Talk:Tech/News/Archives/2014

The new job queue design

I think the new tech news is missing a note about the new design of the job queue (in relation to page_links_updated). Christian75 (talk) 09:47, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. Do you have a link that would provide more information? guillom 11:31, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Arabic Wikipedia

The latest Tech news wasn't delivered to users on Arabic Wikipedia who are on this list (ar:User:Aboluay and ar:User:Emara). Also, it wasn't delivered to Arabic Wikipedia Village Pump (ar:ويكيبيديا:الميدان/أخبار/01/2014). Please fix this. --Meno25 (talk) 05:58, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the report. I've investigated a bit, and the error log indicates that this isn't a bug. The problem is that the delivery bot can't post on that wiki, because its IP was blocked in November. This IP (127.0.0.1) is the internal IP of the server and shouldn't be blocked, otherwise internal bots like the one delivering Tech news can't edit pages. Once that IP is unblocked, the delivery bot should be able to post on the Arabic Wikipedia. guillom 09:51, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@Guillom: Thank you for taking the time to investigate this. I unblocked the IP and left a notice on its user page, so that, it won't get blocked again. --Meno25 (talk) 17:11, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@Meno25: No problem; thanks for unblocking it :) guillom 20:16, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-07, Math extension, significant under-reporting of problem

When I saw the statement:

"On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension."

My immediate reaction was WOW how disconnected are these people from what is going on? Then: What else are they saying that has little resemblance to reality?

Looking at en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Math aligned environments failing to parse, it appears that the math extension issues were first reported there at 02:05, 7 February 2014 (UTC). Discussion had been going on at en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Problem with multiline equations from 23:46, 6 February 2014 (UTC). Problems were still being reported at VPT through 00:58, 10 February 2014 (UTC). Some errors are still being reported, but those appear to involve MathJax. So, this outage which was reported in Tech News: 2014-07 as "about half an hour in total" was, in reality, impacting en.wikipedia.org for more than 3 days, not half an hour.

The Tech News bulletins provide good and important information. When they get something like this wrong in such a clear and obvious way, particularly when the problem is dramatically under-reported, it results in a significant loss of credibility for the entire process. I would suggest that, at a minimum, a correction be included in the next one that goes out. Makyen (talk) 12:17, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The bug on the math extension is one thing, but the report speaks only about the downtime of complete servers, and effectively this has not been 3 days but half an hour.

issues in extensions, as long as they are not interrupting all projects do not fit in the summary of Tech news in my opinion. Tech news are made for cross-wiki announcements, and not specific to some pages of some wikis, for that there's still Bugzilla; and if something in the correction would affect all wikis, it would be announced. I don't think that the credibility of Tech news are impacted. They cannot report all individual problems (there are really many, too many for this summary. Those interested can start by the Tech News, and then navigate on Meta or elsewhere with the provided links. I think it is enough. verdy_p (talk) 12:29, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

@Makyen: Thank you for your message. I assure you that I am not disconnected from what's going on; indeed, I was on-line when the problems with the Math extension happened, and watched in real-time as they were being fixed by the Wikimedia Foundation operations team.

The outage that occurred last Thursday actually consisted of two smaller downtimes, each for around 15 minutes; the first one between 16:35-16:45 UTC and the other one between 19:30-19:50, when many projects were completely unavailable for users (who could only see HTTP 502 errors). We are aware that Math-related errors were seen much earlier and much later than that, but we cannot report every extension-related issue that's happening on Wikimedia wikis, for the simple reason that it's not interesting for our audience. Thank you for your understanding. odder (talk) 12:36, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

RSS feed

I don't see a need to store these Tech news at contributors' talk pages, mail servers. How can I subscribe to it as an RSS feed? --Gryllida 22:52, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

That's not possible at the moment, as far as I know. You can subscribe to the Atom feed of the "Latest" redirect, to be notified when the latest version is published, but the content won't be included. Our long-term goal is for users to be able to subscribe via their preferences and get a Notification (that would link to the latest edition), but that feature hasn't been developed. guillom 14:38, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

We should set up mw:Extension:FeaturedFeeds to work with tech news. Wikipedia already uses it for article of the day, so the extension is already deployed to our wikis. Bawolff (talk) 22:57, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I submitted Gerrit patch #124272, but it's only awaiting a merge at this point. odder (talk) 21:00, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

It is now possible to subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed to receive Tech News in a news aggregator of your choice; the feed will automatically update at 00:00 UTC every Monday. The feed will deliver an English version of Tech News for now, so you'll need to click on a link to read the bulletin in your language. Per-language feeds might be available in the future if there's need for them (so, if you think that's a good idea, let us know!). We'll be featuring this information in this week's issue of Tech News, and I will also be informing the Wikitech-l and Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list later today. odder (talk) 13:41, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

The RSS/Atom feed is not working anymore, the last post that is visible is "Tech News issue #52, 2014 (December 22, 2014)". I am talking about the link that is visible on the page as "RSS" or "Atom" on the main page for Tech News. Could somebody check this feed system and fix the problem? Thanks. --Galanga (talk) 18:07, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Isolating MediaWiki-centric news

We have a problem of MediaWiki news at http://mediawiki.org (evidence). Now, Tech News is not only a great channel of Wikimedia tech news, it is also a great channel of MediaWiki news. With a bit of organization of the current Tech News content, you could isolate the MediaWiki-centric news (e.g. feature X is coming) separating it from the Wikimedia centric news (e.g. something broke our servers). Tech News readers would receive their news without noticing any change, but the MediaWiki-centric part could be featured in mediawiki.org. Feasible? The prize could be a fixed spot at mw:News and the mediawiki.org homepage, the current one and the potentially new one.--Qgil (talk) 23:15, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Qgil: It's technically feasible, by posting the weekly tech newsletter to a specific page on mediawiki.org, and labeling the content that should be transcluded. We wouldn't want to do that for every wiki that asks, because we'd end up adding a lot of unnecessary tags, but this one is fine imho. Server issues is easy to leave out; however, it'll be difficult to leave out "Feature X is now available on wiki Y". If that's ok, I'll start tagging this week's issue and we can see how it goes, and whether it's practical or not to maintain such a distinction. guillom 08:14, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Does it really make sense to put in MediaWiki news that feature X is available in a WMF specific build which we don't recommend non-WMF people use? Bawolff (talk) 22:58, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Link to translations not working as expected

The link to "Translations" seen at w:la:Vicipaedia:Taberna#Tech_News:_2014-11 takes me to a non-existent page called Taberna here at Meta. Surely this is not intentional? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 12 March 2014 (UTC) --Xcq5678 (talk) 21:13, 22 March 2014 (UTC)这个不知有利于修复

Acknowledgements

It's nice to see Tech News listed by RobLa among the top2 2012–4 achievements for engineering communication/recruitment/community-building/etc. (together with mentoring):[1] volunteer-driven projects for the win! ;) Thanks Guillom (once again) for the long gestation of the idea; to Odder for the constant hard work/leadership; and to all the volunteers who gave ideas during the gestation and who provide suggestions for each issue. --Nemo 10:06, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Huge thanks should also go to the translators, many of whom translate each and every issue. It's thanks to them that Tech News is served in more than 10 languages, week in and week out. odder (talk) 10:11, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Call for contributors

Tech News #16 (2014) features a call for contributors: we are looking for volunteers willing to donate some time to help us publish a new issue of Tech News every week. So far, Tech News has mainly been a two-men operation, with varying degrees of involvement from either myself or Guillaume — so some fresh blood would be greatly appreciated!

Any contribution is useful — you can start by adding a link to an interesting new feature, simplifying messages added by others, etc. It's really easy, and the more of us are involved, the less work everyone has to do :-) All details are explained on our main page, so you can jump right into the next issue! Feel free to ask any questions, and we'll be happy to answer them. Thanks, odder (talk) 21:11, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm happy to help. PiRSquared17 (talk) 18:07, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

@PiRSquared17: I see you already contributed to #17; your help with this and the past issues is very greatly appreciated. Thanks so much for taking the time to help — I hope you'll be able and willing to help with the future issues, too :-) odder (talk) 13:35, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Template for user pages?

Is there a Tech News template like this one for transcluding the Signpost?:

• wikipedia:Template:Signpost-subscription

I prefer transclusion to having to clear out my talk page periodically of the many newsletters I get. I am asking each newsletter for a template instead. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:01, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Timeshifter: There isn't such a template yet, but this seems similar to what we intend to do for mediawiki.org (transclusion of the latest newsletter for possible use on the main page) so I'll look into it in the next few days and let you know. guillom 13:57, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I would like to transclude it from a Wikipedia template placed on one of my user pages, or subpages. I might set up a subpage just for several newsletters. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:57, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Timeshifter: I've set up w:Template:Latest tech news. It should now display the latest issue of the newsletter every week. I'll keep an eye on it to check if it's working properly, but please feel free to let me know if you notice a problem. guillom 17:30, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I started a user page of transcluded newsletters. I will add more as I find the templates.

Wikipedia:User:Timeshifter/Newsletters --Timeshifter (talk) 18:45, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer, with a space

I've noticed that Tech News keeps referring to "MediaViewer". It's actually called "Media Viewer". I can understand the confusion, given that VisualEditor doesn't have a space in its name - good job being consistent, WMF Engineering! But it would be helpful if Tech News could refer to it by its correct name in future posts. — Scott • talk 13:53, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

I think the usual standard is "Foo Bar" for what the user sees and "Extension:FooBar" for the software. But in this case, it appears to be "mw:Media Viewer" and "mw:Extension:MultimediaViewer". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Also when words are separated and are not really separate product names but just a feature within the common MEdiaWiki software, it is localisable. Non grammatical titling capitals in the name are typically an English practice frequently abused (especially in US) when in fact this is now a work title. When translating, you are absolutely not required to use these capitals, when this is still a generic term or expression, even if there's a subproject on the MediaWiki extensions portal. As much as possible, even in English, you should avoid unnecessary non-grammatical capitals (even in German within some regional dialects, there's a trend to drop the capitalisation of common nouns everywhere (and keep them only at start of sentences, or only on the first significant term in a work title (after too common terms like a leading article which is typically ignored when sorting work titles in a list of works like movied and published books): this has already occured in western dialects (Saxon) and, in a continuum, in Dutch and is about to occur in Swizerland.

More generally, capitalization just obscures differences and are not more readable.They are a form of emphasis, and this duplicates other emphasing text rendering styles such as bold and underlining, already used for page title names at top of pages or section headings.

The latin script is much easier to read in lowercase than in capitals (simply because it better exhibits better differences at top of glyphs and because they bring a better blackness contrast of the baseline betwee successive lines of text, allowing the eye to follow the line more easily). And this is even more important at small font sizes used in web pages (and notably on Wikimedia sites that alreado reduce the default browser font size, even if they increse a bit the normal line height about from about 1.25 em to 1.5em, but only in an attempt to leave more space for superscripts and keep line-height balanced). We are not writing texts on monumental stones and we are also not designing book cover pages or giant advertizement banners, but even in these "titling" styles capitals are a bit easier to read only with big font sizes, and serif font styles avoiding bold to increse the perceived differences between letters.

For all these reasons, I mich prefer the form "Media viewer" (in standalone contexts) and "media viewer" (in inline contexts, een if they are links to a project page in MediaWiki wiki).verdy_p (talk) 18:54, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Call for Contributors

I see that you've posted a call for contributors in Tech News #28. Is there anything specific to help with? --Asaifm (talk) 18:58, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Links in Tech News headings

Per en:MOS:HEAD, the subheadings created when Tech News is delivered on en.WP should not include links. It would probably be best to remove the links from headings on all projects. Can someone do this, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:17, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

That page says "should normally not contain links", so it's not mandatory, I suppose. Also note that English Wikipedia guidelines do not apply to other wikis. Besides, if we removed links in the section headers, then there wouldn't be a direct link to that particular issue of Tech News. Regards, --Glaisher (talk) 12:48, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Also this guideline only applies to Wikipedia articles in the main namespace (or headlines generated by templates used in the namespace), not to talk pages and forums where these news are posted.

In talk pages it is very common to use a link in a title of a new talk section to reference which page will be discussed in that section.; as this provides both a title for that talk section and a backlink in the same space. verdy_p (talk) 06:38, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

No mention of superprotect

The latest issue of Tech News did not mention the rollout of the 'super-protect' functionality... —Tom Morris (talk) 14:37, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I tried to add that but it was moved to the next issue. Helder 14:44, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, each issue of Tech News is frozen on Saturday, to give translators enough time. Tech changes that happen after that (like the superprotect feature) are included in the next issue. Superprotection will be mentioned in issue #34. guillom 08:49, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

As there is a call for not translating next Tech News because of that change, maybe it will be useful also to mention this call? -- Ата ^(talk) 08:34, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Not translating Tech News means many subscribers won't be able to read the newsletter in their language, or even at all. This feels counter-productive since the newsletter's goal is to disseminate technical news to as many people as possible. The absence of translations will restrict the number of people who are made aware of technical changes, including the existence of superprotection, so I encourage everyone to continue to translate Tech News for the benefit of the readers. guillom 09:51, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Help Needed: For Project started to improve CATEGORIES on WP

Hi, there has been a serious discussion to set up a technical system on Wikipedia that will allow users to both sort and view categories either alphabetically or by topic. Until now there is no single system or method at work in categories that has allowed them to become disorganized and, well, "un"categorized in spite of being named as such! In order to remedy this situation, please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#CatVisor; Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#JQuery workaround; Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Update requested, as well as the the steady work at User:Paradoctor/CatVisor; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Planned features; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#JQuery workaround by Salix alba; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Releases (alpha 2; alpha 1; alpha 0). In order to successfully complete and implement the proposed improvements, the input and deployment of the Wikimedia Foundation is needed as well as the attention of its professional staff is required in order to successfully fully implement the project. Please direct this communication and request to the most appropriate technical and decision-making individuals. Thank you so much in advance! Yours sincerely, IZAK (talk) 01:55, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Delivery on English Wikinews

I'll admit I'm guilty of not often reading the tech bulletins, but they're currently being delivered to the "Miscellaneous" section of enWN's Water Cooler (en:wikinews:Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous). There is a specific Technical section/page, which would likely be more-appropriate for these: en:wikinews:Wikinews:Water cooler/technical. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:55, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

You could change it at Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassadors#Community_pages. --Glaisher (talk) 11:13, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

'Collaboration' vs 'Discussion'

Per my comments here on enWN, I'm seeing strange behaviour for the naming of talk pages. I'm not sure if this is something I should raise as a bug, or if I'm just missing a message we'd need to tweak to resolve this. Particularly for the main namespace on English Wikinews, 'Collaboration' becomes most-inappropriate once an article is archived.

Of course, this could-well be something to do with our rather-extensive local .js and .css customisations; something I, personally, am very leery of digging into. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:55, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Hey Brianmc, the collaboration thing was done by BrianNewZealand about 6 years ago - https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Talk&oldid=443970 . Well it could certainly be changed by any admin, in order for it to differ based on archiveness, one would need js magic. Bawolff (talk) 06:20, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Tracking category?

Tech News 2014-43 states "If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category." What is the tracking category called? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

{{int:MediaWiki:duplicate-args-category}}: Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls. Helder 11:45, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Helder! I couldn't use the int: trick in Tech News because the change wasn't deployed yet, and I didn't think of linking to TWN. I'll remember that for next time :) Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 13:20, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Add links to WMF tech blog posts?

See this proposal. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:04, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

I think we feature tech blog posts pretty often in Tech news, as long as they have an impact on editors. Do let me know if I miss any. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Right to left text problem

Hello. There are a lot of problems in right-to-left translations text order of the tech news. Please use the RLM Unicode symbol more frequently. Thank you, IKhitron (talk) 13:04, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

poor indication for breaking changes

every so often, a new software update breaks existing local wiki scripts. this is understandable, and i do not ask to completely avoid these kind of changes.

however, the typical way to detect it is when some user reports that something stopped working. this "breakage maintenance" method is sub-optimal at best: some scripts are used by small number of users, so the reports are slow to come, some wikis use scripts imported from other wikis, which means the same issue has to be debugged over and over again in different locations, and even worse - the importing wiki may not have the local expertise on board to find and fix the problem (you might be surprised - today, after the "resignation" of TheDJ, it turns out that there is practically nobody on enwiki with permission to modify pages in mediawiki space that can actually fix scripts).

the most recent example of such breaking changes are:

• removal of outdated $.borwser . quite a few scripts used to test for brain-damaged browsers with $.browser.msie . not only this test does not work - it actually throws an exception that neutralizes the whole script, even for people who use perfectly sane browsers
• with very last jquesry upgrade, checkboxes no longer return true value with $(selector).attr("checked"), and the code needs to be modified to $(selector).prop("checked") (similarly, checkboxes no longer can be toggled programatically with $(selector).attr("checked", "chaecked") )

both these were deprecated for a long time (i think), but few maintainers on few wikis actually comb the code to remove all deprecated calls in all scripts. even when something is deprecated for a long time, i think tech news should contain a paragraph for "breaking changes in upcoming version", instead of relying on users to report breakages.

ideally, there will also be a link to some "how to fix it" page on mw, with each such breaking change.

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 17:58, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

From what I can see, wikitech-l and wikitech-ambassadors-l both handle this quite well (people tend to use a [BREAKING CHANGE] tag in the subject). I guess a lot of more "techie" users do follow those lists, while TN (from my very personal POV) is more "for the masses"? I would be surprised if the original announcements for both the things you mention weren't featured in Tech News though. I haven't checked though. Seems like you feel more reminders are needed, then. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

קיפודנחש: Thank you for sharing this! A quick search shows several announcements in Tech News about JavaScript. Issues 20, 40 and 50 of the newsletter are recent examples in which we announced upcoming JavaScript changes that required scripts to be updated. This certainly doesn't mean that your concern isn't valid. In your opinion, if the problem that we missed announcements and didn't feature them in the newsletter, or is it that our warnings went unnoticed? I'm genuinely interested in what you and other people think about this. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Elitre: i do not share your assessment that these channels handle breaking changes "quite well". in many wikis, the people maintaining the scripture do not subscribe - the glaring example is enwiki. in addition, some wikis (including, again, enwiki) maintain rich and diversified array of user-written scripts that are offered to the public through a mechanism that predates mw:Extension:Gadget, and is still alive and kicking today ( "add importScript('User:x/script_y.js); to your Special:MyPage/common.js file" ). some/many/most of the authors of these scripts do read technews but do not subscribe to the channels you mentioned.

Guillaume i glanced at the past publications you linked to. i saw two mentions of lua breakages: kudos to the lua maintainer. after reading it, i remembered that indeed i saw them, and i combed hewiki ahead of time to verify we will not be affected (we weren't - we did not have any lua module that used the calls that were about to disappear). i'm asking for similar service when JS breakages are about to happen. i do remember a few in the past, but not consistently, as my example shows. mediawiki library calls are regularly deprecated, but all too often they go out of service with no warning.

to summarize: if it's easy to get a list of "breaking changes", i see no reason and no justification not to include it with tech news. if it's difficult to get such a list, well, it should be made easy, and then, see the previous sentence...

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 19:33, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

קיפודנחש, hi again - the ones I mention are mailing lists (example 1, example 2). Given my work on dozens of wikis, I have the impression that both gadget maintainers and ambassadors currently do a great job, but of course that can always be improved. If adding reminders to TN is your suggestion to make more and more communities aware of what's happening, I certainly accept it. My guess though is that having more translations of TN would probably help more? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:47, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

hi again. i have no opinion as to the effect of having more translations - for the wikis i frequent, tech news is already translated, or simply native, and the natural audience is pretty comfortable with english anyway.

my recent experience with the recent breakages i mentioned above does not agree with your impression that "gadget maintainers are doing good job" (being one of those "gadget maintainers" myself, on hewiki, i absolutely include myself here...). in hewiki we fixed the breakages caused by the changes i mentioned above *after* users reported them. i then reported it on en:WP:VPT as a courtesy, and it felt like i had to drag the maintainers by the ear to make the same changes ( see en:Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_133#javascript: testing whether a checkbox is checked (jQuery) ). i'm willing to bet that if you'll run a global search for ).attr("checked" in all wikis (and limit the search to "prefix:Mediawiki:Gadget-"), you'll find dozens, if not hundreds of cases that are still broken (just to demonstrate, i searched frwiki, and found fr:MediaWiki:Gadget-BlockMessage.js. this is the french wikipedia, which is known and respected for technical expertise, and specifically JS). i am not saying tech-news would be the magic bullet here, but we (that is, the gadget-maintainers on several thousands of wikimedia projects in several hundreds of languages) can use all the help we can get, and mentioning JS breakages on tech-news, just like scribunto maintainers are doing for scribunto breakages, would be a great help. peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 21:46, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

In general we strive to 'not break' things. That means we try to use redirect functions that emit deprecation warnings to keep stuff working for instance. Something like $.browser disappearing had deprecation warnings in the console for some 4 months, giving authors a chance to fix them (this was after this function had already been deprecated by jQuery since January 2009. For our own api's we emit such warnings for up to a year in some cases, depending on how much they are in use. The second issue (checked), I'm not sure if there were warnings for that one, but even if we did miss that one, then that was just one out of dozens of removed behaviors in jQuery that we did not warn authors about. In general, it does remain the case that authors try to avoid making changes at all to something that works right now, so at some point you just have to bite the bullet and deal with the fallout. Things like usage tracking help the teams dealing with that, to assess how tough of a bullet such a removal might be. Experience has shown that the path of the last year is definitely the way forward when it comes to JS deprecations. You have to tackle the problem there where people encounter it, preferably before it becomes a real problem, but even more notes in a newsletter are not going to bring you that last 1-2% that people had missed before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:43, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

thanks for the response. there are some problems with relying on console.log messages for pinpointing JS deprecation:

1. you only see those when running with &debug=true in address line, and then examine the console output. this was very helpful, and we caught and fixed quite a few calls to deprecated methods using this output, but it's not a catch-all. with php deprecation, you can systematically examine the logs looking for those messages, which means that even rarely-used calls will be caught. there is no similar way to deal with JS - there are no logs.
2. this only works if the person looking for the console messages is the same person running the code that uses the deprecated method. this is not always the case: code-path depends on many things, such as permissions, user preferences, sometimes even page accessed, etc.

the bottom line is, that we can't rely on console.log messages alone - we often need to search through the codebase for use of deprecated methods. this would be significantly easier if each new code release would come with a nice tidy list of "these JS calls will not work as of next code release". this will give us a few days to verify our code won't break before the next version is actually deployed. the reason i think tech-news will be good vehicle for such messages is because quite a few users who are not strictly "maintainers" do write and maintain scripts in user space, and for those users, tech-news seems an appropriate channel of communication. it will be enough to include "some breaking changes in upcoming version", which will link to some page on MW or meta: this way, the actual content and explanation of the breaking changes themselves won't have to be translated.

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 16:10, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

2014 feedback request

Hi, one important (but not breaking) change was the introduction of various new Special:TrackingCategories; that spooked me. So "minor changes" causing red links on millions of allegedly broken pages (some real bug or oddity hidden in template cascades for 6+ vears) and costing hundreds of hours to track down on c: and m: MUST be announced in time, not after the fact or never. –Be..anyone (talk) 14:59, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

eo: Ĝenerala opinio

Danke al Teĥnikaj novaĵoj mi povis sufiĉe facile teni superrigardon pri ŝanĝoj gravaj por Esperanta Vikipedio, mia ĉefa viki-projekto, kaj helpi teni ĝin ĝisdata. De tiu vidpunkto la servo estas tre utila, ĉar mi ŝajne maltrafis neniun gravan averton. Tamen, por servoj, por kiu estas bezonata frua limdato (ekzemple malŝalto de lokaj alŝutoj se ne estas provizita malkonsento) mi aprezus, se estus provizita pli multa tempo (2 semajnoj estas minimumo, ne optimumo) ekde anonco. Memoru, ke eĉ mezgrandaj projektoj povas havi problemojn pri teĥnikistoj. Amike. --KuboF (talk) 19:58, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Tell us when things happen

Please report in Technical News when features are turned on or off that have an important effect on editor experience. Example: the GettingStarted feature, which came and went last year. Many of us talk to new editors and patrol their edits, and need to know about what they are seeing and the processes through which their edits are made. I had to ask at Village Pump to find out what was going on.Noyster (talk) 18:36, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the specific example. Summary: GettingStarted continued working as before, but stopped adding a tag at some point. --Nemo 13:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC)