Tech/News/2020/40
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It's the latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community! Not everything may affect you. More translations are available.
Recent changes
- Admins now have links to diffs of deleted revisions on Special:AbuseLog using the interface of Special:Undelete. [1]
- Editors are automatically added to some user groups, for example autoconfirmed when they have made enough contributions and have been registered some days ago. Abuse filters can hinder users from being automatically added to user groups for a period of time and remove groups they already have. Wikis can now ask to change how long this period of time is for their wiki on Phabricator. It is currently five days. [2]
Issues and maintenance
- Last year some abuse filters stopped working if they tried to use variables that were unavailable. This has now been fixed. [3]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 September. It will be on all wikis from 1 October (calendar).
Future changes
- You can't see the language links to other language versions from the talk page, history page or when you are editing an article. This may change. It has not yet been decided if for example the history page should link to the history page in other languages or to the article in other languages. You can take part in the discussion in Phabricator.
- The link colours may change to make the difference between links and other text clearer. You can read more on Phabricator.
- In your preferences you can choose to get notifications for various events on the web (echo) or by mail. You will see
Appsas an additional option later this week. The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps will use push notifications for those who want them. You can see the preferences on the test wiki. The goal is to have push notifications on Android in October and on iOS in early 2021. [4] - You will soon be able to put pages on your watchlist with an expiration date. This can be useful if you want to keep an eye on something but not have it watchlisted for eternity. It already works on mediawiki.org and will come to more wikis later. You can read more and see when it will come to other wikis.
- You can see what Wikimedians think are the best new technical tools this year. You can also nominate tools yourself.
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Fine print: Tech news in British English (en-gb) does not necessarily use British spelling. It is only British in spirit, unoversimplified when compared to the regular English version, allowing more complex terms (e.g. "issues" instead of "problems") and constructions.