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
The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [1]
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [2]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [3][4]
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Ahecht has created a fork of SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
Without caching. Each script takes 400–500ms. A particularly large script takes 1.11 s! Internet download speed is 50 Mbps.With caching enabled. Each script takes just 1-2 ms to load.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in TypeScript.
/afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by /redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid: Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that editing is an honor.
/AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured) provides a dialog box to customize rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Mike Peel (scheduled to end after 9 March 2024 13:08 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Madamebiblio requested for admintool to fight against vandalism, and the request was closed as successful.
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot - Task: Will run scripts on toolforge to automate and schedule edits on bibliographic items. Starting with Swiss online magazine Syntopia Alpina (Q112206291), then continuing by adding swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to version/edition items.
BorkedBot_12 - Task: Update number of viewers/listeners (P5436) with the qualifier YouTube channel ID (P2397) for YouTuber content creators and influencers.
LocodeBot - Task: Match UN/LOCODE (Q499348) to Wikidata entries by ISO 3166-2 region code, name and distance (if defined), important for UN organisations.
Join the Queensbridge Tech Lab edit-a-thon - create and enrich local diverse heroes in Queens, NYC as part of the NYC Open Data Week. March 16, 10:00 - 16:00 EST (UTC -5).
Empowering BHL Staff with Wiki Education’s Wikidata Certificate Course - The Biodiversity Heritage Library blog celebrates committee members completing a Wikidata Certification course led by Will Kent, as part of the Wiki Education. Participants levelled up SPARQL queries, visualisations, federation, modelling and bulk loading and editing.
WiQuizz - from Nuxt and SPARQL WiQuizz allows you to create or play quiz games where content is generated from Wikidata. It could be a fun way to get people interacting with Wikidata!
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Claim Analysis Toolkit, collection of Observable notebooks to visualize simple Wikidata claims
date popularized (point in time the subject became well known to the public, if different from its inception)
Bild der Person bei der Tätigkeit (picture of a person in action, especially for a sportsperson, visual artist, musican, actor. P18 is normally used for portraits)
Newest WikiProjects: Te Papa Research Expeditions - create and enrich metadata and trial research expeditions schema for Te Papa, Dominion and Colonial Museums.
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
The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [5]
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [6]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [7]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [8][9]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [10]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-03-11. Translations are available.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Zafer - (RfP scheduled to end after 12 March 2024 20:03 (UTC))
Closed request for adminship: Mike Peel 2 - Adminship re-granted, welcome back Mike!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
Mfchris84-Bot 1 - Task: Add swisscovery edition ID (P9907) to instance of (P31) version, edition or translation (Q3331189) based on checking ISBN-13 (P212) or ISBN-10 (P957).
NinoBot - Task: Semi-automatically create version, edition or translation (Q3331189) entries for Spanish Wikisource Index pages from Commons files.
Emijrpbot 10 - Task: Create a written work (Q47461344) and version, edition or translation (Q3331189) item for works and editions in the National Library of Spain datos.bne.es project.
Queer Data Days - Wikidata Gender Diversity Project Event, a pair of virtual events welcoming a range of speakers investigating queer approaches to data and technology. Sign up for March 15 or March 16, 15:00 (CET).
Wikidata Leveling Up Days, an online event and a collection of resources to welcome new people to Wikidata. The online event takes place on April 5-7 and 12-14 with presentations, workshops and discussions. The program is open to contributions. Learn more about the project at the website WiGeDi.
Wikibase Intro (Dutch) - Bart Magnus writes an article about the benefits of Wikibase for the Flemish Association for Library, Archives & Documentation (VVBAD).
Multilingual entity linking and global insights - Ontotext are developing AI products that can read text and establish of the same concept in different languages (MEL) and between knowledge graphs and plaintext.
Bosnia and Herzegovina - This project aims to be a central hub for the curation of all items (biographical, cultural, geographical, organizational, etc.) related to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Te Papa Research Expeditions - aims to create or enrich Wikidata with data on research expeditions undertaken by Te Papa/ Dominion Museum/Colonial Museum and institutional staff
WikiProject Highlights: Looted heritage - this WikiProject is calling for Item suggestions to work on. The scope includes all forms of looted heritage; artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
Newest database reports: unmarked supercentenarians - contains instance of (P31) human (Q5) with period of life greater than 110 years and not marked with subject has role (P2868) supercentenarian (Q1200828) or subject has role (P2868) alleged supercentenarian (Q106991708).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [11][12]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [13]
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [14]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [15]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [16][17]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2024-03-18.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: KonstantinaG07 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 20 March 2024 17:37 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Zafer Adminship granted, welcome Zafer!
New requests for permissions/Bot:
PagesBot - Task: Adds no. of pages statements based on page(s) on items of type: scholarly article. Then adds a reference with based on heuristic equal to inferred from page(s).
Wicci'o'Bot - Task: Import identifiers of new properties created for TheTVDB (Q15616250), nientepopcorn (Q123434360) (and more properties I plan to request to be added shortly) inherent in the film and TV industry, using IMDb ID (P345) as source.
Closed request for comments: Duplicate Refs, Data Model and UI - (RfC closed 15 March 2024 18:57 UTC). The Community showed support for the proposal to change data model and UI for duplicated references. A Phabricator ticket has been opened: T360224
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call March 19, 2024: Please join us on March 19 for a community discussion about how GLAM professionals can incorporate Wikidata/linked data into their work week. Bring your success stories about institutional buy-in and how you’ve communicated the value of linked data to managers and colleagues. We hope to share some strategies that you can take back and use in your own workplace. This will be a followup of sorts to our call last May, and you can review some of what we talked about then, plus slides from our survey here: Notes from May 30, 2023 Meeting on Advocacy for Wikidata & Linked Data in Libraries.Agenda
Connecting Local Archive Data to Wikidata: Focusing on the Archives of National Debt Redemption Movement. By Yun, J., & Oh, S.G. Documents the findings of connecting Wikidata with the Korean NDRM.
Wikidata Lab: Dear Diary (Portugese) - Aims to share resources and capabilities for integration of Wikidata with other free knowledge projects, in particular the Querido Diário project, from Open Knowledge Brasil. Hosted by Porto, É. & Giulio Carvalho, G.
ORCID Scraper - helps users get DOIs from orcid.org for a specific author and curate them using Scholia. It gives users an overview of which DOIs are missing and helps them easily import missing articles one by one.
Newest WikiProjects: Polish Socialist Party - aims to document and enrich data and items (Leadership, sports clubs, commemorated buildings, art, publications etc.) that are connected with the Polish Socialist party.
WikiProject Highlights:
RfC: Slowking4 (2) - Comments are required on actions against the named editor.
Showcase Items: Mahatma Gandhi - The "Great Soul", lawyer, political ethicist and leader of the non-violent resistance to end Imperial British occupation of India.
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
The notice "Language links are at the top of the page" that appears in the Vector 2022 skin main menu has been removed now that users have learned the new location of the Language switcher. [18]
IP info feature displays data from Spur, an IP addresses database. Previously, the only data source for this feature was MaxMind. Now, IP info is more useful for patrollers. [19]
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. [20][21][22]
RevisionSlider is an interface to interactively browse a page's history. Users in right-to-left languages reported RevisionSlider reacting wrong to mouse clicks. This should be fixed now. [24]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 March. It will be on all wikis from 21 March (calendar). [25][26]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [27][28]
2024 Women's Wiki Month Datathon (Indonesian) Between 24 - 26 March 2024, Wikimedia Indonesia is hosting a competitive Data-thon with Prizes available for editing and enriching Wikidata items on the topic of Women's Health. Full details on the project page.
Levelling Up Days 2024 is an online event designed to welcome new people to Wikidata, upgrade their editing skills and find out about useful tools and apps. Join us for a series of videos and discussions regarding Wikidata and its uses in and outside of the Wikimedia projects.
Program - the live portions of the event take place across the weekends 5-7 and 12-14 April
Ontology Explorer, also an Observable notebook, explore the subclasses in front or behind a Wikidata Item.
Tool of the week
Members of European Parliament by pac02. Explore visualisations of MEP's in the European Parliament. Country of origin, gender, political alignment and other properties from Wikidata can be explored.
Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year 2023 - We encourage you to nominate and vote for research papers published in 2023 that focused on or benefited the Wikimedia projects (we're not biased but hope you vote for Wikidata-based Papers). Please submit your nominations by April 18, 2024.
In preparation for the Research Track of the 11th Wiki Workshop, there is now a Call for Contributions for the event scheduled virtually on June 20, 2024 (tentatively 12:00-19:00 UTC). The Wiki Workshop aims to bring together researchers who study all aspects of the Wikimedia Projects. We hope Wikidata and Wikibase are well represented! Submission deadline: April 22, 2024 (23:59 AoE)
Showcase Lexemes: अग्नि -the Sanskrit word for 'fire' and also the Hindu God of fire 'Agni'
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We worked on the ability to create Items via POST /entities/items (phab:T342990)
We worked on making it possible to modify the data of a Property via PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id} (phab:T347394)
EntitySchemas: We are getting back to making architecture improvements to enable the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements.
IP masking: We wrapped up the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP masking changes.
Query Service: We added the ability to stop a query in the UI in order to not have to wait for a broken query to finish or run into a time-out. You can find the stop button below the run button in the query UI now.
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
An update was made on March 18th 2024 to how various projects load site, user JavaScript and CSS in Vector 2022 skin. A checklist is provided for site admins to follow.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 March. It will be on all wikis from 28 March (calendar). [29][30]
The mw.config value 
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [3][4]
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script[edit]
Newly maintained scripts[edit]
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Improve a script[edit]
Requested scripts[edit]
New scripts[edit]
Guideline and policy news
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