Hi Everyone!
The second edition of the Coolest Tool Award
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Coolest_Tool_Award> will happen online on
Friday 11 December 2020 at 17:00 UTC[^1].
The awarded tools will be showcased in a virtual event, with broadcasted
video and chat channels for socializing. We will send more details and
links soon.
Save the date, and join us celebrating the great work volunteer developers
do for the Wikimedia communities.
We hope to see you there!
Joaquin, for the Coolest Tool Academy 2020
[^1]: 17:00 UTC is 9:00 PST, 18:00 CEST, 22:30 IST. More timezones in
timeanddate.com
<https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20201211T17>
[image: Coolest_Tool_Award_2020_event_date.png]
--
Joaquin Oltra Hernandez
Developer Advocate - Wikimedia Foundation
As we announced back in March, as part of the architecture cleanup of
MediaWiki, the Graphoid graph service will soon stop rendering graphs
server-side [1]. All rendering will take place in the client. This change
primarily affects end-users who do not have or have disabled JavaScript.
Unfortunately, this was going to be a consequence of retiring Graphoid in
order to upgrade other parts of the infrastructure. The vast majority of
wikis have operated without server side rendering through this year and now
we are simply looking to make this change for the last remaining projects
and will be completed by the end of this calendaryear.
This decision was not taken lightly (see [2] for some of the history) and
we are still hoping to re-enable server-side graph rendering in the future,
but any such rendering would be with a totally new service [3], as
maintaining the previous Graphoid service was untenable. The server
graphoid sits on is already well past its service life, and is running old
unmaintained software. In short, it is likely to fail one way or another,
possibly causing significant problems if we take no action. The graph
extension has been provisioned to enable editor defined static fallback
images alongside client side rendering. [4]
1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124254
2. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T211881
3. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249419
4. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph#User_defined_fallback
--
Seddon
*Senior Community Relations Specialist*
*Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation*
Bonjour
Starting on November 16, 2020 the Wikimedia Foundation Operations team will
migrate the servers running the MediaWiki application servers to a new
release of the ICU
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Components_for_Unicode> Unicode
library (from version 57 to 63).
This unblocks some future work on upgrading the servers to a new Operating
System release and will also allow the use of improved internationalisation
in the future (as wikis will then be able to use features introduced by the
new ICU release such as new collation definitions, and allows us to use a
more recent version of Unicode in MediaWiki).
This migration will cause some unavoidable temporary user-visible impact: *The
sorting of some category pages will be distorted* – all pages which have
been updated with the new software version will use the new sorting while
untouched pages still use the old sorting. As such, Ops need to run a
maintenance script to update the sorting for old entries.
*The distortions may last from a few hours* (on medium-sized wikis), up to *a
day* (on the largest wikis), and *a few days* on English Wikipedia. The
start-time will depend upon when the migration script reaches each wiki.
The detailed list and the task for the technical implementation is at
*T264991* <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T264991>.
This operation is announced in the next issues of Tech News
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>. Please share this message
where it needs to be posted!
Thank you,
Benoît
--
Benoît Evellin - Trizek (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello!
Next Monday, the Community Wishlist Survey 2021 will begin. I'd like to ask
you to finish and review the translation of the message which will be sent
out to the village pumps:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2021/Invitation
When there's an update regarding the CWS translations, I'll put it in this
very thread. This way, hopefully, it will be easily noticeable.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
Szymon Grabarczuk (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello,
I'm rewording the browser security message a bit and I need translation of
this sentence to these languages: zh, es, ja, sv, hi
"Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia are getting more secure. You are
using an old web browser that will not be able to connect to Wikimedia
projects in the future. Please update your device or contact your IT
administrator."
(For more information see
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/puppet/+/637850)
Thank you so much!
--
Amir (he/him)
Hello,
A new feature called Reference Previews [1] was introduced as a beta
feature last year. After more than a year of testing, bug fixing and other
improvements it will soon leave the beta state in the first wikis, enabling
it by default for all users including readers. New features like this are
deployed in multiple batches, to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Therefore, we are currently looking for a few small or medium-sized wikis
that are interested in being among the first to gain the new feature.
If your community is interested, please reach out to me on my discussion
page or via email.
The feature shows you references in a small popup when you hover over the
reference number in square brackets. This way you can look up a reference
without jumping down to the bottom of the page. The feature is part of the
MediaWiki Popups extension [2], which is also used for the Page Previews
feature [3]. Both features can be turned on and off together by the user.
Several wikis have a gadget called “RefTooltips” to provide the same
functionality [4]. The new extension will disable itself if RefTooltips is
used. This way, it is up to the users and communities to decide if they
want to disable the gadget in favor of the new feature.
Reference Previews originated from a wish from the German-speaking wiki
community and was developed collaboratively by Wikimedia Deutschland the
Wikimedia Foundation. If you'd like to know more about this feature, please
visit the project page.[1]
For the Technical Wishes team,
Michael Schönitzer
1: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/ReferencePreviews
2: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Popups
3: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews
4: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234204#6244041
--
*M. F. Schönitzer*
Community Communication
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de
Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.