Wikipedia:Community Portal/Archive2

Introducting Beta Features

(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)

We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.

Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Here are the first features you can test this week:

• Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen
• VisualEditor Formulæ (for wikis with VisualEditor) — edit algebra or equations on your pages
• Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday)

Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.

After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.

Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.

Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 5 Eye Nkanga 2013 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery (wrong page? Correct it here), 20:52, 5 Eye Nkanga 2013 (UTC)

Call for comments on draft trademark policy

Hi all,

The Wikimedia legal team invites you to participate in the development of the new Wikimedia trademark policy.

The current trademark policy was introduced in 2009 to protect the Wikimedia marks. We are now updating this policy to better balance permissive use of the marks with the legal requirements for preserving them for the community. The new draft trademark policy is ready for your review here, and we encourage you to discuss it here.

We would appreciate if someone would translate this message into your language so more members of your community can contribute to the conversation.

Thanks,
Yana & Geoff

VisualEditor coming to Xhosa Wikipedia

Molweni. :) Hi. :)

Please pardon my English. I hope someone will translate my message into isiXhosa or any other language that people speak here.

Igama lam ngu Anna. :) My name is Anna. :) I am a Community Advocate at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. It's nice to meet you. :)

VisualEditor is coming to the Xhosa Wikipedia, probably sometime in January. VisualEditor is software in development to allow people to edit pages in MediaWiki without needing to learn wikitext syntax (like typing [[ and ]] to link to another page). It is already available and in use on some Wikipedia projects. Please see mw:Help:VisualEditor/FAQ for more information.

When this software arrives, you will have the option to use it or to use the current wikitext editor. When you press "Edit", you will get the new VisualEditor software. To use the wikitext editor, you can press "Edit source". For more information about how to use VisualEditor, see mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide.

It is important that editors on this wiki test the new editor before it is deployed. This would let us know about any serious issues specific to this Wikipedia before the rollout. To enable VisualEditor now, go to your "Preferences" ("Ezithandwa ndim"), select "Beta Features", and check the box to enable "VisualEditor".

Please let us know if you find any problems. If you are willing and if you are able, please report any problems in Bugzilla in the "VisualEditor" product. Or you can explain any problems on the central feedback page on MediaWiki.org.

If you notice major issues impacting your project, please let us know directly. You can email me or leave a note on my talk page or, if there is an emergency, like an unexpected bug is causing widespread problems, contact James Forrester, the Product Manager, at jforrester@wikimedia.org for immediate attention.

We would also appreciate help translating the user interface and other pages about VisualEditor here on xh.wikipeida.org and on MediaWiki.org. See VisualEditor TranslationCentral for general information.

To help with translations, you will need to create an account on TranslateWiki. An administrator will approve your account request.

Here is what needs to be translated into isiXhosa:

• Translatewiki:User interface
• Help:VisualEditor/User guide
• Help:VisualEditor/FAQ
• VisualEditor/Portal

On each of these pages, you will see the text needs to be translated: words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. The original English text will be on one side, with the option to "edit" on the other. Pressing "edit" will open an edit window where you can enter the translated text.

There are resources for translators at mw:VisualEditor/TranslationCentral#To_do.

If you want to help with translations and would like to talk about how, please email me or leave me message on my talk page.

I have started a local page about VisualEditor here. Please feel free to add to it.

Enkosi! Thank you! And happy editing! :) --Anna Koval (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 18 Eyo Mnga 2013 (UTC)

Translators Needed

Hi! :) Molweni! :)

Please pardon my English. I hope someone will translate my message into isiXhosa or another language that people speak here too.

VisualEditor is coming to the Xhosa Wikipedia, sometime in January and we need help translating the user interface and other pages about VisualEditor here on xh.wikipeida.org and on MediaWiki.org.

0% of the user interface, the user guide, the FAQ, and the portal page have been translated (see Xhosa here).

To help with translations, you must create an account on TranslateWiki. An administrator will approve your account request.

Here is what still must be translated into isiXhosa:

• Translatewiki:User interface
• Help:VisualEditor/User guide
• Help:VisualEditor/FAQ
• VisualEditor/Portal

On each of these pages, you will see the text needs to be translated: words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. The original English text will be on one side, with the option to "edit" on the other. Pressing "edit" will open an edit window where you can enter the translated text.

See VisualEditor TranslationCentral for general information. See mw:VisualEditor/TranslationCentral#To_do for resources for translators.

If you want to help with translations and would like to talk about how, please email me or leave me message on my talk page.

I have started a local page about VisualEditor here. Please feel free to add to it.

Enkosi kakhulu! Thank you all very much! :) --Anna Koval (WMF) (talk) 23:06, 17 Desemba 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor Office Hours

Molweni. :) Apologies for writing in English. Translation assistance is appreciated. :)

The WMF engineering department has planned office hours to discuss VisualEditor -- software that will make it easier to edit Xhosa Wikipedia. These discussions will be on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) at irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-office. The first is on January 15th, at 2300 UTC; the second is a week later, on January 22nd, at 2300 UTC. Product Manager James Forrester will discuss VisualEditor and upcoming plans. Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes. If you want to ask a question or provide feedback but can't attend, don't use Internet Relay Chat, or don't speak English, please post your question or comment here or on my talk page or email me, and I will present it on your behalf. I’ll post another reminder closer to the office hours.

You can test the new interface before it is deployed. To enable VisualEditor now, go to your "Preferences", select "Beta Features", and check the box to enable "VisualEditor". Please let us know what you like and what you don't like, what works well and what could be improved.

Enkosi, Anna Koval (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 30 Eyo Mnga 2013 (UTC)

I doubt anyone else will read this, unfortunately. PiRSquared17 (talk) 22:40, 1 EyoMqungu 2014 (UTC)

Dear Pi, I assume you're commenting on the lack of activity on this wiki and not the misplacement of my posts. If there's somewhere else on this project where you think I would reach more people, I'd be grateful for the suggestion. Meanwhile, I will continue to hope, and I will continue to try. :) I'd rather announce to nobody than not announce to somebody. Anna Koval (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 3 EyoMqungu 2014 (UTC)

It looks like someone else might actually have seen this, as they started translating in Xhosa on MediaWiki.org. Great! :-) PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:13, 9 EyoMqungu 2014 (UTC)

Pi, It's so exciting! I couldn't be happier. Here's hoping for *lots* more! :)

Request for comment on Commons: Should Wikimedia support MP4 video?

I apologize for this message being only in English. Please translate it if needed to help your community.

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks community guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. This digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC.

Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).

However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.

We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not to support MP4. Our Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.

Please join this RfC -- and share your advice.

All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.

You are also welcome to join tomorrow's Office hours chat on IRC, this Thursday, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members.

We look forward to a constructive discussion with you, so we can make a more informed decision together on this important topic. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 06:47, 16 EyoMqungu 2014 (UTC)

Universal Language Selector will be enabled by default again on this wiki by 21 February 2014

On January 21 2014 the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector (ULS) was disabled on this wiki. A new preference was added for logged-in users to turn on ULS. This was done to prevent slow loading of pages due to ULS webfonts, a behaviour that had been observed by the Wikimedia Technical Operations team on some wikis.

We are now ready to enable ULS again. The temporary preference to enable ULS will be removed. A new checkbox has been added to the Language Panel to enable/disable font delivery. This will be unchecked by default for this wiki, but can be selected at any time by the users to enable webfonts. This is an interim solution while we improve the feature of webfonts delivery.

You can read the announcement and the development plan for more information. Apologies for writing this message only in English. Thank you. Runa

Amendment to the Terms of Use

Hello all,

Please join a discussion about a proposed amendment to the Wikimedia Terms of Use regarding undisclosed paid editing and we encourage you to voice your thoughts there. Please translate this statement if you can, and we welcome you to translate the proposed amendment and introduction. Please see the discussion on Meta Wiki for more information. Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) 22:00, 21 Eyo Mdumba 2014 (UTC)

Call for project ideas: funding is available for community experiments

I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.

Do you have an idea for a project that could improve your community? Individual Engagement Grants from the Wikimedia Foundation help support individuals and small teams to organize experiments for 6 months. You can get funding to try out your idea for online community organizing, outreach, tool-building, or research to help make Wikipedia better. In March, we’re looking for new project proposals.

Examples of past Individual Engagement Grant projects:

• Organizing social media for Chinese Wikipedia ($350 for materials)
• Improving gadgets for Visual Editor ($4500 for developers)
• Coordinating access to reliable sources for Wikipedians ($7500 for project management, consultants and materials)
• Building community and strategy for Wikisource (€10000 for organizing and travel)

Proposals are due by 31 March 2014. There are a number of ways to get involved!

Hope to have your participation,

--Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation 19:44, 28 Eyo Mdumba 2014 (UTC)

Proposed optional changes to Terms of Use amendment

Hello all, in response to some community comments in the discussion on the amendment to the Terms of Use on undisclosed paid editing, we have prepared two optional changes. Please read about these optional changes on Meta wiki and share your comments. If you can (and this is a non english project), please translate this announcement. Thanks! Slaporte (WMF) 21:56, 13 Eyo Kwindla 2014 (UTC)

Bringing Xhosa Wikipedia to life

User:Victorgrigas, User:Nomden: any ideas for how to attract editors to xhwiki? PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:24, 30 Eyo Kwindla 2014 (UTC)

Changes to the default site typography coming soon

This week, the typography on Wikimedia sites will be updated for all readers and editors who use the default "Vector" skin. This change will involve new serif fonts for some headings, small tweaks to body content fonts, text size, text color, and spacing between elements. The schedule is:

• April 1st: non-Wikipedia projects will see this change live
• April 3rd: Wikipedias will see this change live

This change is very similar to the "Typography Update" Beta Feature that has been available on Wikimedia projects since November 2013. After several rounds of testing and with feedback from the community, this Beta Feature will be disabled and successful aspects enabled in the default site appearance. Users who are logged in may still choose to use another skin, or alter their personal CSS, if they prefer a different appearance. Local common CSS styles will also apply as normal, for issues with local styles and scripts that impact all users.

For more information:

• Summary of changes and FAQ
• Discussion page for feedback or questions
• Post on blog.wikimedia.org

-- Steven Walling (Product Manager) on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation's User Experience Design team

Media Viewer

Greetings, my apologies for writing in English.

I wanted to let you know that Media Viewer will be released to this wiki in the coming weeks. Media Viewer allows readers of Wikimedia projects to have an enhanced view of files without having to visit the file page, but with more detail than a thumbnail. You can try Media Viewer out now by turning it on in your Beta Features. If you do not enjoy Media Viewer or if it interferes with your work after it is turned on you will be able to disable Media Viewer as well in your preferences. I invite you to share what you think about Media Viewer and how it can be made better in the future.

Thank you for your time. - Keegan (WMF) 21:29, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

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Media Viewer is now live on this wiki

Media Viewer lets you see images in larger size

Greetings— and sorry for writing in English, please translate if it will help your community,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Multimedia team is happy to announce that Media Viewer was just released on this site today.

Media Viewer displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, to provide a better viewing experience. Users can now view images faster and more clearly, without having to jump to separate pages — and its user interface is more intuitive, offering easy access to full-resolution images and information, with links to the file repository for editing. The tool has been tested extensively across all Wikimedia wikis over the past six months as a Beta Feature and has been released to the largest Wikipedias, all language Wikisources, and the English Wikivoyage already.

If you do not like this feature, you can easily turn it off by clicking on "Disable Media Viewer" at the bottom of the screen, pulling up the information panel (or in your your preferences) whether you have an account or not. Learn more in this Media Viewer Help page.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about Media Viewer. You are invited to share your feedback in this discussion on MediaWiki.org in any language, to help improve this feature. You are also welcome to take this quick survey in English, en français, o español.

We hope you enjoy Media Viewer. Many thanks to all the community members who helped make it possible. - Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 19 Eyesilimela 2014 (UTC)

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VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014

This is a one-time mailing to projects that may need this information. Future newsletters will be available as opt-in only. To receive future newsletters (about one per month), please add your page to the subscribers' list at m:VisualEditor/Newsletter. You're welcome to translate to your language.

Did you know?

The character formatting menu, or "Style text" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

• They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
• You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
• The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type "date" for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and "boolean" for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like {{citeweb}} → {{cite web}}) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
• Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
• They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki

Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact us if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at Meta (or at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only). Thank you! --Elitre (WMF), 22:33, 25 Eyesilimela 2014 (UTC)

Updates related to VisualEditor

Please help translate this message in your language. Thanks :)

Hi, everybody. This is a reminder that we invite you to discuss VisualEditor's recent development and plans ahead during the next office hours with James Forrester (Product Manager):

• Thursday, August 14, 9:00 UTC;
• Thursday, September 18, 16:00 UTC.

If you are not able to attend but have a question for James, you can leave your question at mediawiki.org or on my talk page by the day before, and I will try to get a response. We plan to continue these monthly sessions as long as there is community interest, and to announce them through the VisualEditor global newsletter as well (please subscribe your talk page there to get the latest news about the software).

Most of the VisualEditor team will be at Wikimania in London in August! You'll be able to meet the developers during the Hackaton or at the following sessions:

• VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, Saturday, August 9;
• VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, Sunday, August 10.

WMF community liaisons will share a booth with community advocates at the Community Village and look forward to talking to you there. Thanks for your attention! --User:Elitre (WMF) 16:02, 31 Eye Khala 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor global newsletter—July and August 2014

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

Dialog boxes in VisualEditor have been re-designed to use action words instead of icons. This has increased the number of items that need to be translated. The user guide is also being updated.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

• Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments. You can click on the icon to see the comment.
• You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item. Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
• All references and footnotes (<ref> tags) are now made through the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, including the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "Insert" menu. The "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-referencelist-tooltip⧽" is still added via the "Insert" menu.
• When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
• All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
• The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
• The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30. There is a VisualEditor Translation Sprint going on during Wikimania; whether you're in London or not, any contributions are welcome!

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! --Elitre (WMF), 14:40, 9 Eye Thupha 2014 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

-- JurgenNL (talk) 17:35, 21 Eye Thupha 2014 (UTC)

Process ideas for software development

’’My apologies for writing in English.’’

Hello,

I am notifying you that a brainstorming session has been started on Meta to help the Wikimedia Foundation increase and better affect community participation in software development across all wiki projects. Basically, how can you be more involved in helping to create features on Wikimedia projects? We are inviting all interested users to voice their ideas on how communities can be more involved and informed in the product development process at the Wikimedia Foundation. It would be very appreciated if you could translate this message to help inform your local communities as well.

I and the rest of my team welcome you to participate. We hope to see you on Meta.

Kind regards, -- Rdicerb (WMF) talk 22:15, 21 Eye Thupha 2014 (UTC)

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Grants to improve your project

Apologies for English. Please help translate this message.

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals for funding new experiments from September 1st to 30th. Your idea could improve Wikimedia projects with a new tool or gadget, a better process to support community-building on your wiki, research on an important issue, or something else we haven't thought of yet. Whether you need $200 or $30,000 USD, Individual Engagement Grants can cover your own project development time in addition to hiring others to help you.

• Submit your proposal
• Get help: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:52, 2 Eyo Msintsi 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor available on Internet Explorer 11

VisualEditor will become available to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 during today's regular software update. Support for some earlier versions of Internet Explorer is being worked on. If you encounter problems with VisualEditor on Internet Explorer, please contact the Editing team by leaving a message at VisualEditor/Feedback on Mediawiki.org. Happy editing, Elitre (WMF) 07:29, 11 Eyo Msintsi 2014 (UTC).

PS. Please subscribe to the global monthly newsletter to receive further news about VisualEditor.

VisualEditor News #8—2014

Did you know?

TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that replaced some categories with a link to the system message MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers

Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor

The tool for editing TemplateData has been deployed to 30 more Wikipedias this week. Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template page or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes

Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the mw-redirect and mw-disambig class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as 'required' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a dir attribute but no lang set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki

At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community is available. Thank you all for your work.

This was the first translatable VisualEditor newsletter, so thanks to everybody who made this possible! If it hasn't been delivered in your language, and you'd like to help with translations in the future, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre (WMF), so that you will be notified when the next issue is due.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)

09:49, 13 Eye Dwarha 2014 (UTC)

Meta RfCs on two new global groups

Hello all,

There are currently requests for comment open on meta to create two new global groups. The first is a group for members of the OTRS permissions queue, which would grant them autopatrolled rights on all wikis except those who opt-out. That proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Creation of a global OTRS-permissions user group. The second is a group for Wikimedia Commons admins and OTRS agents to view deleted file pages through the 'viewdeletedfile' right on all wikis except those who opt-out. The second proposal can be found at m:Requests for comment/Global file deletion review.

We would like to hear what you think on both proposals. Both are in English; if you wanted to translate them into your native language that would also be appreciated.

It is possible for individual projects to opt-out, so that users in those groups do not have any additional rights on those projects. To do this please start a local discussion, and if there is consensus you can request to opt-out of either or both at m:Stewards' noticeboard.

Thanks and regards, Ajraddatz (talk) 18:04, 26 Eye Dwarha 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (November 2014)

Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today :)

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for:

• DeGruyter: 1000 new accounts for English and German-language research. Sign up on one of two language Wikipedias:
  • English signup
  • Deutsch signup
• Fold3: 100 new accounts for American history and military archives
• Scotland's People: 100 new accounts for Scottish genealogy database
• British Newspaper Archive: expanded by 100+ accounts for British newspapers
• Highbeam: 100+ remaining accounts for newspaper and magazine archives
• Questia: 100+ remaining accounts for journal and social science articles
• JSTOR: 100+ remaining accounts for journal archives

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team.23:19, 5 Eye Nkanga 2014 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Global AbuseFilter

Hello,

AbuseFilter is a MediaWiki extension used to detect likely abusive behavior patterns, like pattern vandalism and spam. In 2013, Global AbuseFilters were enabled on a limited set of wikis including Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Wikispecies and (in early 2014) all the "small wikis". Recently, global abuse filters were enabled on "medium sized wikis" as well. These filters are currently managed by stewards on Meta-Wiki and have shown to be very effective in preventing mass spam attacks across Wikimedia projects. However, there is currently no policy on how the global AbuseFilters will be managed although there are proposals. There is an ongoing request for comment on policy governing the use of the global AbuseFilters. In the meantime, specific wikis can opt out of using the global AbuseFilter. These wikis can simply add a request to this list on Meta-Wiki. More details can be found on this page at Meta-Wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on m:Talk:Global AbuseFilter.

Thanks,

PiRSquared17, Glaisher

— 17:36, 14 Eye Nkanga 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #9—2014

Did you know?

VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Log in and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings button in the upper-right corner to pick which editor to use. Choose "⧼Mobile-frontend-editor-visual-editor⧽" to use VisualEditor, or "⧼Mobile-frontend-editor-source-editor⧽" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available on the mobile website.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements

Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in them was just introduced to Wikipedias. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be added later.

To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus are now hidden behind a "More" item, such as "Underline" in the styling menu.

The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias this week, and the following week at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar menus are now shown in the menus.

VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience/Design group. The appearance of dialog boxes has already changed in the mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. You are welcome to compare the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search engine could not find the page. A link inside a template to a local page that does not exist will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to an error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like [1] with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData

The tool for quickly editing TemplateData has been deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. This tool was already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "Edit template data" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData to learn more about it. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common value for that parameter. The autovalue can be overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog box in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide is being updated to add information about editing tables. The translations of the user guide for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.

You can influence VisualEditor's design! Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.

Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you! —Elitre (WMF)

23:29, 14 Eye Nkanga 2014 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Now Available (December 2014)

Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today :)

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• Elsevier - science and medicine journals and books
• Royal Society of Chemistry - chemistry journals
• Pelican Books - ebook monographs
• Public Catalogue Foundation- art books

Other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team.00:22, 18 Eyo Mnga 2014 (UTC)

You can host and coordinate signups for a Wikipedia Library branch in your own language. Please contact Ocaasi (WMF).

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

VisualEditor News #10—2014

Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements

Basic support for editing tables is now available. You can add and delete tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid rowspan and colspan elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing ^ Ctrl+F or ⌘ Cmd+F.

You can now create and edit simple <blockquote> paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "Paragraph" into a "Block quote".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "* " will make the line a bullet list; "1." or "#" will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change.

There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ^ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

The current VisualEditor design will be replaced with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at mediawiki.org in late December and on other sites in early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January.

Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Translations of the user guide for most languages are outdated. Only Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translations are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

18:59, 26 Eyo Mnga 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #1—2015

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's appearance, the coming Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

The Wikimedia Foundation has named its top priorities for this quarter (January to March). The first priority is making VisualEditor ready for deployment by default to all new users and logged-out users at the remaining large Wikipedias. You can help identify these requirements. There will be weekly triage meetings which will be open to volunteers beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Tell Vice President of Engineering Damon Sicore, Product Manager James Forrester and other team members which bugs and features are most important to you. The decisions made at these meetings will determine what work is necessary for this quarter's goal of making VisualEditor ready for deployment to new users. The presence of volunteers who enjoy contributing MediaWiki code is particularly appreciated. Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins.

Due to some breaking changes in MobileFrontend and VisualEditor, VisualEditor was not working correctly on the mobile site for a couple of days in early January. The teams apologize for the problem.

Recent improvements

The new design for VisualEditor aligns with MediaWiki's Front-End Standards as led by the Design team. Several new versions of the OOjs UI library have also been released, and these also affect the appearance of VisualEditor and other MediaWiki software extensions. Most changes were minor, like changing the text size and the amount of white space in some windows. Buttons are consistently color-coded to indicate whether the action:

• starts a new task, like opening the ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽ dialog: blue ,
• takes a constructive action, like inserting a citation: green ,
• might remove or lose your work, like removing a link: red , or
• is neutral, like opening a link in a new browser window: gray .

The TemplateData editor has been completely re-written to use a different design based on the same OOjs UI system as VisualEditor. (T67815, T73746.) This change fixed a couple of existing bugs and improved usability. (T73077, T73078.)

Search and replace in long documents is now faster. It does not highlight every occurrence if there are more than 100 on-screen at once.(T78234.)

Editors at the Hebrew and Russian Wikipedia requested the ability to use VisualEditor in the "Article Incubator" or drafts namespace. (T86688, T87027.) If your community would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace on your wiki, then you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.

Looking ahead

The Editing team will soon add auto-fill features for citations. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to contribute to the Citoid service's definitions for each website, to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections.

We will need editors to help test the new design of the special character inserter, especially if you speak Welsh, Breton, or another language that uses diacritics or special characters extensively. The new version should be available for testing next week. Please contact User:Whatamidoing (WMF) if you would like to be notified when the new version is available. After the special character tool is completed, VisualEditor will be deployed to all users at Phase 5 Wikipedias. This will affect about 50 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh. The date for this change has not been determined.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
• Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC); information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins, and you can also contact James F. to learn more about this initiative.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.
• Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

18:30, 5 Eyo Mdumba 2015 (UTC)

[Global proposal] m.Wikipedia.org: (all) Edit pages

MediaWiki mobile

Hi, this message is to let you know that, on domains like xh.m.wikipedia.org, unregistered users cannot edit. At the Wikimedia Forum, where global configuration changes are normally discussed, a few dozens users propose to restore normal editing permissions on all mobile sites. Please read and comment!

Thanks and sorry for writing in English, Nemo 22:32, 1 Eyo Kwindla 2015 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (March 2015)

Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for, free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• Project MUSE — humanities and social science books and journals
• DynaMed — clinical reference tool for medical topics
• Royal Pharmaceutical Society — pharmaceutical information and practice resources
• Women Writers Online — a digital humanities database focused on women's literature
• Newspapers.com — American newspapers database w/ Open Access opportunities (expansion of accounts)

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 21:14, 2 Eyo Kwindla 2015 (UTC)

Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator page.

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Inspire Campaign: Improving diversity, improving content

This March, we’re organizing an Inspire Campaign to encourage and support new ideas for improving gender diversity on Wikimedia projects. Less than 20% of Wikimedia contributors are women, and many important topics are still missing in our content. We invite all Wikimedians to participate. If you have an idea that could help address this problem, please get involved today! The campaign runs until March 31.

All proposals are welcome - research projects, technical solutions, community organizing and outreach initiatives, or something completely new! Funding is available from the Wikimedia Foundation for projects that need financial support. Constructive, positive feedback on ideas is appreciated, and collaboration is encouraged - your skills and experience may help bring someone else’s project to life. Join us at the Inspire Campaign and help this project better represent the world’s knowledge!

• Inspire Campaign main page

(Sorry for the English - please translate this message!) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:01, 4 Eyo Kwindla 2015 (UTC)

SUL finalization update

Hi all,apologies for writing in English, please read this page for important information and an update involving SUL finalization, scheduled to take place in one month. Thanks. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 13 Eyo Kwindla 2015 (UTC)

Stewards confirmation rules

Hello, I made a proposal on Meta to change the rules for the steward confirmations. Currently consensus to remove is required for a steward to lose his status, however I think it's fairer to the community if every steward needed the consensus to keep. As this is an issue that affects all WMF wikis, I'm sending this notification to let people know & be able to participate. Best regards, --MF-W 16:12, 10 Ekatshazimpuzi 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015

Did you know?

With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:

Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:

After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements

VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead. (T90734)

Looking ahead

The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users at the English Wikipedia, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon. (T90666)

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language. Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

19:49, 10 Ekatshazimpuzi 2015 (UTC)

Content Translation beta-feature will be enabled on 21 April 2015

Hello, Content Translation will be enabled as a beta-feature in the Xhosa Wikipedia on 21 April, 2015. It is currently available on http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation for testing translation. You need to create a new account for this wiki as it is currently not covered by the central authentication system. Once logged in please enable the beta-feature to see the tool. You can translate from any article in the available source languages. Please let us know your comments and feedback through the Content Translation talk page or Phabricator. My apologies for writing this announcement only in English. Please feel free to translate this message for wider distribution. Thank you.--Runa Bhattacharjee (talk) 09:58, 17 Ekatshazimpuzi 2015 (UTC)

Nominations are being accepted for 2015 Wikimedia Foundation elections

This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.

Greetings,

I am pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year the Board and the FDC Staff are looking for a diverse set of candidates from regions and projects that are traditionally under-represented on the board and in the movement as well as candidates with experience in technology, product or finance. To this end they have published letters describing what they think is needed and, recognizing that those who know the community the best are the community themselves, the election committee is accepting nominations for community members you think should run and will reach out to those nominated to provide them with information about the job and the election process.

This year, elections are being held for the following roles:

Board of Trustees
The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the board elections page.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC elections page.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud
The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC Ombudsperson elections page.

The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 20 to 23:59 UTC May 5 for the Board and from 00:00 UTCApril 20 to 23:59 UTC April 30 for the FDC and FDC Ombudsperson. This year, we are accepting both self-nominations and nominations of others. More information on this election and the nomination process can be found on the 2015 Wikimedia elections page on Meta-Wiki.

Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections -at- wikimedia.org

On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 05:03, 21 April 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Content Translation beta-feature now available

Hello, Content Translation has now been enabled as a beta feature on the Xhosa Wikipedia. To start translating, enable the beta feature and go to Special:ContentTranslation or to your contributions page and create a new translation by selecting the source language, the article name and target language. If the article already exists then a warning will be displayed. After you translate the article, you can publish it directly as a new page on the Xhosa Wikipedia. In case the article gets created in the Xhosa Wikipedia by another user while you were translating, you will see an option to save the newly published translation under your user namespace. The number of published pages can be seen on the Content Translation stats page.

Since, this is the first time we have installed the tool on this Wikipedia, there are chances that there may be some problems or service disruptions which we are not yet aware of. We will be monitoring the usage to check for any failures or issues, but please do let us know on the Content Translation talk page or through Phabricator if you spot any problems that prevent you from using the tool. For more information, please read about how to use the tool. You can also view a short screencast on how to use Content Translation. My apologies for writing this announcement only in English. Please feel free to translate this message for wider distribution. Thank you.--Runa Bhattacharjee (talk) 15:52, 21 Ekatshazimpuzi 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Funds Dissemination Committee elections 2015

This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.

Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2015 elections for the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and FDC Ombudsperson. Questions and discussion with the candidates for the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and FDC Ombudsperson will continue during the voting. Nominations for the Board of Trustees will be accepted until 23:59 UTC May 5.

The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions on the committee being filled.

The FDC Ombudsperson receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled.

The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 3 to 23:59 UTC May 10. Click here to vote. Questions and discussion with the candidates will continue during that time. Click here to ask the FDC candidates a question. Click here to ask the FDC Ombudsperson candidates a question. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 FDC election page, the 2015 FDC Ombudsperson election page, and the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Volunteer Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 03:45, 4 May 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2015)

Apologies for writing in English, please help translate this into your local language. Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

Today The Wikipedia Library announces signups for more free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• MIT Press Journals — scholarly journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences (200 accounts)
• Loeb Classical Library — Harvard University Press versions of Classical Greek and Latin literature with commentary and annotation (25 accounts)
• RIPM — music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966 (20 accounts)
• Sage Stats — social science data for geographies within the United States (10 accounts)
• HeinOnline — an extensive legal research database, including 2000 law-related journals as well as international legal history materials (25 accounts)

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Project MUSE, JSTOR, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 22:12, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

We need your help! Help coordinate Wikipedia Library's account distribution and global development! Please join our team at Global our new coordinator signup.

This message was delivered via the Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List

Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections 2015

This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.

Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Questions and discussion with the candidates for the Board will continue during the voting.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation manages many diverse projects such as Wikipedia and Commons.

The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 17 to 23:59 UTC May 31. Click here to vote. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Volunteer Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 17:20, 17 May 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Pywikibot compat will no longer be supported - Please migrate to pywikibot core

Sorry for English, I hope someone translates this.
Pywikibot (then "Pywikipediabot") was started back in 2002. In 2007 a new branch (formerly known as "rewrite", now called "core") was started from scratch using the MediaWiki API. The developers of Pywikibot have decided to stop supporting the compat version of Pywikibot due to bad performance and architectural errors that make it hard to update, compared to core. If you are using pywikibot compat it is likely your code will break due to upcoming MediaWiki API changes (e.g. T101524). It is highly recommended you migrate to the core framework. There is a migration guide, and please contact us if you have any problem.

There is an upcoming MediaWiki API breaking change that compat will not be updated for. If your bot's name is in this list, your bot will most likely break.

Thank you,
The Pywikibot development team, 19:30, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #3—2015

Did you know?

When you click on a link to an article, you now see more information:

The link tool has been re-designed:

There are separate tabs for linking to internal and external pages. The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has created new interfaces for the link and citation tools and fixed many bugs and changed some elements of the design. Some of these bugs affected users of VisualEditor on mobile devices. Status reports are posted on mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

A test of VisualEditor's effect on new editors at the English Wikipedia has just completed the first phase. During this test, half of newly registered editors had VisualEditor automatically enabled, and half did not. The main goal of the study is to learn which group was more likely to save an edit and to make productive, unreverted edits. Initial results will be posted at Meta later this month.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations are available at a few Wikipedias through the citoid service. Citoid takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. If Citoid is enabled on your wiki, then the design of the citation workflow changed during May. All citations are now created inside a single tool. Inside that tool, choose the tab you want (⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-auto⧽, ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-manual⧽, or ⧼citoid-citeFromIDDialog-mode-reuse⧽). The cite button is now labeled with the word "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" rather than a book icon, and the autofill citation dialog now has a more meaningful label, "⧼Citoid-citeFromIDDialog-lookup-button⧽", for the submit button.

The link tool has been redesigned based on feedback from Wikipedia editors and user testing. It now has two separate sections: one for links to articles and one for external links. When you select a link, its pop-up context menu shows the name of the linked page, a thumbnail image from the linked page, Wikidata's description, and appropriate icons for disambiguation pages, redirect pages and empty pages (where applicable). Search results have been reduced to the first five pages. Several bugs were fixed, including a dark highlight that appeared over the first match in the link inspector. (T98085)

The special character inserter in VisualEditor now uses the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki can also create a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Please read the instructions for customizing the list at mediawiki.org. Also, there is now a tooltip to describing each character in the special character inserter. (T70425)

Several improvements have been made to templates. When you search for a template to insert, the list of results now contains descriptions of the templates. The parameter list inside the template dialog now remains open after inserting a parameter from the list, so that users don’t need to click on "⧼visualeditor-dialog-transclusion-add-param⧽" each time they want to add another parameter. (T95696) The team added a new property for TemplateData, "Example", for template parameters. This optional, translatable property will show up when there is text describing how to use that parameter. (T53049)

The design of the main toolbar and several other elements have changed slightly, to be consistent with the MediaWiki theme. In the Vector skin, individual items in the menu are separated visually by pale gray bars. Buttons and menus on the toolbar can now contain both an icon and a text label, rather than just one or the other. This new design feature is being used for the cite button on wikis where the Citoid service is enabled.

The team has released a long-desired improvement to the handling of non-existent images. If a non-existent image is linked in an article, then it is now visible in VisualEditor and can be selected, edited, replaced, or removed.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Wednesday at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the VisualEditor Q4 blocker project with the bug.
• If your Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other community wants to have VisualEditor made available by default to contributors, then please contact James Forrester.
• If you would like to request the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
• The team is planning the second VisualEditor-related "translathon" for July. Please follow this task on Phabricator for details and updates! Announcements will follow in due course.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

10:44, 13 Eyesilimela 2015 (UTC)

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (June 2015)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

Today The Wikipedia Library announces signups for more free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• Taylor & Francis — academic publisher of journals. The pilot includes two subject collections: Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences. (30 accounts)
• World Bank eLibrary — digital platform containing all books, working papers, and journal articles published by the World Bank from the 1990s to the present. (100 accounts)
• AAAS — general interest science publisher, who publishes the journal Science among other sources (50 accounts)

New French-Language Branch!

• Érudit (en Francais) — Érudit is a French-Canadian scholarly aggregator primarily, humanities and social sciences, and contains sources in both English and French. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (50 accounts).
• Cairn.info (en Francais) — Cairn.info is a Switzerland based online web portal of scholarly materials in the humanities and social sciences. Most sources are in French, but some also in English. Signups on both English and French Wikipedia (100 accounts).
• L'Harmattan — French language publisher across a wide range of non-fiction and fiction, with a strong selection of francophone African materials (1000 accounts).

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including an expansion of accounts for Royal Society journals and remaining accounts on Project MUSE, JSTOR, DeGruyter, Highbeam Newspapers.com and British Newspaper Archive. If you have suggestions for journals or databases we should seek access to make a request! Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 22:08, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

We need your help! Help coordinate Wikipedia Library's account distribution and global development! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List

HTTPS

Apologies for writing in English.

Hi everyone.

Over the last few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working towards enabling HTTPS by default for all users, including unregistered ones, for better privacy and security for both readers and editors. This has taken a long time, as there were different aspects to take into account. Our servers haven't been ready to handle it. The Wikimedia Foundation has had to balance sometimes conflicting goals.

Forced HTTPS has just been implemented on all Wikimedia projects. Some of you might already be aware of this, as a few Wikipedia language versions were converted to HTTPS last week and the then affected communities were notified.

Most of Wikimedia editors shouldn't be affected at all. If you edit as registered user, you've probably already had to log in through HTTPS. We'll keep an eye on this to make sure everything is working as it should. Do get in touch with us if you have any problems after this change or contact me if you have any other questions.

/Johan (WMF)

22:01, 19 Eyesilimela 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to create PNG thumbnails of static GIF images

The thumbnail of this gif is of really bad quality.

How a PNG thumb of this GIF would look like

There is a proposal at the Commons Village Pump requesting feedback about the thumbnails of static GIF images: It states that static GIF files should have their thumbnails created in PNG. The advantages of PNG over GIF would be visible especially with GIF images using an alpha channel. (compare the thumbnails on the side)

This change would affect all wikis, so if you support/oppose or want to give general feedback/concerns, please post them to the proposal page. Thank you. --McZusatz (talk) & MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:07, 24 Eye Khala 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to create PNG thumbnails of static GIF images

The thumbnail of this gif is of really bad quality.

How a PNG thumb of this GIF would look like

There is a proposal at the Commons Village Pump requesting feedback about the thumbnails of static GIF images: It states that static GIF files should have their thumbnails created in PNG. The advantages of PNG over GIF would be visible especially with GIF images using an alpha channel. (compare the thumbnails on the side)

This change would affect all wikis, so if you support/oppose or want to give general feedback/concerns, please post them to the proposal page. Thank you. --McZusatz (talk) & MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:32, 24 Eye Khala 2015 (UTC)

What does a Healthy Community look like to you?

Hi,
The Community Engagement department at the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a new learning campaign. The WMF wants to record community impressions about what makes a healthy online community. Share your views and/or create a drawing and take a chance to win a Wikimania 2016 scholarship! Join the WMF as we begin a conversation about Community Health. Contribute a drawing or answer the questions on the campaign's page.

Why get involved?

The world is changing. The way we relate to knowledge is transforming. As the next billion people come online, the Wikimedia movement is working to bring more users on the wiki projects. The way we interact and collaborate online are key to building sustainable projects. How accessible are Wikimedia projects to newcomers today? Are we helping each other learn?
Share your views on this matter that affects us all!
We invite everyone to take part in this learning campaign. Wikimedia Foundation will distribute one Wikimania Scholarship 2016 among those participants who are eligible.

More information

• All participants must have a registered user of at least one month antiquity on any Wikimedia project before the starting date of the campaign.
• All eligible contributions must be done until August 23, 2015 at 23:59 UTC
• Wiki link: Community Health learning campaign
• URL https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/Community_Health_learning_campaign
• Contact: María Cruz / Twitter: Template:@WikiEval #CommunityHealth / email: evalTemplate:@wikimediaTemplate:Dotorg

Happy editing!

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:43, 31 Eye Khala 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata: Access to data from arbitrary items is coming

(Sorry for writing in English)

When using data from Wikidata on Wikipedia and other sister projects, there is currently a limitation in place that hinders some use cases: data can only be accessed from the corresponding item. So, for example, the Wikipedia article about Berlin can only get data from the Wikidata item about Berlin but not from the item about Germany. This had technical reasons. We are now removing this limitation. It is already done for many projects. Your project is one of the next ones. We will roll out this feature here on August 12.

We invite you to play around with this new feature if you are one of the people who have been waiting for this for a long time. If you have technical issues/questions with this you can come to d:Wikidata:Contact the development team.

A note of caution: Please be careful with how many items you use for a single page. If it is too many pages, loading might get slow. We will have to see how the feature behaves in production to see where we need to tweak and how.

How to use it, once it is enabled:

• Parser function: {{#property:P36|from=Q183}} to get the capital from the item about Germany
• Lua: see mw:Extension:Wikibase Client/Lua

Cheers Lydia Pintscher MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:46, 3 Eye Thupha 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata: Access to data from arbitrary items is here

(Sorry for writing in English)

Hi everyone,

As I have previously announced here we have now enabled the arbitrary access feature here. This means from now on you can make use of data from any Wikidata item in any article here. Before you could for example only access data about Berlin in the article about Berlin. If you want to find out more or have questions please come to d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access. I hope this will open up great possibilities for you and make your work easier. Cheers Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 13:32, 12 Eye Thupha 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #4—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

You can add quotations marks before and after a title or phrase with a single click.

Select the relevant text. Find the correct quotations marks in the special character inserter tool (marked as Ω in the toolbar).

Click the button. VisualEditor will add the quotation marks on either side of the text you selected.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.

Wikimania

The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about VisualEditor and the future of editing.

Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince, जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.

For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).

For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%). There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).

We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. We thank the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.

Recent improvements

Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.

Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.

Future changes

The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.

On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page is now using Flow instead of LiquidThreads.
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mediawiki.org if you can help.
• If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
• Please file requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
• The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

—Elitre (WMF), 22:28, 14 Eye Thupha 2015 (UTC)

How can we improve Wikimedia grants to support you better?

My apologies for posting this message in English. Please help translate it if you can.

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation would like your feedback about how we can reimagine Wikimedia Foundation grants, to better support people and ideas in your Wikimedia project. Ways to participate:

• Respond to questions on the discussion page of the idea.
• Join a small group conversation.
• Learn more about this consultation.

Feedback is welcome in any language.

With thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation.

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was sent by I JethroBT (WMF) through MediaWiki message delivery. 00:43, 19 Eye Thupha 2015 (UTC)

Introducing the Wikimedia public policy site

Hi all,

We are excited to introduce a new Wikimedia Public Policy site. The site includes resources and position statements on access, copyright, censorship, intermediary liability, and privacy. The site explains how good public policy supports the Wikimedia projects, editors, and mission.

Visit the public policy portal: https://policy.wikimedia.org/

Please help translate the statements on Meta Wiki. You can read more on the Wikimedia blog.

Thanks,

Yana and Stephen (Talk) 18:13, 2 Eyo Msintsi 2015 (UTC)

(Sent with the Global message delivery system)

Open call for Individual Engagement Grants

My apologies for posting this message in English. Please help translate it if you can.

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals until September 29th to fund new tools, community-building processes, and other experimental ideas that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), Individual Engagement Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

• Submit a grant request
• Get help with your proposal in IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session
• Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants

Thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 20:52, 4 Eyo Msintsi 2015 (UTC)

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was sent by I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) through MediaWiki message delivery.

Open call for Individual Engagement Grants

My apologies for posting this message in English. Please help translate it if you can.

Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants program is accepting proposals until September 29th to fund new tools, community-building processes, and other experimental ideas that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), Individual Engagement Grants can support you and your team’s project development time in addition to project expenses such as materials, travel, and rental space.

• Submit a grant request
• Get help with your proposal in IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session
• Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants

Thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 21:54, 4 Eyo Msintsi 2015 (UTC)

(Opt-out Instructions) This message was sent by I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) through MediaWiki message delivery.

New Wikipedia Library Database Access (September 2015)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

The Wikipedia Library is announcing signups today for free, full-access accounts to published research as part of our Publisher Donation Program. You can sign up for new accounts and research materials from:

• EBSCOHost - this is one of our largest access donations so far: access to a wide variety of academic, newspaper and magazine sources through their Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete and MasterFILE Complete
• Newspaperarchive.com - historical newspapers from the United States, Canada, UK and 20 other countries, and includes an Open Access "clipping" feature (1000 accounts)
• IMF Elibary- a digital collection of the IMF's reports, studies and research on global economics and development (50 accounts)
• Sabinet - one of the largest African digital publishers, based in South Africa, with a wide range of content in English and other European and African languages (10 accounts)
• Numérique Premium - a French language social science and humanities ebook database, with topical collections on a wide range of topics (100)
• Al Manhal - an Arabic and English database with a wide range of sources, largely focused on or published in the Middle East (60 accounts)
• Jamalon - an Arabic book distributor, who is providing targeted book delivery to volunteers (50 editors)

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including expanded accounts for Elsevier ScienceDirect, British Medical Journal and Dynamed and additional accounts for Project MUSE, DeGruyter, Newspapers.com, Highbeam and HeinOnline. Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 19:42, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

We need help! Help us coordinate Wikipedia Library's distribution of accounts, communication of access opportunities and more! Please join our team at our new coordinator signup.

This message was delivered via the Global Mass Message tool to The Wikipedia Library Global Delivery List.

Only one week left for Individual Engagement Grant proposals!

(Apologies for using English below, please help translate if you are able.)

There is still one week left to submit Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) proposals before the September 29th deadline. If you have ideas for new tools, community-building processes, and other experimental projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.

• Submit a grant request
• Get help with your proposal in IdeaLab
• Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources 21:01, 22 Eyo Msintsi 2015 (UTC)

Reimagining WMF grants report

(My apologies for using English here, please help translate if you are able.)

Last month, we asked for community feedback on a proposal to change the structure of WMF grant programs. Thanks to the 200+ people who participated! A report on what we learned and changed based on this consultation is now available.

Come read about the findings and next steps as WMF’s Community Resources team begins to implement changes based on your feedback. Your questions and comments are welcome on the outcomes discussion page.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 16:56, 28 Eyo Msintsi 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #5—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

Did you know?

You can use the visual editor on smartphones and tablets.

Click the pencil icon to open the editor for a page. Inside that, use the gear menu in the upper right corner to "Switch to visual editing".

The editing button will remember which editing environment you used last time, and give you the same one next time. The desktop site will be switching to a system similar to this one in the coming months.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs, added new features, and made some small design changes. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages like Japanese and Arabic, making it easier to edit on mobile devices, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

Educational features: The first time ever you use the visual editor, it now draws your attention to the Link and ⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽ tools. When you click on the tools, it explains why you should use them. (T108620) Alongside this, the welcome message for new users has been simplified to make editing more welcoming. (T112354) More in-software educational features are planned.

Links: It is now easier to understand when you are adding text to a link and when you are typing plain text next to it. (T74108, T91285) The editor now fully supports ISBN, PMID or RFC numbers. (T109498, T110347, T63558) These "magic links" use a custom link editing tool.

Uploads: Registered editors can now upload images and other media to Commons while editing. Click the new tab in the "Insert Images and media" tool. You will be guided through the process without having to leave your edit. At the end, the image will be inserted. This tool is limited to one file at a time, owned by the user, and licensed under Commons's standard license. For more complex situations, the tool links to more advanced upload tools. You can also drag the image into the editor. This will be available in the wikitext editor later.

Mobile: Previously, the visual editor was available on the mobile Wikipedia site only on tablets. Now, editors can use it on all devices regardless of size if they wish. (T85630) Edit conflicts were previously broken on the mobile website. Edit conflicts can now be resolved in both wikitext and visual editors. (T111894) Sometimes templates and similar items could not be deleted on the mobile website. Selecting them caused the on-screen keyboard to hide with some browsers. Now there is a new "Delete" button, so that these things can be removed if the keyboard hides. (T62110) You can also edit table cells in mobile now.

Rich editing tools: You can now add and edit sheet music in the visual editor. (T112925) There are separate tabs for advanced options, such as MIDI and Ogg audio files. (T114227, T113354) When editing formulæ and other blocks, errors are shown as you edit. It is also possible to edit some types of graphs; adding new ones, and support for new types, will be coming.

On the English Wikipedia, the visual editor is now automatically available to anyone who creates an account. The preference switch was moved to the normal location, under Special:Preferences.

Future changes

You will soon be able to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor after you start editing. (T49779) Previously, you could only switch from the visual editor to the wikitext editor. Bi-directional switching will make possible a single edit tab. (T102398) This project will combine the "Tshintsha" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Tshintsha" tab, similar to the system already used on the mobile website. The "Tshintsha" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time.

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page uses Flow for discussions.
• Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).
• Local admins can set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki. If you need help, then please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.
• The weekly task triage meetings are open to volunteers. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration, though. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

—Elitre (WMF), 18:17, 30 Eye Dwarha 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

Hi everyone! Apologies for posting in English. Translations are very welcome.

The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on building improved curation and moderation tools for experienced Wikimedia contributors. We're now starting a Community Wishlist Survey to find the most useful projects that we can work on.

For phase 1 of the survey, we're inviting all active contributors to submit brief proposals, explaining the project that you'd like us to work on, and why it's important. Phase 1 will last for 2 weeks. In phase 2, we'll ask you to vote on the proposals. Afterwards, we'll analyze the top 10 proposals and create a prioritized wishlist.

While most of this process will be conducted in English, we're inviting people from any Wikimedia wiki to submit proposals. We'll also invite volunteer translators to help translate proposals into English.

Your proposal should include: the problem that you want to solve, who would benefit, and a proposed solution, if you have one. You can submit your proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey page, using the entry field and the big blue button. We will be accepting proposals for 2 weeks, ending on November 23.

We're looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Community Tech Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:57, 9 Eye Nkanga 2015 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016 scholarships ambassadors needed

Hello! Wikimania 2016 scholarships will soon be open; by the end of the week we'll form the committee and we need your help, see Scholarship committee for details.

If you want to carefully review nearly a thousand applications in January, you might be a perfect committee member. Otherwise, you can volunteer as "ambassador": you will observe all the committee activities, ensure that people from your language or project manage to apply for a scholarship, translate scholarship applications written in your language to English and so on. Ambassadors are allowed to ask for a scholarship, unlike committee members.

Wikimania 2016 scholarships subteam 10:48, 10 Eye Nkanga 2015 (UTC)

Harassment consultation

Please help translate to your language

The Community Advocacy team the Wikimedia Foundation has opened a consultation on the topic of harassment on Meta. The consultation period is intended to run for one month from today, November 16, and end on December 17. Please share your thoughts there on harassment-related issues facing our communities and potential solutions. (Note: this consultation is not intended to evaluate specific cases of harassment, but rather to discuss the problem of harassment itself.)

• Harassment consultation 2015

Regards, Community Advocacy, Wikimedia Foundation

Your input requested on the proposed #FreeBassel banner campaign

This is a message regarding the proposed 2015 Free Bassel banner. Translations are available.

Hi everyone,

This is to inform all Wikimedia contributors that a straw poll seeking your involvement has just been started on Meta-Wiki.

As some of your might be aware, a small group of Wikimedia volunteers have proposed a banner campaign informing Wikipedia readers about the urgent situation of our fellow Wikipedian, open source software developer and Creative Commons activist, Bassel Khartabil. An exemplary banner and an explanatory page have now been prepared, and translated into about half a dozen languages by volunteer translators.

We are seeking your involvement to decide if the global Wikimedia community approves starting a banner campaign asking Wikipedia readers to call on the Syrian government to release Bassel from prison. We understand that a campaign like this would be unprecedented in Wikipedia's history, which is why we're seeking the widest possible consensus among the community.

Given Bassel's urgent situation and the resulting tight schedule, we ask everyone to get involved with the poll and the discussion to the widest possible extent, and to promote it among your communities as soon as possible.

(Apologies for writing in English; please kindly translate this message into your own language.)

Thank you for your participation!

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Your input requested on the proposed #FreeBassel banner campaign

This is a message regarding the proposed 2015 Free Bassel banner. Translations are available.

Hi everyone,

This is to inform all Wikimedia contributors that a straw poll seeking your involvement has just been started on Meta-Wiki.

As some of your might be aware, a small group of Wikimedia volunteers have proposed a banner campaign informing Wikipedia readers about the urgent situation of our fellow Wikipedian, open source software developer and Creative Commons activist, Bassel Khartabil. An exemplary banner and an explanatory page have now been prepared, and translated into about half a dozen languages by volunteer translators.

We are seeking your involvement to decide if the global Wikimedia community approves starting a banner campaign asking Wikipedia readers to call on the Syrian government to release Bassel from prison. We understand that a campaign like this would be unprecedented in Wikipedia's history, which is why we're seeking the widest possible consensus among the community.

Given Bassel's urgent situation and the resulting tight schedule, we ask everyone to get involved with the poll and the discussion to the widest possible extent, and to promote it among your communities as soon as possible.

(Apologies for writing in English; please kindly translate this message into your own language.)

Thank you for your participation!

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 21:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Community Wishlist Survey

Hi everyone! Apologies for posting this in English. Translations are very welcome.

We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.

Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.

The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!

Community Tech via

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:38, 1 Eyo Mnga 2015 (UTC)