Tech/News/2013/27

The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe and contribute.

Recent software changes: (Not all changes will affect you.)

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.22/wmf9) was added to test wikis on June 27. It will be enabled on non–Wikipedia sites on July 8, and on all Wikipedias on July 11.
On Wikisource, the canonical names of the "Index" and "Page" namespaces in the Proofread Page extension are no longer localized (bug #47596). Please check scripts that depend on $wgCanonicalNamespace. [1]
A JavaScript problem caused the "View history" and "Add topic" tabs in the Vector skin to be moved into the drop-down menu on right-to-left wikis. The issue is now fixed and links are visible as before (bug #50196). [2]
There was a short site outage on June 28.
The automated Category:Pages with broken file links now includes broken file links inserted inside the <gallery /> tag (bug #50119). [3]
The Nearby feature is now enabled on Commons and shows images in a user's area. [4]
There is now a special page listing disambiguation pages for wikis that use the Disambiguator extension (bug #44040). [5]
The old version of the Article feedback tool (version 4) was removed from wikis that still used it. [6]
VisualEditor news:
- Many bugs that caused text to be removed or damaged have been fixed, including one related to copy-paste (bug #49816).
- VisualEditor now offers a visual interface to edit references.
- In preparation for enabling the VisualEditor on a wider scale, new documentation has been created, including a list of frequently-asked questions and a user guide with many images. Please help with translations.
- Several problems related to overlapping of elements with the VisualEditor toolbar have been fixed (bug #50096, #50159, #50324).
- TemplateData information is now displayed for templates that are added to a page (bug #49778).
- Section edit links now show links to both VisualEditor and the old (source) editor (bug #49666).
- Images are now loaded securely when using HTTPS (bug #43015). [7]

Future software changes

VisualEditor will be enabled for all logged-in English Wikipedia users on July 1, and for all users on July 8.
From July 15 and July 8 respectively, it will be possible to upload WAV and native FLAC files to Commons, and use them directly on wiki pages (bug #49505). [8]
The Universal Language Selector will be added to the English Wikipedia on July 2, and to remaining wikis on July 9. [9]

Erratum

Tech news #26 incorrectly reported that audio transcoding was added to TimedMediaHandler; it was actually statistics about audio transcoding that were added. [10]

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