Tech/News/2020/45
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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
- Since October 29, 2020, you can no longer visit Wikimedia wikis if your browser uses a very old version of TLS because this created a security problem for everyone. It could potentially be used to perform a downgrade attack. A list of browser recommendations is available. All major modern operating systems and browsers should always be able to connect to Wikimedia projects. [1]
There is a new automatic tracking category available to identify problematic usage of the {{formatnum}}parser function: Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments which collects pages that use{{formatnum}}with invalid input like{{formatnum:TECHNEWS}}. Note that{{formatnum:123,456}}is also invalid: as described in the documentation, the argument should be unformatted. The new tracking category's name can be translated at translatewiki. [2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 November. It will be on all wikis from 5 November (calendar).- Administrators and stewards will soon be able to use Special:CreateLocalAccount to force local account creation for an existing global account. This is useful when account creation is blocked for that user by a block or filter. [3]
- The Reply tool will be offered as an opt-in Beta Feature on most Wikipedias on Wednesday, 4 November. Exceptions to this are the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias and some smaller Wikipedias, some of which already have the feature. You can read the help page and the troubleshooting guide for more information. [4]
Future changes
- A discussion has been restarted about using a Unicode minus sign (− U+2212) in the output of
{{formatnum}}when it is given a negative argument. [5] - In the future IP addresses of unregistered users will not be visible for everyone. Those users will get a public alias instead. There will be a new user right or function for more vandal fighters to see the IPs of unregistered users and some criteria will be formed to determine who gets access to this user right or function. There will also be other new tools to help handle vandalism. This process is still in an early stage and the developers are still collecting information from the communities before they will suggest solutions.
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