Talk:Tech/News/Archives/2019

2019-2

Hi,
It is now possible to export from MediaWiki to LaTeX (typesetting software), PDF, EPUB (Ebook Reader) and ODT (LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Other Word Processors). Is also possible to get HTML (images and formulas in high resolution, list of figures and list of contributors included; for further processing).

• mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org
• de:b:Benutzer:Dirk_Huenniger/wb2pdf

If relevant please include that into the newsletter 2019-2. For me at will be hard to do that from Monday until Wednesday next week, since I got a full time job. But I will be available during the weekend if any questions arise. Yours Dirk Hünniger (talk) 19:31, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Hello Dirk Hünniger, and thank you for that suggestion.

However, it came a bit late for the 2019-02 issue. According to the documentation, the newsletter content is usually frozen around mid-afternoon UTC and it is not advised to add content on Fridays.

We will consider to insert your news ont next week issue.

Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi,

It was meant for 2019-3 anyway. I was just confused that 2019-2 was the first issue in 2019. Thanks for looking a it. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 21:11, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Dirk Hünniger: Your tool has been around for a little while, is there anything new that's happened over the last few weeks? New functionality? /Johan (WMF) (talk) 09:09, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Trizek: Maybe this is something for the Tech Showcase? /Johan (WMF) (talk) 10:55, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

I think it is. The Tech Showcase is described as "Fresh software for Wikimedia caught on the spot. Plans, prototypes, releases... Do you have a scoop? Tell us in the Talk page!". Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:45, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

The only thing new since it was last mentioned on tech news is export new formats epub and odt.Dirk Hünniger (talk) 18:47, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Dirk Hünniger: Since when is that new? /Johan (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Commit date is 2017-07-06 09:54:49

Tech News doesn't report on things that might be cool and that more people should be aware of, but happened a long time ago (even a few months is beyond our scope) – that's just not what people sign up to read the newsletter for, and we'd have to cover most of the technology available in the Wikimedia space, because most editors are unaware of a lot of tools. Trizek might be better suited to comment on the Tech Showcase perspective. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 04:46, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Futhermore support for Collections commit 2017-08-28

And very recently native Windows Command line version 2018-12-23 Dirk Hünniger (talk) 19:00, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Parts of 2019-03 not sent via mass message

The version of this week's tech news seems to have gotten cut off after "The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from January 15" (diff). It doesn't include the content after that, which can be seen on Tech/News/2019/03. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 18:16, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Hello k6ka. Sorry to hear that.

It went well for translated parts, so I think that's a bad edit made when I've assembled everything. I'm sorry.

Since the link in the title is not broken, people can read the whole newsletter on Tech/News/2019/03.

Sending it again would be complicated.

Sorry again, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Web feed stopped working

Hey there,
The web feed hasn't been updated since December 24, both Atom and RSS. Was it discontinued? --Titore (talk) 00:56, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

It seems to be working fine now, I just received the first update since December. Thanks to whoever took care of this. --Titore (talk) 03:10, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Translatable header

The first header is translatable in every issue but not used in distribution. Could it be in template and not duplicate devery issue? --Wargo (talk) 18:20, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Yeah. It makes translation a bit more time consuming. I hope someone fixes this.--▸ ‎épine _talk♬ 05:00, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Naming for U+002D

Which are names of the character - U+002D in English? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:06, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

• @Incnis Mrsi: "Minus". Formally it's actually en:Hyphen-minus. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

  So don’t call it a “dash” anymore. There are no dashes in ASCII. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:55, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

  OK. Who do you think you're telling off, and why do you think this was a successful route to do so? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Issue 17 delayed

Due to phab:T221570 MassMessages are currently not working. I hope it might be fixed by sometime tomorrow, in which case this issue can be delivered as usual. If not, we'll evaluate options. Luckily this is a week without MediaWiki deployments and no high/urgent messages, so a delayed delivery seems reasonable. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 03:12, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Author credits

Thread moved to Talk:MediaWiki 1.34/wmf.16 Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

No issue next week – unless you want to write it

(On the assumption that anyone truly invested in Tech News is watching this page.)

Hey folks!

None of the usual Tech News writers will be available to write the issue next week. Do you want to? Tech/News/Manual has a detailed description of the necessary steps – what to do and when. If not, we'll simply not have an issue next week, and report any new changes in two weeks instead. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 10:27, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

We have now announced that there will be no issue next week; we'll pick up the torch again week after next. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:28, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Three copies problem and missed copies problem for week 37

We're aware of the two problems with this week's issue. MassMessage has delivered 3 copies of the week 37 issue at different timestamps to some destinations (example), and not delivered at all to other destinations.

There's not anything I can feasibly do en-masse to fix either of these problems, and many of the duplicates have already been individually fixed, so I offer my apologies, and request you please remove 2 of the duplicates where you find them, and copy the newsletter to pages where it is missing but should've been delivered. With thanks, and apologies on behalf of the software (as flawed as us humans!) for which I'll now file a bug (phab:T232379), -- Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:47, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Week 38

As with week 37 I didn't receive the 38th issue also. —Ah3kal (talk) 04:30, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

There was a problem in sending issue 37, and it has been explained in the very section above this. Not sure about this week's issue though, it appears the problem is still there, Quiddity (WMF) can explain more. – Ammarpad (talk) 06:22, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

@Ah3kal and Ammarpad: Discussion at the related task (phab:T232379) is ongoing. The developers have an idea for it might potentially be resolved, but I'm not sure how complicated that idea will be to actually develop/implement. I will ask. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Week 39

Hello, i have three time the newsletter--Woelle ffm (talk) 06:02, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

@Woelle ffm:, A patch to solve this problem has been merged. It will be deployed on production this week. So hopefully you'll not receive double or triple copies when next issue is out. – Ammarpad (talk) 06:34, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Tech News published three times within ten minutes (Week 37, 38, 39)

Johan Johan Jönsson Hi, on phab:T232379 you asked me to come to you here. If you are the maintainer of Tech/News or of its publishing, so please read the sections above. It's the third week now, that MassMessage delivers the Tech News three times within 10 minutes onto all the discussion pages that subscribed to. I mentioned it in the phab task too. I don't really know why the problem has to be forked onto this talk page too, because of this problem seems to be a result of the problem mentioned in the phab task. Johan, please name me someone, who has to be assigned solving the problem. Thank you very much, Doc Taxon (talk) 11:28, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Doc Taxon: Ah, as explained in the Phab ticket, that issue has been addressed and there should be no more than one delivery next week. The reason we asked for comments here was because it had been stated in the ticket that this is being fixed this week (phab:T232379#5508822, phab:T232379#5519095) but you seemed to want more explanations, so I thought you also had other concerns. (: Does that answer your question, or am I missing something? /Johan (WMF) (talk) 11:46, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

To be clear, the regular train goes out Tuesday to Thursday and Tech News is delivered on Mondays, so Tech News this week was still affected but shouldn't be for issue 2019/40. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 11:47, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Johan ah, okay thank you very much and good hope! Doc Taxon (talk) 11:56, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Hopefully this means less annoyance in the future!

(Also, to avoid future confusion: Johan Jönsson isn't me, we just share two common names. My normal, non-WMF account is Julle.) /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:16, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Comment I've backported the fix into current production version, it should work fine now. --Martin Urbanec (talk) 11:58, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! /Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:16, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Week 42

Hello, I got two copies again.--Woelle ffm (talk) 05:57, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Johan Johan Jönsson Week 41 all has been okay, but week 42 the Tech News have been delivered twice. Something is running wrong again ... Doc Taxon (talk) 08:37, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

Woelle ffm, Doc Taxon: This is human error. What happened was this: using the main target list, only a small number of targets actually got Tech News (possibly due to phab:T232392). My script to list exactly who failed for unknown reasons, so I ended up trying to figure it out manually before sending Tech News out again in smaller batches. Apparently not well enough. My apologies. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 09:37, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

If anyone wants to learn

A few weeks back we posted Talk:Tech/News/Archives/2019#No issue next week – unless you want to write it but ended up having no newsletter that week, which is perfectly fine that week, of course. But if anyone would like to get more involved in writing Tech News, in a less forced manner, please let us know. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 15 October 2019 (UTC)

About Tech News issue categories

Hi!

All Tech News issues contain this wikitext for categorizing:
[[Category:Tech News{{#translation:}}|2019/43]]{{#if: {{#translation:}} | [[Category:Tech News{{#translation:}}|2019/43]] }}

Is the #if statement really useful? I get the feeling that both statements lead to the same category. Isn’t the following sufficient?
[[Category:Tech News{{#translation:}}|2019/43]]

—Pols12 (talk) 14:07, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Good question. I'll take a look. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:29, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

I'll be honest: didn't figure it out immediately and completely forgot about this. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 06:33, 12 December 2019 (UTC)