Tech/News/2021/38

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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • Growth features are now deployed to almost all Wikipedias. For the majority of small Wikipedias, the features are only available for experienced users, to test the features and configure them. Features will be available for newcomers starting on 20 September 2021.
  • MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which “stubs” would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [1]
  • A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook’s HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.

Problems

  • There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [2]

Changes later this week

  • Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
  • Advanced item The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [3]

Future changes

  • The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of “Discussion tools” in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [4]
  • Advanced item The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.

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