An analysis of what happened was circulated a few days ago and now
published:
<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/TranslationNotifications_issues_2012-12>
It's fairly technical but it's supposed to help improve for the future,
although so far it wasn't acted upon: «TL;DR: Changes in MW core exposed
a bug in TranslationNotifications. The same bug is also present in other
extensions. Many people participated in preventing further damage and
fixing the issue. More work remains to be done.»
We still don't know if the translation notifications should now work or
what's going to happen to the job queue, nor how/if todays' jobqueue
disaster
(http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/65703
) may impact it.
Nemo
See
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf6#Breaking_changes>
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_depl…>
Is someone taking care of these notifications? Please help
1) checking that the instructions are clear and complete (e.g. what
updates are needed for custom enotif_body),
2) listing the affected wikis.
Note that it's also very unclear what sort of changes are legally
allowed for wikimedia-copyrightwarning, some wikis like it.wiki have
changed the copyright/terms of use warnings drastically (besides adding
tons of other crap) but the legal department only checks/advises en.wiki.
Unless for some mysterious reason a wiki is very sure of how it should
be, my personal suggestion is to keep the default, but as such I didn't
write it on the wiki page.
Nemo
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf6#Most_important_changes
This week and next week we're deploying a new version of MediaWiki to
your wiki, as usual. This upgrade is now out to mediawiki.org and
test2.wikipedia.org in case you want to try it out before it comes to
your wiki -- for instance, you could log in and put your user scripts in
your userspace to make sure everything still works. Key changes:
Display changes:
* The message "wikimedia-editpage-tos-summary" (displayed below the edit
form) has been removed; if it was customized on your wiki, its contents
will have to be merged with "wikimedia-copyrightwarning".
* We changed the wording of the protectedpagetext message to include
moving and other actions.
* MediaWiki:Contributions now reflects the gender of the user.
* We're displaying IPv6 addresses more nicely.
Fixes:
* Bogus page creation e-mail notifications were being sent when a page
was actually being deleted. We think we've fixed that.
* We fixed the mobile version of the website so that, if you disable
images, it doesn't also strip other content.
* Your "enhanced changelist" displays minor/bot changes better.
New:
* There's a new DynamicSidebar - tell us if your sidebar acts weird.
* TimedMediaHandler now supports embedding a smaller audio player of
35-pixel width, and reorders the controls so that small players get a
play/pause button and volume first.
* In WebFonts we've added the Gubbit font, replacing Kedage, for Kannada.
As always, more at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/wmf6
and deployment dates at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap . Please let us
know of any bugs! Thank you for your feedback!
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Administrators on Commons can now use UploadWizard to grab freely
licensed photos directly from Flickr. Go to Special:UploadWizard, and
you should see, next to the "Select a media file to donate" button, a
button that lets you "Add images from Flickr".
Commons administrators, please test this and let us know how it works! I
believe we want to be able to open it up so all users will be able to
upload multiple images at once from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons.
(in Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28731)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Greetings,
Summary: I'm trying to get comments and ideas on how to improve
communication between developers and Wikimedia editors, and I'd like
to ask the help of people on this list to ask your local communities
what they think, and post the results of those discussions here.
Longer version:
Communication between Wikimedia contributors and "tech people"
(primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other
engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia
employees have made efforts to become more transparent, but what I'd
like to discuss today is how we can better engage in true
collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and
announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's
already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!".
It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way,
from the early planning to deployment.
Some "big" tech projects sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation are
lucky enough to have a Community Liaison who can spend a lot of time
discussing with editors, basically incarnating this 2-way
communication channel between users and engineering staff. But one
person can only do so much: they have to focus on a handful of
features, and primarily discusses with the English Wikipedia
community. We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering
projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly
collaborate to build new features together. Hiring hundreds of
Community Liaisons isn't really a viable option.
There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new
software features and deployments) that drive editors insane. You
probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be,
and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and
volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long
term?) What can users do to get there?
Instead of just postulating that "The problem is X" and "The solution
is obviously Y", I've started an extensive consultation process to
learn from users, to hear you, to listen to your complaints and your
ideas on how to fix the issues. I'm hoping that this open and
collaborative thinking process will yield better results than a
one-sided analysis.
An preliminary consultation took place last month with projects in
English and French. I've summarized the initial findings and
proposals:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Fall_2012_consultat…
I'm hoping that we can now expand this consultation to more projects
and more languages, with your help. It isn't feasible for me to launch
a discussion on each wiki in each language, but I'm hoping that you
can help me spread this message and start those discussions with your
local communities.
I realize this will take some of your time, but I think it's worth
spending a little time to discuss this now in order to make big
improvements later on how we communicate with each other.
I'm available to answer comments, concerns and questions.
Many thanks for your help!
--
Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Hey everyone,
Recently my team needed to change a MediaWiki message in core,
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation. This message was presented to users after they
registered, and while the default contents have not changed (except for the
header, which now reads "Welcome, $1!", where $1 is the username).
However, any custom content that communities placed in to
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation needs to be moved to the new message,
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation-msg. We've generated a list of all the wikis that
seem to have customized the content.[1]
Apologies for any inconvenience, but changing the message was the cleanest
way to change the header text. If you can help get the word out to local
admins, that would be a huge help.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
1.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:S_Page_%28WMF%29/welcomecreation_messag…
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Going to FOSDEM
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:32:18 -0800
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Organization: Wikimedia Foundation
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Are you going to FOSDEM? If so (or if you are considering going) please
add yourself to
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Events/FOSDEM
I still don't know. Depends on whether we have a MediaWiki EU critical mass.
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 4:50 PM
Subject: Proposal: MediaWiki Groups
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi, here you have a first draft about MediaWiki Groups, and implicitly
MediaWiki reps:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil/MediaWiki_groups
MediaWiki groups organize open source community activities within the
scope of specific topics and geographical areas. They extend the
capacity of the Wikimedia Foundation in events, training, promotion
and other technical activities benefiting Wikipedia, the Wikimedia
movement and the MediaWiki software.
Imagine MediaWiki Germany Group, MediaWiki Lua Group...
These groups may become a significant source of growth and wider
diversity of our community.
Please bring your ideas to the discussion page - or here. Thank you!
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
"TemplateSandbox" lets you preview a page with a change in a template it
uses.
At the bottom of the edit form in the Template and Module namespaces, a
new box will appear that allows you to preview other pages as they would
appear if you saved the template/module you are currently editing.
Example: try editing the sample "thank-you" template
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Thankyou . On the edit form,
under the Save button, you'll see "Preview page with this template" --
try User_talk:Example_user .
Or, go to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:TemplateSandbox
and give it the "sandbox prefix" User:Sharihareswara (WMF)/sandbox and
tell it to "render page" User_talk:Example_user . You'll see the ugly
changes I made to the template in my sandbox.
More information at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VPT#New_feature_needs_testing .
You can check this out in the new version of MediaWiki, now live on
mediawiki.org, but until we have more feedback and improvements we
aren't pushing it live on the other sites.
We figure this will make it easier for people to hack on templates, and
to develop new Lua templates to replace wikitext templates.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation