Wikiversity:Babel/archive/2016
This page is an Archive This information is kept for referential reasons only and should not be edited. New discussions can be started at Wikiversity:Babel.
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Wikimedia Year of Science
editThe Wiki Education Foundation is planning a Wikimedia-wide Year of Science 2016. We are just beginning to brain storm ideas for a similar effort at en-wv. Visit v:Wikiversity:Year of Science 2016 if you are interested in participating.
For more information see:
- Wikipedia Year of Science at the Wiki Education Foundation
- w:Wikipedia:Year of Science
- File:Making 2016 the Wikipedia Year of Science.webm Video recording of presentation at WikiConference USA 2015
Please feel free to contact me if you'd like to collaborate on this project in other languages. --mikeu talk 20:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
- I've created Wikiversity:Year of Science 2016 to coordinate multilingual activity. --mikeu talk 17:18, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Wikimania 2016 Scholarships - Deadline soon!
edit- Please help translate to your language
A reminder - applications for scholarships for Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, Italy, are closing soon! Please get your applications in by January 9th. To apply, visit the page below:
Patrick Earley (WMF) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:49, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Proposals for closing projects/Move Beta Wikiversity to Incubator
editRe: meta:Proposals for closing projects/Move Beta Wikiversity to Incubator Please see the most recent edit [1] with a summary of "Move for closure." --mikeu talk 16:23, 8 January 2016 (UTC)
2016 WMF Strategy consultation
edit- Please help translate to your language
Hello, all.
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has launched a consultation to help create and prioritize WMF strategy beginning July 2016 and for the 12 to 24 months thereafter. This consultation will be open, on Meta, from 18 January to 26 February, after which the Foundation will also use these ideas to help inform its Annual Plan. (More on our timeline can be found on that Meta page.)
Your input is welcome (and greatly desired) at the Meta discussion, 2016 Strategy/Community consultation.
Apologies for English, where this is posted on a non-English project. We thought it was more important to get the consultation translated as much as possible, and good headway has been made there in some languages. There is still much to do, however! We created m:2016 Strategy/Translations to try to help coordinate what needs translation and what progress is being made. :)
If you have questions, please reach out to me on my talk page or on the strategy consultation's talk page or by email to mdennis@wikimedia.org.
I hope you'll join us! Maggie Dennis via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
Wikiversity_Simple_English
editRequests for new languages/Wikiversity Simple English has just started. It might be of interest to the community here. Please participate in the discussion. --mikeu talk 20:57, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
language links via Wikidata are coming
editHi everyone :)
I wanted to let you know that Wikiversity is scheduled to receive the first round of Wikidata support on February 23rd. This means you will be able to manage the links between different language versions just in one place (on Wikidata) instead of having to do it in each article. I hope this will help you by reducing some work. If that goes well you'll receive access to the data on Wikidata a while later (date will be scheduled later). If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask on d:Wikidata:Wikiversity or d:Wikidata:Project chat.
Wikidata support is here!
editHey everyone :)
As announced earlier you can now manage your links to other languages and projects via Wikidata. I hope this will make your work here easier. If you keep the links in local wiki text they will overwrite what is coming from Wikidata. You can also completely surpress them using the magic word {{noexternallanglinks}}. If you have questions please don't hesitate to ask at d:Wikidata:Wikiversity or d:Wikidata:Project chat.
Welcome to Wikidata!
Data visualizations and maps on Beta Wikiversity
editThere's a lot of development going on towards making it easy for editors to create and edit data visualizations and maps, which can be used directly on Wikimedia projects. A certain amount of centralization is helpful for this, so the plan seems to be to store these resources on one wiki, probably in a dedicated namespace. Which wiki will be responsible for them is still an open question; previous suggestions include Meta, Commons, Wikidata, and a dedicated new wiki. However, I feel like data visualizations and maps (as well as other similar resources in the same vein), as learning resources that serve a helpful educational purpose on Wikimedia projects and elsewhere, would fit very well here on Wikiversity.
Thoughts on this? Would this kind of content be welcome here on Wikiversity? --Yair rand (talk) 16:50, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- This is an exciting development and one of my original motivations for joining Wikiversity when it first formed. I've opened a learning project space at EN.Wikiversity and across several other wikis outside of the Wikimedia sphere to focus a team on this map of this event which will require pulling together a huge amount of people and data. I think that the centralization aspect is fairly well covered in the RFC above. A live example would set an important precedent for whomever has the energy and focus to fully demonstrate the capability in a 'real life' use case. I'm hoping that this project will help catapult v: into its designated purpose. --CQ (talk) 18:38, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
VisualEditor News #1—2016
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Did you know?
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Indic, and Han scripts, and improving the single edit tab interface.
Recent changes
editYou can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing. This function is available to nearly all editors at most wikis except the Wiktionaries and Wikisources.
Many local feedback pages for the visual editor have been redirected to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
You can now re-arrange columns and rows in tables, as well as copying a row, column or any other selection of cells and pasting it in a new location.
The formula editor has two options: you can choose "Quick edit" to see and change only the LaTeX code, or "Edit" to use the full tool. The full tool offers immediate preview and an extensive list of symbols.
Future changes
editThe single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. This is similar to the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as an account preference for logged-in editors, and as a cookie for logged-out users. Logged-in editors will have these options in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences:
- Remember my last editor,
- Always give me the visual editor if possible,
- Always give me the source editor, and
- Show me both editor tabs. (This is the state for people using the visual editor now.)
The visual editor uses the same search engine as Special:Search to find links and files. This search will get better at detecting typos and spelling mistakes soon. These improvements to search will appear in the visual editor as well.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at most "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. This will affect the following languages, amongst others: Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Thai, Aramaic.
Let's work together
edit- Please try out the newest version of the single edit tab on test2.wikipedia.org. You may need to restore the default preferences (at the bottom of test2wiki:Special:Preferences) to see the initial prompt for options. Were you able to find a preference setting that will work for your own editing? Did you see the large preferences dialog box when you started editing an article there?
- Can you read and type in Korean, Arabic, Japanese, Indic, or Han scripts? Does typing in these languages feels natural in the visual editor? Language engineer David Chan needs to know. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Join the Tech Talk about "Automated citations in Wikipedia: Citoid and the technology behind it" with Sebastian Karcher on 29 February 2016.
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!
poll until March 31: Proposals for closing projects/Move Beta Wikiversity to Incubator
edit"This poll is timeboxed and will be open until March 31 and the option will be selected by simple mayority."
Please read What to do with this proposal?, and VOTE. Thank you! ----Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 14:02, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
Install Extension:Simple Forms
editSaluton! I would need a solution which enable to use HTML <select> elements for the course Internaciigo de komputilaj programoj/Pli alt-nivelaj problemoj. Could an admin do that for me? --Psychoslave (talk) 14:49, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
- To install an extension, Phabricator need a vote of the community. You nned to lauch the vote by the explain of the needing extension in betawikiversity. But you need to know that betawikiversity is an incubator, so it will be prefered to activate your wikiversity to as what the community want. Crochet.david (talk) 19:41, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
Open Call for Individual Engagement Grants
editPlease help translate to your language:
Greetings! The Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program is accepting proposals until April 12th to fund new tools, research, outreach efforts, and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers. Whether you need a small or large amount of funds (up to $30,000 USD), IEGs 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 or draft your proposal in IdeaLab
- Get help with your proposal in an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants
With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:47, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
Server switch 2016
editThe Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its newest data center in Dallas. This will make sure Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the new data center on Tuesday, 19 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
- You will not be able to edit for approximately 15 to 30 minutes on Tuesday, 19 April and Thursday, 21 April, starting at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT).
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped.
Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be a code freeze for the week of 18 April.
No non-essential code deployments will take place.
This test was originally planned to take place on March 22. April 19th and 21st are the new dates. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. They will post any changes on that schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
Wikidata: access to the data is coming
editHi everyone :)
A while ago you received access to the interwiki links from Wikidata. Everything seems to be going well so I'd like to move on to the second stage. You will get access to the actual data in Wikidata like the date of birth of a person. You'll be able to make use of them in your templates via Lua or a new parser function (#property). We'll be enabling this on May 3rd. I hope this will open up great new possibilities for you and make your work easier. If you have questions please come to d:Wikidata:Project chat or d:Wikidata:Wikiversity.
Wikidata: data access is here
editHi everyone :)
We just enabled access to the data on Wikidata for you. This means you can now access data like the number of inhabitants of a city or get a link to a picture for a famous person and much more. You can access the data in two ways - via a parser function and via Lua. How to use it:
- Parser function: {{#property:P36|from=Q183}} to get the capital (Property:P36) from the item about Germany (Q183)
- Lua: see mw:Extension:Wikibase Client/Lua
I hope this will help you do great things here. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. A good place to do that is d:Wikidata:Project chat.
IMPORTANT: Admin activity review
editHello. A policy regarding the removal of "advanced rights" (administrator, bureaucrat, etc. ) was adopted by global community consensus in 2013. According to this policy, the stewards are reviewing administrators' activity on all Wikimedia Foundation wikis with no inactivity policy. To the best of our knowledge, your wiki does not have a formal process for removing "advanced rights" from inactive accounts. This means that the stewards will take care of this according to the admin activity review.
We have determined that the following users meet the inactivity criteria (no edits and no log actions for more than 2 years):
- Ciprian Dorin Craciun (administrator)
These users will receive a notification soon, asking them to start a community discussion if they want to retain some or all of their rights. If the users do not respond, then their advanced rights will be removed by the stewards.
However, if you as a community would like to create your own activity review process superseding the global one, want to make another decision about these inactive rights holders, or already have a policy that we missed, then please notify the stewards on Meta-Wiki so that we know not to proceed with the rights review on your wiki. Thanks, Ajraddatz (müzakirə) 00:18, 24 may 2016 (UTC)
Hi everyone! Who can update this page States of Wikiversities? --— Green Zero обг 16:49, 5 June 2016 (UTC)
- Usually, Crochet.david does this. Regards, --Vogone (talk) 00:21, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
- I can't, it's not easy to do this manually. Crochet.david (talk) 15:19, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Compact Language Links enabled in this wiki today
editPlease help translate to your language
Compact Language Links has been available as a beta-feature on all Wikimedia wikis since 2014. With compact language links enabled, users are shown a much shorter list of languages on the interlanguage link section of an article (see image). Based on several factors, this shorter list of languages is expected to be more relevant for them and valuable for finding similar content in a language known to them. More information about compact language links can be found in the documentation.
From today onwards, compact language links has been enabled as the default listing of interlanguage links on this wiki. However, using the button at the bottom, you will be able to see a longer list of all the languages the article has been written in. The setting for this compact list can be changed by using the checkbox under User Preferences -> Appearance -> Languages
The compact language links feature has been tested extensively by the Wikimedia Language team, which developed it. However, in case there are any problems or other feedback please let us know on the project talk page. It is to be noted that on some wikis the presence of an existing older gadget that was used for a similar purpose may cause an interference for compact language list. We would like to bring this to the attention of the admins of this wiki. Full details are on this phabricator ticket (in English).
Due to the large scale enablement of this feature, we have had to use MassMessage for this announcement and as a result it is only written in English. We will really appreciate if this message can be translated for other users of this wiki. Thank you. On behalf of the Wikimedia Language team: Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 07:39, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Editing News #2—2016
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for Arabic and Indic scripts, and adapting the visual editor to the needs of the Wikivoyages and Wikisources.
Recent changes
editThe visual editor is now available to all users at most Wikivoyages. It was also enabled for all contributors at the French Wikinews.
The single edit tab feature combines the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab. It has been deployed to several Wikipedias, including Hungarian, Polish, English and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as to all Wikivoyages. At these wikis, you can change your settings for this feature in the "Editing" tab of Special:Preferences. The team is now reviewing the feedback and considering ways to improve the design before rolling it out to more people.
Future changes
editThe "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next few months. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including: Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Assamese, Aramaic and others.
The team is working with the volunteer developers who power Wikisource to provide the visual editor there, for opt-in testing right now and eventually for all users. (T138966)
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. It will look like the visual editor, and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices around September 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together
edit- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- Learn how to improve the "automagical" citoid referencing system in the visual editor, by creating Zotero translators for popular sources in your language! Watch the Tech Talk by Sebastian Karcher for more information.
If you aren't reading this in your preferred 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!
Open call for Project Grants
editPlease help translate to your language:
- Greetings! The Project Grants program is accepting proposals from July 1st to August 2nd to fund new tools, research, offline outreach (including editathon series, workshops, etc), online organizing (including contests), and other experiments that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers.
- Whether you need a small or large amount of funds, Project 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 or draft your proposal in IdeaLab
- Get help with your proposal in an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants or Project and Event Grants
- Also accepting candidates to join the Project Grants Committee through July 15.
- With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 15:25, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Save/Publish
editThe Editing team is planning to change the name of the “Save page” button to “Publish page” and “Publish changes”. “Publish page” will be used when you create a new page. “Publish changes” will be used when you change an existing page. The names will be consistent in all editing environments.[2][3]
This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016. The change will be announced in Tech News when it happens.
If you are fluent in a language other than English, please check the status of translations at translatewiki.net for “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.
The main reason for this change is to avoid confusion for new editors. Repeated user research studies with new editors have shown that some new editors believed that “Save page” would save a private copy of a new page in their accounts, rather than permanently publishing their changes on the web. It is important for this part of the user interface to be clear, since it is difficult to remove public information after it is published. We believe that the confusion caused by the “Save page” button increases the workload for experienced editors, who have to clean up the information that people unintentionally disclose, and report it to the functionaries and stewards to suppress it. Clarifying what the button does will reduce this problem.
Beyond that, the goal is to make all the wikis and languages more consistent, and some wikis made this change many years ago. The Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation supports this change. Making the edit interface easier to understand will make it easier to handle licensing and privacy questions that may arise.
Any help pages or other basic documentation about how to edit pages will also need to be updated, on-wiki and elsewhere. On wiki pages, you can use the wikitext codes {{int:Publishpage}}
and {{int:Publishchanges}}
to display the new labels in the user's preferred language. For the language settings in your account preferences, these wikitext codes produce “Publish page” and “Publish changes”.
Please share this news with community members who teach new editors and with others who may be interested.
RevisionSlider
editGrants to improve your project
editPlease help translate to your language:
Greetings! The Project Grants program is currently accepting proposals for funding. There is just over a week left to submit before the October 11 deadline. If you have ideas for software, offline outreach, research, online community organizing, or other 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: In IdeaLab or an upcoming Hangout session
- Learn from examples of completed Individual Engagement Grants or Project and Event Grants
Creative Commons 4.0
editHello! I'm writing from the Wikimedia Foundation to invite you to give your feedback on a proposed move from CC BY-SA 3.0 to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license across all Wikimedia projects. The consultation will run from October 5 to November 8, and we hope to receive a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. Please, if you are interested, take part in the discussion on Meta-Wiki.
Apologies that this message is only in English. This message can be read and translated in more languages here. Joe Sutherland (talk) 01:34, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
Install Extension:FormatNum
editHello, I like to use the Extension:FormatNum for in an Esperanto course. Would anyone with relevant rights be kind enough to do it, or otherwise please tell me the step I should follow to install it. --Psychoslave (talk) 12:30, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- What is wrong with {{formatnum}} ? Crochet.david (talk) 17:48, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
- It looks like there's no {{formatnum}} template here, and the built in call {{#formatnum: 2300.123|2|,|_}} doesn't work ever. --Psychoslave (talk)
- be careful {{formatnum}} is not a template, it's a magic word as {{!}}. so {{formatnum: 2300.123|2|,|_}} are rendering as 2,300.123 Crochet.david (talk) 12:45, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- Ok, then it's just my memory which was wrong, I thought the magic word should begin with a #. Dankon! --Psychoslave (talk)
- It seems that the magic word formatnum only format according to the locale of the wiki instance. There's no documented way to change the behaviour with parameters. That is
<span lang="fr">{{formatnum:123456.789}}</span>
and<span lang="en">{{formatnum:123456.789}}</span>
both render as 123,456.789, and no parameter to change the format is provided. So actually, the extension would be indeed useful here. An other solution would be to have a dedicated project for each language, with a proper locale configuration. What are the rational for not splitting beta.wikiversity.org into dedicated incubators? --Psychoslave (talk) 11:52, 13 October 2016 (UTC) - Thus said, the formatnum magic word should be sensitive of contextual locale provided through the html lang paramater anyway. --Psychoslave (talk) 11:59, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- Any further comment Crochet.david (Talk | Email | Contribs | SulUtil)? --Psychoslave (talk) 18:26, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
- be careful {{formatnum}} is not a template, it's a magic word as {{!}}. so {{formatnum: 2300.123|2|,|_}} are rendering as 2,300.123 Crochet.david (talk) 12:45, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- It looks like there's no {{formatnum}} template here, and the built in call {{#formatnum: 2300.123|2|,|_}} doesn't work ever. --Psychoslave (talk)
Editing News #3—2016
editRead this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.
Recent changes
edit- You can now set text as small or big.[4]
- Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[5] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[6]
- Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[7]
- At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.[8]
- The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[9] In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
- Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[10]
Future changes
editThe visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
Let's work together
edit- Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor? Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
- If you aren't reading this in your preferred 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!
17:50, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
Password reset
editI apologise that this message is in English. ⧼Centralnotice-shared-help-translate⧽
We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.
Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.
In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.
Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Adding to the above section (Password reset)
editPlease accept my apologies - that first line should read "Help with translations!". Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
New way to edit wikitext
editSummary: There's a new opt-in Beta Feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. Please go try it out.
We in the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing department are responsible for making editing better for all our editors, new and experienced alike. We've been slowly improving the visual editor based on feedback, user tests, and feature requests. However, that doesn't work for all our user needs: whether you need to edit a wikitext talk page, create a template, or fix some broken reference syntax, sometimes you need to use wikitext, and many experienced editors prefer it.
Consequently, we've planned a "wikitext mode" for the visual editor for a long time. It provides as much of the visual editor's features as possible, for those times that you need or want wikitext. It has the same user interface as the visual editor, including the same toolbar across the top with the same buttons. It provides access to the citoid service for formatting citations, integrated search options for inserting images, and the ability to add new templates in a simple dialog. Like in the visual editor, if you paste in formatted text copied from another page, then formatting (such as bolding) will automatically be converted into wikitext.
All wikis now have access to this mode as a Beta Feature. When enabled, it replaces your existing wikitext editor everywhere. If you don't like it, you can reverse this at any time by turning off the Beta Feature in your preferences. We don't want to surprise anyone, so it's strictly an opt-in-only Beta Feature. It won't switch on automatically for anyone, even if you have previously checked the box to "Automatically enable most beta features".
The new wikitext edit mode is based on the visual editor, so it requires JavaScript (as does the current wikitext editor). It doesn't work with gadgets that have only been designed for the older one (and vice versa), so some users will miss gadgets they find important. We're happy to work with gadget authors to help them update their code to work with both editors. We're not planning to get rid of the current main wikitext editor on desktop in the foreseeable future. We're also not going to remove the existing ability to edit plain wikitext without JavaScript. Finally, though it should go without saying, if you prefer to continue using the current wikitext editor, then you may so do.
This is an early version, and we'd love to know what you think so we can make it better. Please leave feedback about the new mode on the feedback page. You may write comments in any language. Thank you.
James Forrester (Product Manager, Editing department, Wikimedia Foundation) --19:31, 14 December 2016 (UTC)