Tech/News/2021/02
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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
- You can set your preferences to remind you when you have not added an edit summary. This conflicted with the CAPTCHA. This has now been fixed. [1]
- You can link to specific log entries by clicking the timestamps in the log. Until now, such links to private log entries showed no entry regardless of whether or not the user had permission to view private log entries. The links now show the entry. [2]
- Admins can use the abuse filter tool to automatically prevent bad edits. Three changes happened last week:
- The filter editing interface now shows syntax errors while you type, similar to JavaScript pages. It also shows a warning for regular expressions that match an empty string. New warnings will be added later. [3]
- Oversighters can now hide multiple filter log entries at once using checkboxes on Special:AbuseLog, similar to how the usual revision deletion works. [4]
- When a filter matches too many actions after it has been changed it gets throttled. The most powerful actions are disabled to avoid many editors getting blocked when an administrator made a mistake. The administrator will now get a notification about this throttle.
There is a new tool to build new skins. You can also see existing skins and give feedback. [5]- Bots using the API no longer watch pages automatically based on account preferences, but setting
watchlisttowatchwill still work. This is to reduce the size of the watchlist data in the database. [6] - Scribunto's file metadata now includes length. [7]
- CSS and JavaScript code pages now have link anchors to line numbers allowing to link directly to a line number, for example line 50 of Common.js on English Wikipedia. [8]
There was a new version of MediaWiki last week. You can read a detailed log of all 763 changes, but most of them are very small and will not affect you.
Changes later this week
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 January. It will be on all wikis from 14 January (calendar).
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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.