Hi,
The latest tech newsletter is now available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2014/02 . 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 inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent software changes
- The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf9)
was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 2. It will be
enabled on non-Wikipedia wikis on January 7 and on all Wikipedia wikis
on January 9 (calendar).
- The old note-taking site (Etherpad) was removed on December 30, 2013. You can see most of the documents on the new site. [1]
Problems
- On January 2, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage
projects were broken for 2 hours due to language cache update issues.
- On the same day, it was not possible to edit most wikis for about 30 minutes, due to a database replication problem.
Future software changes
- The new search tool (CirrusSearch)
will be added as the default search method for Italian Wikipedia,
French Wikisource, Wikidata and all Wikivoyage sites, and as a second
search method for the German Wikipedia and all Wikibooks sites on
January 6. [2]
- Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian Wikipedia users will also be able to enable CirrusSearch in their Beta Features options. [3]
- Plural form rules for some languages will be changed.
Many translations of the user interface for Belarusian, Russian,
Serbian, Ukrainian and other languages will need to be changed. [4] [5] [6]
- You will see a warning when you try to delete a page linked to from other pages. [7] [8]
- You will be able to hide redirect pages on the list of protected pages. [9] [10]
- You will be able to use keyboard shortcuts in the Translate tool, by pressing Alt+1 and similar key groups. [11] [12]
- E-mails sent by MediaWiki will include the name of the site in their
From:
line. You will be able to change this name on your wiki by editing the MediaWiki:Emailsender
page. [13] [14]
- Images viewed in the Beta Features media viewer will load faster. [15] [16]
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Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation