Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-09/Technology report

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

• You can now mention up to 50 users in a post and they will get a notification. Previously you could notify up to 20 users.
• A new version of the Wikidata Toolkit has been released. It now has Wikibase API support.
• You can now use Wikidata to find all good or featured articles in a Wikipedia version.

Problems

• There was a problem with Tool Labs due to kernel issues. This has been fixed.
• The Content Translation tool published some pages with the same reference repeated several times. This has been fixed.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 9. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 10 (calendar).
• The maximum character length when you search for something on the Wikimedia wikis is now 300 characters.
• The notifications list has been split into two lists. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second list. Feedback is requested at the Echo talk page.

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 8 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the Wikitech ambassadors mailing list. The list is for Wikimedians interested in spreading information about Wikimedia technology news. See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikimedia mailing lists will be moved to a new server and the software will be upgraded. This will happen on September 9 at 14:00 (UTC). The mailing lists will not be working during the move. It can take up to four hours.
• Wikidata will soon be able to store measurements, such as a mountain's height or the distance between two places.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.