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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-01/Technology report

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Technology report

Paying attention to your mobile

A person holds a mobile phone; in the background are Wikimedia project logos
Wikimedia developers are improving the mobile website.


You can read more about advanced mobile editing and other things the developers plan to work on over the next year; there is also a presentation you can watch.

Making the wikis work better on mobile phones is also something editors can help with. There is a list of recommendations for making content easier to read in the mobile view. You can add things to the page and ask others to help.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Bot tasks

Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #36, #37, #38, and #39. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes
  • There is a new user right for users who can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. Before this all admins could edit CSS and JavaScript. This was a security risk. This group is called interface administrators. Administrators can delete user CSS and JavaScript pages. [1][2]
  • There will be an A/B test on the Wikipedia mobile website. It starts this week. It tests how we show templates that show information about an article. The test will last two weeks. [3][4]
  • You can now use different CSS rules for different skins when you edit templates. This is because of TemplateStyles. [5]
  • wp10 in ORES is now called articlequality. [6]
  • When you get a new message on your talk page you get a yellow message in the toolbar. The preference to show or not show this has been removed. [7]
  • When you added or edited a template with the visual editor the input boxes were very big. This has been fixed. The input boxes will now be smaller until you click on them. Then they will change size to fit the text. [8]
  • The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. Images uploaded using Nearby are now automatically added to the associated Wikidata item. You can browse other images on Commons. You can see your achievements and your upload statistics. It has also fixed some bugs. [9]
  • Advanced item MediaWiki web requests now have a time limit of 60 seconds for GET requests and 200 seconds for POST requests. [10]
  • Special:AncientPages can hide disambiguation pages. [11]
  • The preferences form has changed to use the standard look. If you see any problems please report them on Phabricator. [12]
Problems
  • UploadWizard had problems with campaigns. Users could not upload files. This has now been fixed. [13]
  • You can get a notification when a link is made to a page you created. This has not worked since June. It was fixed last week. [14]
  • Some diffs showed lines in the wrong order. This was fixed last week. [15]
  • Marking a cross-wiki notification as read didn't work every time. The other wiki was not updated. This has now been fixed. [16]
  • <maplink> did not work for a few days. This was because of a bug. This has now been fixed. [17]
  • {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} is used by some templates. For a period edits saved with {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} would save the previous user's name and not your username. This is now fixed. Edits made before the bug was fixed will still be wrong and need to be corrected. [18]
  • When you move a page the title still shows the old page name. The developers are working on fixing this. [19]
  • You could not see the menu on the notifications page on the mobile version. This has now been fixed. [20]
Future changes
Meetings
  • Recurrent item Advanced item You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/up-one-lvl-kbd.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/up-one-lvl-kbd.js
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/invert.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/invert.js
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/link-section-edits.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/link-section-edits.js
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/subpages.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/subpages.js
  6. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/WhatLinksHere.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/WhatLinksHere.js
  7. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Danski454/UserLogToolbar.js' ); // Backlink: User:Danski454/UserLogToolbar.js
  8. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Flooded with them hundreds/sectionremover.js' ); // Backlink: User:Flooded with them hundreds/sectionremover.js
  9. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Flooded with them hundreds/PageMoverClosure.js' ); // Backlink: User:Flooded with them hundreds/PageMoverClosure.js