote. [534]

Problems

There was an issue with ProofreadPage and WikiEditor on Wikisource wikis. It is now fixed. [535] [536]

Tech news written by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Dear Auric!

Please let me know why you have requested the deletion of my article "Mikkel Hess" even though significant changes have been made from the previous one? I have had much help during the last week with the references by other Wikipedia users and unless you find the changes to be insufficient, in which case I warmly receive your comments, please help remove the deletion notification. Best regards RoseVind13 (talk) 14:49, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I've prettied it up. Sorry if you think I overreacted. Too often deleted articles will be swiftly recreated with a cut-and-paste version. Your new version seemed to fit those parameters. The article could better have been created at WP:AFC as a draft, which would have allowed you to add better sources and work on the formatting before being published. --Auric talk 16:00, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-35

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

VisualEditor news

There was a error when you put your cursor directly after a reference list. It is now fixed. [537]
You can now add colors to links in the editor using gadgets. You can do this to see links to redirects or disambiguation pages. [538]
If you use Internet Explorer, you will soon be able to use VisualEditor. [539] [540] [541]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf18) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 21. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on August 26, and on all Wikipedias on August 28 (calendar).
After August 26, you will have a central JavaScript and CSS page. They will be on Meta-Wiki and will work on all wikis. Read more on the help page. [542]

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

09:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Nayib Bukele

If you look at the edit history, there's someone who's recently added the promotional stuff on. (I've already reverted once.) George8211 / T 16:32, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

You should notice that the "promotional stuff" is actually a direct translation from Spanish. I've decided to chop it out.--Auric talk 16:40, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Oh. Thanks. George8211 / T 16:42, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-36

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

Recent software changes

You can now test a new Beta Feature to see links to other wikis in the sidebar. The links come from Wikidata. [543] [544]
You can now search pages that link to a page. Use the linksto: keyword in your search. [545] [546]
A redirect to a section now changes the URL in the address bar of your browser. If "Dog" redirects to "Animals#Dog", you now see "Animals#Dog" instead of "Dog#Dog". [547] [548]
If you are testing Flow, you now have a Flow tab in your Notifications. It is called "Messages". [549]

VisualEditor news

You can no longer delete required fields in templates. [550]
We fixed many Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 11, you will get VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [551] [552] [553]
VisualEditor now looks better in Monobook. [554]
We fixed a bug where some of your typing could be undone when you used "cut" (Ctrl+X). [555]
You will no longer see empty or deleted categories among the suggestions when you add a category. [556]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf19) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since August 28. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 2, and on all Wikipedias on September 4 (calendar).
There is a proposal to build a database on Commons for file data. It will make it easier to see the author, license and topics. You can give feedback on this idea. You can also come to the IRC chat on September 3 at 18:00 (UTC) in #wikimedia-office at freenode. [557]
You can give feedback on Media Viewer until September 7. You can say what needs to be improved and ask other people to give feedback too. [558]
You can test a new version of the tool to show math. It uses MathML. Report bugs in bugzilla.
You will no longer be able to upload images from the mobile site. [559]

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

07:49, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Patrick McLaw

Hi Auric. I'm sure you'll be unhappy to hear this, but I've just deleted Patrick McLaw. The article appeared to consist of a series of happenings, some of which were only commentary-worthy for having been wrong, that were collectively used to paint McLaw in a negative light, despite the sum total of his apparent notability being "people thought something but it turned out not to be true". We need to be extremely sensitive to what content we put about about living people, and the article as it stood was problematic because it lacked that sensitivity - associating living people with hot-button criminal activity and discussing their purported mental health are both things we must do only with extreme care, sourcing, and proof of notability. Until we're able to do that, we can't write about those things.

If you'd like the deleted content so you can keep working on it, feel free to drop me a line and I can email it to you, but please keep in mind that unless the content is seriously reworked to comply with BLP, it cannot be stored on Wikipedia, whether in project space or userspace. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 22:20, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

No, it's fine. When I wrote it, the focus was on the school's actions, not McLaw. Mental health was not being discussed in my initial version. I also thought I was being careful and precise, mentioning his earlier actions, which seemed to suggest notability. Sorry if I offended anyone.--Auric talk 23:09, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Cai Baixi for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Cai Baixi is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cai Baixi until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Tech News: 2014-37

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

VisualEditor news

From Thursday, Internet Explorer 11 users will get VisualEditor. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [560] [561] [562]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf20) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 9, and on all Wikipedias on September 11 (calendar).
You will soon confirm a "Thanks" inline instead of in a dialog. [563]
You can read more about the plan to move to Phabricator, a tool that will help people develop the MediaWiki software and report bugs. [564]

Problems

There were problems with JavaScript and CSS on Friday, September 5 because of a code error.

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

09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Zu Shenatir for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Zu Shenatir is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zu Shenatir until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Tech News: 2014-38

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 software changes

You can now change the style of links to disambiguation pages. This is done with the mw-disambig CSS class. [565] [566]
There was a problem on right-to-left wikis with Wikidata log entries. The text was messy in watchlists and recent changes. The problem is now fixed. The same problem will be fixed soon for user names. [567] [568] [569]
New users are randomly chosen for a test on 12 Wikipedias. They get messages with ideas of articles to edit. The ideas come from what they have already edited. [570]

Problems

There was a problem with loading images on September 10. [571]

VisualEditor news

If you don't select text when you add a link, the link now shows a number. [572]
The citation tool no longer offers to reuse a citation if there are none on the page yet. [573] [574]
You can now use help buttons in the "Page settings" menu to see what the options are for. [575]

Future software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf21) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 16, and on all Wikipedias on September 18 (calendar).
These changes are coming with the new version:
- If you use Internet Explorer 7, JavaScript will no longer work. JavaScript tools and scripts will no longer work in that browser. You should update to a newer browser. [576] [577] [578]

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

08:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Paul Bunyan edits

I know it's easy to be hard on newbies, and perhaps I was a bit quick to suggest that those edits could be vandalism. Test edits, however, are exactly what they appear to be. BnPerdue16 initially edited the article to provide Sandra Bullock's picture, and then he or she reverted to the correct picture but inserted an infobox with completely made-up information. I'll leave the infobox this time, but take out the made-up information. John M Baker (talk) 22:41, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. I've added some more (sourced) info. --Auric talk 22:54, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-39

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 software changes

You can test a new Beta Feature called HHVM. It should make editing faster. Please report bugs if you see them. [579]

Problems

There was a problem on the English Wikipedia on September 19. It was due to edits on a template used on many pages.
Sites were down for users in the Pacific area around 7:00 UTC on September 20. It was due to a problem in the San Francisco data center.
There were two bad bugs messing up articles in some browsers in VisualEditor. We fixed the bugs and updated the sites. [580] [581]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf22) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 23, and on all Wikipedias on September 25 (calendar).
If you have more than 2000 notifications, the oldest ones will be removed.[582] [583]
In the "Vector" skin, the icon used for users will show a neutral gender. [584] [585]
The VisualEditor template tool now tells you if a required field is missing. [586]
The "Cancel" button of the VisualEditor save window is now called "Resume editing". This shows that you can still edit and you won't lose your changes. [587]
There are new keyboard shortcuts in VisualEditor. Use Ctrl+Shift+6 for code and Ctrl+Shift+5 for ~~strikethrough~~. [588] [589]
In VisualEditor, you can now see that you are switching to the source editing mode. Before, it was not clear it was happening. [590]

Future site changes

You can see a plan for the move to Phabricator. It's the new tool to track bugs. A guided tour will be done via video on September 24. [591]

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

09:05, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

if someone edits pls don't let it remain hanging

i would rather see a page that is about to be well done than one has to start from the roots. The root thing does not say anything constructive as well as the holistic aspect of the article. editors must edit constructively where the end product is something that anyone can appreciate. others just change it into a stubTowering peaks (talk) 12:54, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Don't worry, I'm just getting started.--Auric talk 13:19, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry to edit randomly on your page, can't quite figure out how to get in touch with you. I've been reading about the Keane case, and I noticed that user FACTS CHECKERS has removed information on Walter Keane's page as of 9/24/14. It just seems really sketchy to remove all information about a legal case, considering user FACTS CHECKERS has only changed information regarding the Keane artist/legal history. Since you seem to be relatively in charge here (or whatever that might mean) it'd be lovely if you could look into FACTS CHECKERS and their edits; considering the Keane case is somewhat common knowledge, and I've found court documents that support the idea that Margaret Keane painted the work. Thanks for your time, hope I haven't messed anything up on your page. 96.32.130.138 (talk) 04:04, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-40

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 software changes

On Commons, you can now see what files are most used across all wikis. You can also see the same list for deleted or uncreated files. [592] [593]
There are now many more translations for language names. [594]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf1) is on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since September 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis on September 30, and on all Wikipedias on October 2 (calendar).
Errors from Scribunto (Lua) are now shown on the page. Before, you had to click on "Script error" to see them. [595] [596]
You can add an "autovalue" for a field in TemplateData. When users add the template to a page, the value will be added automatically. An example is when a clean-up template shows the date it was added. [597]
If you change a user preference but don't save it, it now asks if you want to save it. [598] [599]
The PDF export tool has changed. The new one has better language support but it doesn't offer ZIM and EPUB formats. [600]

Future changes

You can watch a video showing Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. You can also read more about the move from Bugzilla.
JavaScript authors: Many old methods will be removed soon. Please check your scripts and gadgets and replace the old methods by the new ones if needed. [601]

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

09:44, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Hello

An topic you recently edited or contributed to Talk discussion on is the subject of discussion, if you would like to participate: [602]. This is a blanket notice given to all editors. SantiLak (talk) 03:25, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Sexual Jihad

Auric I edited sexual jihad because it incorrectly states that muslim men are allowed to have sex with female slaves. This is incorrect. Will you please make the edit of me. Thank you. Muslim Men are not allowed to have sex with female slaves. Thank you.— Preceding unsigned comment added by ‎ 86.25.172.21 (talk) 11:12, October 1, 2014

Tech News: 2014-41

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 use the phab: and phabricator: interwikis to link to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org. [603] [604]
Some wikis have a template to track bugs in Bugzilla. You should update it to work with Phabricator. You can look at the one on mediawiki.org to see how. [605] [606]
You can look at Special:MediaStatistics to see what kind of files are on your wiki. [607]
A new tool can now create thumbnails of large TIFF images. This concerns files larger than 50 megapixels. These thumbnails are also sharpened. You can comment on Commons. [608]
The Media Viewer tool has a clearer link to the file page. It also has buttons to download, share and embed the file. You can enlarge images by clicking on them. [609]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf2) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 2 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 7 October, and on all Wikipedias from 9 October (calendar).
If you make a code mistake when editing a Lua script, you won't be able to save your edit. [610] [611]
We fixed some more Internet Explorer bugs. If you use Internet Explorer 10, you will be able to use VisualEditor next week. Support for earlier versions is coming next. [612]
On Thursday, the tool to edit TemplateData will come to 30 more wikis. [613] [614]
You can help sort bugs in the Book and PDF export tool on October 8. [615]
1% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [616]

Future changes

You can look at the plan of the Mobile team for their future work. [617]
More changes to Media Viewer are coming. It will be easier to disable it, and you will see the caption below the image. [618] [619]

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

06:10, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Amt000

After his latest revert, I've started a new edit warring noticeboard report. Would you like to comment? Origamite^ⓣⓒ 17:54, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon. Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect or mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of Jani Schofield for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Jani Schofield is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jani Schofield until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Re WP:ANI#Welcome messages to user pages

I see nobody got a chance to reply to your question before the section was closed: the problem with what happened is that the users were welcomed on their user pages, not their talk pages. This is, of course, not acceptable practice. ansh666 18:31, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up.--Auric talk 18:33, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome! ansh666 18:37, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Wim A. G. Blonk

The article on Wim A. G. Blonk will go on Tuesday evening, and I was not able to find a suitable reference. Can you help?--DThomsen8 (talk) 20:25, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-42

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 software changes

You can now log into Phabricator, the new tool to track bugs. Create your account and add your Bugzilla email address. We are copying the bugs from Bugzilla. Bugzilla is still open. [620] [621]
You will now get the VisualEditor newsletter in your language if someone has translated it. You can add translations. You can know about the next translations by joining the translators list or asking Elitre (WMF).

Problems

10% of Tool Labs was down on October 7. [622]
Tool Labs was also broken on October 11. [623]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf3) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since 9 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from 14 October, and on all Wikipedias from 16 October (calendar).
5% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [624]

Meetings

You can join a meeting with Language developers on October 15, 2014 at 17:00 (UTC). [625]
There is a proposal to organize file pages better. It would use the same tools as Wikidata. You can join a meeting about it on October 16, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [626]
You can join a meeting about VisualEditor on October 18, 2014 at 18:00 (UTC). [627]

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

08:54, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Duberry cookies

Here's most of the article immediately before it was taken to VFD:

Duberry Cookies first originated in Aberdeen on the east coast of Scotland. Created by Des Confectionaries in 1956. The cookies never produced on a large scale were first distributed in Glasgow and have been a hit with the nation ever since. The cookie has a jam centre with white chocolate pieces infused into the mixture. Currently Des Confectionaries are still producing the cookie, the main market for the cookie being in Northern England.

Besides this, the article had two cleanup tags, a category, and a stub tag. Nyttend (talk) 21:00, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. Unfortunately, it's not as similar as I hoped, and I can locate nothing online. Thanks for your hep anyway.--Auric talk 22:54, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. You can read translations.

Recent changes

You can test a new system to see math using MathML. Go to your display options and choose "⧼mw math mathml⧽".
You can add badges in Wikidata for quality articles and featured lists. [628] [629]

File information cleanup

You can join a wiki project to help tools read file information. It will help people reuse files.
See how to fix metadata. You can fix it by adding markers to templates and adding templates to files.
You can see a list of files missing machine-readable information on your wiki.
The files missing readable data are also in these categories: no license, no description, no author or no source. [630]

Problems

Developers fixed a security problem. If you use Internet Explorer 6, you won't be able to log in any more. You should use a newer browser. [631]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf4) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 21, and on all Wikipedias from October 23 (calendar).
10% of logged-out readers are getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. You can also test it as a Beta Feature. [632]
If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category. [633] [634]

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

13:48, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Lia Olguța Vasilescu

Hello. Please see this at WP:AN, where I incidentally mention edits of yours (which I think were well-intentioned) in the context of a major edit by somebody else that I find very odd. -- Hoary (talk) 01:29, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the minor complication, but as it seemed an "incident" I moved the matter here in WP:AN/I. -- Hoary (talk) 03:47, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know.--Auric talk 12:17, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Apologies

I am sorry. I compared the two revisions and for some reason I thought that you had deleted information. My mistake. -- Kndimov (talk) 17:20, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Understandable. It happens.--Auric talk 17:21, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

hi

Its me awesome killer77443 thank u for helping feel free to call me daniel— Preceding unsigned comment added by AWESOMEKILLER77443 (talk • contribs) 21:23, October 25, 2014‎ (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-44

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

Problems

There was an issue with files from Commons on October 21. You could only see those with names between 140 and 159 characters by visiting Commons itself. [635]
There was a problem with cut and paste in VisualEditor in Firefox. It was fixed quickly. [636]
There was a problem with editing math in VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [637]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will now come to Wikipedia sites every Wednesday, instead of every Thursday. [638]
The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 23. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28, and on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
VisualEditor now uses autovalues for templates if they are in TemplateData. [639] [640] [641]
VisualEditor's menu items now show their shortcuts beside them. [642]
VisualEditor now opens faster when you click "edit". [643]
The rules for plurals in translations changed in some languages. Interface translations are currently not being updated from translatewiki.net; this process will start again on November 6. [644]

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

05:21, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Halloween cheer!

Happy Halloween!

Hello Auric:
Thanks for all of your contributions to improve Wikipedia, and have a happy and enjoyable Halloween!
– –Davey2010 • (talk) 16:58, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Send Halloween cheer by adding {{subst:Happy Halloween}} to user talk pages with a friendly message.

Thank you!--Auric talk 21:13, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Wow I'm impressed

, You're welcome :) –Davey2010 • (talk) 21:57, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Nofel Izz

Nofel Izz (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

What source did you intend to use, but forgot to do so, for his year of birth? --Ronz (talk) 17:13, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

No source, but the article belongs to Category: 1975 births. The full DOB is also available on his WikiData page [645]. --Auric talk 17:45, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Unless I'm overlooking something, the WikiData page only cites the article. I've removed the cat and other DoB info from the article per BLP. --Ronz (talk) 17:02, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for doing that. --Auric talk 20:09, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-45

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 software changes

The "Special:Cite" page is now called "Special:CiteThisPage". That way, you know it's to cite the page, not to add a reference. [646]
You can no longer use the insource: keyword for text searches. It caused issues with the new search tool. It will come back later. [647] [648]

Problems

There was a bug in VisualEditor with Internet Explorer. It hid tools like the link editor when you opened them. The bug was fixed on Monday. [649]
Issues with the new search tool caused geo data code to show up on pages on Monday and Friday. The mobile "nearby" tool was also broken. The problem is now fixed. [650] [651] [652]
HHVM caused server issues on Thursday. They are now fixed.

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf5) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since October 29. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 4, and on all Wikipedias from November 5 (calendar).
Some wikis have icons at the top of a page to show if it is protected or featured. Icons show up using CSS. You can now use the <indicator> tag in these templates instead to add the icons. [653] [654]
VisualEditor now tells you if you're editing a re-used reference. This helps you avoid changing it if you just want to add a new one. [655]
The icons in VisualEditor's template editor tool for adding more fields are back, along with other fixes. [656] [657] [658] [659] [660]
After November 6, all wikis will have the tool to edit TemplateData. [661] [662] [663]

Future changes

The new search tool will come to the last wikis in the coming weeks. This includes Wikipedia in French, Chinese, German and English. [664]

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

17:28, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014

Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [665] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design. Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-46

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 software changes

You may see a new tool on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [666] [667]
The MediaWiki API now shows information in a nice format. You can translate it in translatewiki.net. [668]

File information cleanup

Reminder: You can help fix file information on your wiki. It will help robots understand the information. After that, it will be easier for you to search files and re-use them.
You can join two IRC chats this week to learn more about the file cleanup project. One will be on Wednesday at 18:00 (UTC) and the other on Thursday at 04:00 (UTC). You can ask questions during the chat if you need help to fix files on your wiki.
You can see a list of files to fix on the Labs tool. You can report bugs and ask questions on the talk page.

Problems

Wikimedia Labs was broken for a few hours on Thursday. It was due to a hardware problem. [669]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf7) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 11, and on all Wikipedias from November 12 (calendar).
You can now use more editing tools for tables in VisualEditor. You can add rows and columns, merge cells, and edit table captions. [670] [671]
The style and insert menus in the toolbar of VisualEditor now show fewer tools. This helps you see the most common tasks. You can see all items by clicking "More". [672]
The way windows inside VisualEditor work has changed. VisualEditor should be faster and have fewer bugs. [673]

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

15:00, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Christian Serratos page and stalker/user changing this page to his personal views and likings. Manipulating Wikipedia into having us add personal information.

Greg Fasolino has repeatedly changed information to suit his personal views. Back when this started with Greg simultaneously there happened to be a stalker on Twitter saying he would do harmful against the law type of things to Christian Serratos. All because he saw her when she first appeared on Neds. Now this was a small show that she is not known for nor has had a fan base that was met by Christian. Christian went all over the world with Twilight and met fans that camped out. That said after the PD and detectives thought they calmed this man he went on to place Neds as the show all over Wikipedia and many sites. All sites have complied minus Wikipedia. It seems Greg has worked this system that Wikipedia has going on and now he takes things down that her team places up. He also manipulates the system and places wrong personal information to have us correct it and place more personal information all to his liking. Please understand that this is a serious issue. Please assist in this. Once the Neds as his #1 personal choice is taken down he adds it again. This has been persistent since the PD asked this stalker to not use unlawful words on the net. Now he uses Wikipedia bots against the site. Neds was not the break out role. She played a minor character on that. Something he is not aware of. She worked prior to it and on much stronger roles afterwards. Please assist.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Preppy12 (talk • contribs) 21:30, November 10, 2014‎ (UTC)

Thanks for your help!

On the Sokolof article.

Tech News: 2014-47

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

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf8) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 12. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 18, and on all Wikipedias from November 19 (calendar).
The new search tool ("CirrusSearch") will be on the English Wikipedia from November 19. [674]

Move from Bugzilla to Phabricator

The tool to track bugs will change on November 21.
You won't be able to add or edit bugs between November 21 and November 24.
You can make the change easier for you by creating your account.
Bugzilla will be frozen after the change. You will see, edit and report bugs in Phabricator.
You can join two IRC chats to learn more about the change. The chats will be on Tuesday, November 18 at 16:00 (UTC) and 23:00 UTC. [675]

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

18:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Copyright checks when performing AfC reviews

Hello Auric. This message is part of a mass mailing to people who appear active in reviewing articles for creation submissions. First of all, thank you for taking part in this important work! I'm sorry this message is a form letter – it really was the only way I could think of to covey the issue economically. Of course, this also means that I have not looked to see whether the matter is applicable to you in particular.

The issue is in rather large numbers of copyright violations ("copyvios") making their way through AfC reviews without being detected (even when easy to check, and even when hallmarks of copyvios in the text that should have invited a check, were glaring). A second issue is the correct method of dealing with them when discovered.

If you don't do so already, I'd like to ask for your to help with this problem by taking on the practice of performing a copyvio check as the first step in any AfC review. The most basic method is to simply copy a unique but small portion of text from the draft body and run it through a search engine in quotation marks. Trying this from two different paragraphs is recommended. (If you have any question about whether the text was copied from the draft, rather than the other way around (a "backwards copyvio"), the Wayback Machine is very useful for sussing that out.)

If you do find a copyright violation, please do not decline the draft on that basis. Copyright violations need to be dealt with immediately as they may harm those whose content is being used and expose Wikipedia to potential legal liability. If the draft is substantially a copyvio, and there's no non-infringing version to revert to, please mark the page for speedy deletion right away using {{db-g12|url=URL of source}}. If there is an assertion of permission, please replace the draft article's content with {{subst:copyvio|url=URL of source}}.

Some of the more obvious indicia of a copyvio are use of the first person ("we/our/us..."), phrases like "this site", or apparent artifacts of content written for somewhere else ("top", "go to top", "next page", "click here", use of smartquotes, etc.); inappropriate tone of voice, such as an overly informal tone or a very slanted marketing voice with weasel words; including intellectual property symbols (™,®); and blocks of text being added all at once in a finished form with no misspellings or other errors.

I hope this message finds you well and thanks again you for your efforts in this area. Best regards--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC).

Sent via--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:20, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi

If you could take a look at the article Pettakere cave that I have created I would appreciate it. Thanks.--BabbaQ (talk) 12:16, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-48

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

The move from Bugzilla to Phabricator is done. You can now report bugs in Phabricator. [676]

Problems

There was a problem when editing tables in VisualEditor. VisualEditor was trying to fix bad values for the colspan or rowspan option. VisualEditor now leaves the bad values to avoid making things worse. This was fixed on November 17. [677]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf9) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since November 19. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from November 25, and on all Wikipedias from November 26 (calendar).
You will be able to try VisualEditor on many new wikis for the first time. After November 26, VisualEditor will become available on Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews wikis. You can find it in your Beta options. [678]
VisualEditor now tells you if your edit needs to be approved. [679]
You can now use VisualEditor's tools directly when you resume editing after closing the save window. [680]
VisualEditor's table editing tools now work better in right-to-left languages. [681] [682]

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

19:31, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

DYK for Pettakere cave

On 1 December 2014, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Pettakere cave, which you recently created or substantially expanded. The fact was ... that the Pettakere cave in Indonesia has hand print paintings estimated to be between 35,000 and 40,000 years old? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Pettakere cave. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, live views, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:03, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Ford Island

Just in case you didn't know - you started this article back in 2004. We've expanded it and brought it to featured article status and it's Today's Featured Article.--v/r - T P 07:21, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-50

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 software changes

All users are now getting pages from servers that run the HHVM tool. HHVM should make pages load faster. [683]
You can join a video chat about Phabricator on December 11 at 18:00 (UTC). Phabricator is the new tool to report issues. [684]

Problems

There was a problem with Phabricator on November 29. It was due to a network issue. [685]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf11) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 3. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 10 (calendar). [686]
You can now exit VisualEditor by pressing the "Esc" key. [687]
It is now easier to use VisualEditor with IMEs. Typing in Malayalam now works better. [688] [689]
The new version of OOjs UI fixed many issues with the size and layout of buttons in dialogs. [690] [691] [692]
(Lua) You can no longer use mw.text.unstrip to get the HTML from special page transclusion. You can see a list of scripts to fix. [693] [694]

Future changes

Starting next week JavaScript tools won't work if they use jQuery Migrate. [695]

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

17:11, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-51

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 software changes

You may see a new tool tested on the mobile site of the English Wikipedia. It asks simple questions to make the article better. In the future, your answers will go to Wikidata. [696]
You can watch a video to learn how to use Phabricator to manage projects. [697]
You can test a new version of the Content Translation tool.

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf12) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since December 10. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from December 16. It will be on all Wikipedias from December 17 (calendar). [698]
You can now find and replace text in VisualEditor. You can open the tool via the menu, Ctrl+F or Cmd+F. [699]
VisualEditor now doesn't change the space at the end of a text that you make bold. [700]
The "Apply changes" button in the reference window of VisualEditor is now disabled until you make a change. [701]

Future changes

The star image of the watchlist may change soon. [702] [703]
You won't be able to use Phabricator on December 18, 2014. It will be down between 00:00 and 08:00 (UTC). [704] [705]

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

16:44, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014

Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements

Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan and colspan elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ⌃ Ctrl+F or ⌘ Cmd+F.

You can now create and edit simple <blockquote> paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Paragraph" into a "Block quote".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "* " will make the line a bullet list; "1. " or "# " will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help

Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-52

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 software changes

The Technical Operations team is now using Phabricator to track their tasks. The Operations team manages the Wikimedia servers. In the future you will be able to see the tasks that are not private. [706]

Software changes this week

There will be no software changes this week and next week. This is because of the end-of-year holidays. The next update of MediaWiki will be on January 6. [707]

Future changes

The system that displays citations will change in the future. The new system will not change the style of citations. [708]
A new design for VisualEditor will come in January. You can try it now on test wikis. [709]

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

16:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-01

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

Software changes

There are no technical changes this week.

Feedback about Tech News in 2014

The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2014? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us at m:Talk:Tech/News. You can write in your language. Thank you!

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

16:52, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-03

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 software changes

Rotated PDF files in landscape format used to show too small. They will now display correctly. You may need to purge older files. [710]
You can now use the {{!}} magic word instead of Template:!. Many wikis used the template to create a pipe (|) in tables and templates. You can delete the template. [711]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki (1.25wmf14) has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 7. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from January 13. It will be on all Wikipedias from January 14 (calendar).
A bug in VisualEditor sometimes added a ☀ (Sun) character. This is now fixed. [712]
The search and replace tool in VisualEditor is now much faster in long pages. [713]
The TemplateData editor now uses the same design as VisualEditor. [714] [715] [716]
The thumb option is now shown in your language in the help of the classic editor toolbar. [717]

Future changes

You can sign up to answer questions from designers. It will help them make editing easier. [718]

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

16:47, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Editor calling me a twit. Thank you.--Auric talk 21:28, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Please read WP:NPA and WP:NAM. There is no reason to get personal or even upset because somebody else made a mistake. Everything here gets fixed eventually. Bearian (talk) 22:00, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

To whom are you referring, him or me? Mike Hayes (talk) 04:39, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Your advice is welcome

Hi User:Auric. I am coming to your talk page as I note you signed the The Autie Pact back in 2013. I am a non-neurotypical who lives with Autism in the form of Asperger Syndrome. If you know much about those of us on the Spectrum as well as Wikipedia editors on the Spectrum, you probably understand that editing and communication can be difficult enough for neurotypicals, excruciatingly difficult at times for editors like me with Autism. I am here on your talk page not because I am asking you to intervene, I am not canvassing for support. I am here because you signed the Autie Pact that is meant to be a way to move toward bridging the gap between neurotypical editors and editors with Autism Spectrum Disorder(s). Currently, there has been a discussion for a few days at AN/I regarding my ability to edit. I have been open there about being a person with Asperger's. When that information was brought forth, the reactions have been -- shall we say -- less than complimentary to those expressing their views about editors with Autism. This discussion and the comments from long-time and not-so-long-time editors is, in my opinion, an example of how far we still have to go in Wikipedia toward understanding that we are made up of editors with different editing styles and different ways of seeing the world. Of course, the difference in editors with Autism is more obvious and can be, at times, more maddening to neurotypicals. That said, with the rate of autism being somewhere between 1:55 - 1:110 and Wikipedia being a magnet for those with ASDs, I think it's fair to say that awareness is extremely important. Also important to remember is that discrimination against editors because they have ASDs is just not appropriate nor does it echo WP:AGF. If you are interested in seeing the thread at AN/I I am referring to, the link is here [719]. I have no expectation that you will look at it, my purpose here is really just awareness that Wikipedia still has a long way to go in the way of interactions and understanding between autism-spectrum editors and neurotypical editors. And, as the title of this section says, your advice would be welcome. Thanks for your time. -- WV ● ✉ ✓ 16:38, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Lucy Lightfoot

The "references" you refer to are sales links. One of the "referenced" books is self-published. None of them appear to have any degree of notability. Helpsome (talk) 10:57, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

The books are relevant and not unrelated books as you implied.--Auric talk 22:39, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

I never said they were unrelated. I certainly didn't imply it. My edit summary was "broken link and unreferenced books" one link was broken and two sales links aren't "references". A self-published book on amazon isn't notable enough to be included. Helpsome (talk) 17:22, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

Agreed, however, neither book is "self-published on amazon".--Auric talk 21:21, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

You are being pedantic. The book is self-published. The "reference" was an amazon.com link to purchase the self-published book. You knew exactly what I was saying. Helpsome (talk) 15:05, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

I am afraid I can't see the link you are talking about, either now or in the history. Can you show me a diff?--Auric talk 20:38, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Pearlasia Gamboa

Hi Auric. You've updated an infobox on Pearlasia Gamboa. One of the fields entered was "notable works", where you put "Dominion of Melchizedek". Whilst she was definitely involved in it at some level, as she was at one time its president, I've not seen any decent sources that indicate she had anything to do with (a) its creation or (b) the various fraudulent activities around it. Is it right to have it as a notable work of hers? Bromley86 (talk) 23:06, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

I've removed it. a second glance revealed the rather buried fact that her husband set it up. Thanks for spotting this.--Auric talk 23:13, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

And thanks to you for updating the infobox in the first place - I should have done it when I added the info. Bromley86 (talk) 23:33, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-04

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 download the new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. The new version shows lead images, better galleries and content from Wikidata. It also has many other new features.[720] [721]
Programs and bots still can't read information about images on many wikis. You can see the list of wikis with the most files to fix. Wikipedia in Italian, Indonesian and Japanese language have the most files to fix. On the biggest wikis you should use bots. Bots can add information templates to groups of files. You can ask other tech users to help you.

Problems

All JavaScript on Commons was broken for a few minutes on Tuesday. It was because of old code in the HotCat tool. The same problem happened on some Wikipedias on Wednesday. It is now fixed. [722]

Software changes this week

There are no software changes this week and next week due to annual meetings. [723]

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

18:13, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-05

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 software changes

You can now translate articles with the new ContentTranslation tool on several wikis. [724]

This week

There are no software changes this week due to annual meetings. [725]

Future changes

You can join a project to improve WikiProjects. [726]
The Compact Personal Bar will be removed for now. It has a bug that breaks the tool to choose your language. It will come back when the bug is fixed. [727]

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

16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Interview for The Signpost

This message is being sent to you as a member of WikiProject Death

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Death for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Thanks, Rcsprinter¹²³ (notify) @ 19:43, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-06

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

Problems

There was a security issue on Wikimedia Labs. Many Labs tools were down after the issue was fixed. [728]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since January 14. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 4 (calendar).
The "Save page" button in the VisualEditor toolbar is now blue rather than green. This is the same as on the mobile site. [729]
You can now edit pages on the draft namespace with VisualEditor on the Russian Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia. You can ask to get VisualEditor for a namespace on your wiki. When your community agrees, ask in Phabricator. [730] [731]

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

16:31, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News 2015—#1

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins.

Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.

Recent improvements

The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action:

starts a new task, like opening the ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽ dialog: blue ,
takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red , or
is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray.

The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design (T67815) based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor (T73746). This change fixed a couple of existing bugs (T73077 and T73078) and improved usability.

Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once (T78234).

Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace (T86688, T87027). If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.

Looking ahead

The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.

We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.

Let's work together

Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.

Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Translations are available through Meta. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-07

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 software changes

You can now use {{#lsth: PageName | SectionName }} to transclude a section with its title. [732]

Problems

MediaWiki was reverted to the previous version on February 4. It was because of a performance issue. It was restored later. [733]
UploadWizard was broken on February 4 because of the revert of MediaWiki. [734]
All sites were broken for 30 minutes on February 5. It was due to a network problem. [735]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 5. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 11 (calendar).
You can have one user page for all wikis. Your Meta user page will show if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can test this tool on test wikis. [736] [737] [738]
You can search for media files in VisualEditor more easily. Images are bigger and you see the size and license. [739] [740]
It is easier to review your changes when you save the page in VisualEditor. The window is wider. [741]
You can read the latest news about VisualEditor. You can now join weekly meetings with developers. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The first meeting is on February 11 at 20:00 (UTC).

Future changes

Administrators will soon be able to delete change tags used fewer than 5,000 times. [742]
In the future you will be able to have personal lists of articles on the mobile site. [743]

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

16:27, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-08

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

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 11. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 17. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 18 (calendar).
On Wednesday your Meta user page will be shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. [744] [745] [746]
You can now change the order of categories in VisualEditor using drag-and-drop. [747]
In VisualEditor, you now need to make a change before you can "Apply Changes" to citations and templates. [748]
The way the cursor moves in VisualEditor is changing. Your browser now handles the cursor directly. Most of you will see no change. In right-to-left text, the cursor now moves in a 'visible' rather than 'logical' way. This is like other sites but you may be surprised at first. [749]

Meetings

The VisualEditor Team had their first public bug triage meeting on February 11. They will post the results on the meeting page. [750]
You can join the second weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on February 18 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join. [751]
You can join a meeting with the developers of the Content Translation tool. It will be on February 18 at 13:00 (UTC). [752]

Future changes

You can comment on a proposal about abandoned Labs tools.

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

17:57, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of User:Auric/Hessie Donahue

User:Auric/Hessie Donahue, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Auric/Hessie Donahue and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:Auric/Hessie Donahue during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Ricky81682 (talk) 05:00, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

This was the notice. It was back in February and listed almost a month. But you are right as you are an active user so stale is inappropriate. I thought I checked that. I'm sorry. Ask the admin who deleted it to reconsider and restore it likely under G13. - Ricky81682 (talk) 10:29, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I was on a long wikibreak when this nomination happened and I missed it.--Auric talk 10:42, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-09

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 software changes

All new accounts are now global. [753]
Your Meta user page is now shown if you don't have a user page on a wiki. You can report problems if you see any. You can ask a bot to delete your old user pages. [754] [755] [756]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from February 25. It will be on all Wikipedias from February 26 (calendar).
It is now easier to see template fields in VisualEditor. The fields are bigger. [757]
It is now easier to see when a button is disabled in VisualEditor. [758]
Sometimes when you copy-pasted a template in VisualEditor, it was replaced by HTML. This problem is now fixed. [759]
Tools in Labs will stop working for a few hours on February 24. [760]

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 February 26 at 00:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

At the moment you need to log in to edit Wikimedia wikis on mobile devices. You can say if anyone should be allowed to edit on the mobile sites. The discussion ends on March 15.
Images in the interface will soon work better in Opera 12. [761]

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

16:29, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia email re Newspapers.com signup

Hello, Auric. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

HazelAB (talk) 23:38, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-10

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 software changes

A Lua function to use Wikidata has changed. You need to update the pages that use it. [762]
You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Uzbek and Minangkabau. You need to enable it in your Beta options.
You can now hide banners if you don't have an account. [763] [764]

Software changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since February 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 3. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 4 (calendar).
You can use the Content Translation tool on Wikipedia in Punjabi and Kyrgyz. You can ask for the tool in other languages.
Editing the fake blank line in VisualEditor is now simpler. This change also fixed a few bugs. [765] [766] [767] [768]
The TemplateData editor now warns you if a related page already has TemplateData. [769]
The TemplateData table now tells you if a template doesn't take any parameters. [770]

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 4 at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join technical meetings in France and Mexico this year. You will be able to ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [771]

Future changes

You will be able to get a direct link for a section of a page. [772]

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

16:41, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-11

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 create books on almost all wikis. It doesn't work yet on wikis using the language converter. [773] [774]
VisualEditor had problems with categories in Safari. It sometimes moved or removed the categories. The issue is now fixed. [775] [776] [777]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 4. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 10. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 11 (calendar).
In VisualEditor the "Edit ^beta" button is now called "Edit" on the English Wikipedia. [778] [779]
The feedback tool in VisualEditor now looks like the other tools. It also asks for information about your browser to help fix bugs. [780] [781]
You now see the VisualEditor toolbar even if the rest of the page is still loading. [782] [783]
You now see more information when you edit a link, a reference or other items in VisualEditor. You also see a clearer edit button in those tools. [784] [785]
If you use the ContentTranslation tool you now see red links in the list of articles in other languages. The link is red if the article doesn't exist in the language of your options or of your browser. You can translate the article by clicking on the red link.

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 11 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join a technical meeting in France in May. You can ask for help if you can't pay yourself. [786]

Future changes

You can get help to become a developer. You can learn more on the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy pages. [787]
You will soon be able to read technical reports in Phabricator. [788]

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

15:19, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Annabelle (doll)

Hi, the article has been heavily updated with additional sources, though I believe that the 5 sources prior was enough to establish notability. I hoping you could review the new article. Let me know what you think and whether or not you your opinion has changed. :) Valoem ^talk ^contrib 06:24, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-12

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

The servers that resize images are using new software. You should report new problems that you notice with images. [789]
You can now see lists of bugs about Commons, Wikisource and Wiktionary. [790]
It is now easier to add special characters in VisualEditor. You can edit the list of characters for your wiki. [791] [792]

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. [793] [794]
You can now add examples, and details about old parameters, in TemplateData. [795] [796]

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. [797] [798]
You can comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [799]
The final steps of single user login (SUL) will happen in April. You can see the rules to rename accounts. [800]

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

15:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-13

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

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [801]
VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [802] [803] [804]
When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [805]

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 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [806]

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

15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-14

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 hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [807]
You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [808] [809] [810]
All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [811]
You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [812]
VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [813]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [814]
You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [815]
You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [816]
You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [817]
VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [818] [819] [820] [821]

Meetings

You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on IRC on March 31 at 16:00 (UTC). [822]
You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for reverting my mistake. I'll be careful next time. —ALittleQuenhi (talk to me) 03:59, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015

Did you know?

With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:

Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:

After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements

VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead (T90734).

Looking ahead

The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon.

Let's work together

Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language. Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

-Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 17:50, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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 join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [823]
You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [824] [825]
The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [826]
You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [827]

Problems

The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [828]
Labs was broken several times this week. [829] [830] [831] [832]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [833]
Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [834] [835]
You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [836]

Meetings

You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [837]

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

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Auric. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.