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Tech News: 2017-34

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 test the new Timeless skin on the test wiki and mediawiki.org. You can turn it on in your preferences. You can report bugs in Phabricator. It will come to more wikis soon.
• Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences.
• If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed.
• The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.

Changes later this week

• Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files.
• The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Misplaced Pages wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

18:01, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

SQL help: All AfDs from a certain date?

Hi there again. After creating my AFD closes script, I was wondering about creating a script to analyze who are the main people involved in closing AFDs for a certain day but I am not really sure how to get a list of AFDs to analyze. Is there a way to find out which pages are transcluded instead of linked to using the pagelinks table? I tried this query but it is not limited to transclusions. Thanks in advance! Regards SoWhy 18:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

@SoWhy: I think you want the templatelinks table :) See quarry:query/21179 for the modified query. If you're trying to get the AfDs for a specific day, I'd use a direct equality comparison of the page title rather than using LIKE — MusikAnimal 00:48, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the updated query. I didn't know there was such a table, that does make it quite easier of course :-) Regards SoWhy 06:51, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Can I trouble you with another question? I tried working on my deletion analyzer script but I am struggling with a way to handle the huge logging table efficiently. Trying to grab a single day's deletions using this query takes quite a long time but I cannot think of a better way to limit the results to certain dates. Trying this query within a script on my local install always leads to a 504 error Can you think of a better (more efficient) way to grab those deletions? Regards SoWhy 19:29, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

@SoWhy: The replicas differ from production in that they have different indexing. This is very annoying but thankfully there is a guide, see wikitech:Help:MySQL queries#Alternative Views. So in our case we want to find log entries made by a specific user, so we'll use logging_userindex. That should make it significantly faster. Another tool I heavily rely on is Hedonil's SQL optimizer. This doesn't tell you how to improve your query but it will tell you if it is inefficient. There if you copy your query using logging, you'll see the EXPLAIN suggests it will scan 68,277,806 rows!!! With logging_userindex, you're down to just 36,690 rows :) Note that in a normal MySQL-ish environment, you can run EXPLAIN directly to get this info, but EXPLAIN is not available to end users on Toolforge. Hedonil's tool does some special magic to surface the same information — MusikAnimal 20:38, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks very much. That does make it quite simpler of course! Regards SoWhy 06:17, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Metrics for reuse on Commons?

Hi, Sam Wilson suggested I get in touch. I work at the University of Edinburgh as the Wikimedian in Residence and library staff there have suggested they would be more inclined to share content to Wikimedia Commons if there were extra metrics for the images reuse. Knowing who is downloading the image and where the downloaded image is being reused/shared elsewhere on the internet is obviously too much like surveillance but wondered if number of clicks on an image (to enlarge for instance) or number of downloads (people choosing to save by right click 'Save as' or via download link etc) could be measured? Is this something you could advise about? Apologies if I'm barking up the wrong tree. Cheers, Stinglehammer (talk) 19:05, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

@Stinglehammer: Hey! Sorry for the late reply. The Analytics team does offer data on how many times an image or static media was downloaded or viewed at full size, and also how many times audio/video files were played. The raw TSV files for this can be found at dumps.wikimedia.org. I'm not aware of any tool that can visualize the image data, but for audio and video there is toollabs:commons-video-clicks and the upcoming phab:T149642. Hope this helps! — MusikAnimal 15:54, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

August 30: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

Wednesday August 30, 7pm: WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Misplaced Pages editors and new participants. We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities. We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects. After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery! Wednesday August 30 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com). 7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street (note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location) We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 12:03, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Backlog update:

• The new page backlog is currently at 16,991 pages. We have worked hard to decrease from over 22,000, but more hard work is needed! Please consider reviewing even just a few pages a a day.

Technology update:

• Rentier has created a NPP browser in WMF Labs that allows you to search new unreviewed pages using keywords and categories.

General project update:

• The Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team is working with the community to implement the autoconfirmed article creation trial. The trial is currently set to start on 7 September 2017, pending final approval of the technical features.
• Please remember to focus on the quality of review: correct tagging of articles and not tagbombing are important. Searching for potential copyright violations is also important, and it can be aided by Earwig's Copyvio Detector, which can be added to your toolbar for ease of use with this user script.
• To keep up with the latest conversation on New Pages Patrol or to ask questions, you can go to Misplaced Pages talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers and add it to your watchlist.

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:33, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

StaleDrafts

Would you be able to have you bot update the StaleDraft report daily for a while? With G13 expanded to cover everything on that report, the report is shrinking. More frequent updates would help rid the report of deleted pages as well as postponed and refunded pages that are no longer G13 eligible. That would make it much easier to work with until the backlog is reduced.. Thanks in advance. Thanks. Legacypac (talk) 03:38, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Done! It is now running daily — MusikAnimal 15:54, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 35, 2017)

Tech News: 2017-35

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

Recent changes

• Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror.
• You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address.

Problems

• Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page.

Changes later this week

• You can block users from sending you notifications.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Misplaced Pages wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the next meeting with the Technical Committee. The topic this week is Migrate to HTML5 section ids. The meeting will be on 30 August at 21:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page.
• New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September.
• The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.

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

22:10, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

those 54 ips

If you're converting all of them to 1-year blocks, you got your work cut out for you. I saw Katie blocked a few ranges for two years; isn't that an easier option? Drmies (talk) 00:38, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Someone's running a bot that monitors recent changes, and reverts everyone's edits? My last two spelling corrections were nearly instantaneously reverted by an IP. Can't get any work done if that can't be controlled. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:48, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Yep, I was just blocking to get more IPs to show up and discover more ranges. Mostly thanks to Katie I think it's slowed down. I'll continue to monitor. Best — MusikAnimal 00:51, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	For helping me again and again with my newbie questions regarding scripting and SQL. You are truly a great editor! SoWhy 14:47, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

My pleasure! And thanks for the WikiLove :) — MusikAnimal 16:11, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Derp vandal filters

Can you please explain a little bit? I've noticed that I personally have tripped these filters when I'm not a vandal. 24.91.248.60 (talk) 17:35, 31 August 2017 (UTC)