Hi,

The latest technical newsletter is now available at <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2015/49>. Below is the English version.

You can help write the next newsletter: whenever you see information about Wikimedia technology that you think should be distributed more broadly, you can add it to the next newsletter at <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Next>.

More information on how to contribute is available at <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News#contribute>. You can also contact me directly.

As always, feedback (on- or off-list) is appreciated and encouraged.

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: Octicons-tools.svg. You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [1]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [2]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [3][4]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [5]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [6]

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


//Johan Jönsson