Tech News (2019, week 36)

Please find below the latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. 

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Due to Wikimania and summer vacation, no issue of Tech News has been distributed last week.

Recent changes

• You can use the new termbox interface if you edit Wikidata on a mobile device. This is to edit labels, descriptions and aliases easier on the mobile pages. [1]
• The new version of MediaWiki has been deployed during the last week.
• The previously announced change of positions of the “Wikidata item” link on all wikis has been rollbacked due to unexpected cache issues. [2]
• The limit for rollbacks has been increased from 10 to 100 rollbacks per minute. [3]
• The advanced version of the edit review pages (Recent Changes, Watchlist, and Related Changes) now include two new filters. These filters are for “All contents” and “All discussions”. They will filter the view to just those namespaces. However the “All discussions” filter does not include pseudo talk pages, like discussions that are in the Project: or Wikipedia: namespaces. But it will include changes happening on Project talk: or the Wikipedia talk:. [4]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 September. It will be on all wikis from 5 September (calendar).
• When you log in, the software checks your password to see if it follows the Password policy. From this week, it will also complain if your password is one of the most common passwords in the world. If your password is not strong enough, please consider to change your password for a stronger password. [5]

Meetings

•  You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikidata for up to 30 minutes on September 10 at 05:00 (UTC). [6]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 17 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [7]
• You will be able to read but not to edit some mid-sized wikis for up to 30 minutes September 24 at 05:00 (UTC). You can see which wikis. [8]
• You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for up to 30 minutes on September 26 at 05:00 (UTC). [9]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe to receive it on wiki.