Latest *tech news https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News* from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2024/38 are available.

*Improvements and Maintenance*

- [image: Wishlist item] Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Community_Wishlist/Focus_areas/Template_recall_and_discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Community_Wishlist. - The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T263513 - References Check https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Edit_check#Reference_check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T373692 - It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Requesting_wiki_configuration_changes a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T373480 - [image: Advanced item] Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Data_Services#ToolsDB from both Quarry https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Research:Quarry and Superset https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Research:Quarry#Querying_Quarry's_own_database. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Recently_resolved_community_tasks . - Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search https://global-search.toolforge.org/?q=mw-message-box®ex=1&namespaces=&title= to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation https://doc.wikimedia.org/codex/latest/components/demos/message.html#css-only-version, and an example update https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech/Header&diff=prev&oldid=27449042), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T374499

*Technical project updates*

- Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1727276400. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server_switch The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T370962

*Tech in depth*

- [image: Advanced item] The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/MediaWiki_Product_Insights/Reports/August_2024 is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Hooks handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more. - [image: Advanced item] To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out: - Hackathon Showcase https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2024_-_Auditorium_Kyiv_-_Day_4_-_Hackathon_Showcase.webm (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T369234 in the Phabricator task. - Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Co-Creating_a_Sustainable_Future_for_the_Toolforge_Ecosystem.webm (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

*Tech news https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News prepared by Tech News writers https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/Writers and posted by bot https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/User:MediaWiki_message_delivery • Contribute https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News#contribute • Translate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2024/38 • Get help https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech • Give feedback https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tech/News • Subscribe or unsubscribe https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassadors.*