The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Wikifunctions:Status_updates/2024-09-06 ======
Recording of September’s Volunteer’s Corner is now available on Commons As always, the recording of this month’s Volunteer’s Corner is available for everyone to watch on Wikimedia Commons[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abstract_Wikipedia_Volunteer_Corner_...].
Recent Changes in the software
This week was a quieter one in terms of features shipped, as several people were out and we were focused on finishing the bigger Quarterly pieces of work.
In terms of user-facing changes, we tweaked the code that integrates the special view of Objects with MediaWiki. This means that the "Tools" menu for the page now has the "What Links Here" and "Page Information" tools, amongst others (T343594[https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T343594]). If you're editing a Test case to change the target Function, we now immediately clear the results widget rather than require you to manually re-run it. The message that warns you that you cannot run a Function because it has no connected Implementations now uses that term, rather than the old "approved" wording (T345848[https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T345848]).
Function of the Week: lists have unequal length[https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z13310]
The list inequality function accepts two lists and returns a Boolean that indicates if the input lists are of different lengths. This simple function provides an efficient way to compare the lengths of two lists (or other iterables). It's helpful in scenarios where you want to ensure that two lists are not of the same size before proceeding with other more complicated operations that depend on lengths of lists.
We appreciate simple functions like this which have exemplary uses. A function that checks if two lists are of unequal length has numerous practical applications across various fields. We can use it in inventory[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventory] management, to verify that product and quantity lists are aligned to prevent inventory mismatches. It can be used in data validation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_validation] and matching financial records to help detect missing or incomplete data by checking transaction lists for unequal lengths. Similarly we can use it in form validation, parallel processing and many more complex areas.
We currently have three implementations for this function - one in Javascript, one in Python, and another composition. Both Javascript[https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z14509] and Python[https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z13313] implementations perform a comparison of the two inputs by evaluating their ‘length’ properties. They return the result of the inequality (!==) between these lengths, providing an efficient way to check if the two inputs are of different sizes. The composition[https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z13311] uses the list equality function and negates its result to provide the necessary inequality result for this function.
This function has two tests that demonstrate the use of the function.