Talk:Tech/News

Background

This page is an attempt to consolidate efforts to identify and surface noteworthy technical activity, and broadcast them across the Wikimedia movement. "Technical activity" means anything from commits to bugs, site configuration changes, important discussions (between developers, but also between developers and users) and feature deployments.

The main audience for this broadcast is Wikimedians without specialized technical knowledge (who may otherwise not learn about tech changes that may affect them) and people who relay these news to their fellow editors.

A discussion was first started on the Ambassadors talk page to gauge interest about such a collaboration. The response was positive, and people started sharing their experience and good practices about how to monitor technical news.

Shortly after that, a proposal was made on the English Wikipedia's Village pump for Proposals, for a "Developer's noticeboard" for developers to post tech announcements. The main argument was that announcements posted to the Technical Village pump was too active, and it was difficult to keep track of announcements.

In order to avoid the proliferation of posting venues, another proposal recommended to consolidate efforts around the existing wikitech-ambassadors list, and possibly use a bot to archive or link to these e-mails on wiki (on talk pages, a noticeboard or an archive).

While possibly a good idea in theory, the implementation of such a system would require engineering resources that aren't currently available. As a first the wikitech-ambassador weekly summary could be folded into the previous "tech news" proposal, and posted using the Global delivery system to ambassadors talk pages, noticeboards, etc.

This page is a tentative implementation of this more lightweight solution. Comments, questions and suggestions of improvements are encouraged. guillom 15:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Location

The location of this page is tentative. On the one hand, MediaWiki-related information is centralized on mediawiki.org, as well as Wikimedia engineering project documentation, etc. On the other hand, there isn't a central wiki for tech stuff. Tech has existed on meta for a long time, which is why the Ambassadors page was created here as well. Given the goal and scope of the Tech News page, it makes sense to host it in the same place as Tech and Tech/Ambassadors.

In the end, the weekly summary is intended to be distributed to ambassadors globally using the Global message delivery, so it doesn't matter much for readers where the page lives. It just needs to be a wiki with Translate enabled and where Tech ambassadors feel at home.

In the end, if someone feels strongly that the page should live on mediawiki.org, I'm not opposed to moving it, as long as Tech and Tech/Ambassadors move as well. guillom 15:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

On second thought, mediawiki.org may be a better choice, as we could use transclusion between the newsletter and the "Most important changes" section of pages like mw:MediaWiki 1.22/wmf4, thus avoiding duplication and consolidating efforts.

Would anyone be opposed to moving Tech, Tech/Ambassadors and Tech/News to mediawiki.org? guillom 15:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

OK, now I'm back to thinking Meta is better, because it's where the Global message delivery is. I'm just going to get things started here and we can move things around later if needed (there won't be too many pages to move). guillom 06:02, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

direction

the newsletter is written in english. if it is left in the village-pump equivalent of an RTL wiki untranslated, it should be left within "div" tags with direction=ltr. this is done typically so:

<div class="mw-content-ltr">
== Tech newsletter: whatever is new this week==
newsletter content content

</div>

note that the "div" contains the heading also. peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 20:47, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

This will be done for the next editions. Thank you for reporting it. guillom 04:16, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

In a bit more detail: Sometimes the volunteers will find the time to translate and sometimes not. If you know that it's not translated to a particular language, can you please apply explicit language tags to what you post to the village pumps? Otherwise it will look very weird in some languages.

So, when you know that it's not translated, please put the whole thing into this: <div class="mw-content-ltr" lang="en" dir="ltr"> THE NEWSLETTER </div> This is important now just for RTL languages, but for all languages. We use the lang attribute to apply correct web fonts, so applying lang="en" will make sure that the wrong font is not applied to the English text.

If you know that it is translated, then please apply the appropriate lang, dir and class there.

If you can point me to the code that does it, I can try to fix it. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 05:18, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Obsolete HTML in Tech News

The newsletter that was left at en.wiktionary[1] uses an HTML big element, which is “entirely obsolete, and must not be used by authors.”[2] It should be replaced with updated HTML or CSS. —Michael Z. 2013-05-20 21:01 z

This will be fixed in the next edition. Thank you for reporting it. guillom 04:16, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

It was also incorrect nested within translate tags. --Nikerabbit (talk) 07:46, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Translation

Please use variables for the gerrit/mailing list links, or perhaps even leave the numbered links out of translation units. --Nikerabbit (talk) 07:46, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Odder suggested the same (leave them out of translation units), so we'll start doing that with the next edition.

Translation of bug in a link going to bugzilla was difficult for me. It could say issue. --Nikerabbit (talk) 07:46, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Good idea. Thank you. guillom 14:04, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

float:left in style attribute takes box out of content flow and hides later content at svwp

float:left on the "Important note" div element took the box out of the normal content flow at svwp and made it hide the heading of the next section (which was another discussion on our Village pump page). at least for me in the latest version of Opera. I fixed it for now but we would prefer if you change your messages so it doesn't happen again. Perhaps you can avoid special formatting altogether? --Lajm (talk) 09:13, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

My apologies, that float was included by mistake; I forgot to remove it. I won't be included in the future (and the "important note" won't be included either, since it was a one-time announcement). I'm reluctant to avoiding all special formatting, because I'm afraid the message may get lost in active pages. I'll be more careful about the formatting in the next edition. guillom 14:04, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

If a message gets lost it is because the receiver was more interested in other discussions on the page. Why do you think your message is so much more important than others'? But I'm getting away from the original subject now. I will start a discussion about this on svwp instead to see what our consensus is and perhaps a new discussion here afterwards. --213.114.123.49 05:23, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

I never said the newsletter was more important; I said it might get lost. A newsletter isn't the same kind of content as regular discussions between editors, so I thought some visual distinction between the two would help people differentiate them. If there is cross-wiki consensus to remove the formatting, I'll remove it. guillom 11:16, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Can this annoyance be corrected by a bot? I imagine this would waste a lot of wikipedians' time trying to figure out why the next heading doesn't show. And I agree with the last comment that speacial formating is entirely unnecessary for such deliveries. And if it is used, please thoroughly test it before plastering it on all wikis. ― Teak (talk) 16:44, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

This happened on Meta too. I just by happened figured out that <br clear=all> fixes it. Please check next time. PiRSquared17 (talk) 04:09, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Interwiki links broken on Wikivoyages/Wiktionaries

See voy:Wikivoyage:Travellers'_pub#Tech_newsletter:_Subscribe_to_receive_the_next_editions. Use m:voy:el: and m:wikt:vec: if you want to avoid these edge cases. PiRSquared17 (talk) 04:08, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. This also happened on Commons with the commons: link. Thanks for the tip. guillom 11:16, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Include timestamp with on-wiki delivery

Hi. Please include a timestamp with on-wiki delivery of tech news. Without a timestamp, these talk page posts can become stuck in talk page purgatory, as archive bots are unable to discern when the posts were made if they don't include a timestamp. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 19:50, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Ugh, Yes, sorry about this. I did it for the first edition, then forgot for the subsequent ones. I need to write a publication checklist anyway, so I'll add this to it. Thanks for the nudge. guillom 05:20, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

"tvar" showing up in link - message (on Meta)

see here. I really don't know why it doesn't work... PiRSquared17 (talk) 00:50, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Still using diff links

IMHO the links to code diffs are useless to virtually the entire intended audience of tech news, when links to Gerrit changesets would provide accompanying commentary, a link to a bug report perhaps, etc. and still the diff would only be a click away (for those who wanted it). What gives? Jarry1250 (talk) 10:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, must have been in a bad mood when I wrote the previous. Please read in a more friendly version :) Jarry1250 (talk) 19:01, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Still, it made a lot of sense, and we'll be using links to Gerrit from now on. Thanks for your feedback :-) odder (talk) 19:39, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

weekly changing numbers

Do I really have to confirm the message(s) every week to update the translation page? [3] Isn't there any automatism, or maybe a creative solution to include the dates via a external template? I don't know how the translation stuffs works...--Se4598 (talk) 23:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry about this—the links have been changed because I finally found a way to filter out automated imports of translations into the repositories, and they will not be changed anytime soon. I'll try to figure out a way not to make you update the Bugzilla links every week, thanks for the feedback. odder (talk) 23:24, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I can do this for you. Personally, I would use tvar, but with a template for the last-updated date/URL. PiRSquared17 (talk) 00:02, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Your help would be appreciated. odder (talk) 00:55, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't really understand why manual editing is needed there. The content that changes is either outside the translate tags, or within tvars, so why would translations be impacted? On the French translation, for example, FuzzyBot took care of it, as expected. guillom 14:38, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

This is fine, but it would be good to not have to mark this for translation every week. For example, by storing the dates in a template. PiRSquared17 (talk) 14:49, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Error in this weeks Tech News

There was a misleading summary of a gerrit change in one of the entries in this week's tech news. (The "MediaWiki will now allow converting audio files from one format to another."). I changed it on the source page, but this week's edition has already gone out. Is there anything more I should do. Bawolff (talk) 22:21, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this and fixing it :) We can add an erratum to the next edition. guillom 11:52, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Let me know if anything about the change is unclear or needs further explaining. Bawolff (talk) 20:33, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

We published an erratum in Tech/News/2013/27. guillom 14:28, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

tvar errors

Issue #27 shows an unreplaced tvar: w:ast:Usuariu_alderique:Oriciu#Tech news: 2013-27. I'm at loss as to why this is happening. I suspect an issue with the Translate extension; the tvar is showing in the latest item to have been modified, so this might be linked. guillom 14:28, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

My only thought is that perhaps the tvar element isn't substituted/expanded if there's an identical pre-existing tvar element on the same page. In this case, that specific bug (bugzilla:49505) was already linked from issue 26. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:58, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Again. [4] PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:03, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Reopened bug #46925. odder (talk) 20:12, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

"Use simple, non-technical language", but gerrit

A contradiction (to me) seems to be that the text strives to be simple language, but then often we link gerrit rather than bugzilla, despite gerrit being for devs: last quick and dirty text I added is IMHO very bad. Ideally, the bugzilla ticket should contain the description and use case of the change. It's possible to have both layman and technical links, but the former should be labelled as such and possibly throttled (like, a single "details" link at the end of each bullet). --Nemo 07:38, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't really see your point, I'm afraid. We're striving to describe changes in as simple language as possible, and then we link to Gerrit patches (instead of gitblit diffs as previously) so that interested people can actually see how a particular change was achieved. Most of the time, Gerrit is a middle step between Bugzilla and gitblit, and people are just one click away from either of them. The suggestion to link to Bugzilla instead of Gerrit only makes sense to me if (1) all Gerrit patches link to Bugzilla (unlikely ever to happen) and (2) Bugzilla discussions are less complicated and actually do contain use cases for the changes (not always happening now). And in any case, we (try to) link to Bugzilla whenever possible already, just have a look at #27 or #28. odder (talk) 09:20, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Tech news: 2013-28

The delivered version has a few issues:

• The content is wrapped in <div class="plainlinks mw-content-ltr" lang="en" dir="ltr"> twice for no apparent reason.
• The first sentance shows as:

Latest [[<tvar|technews>m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News</>|tech news]] from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. [[<tvar|more-transl>m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2013/28</>|Translations]] are available.

• <gallery />, <div /> and <table /> are wrapped in <code> but not <nowiki>, thus they are invisible.

--Gadget850 (talk) 19:10, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

(@second point) Yes, this is mentioned in the "tvar" section above. Apparently someone didn't check the /en version before sending. I guess this is a bug in the Translate extension. PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:11, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't see that Translate is installed on the English Wikipedia. --Gadget850 (talk) 19:17, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, but it is here. And the message was written here. Someone did manually fix it, but it shouldn't have been broken in the first place. This would seem to indicate a bug in the extension (which was used for translating that page). It might just be a user error though (but it shouldn't happen this way!) PiRSquared17 (talk) 19:24, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

It looks like an instance of bug #46925, so I have just reopened it. odder (talk) 20:14, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi Gadget850, thanks for reporting this issue to us, I appreciate your involvement. I noticed the second and third problem as well, but it was only after I sent out the issue and I couldn't stop the bot from sending it. I'm not exactly sure what caused the text inside the <code /> not to be visible (it looks all right on Tech/News/2013/28), but I'm quite convinced the problem with <tvar> is a software bug. If you have a look at the history page for Tech/News/2013/28, you'll notice the page hasn't been edited by a human before Verdy fixed the <tvar> problem manually. The first issue is caused by me being blind and a Lua module created by Guillame outputting incorrect code, I'll let him know about this bit. I'm really sorry for causing these errors; I'll be working hard not to make them happen again. Again, thanks for reporting this issue, I appreciate your involvement. odder (talk) 19:47, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Gadget850. This is a wonderful diagnosis, though I largely beat you by a few minutes. ;-) I missed the double <div> (wtfff) in my diagnosis, however. Of course these typos resulted in a flurry of activity on this page and EdwardsBot's talk pages (English Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki at least) and my talk page. Bleh. This is like the third or fourth "incident" in the past few weeks. I'm not really sure how to address the problems we're seeing (namely: garbage in, garbage out). If you think of anything clever, let me know. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:18, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know the process used to edit the report and submit it to the bot to push it. I read the report and noticed the mangled text and the obviously missing tags, took a look at the markup and saw thei susse then used the fedd back link. My only comment is that even if <tvar> worked here, it won't work on the English Wikipedia without the Translate extension. Gadget850 (talk) 16:39, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Global message delivery/Spam is the primary global delivery page. This is the relevant code. The issues we're seeing is human error: either a bad recipients list or bad body text. Other than implementing a manual review process prior to sending out a message, I don't know how to resolve these recurring user errors. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:55, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Odder has now written Tech/News/Manual, which includes a checklist of things to check before sending out the newsletter. This should allow us to catch most errors. guillom 08:44, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Sending to wikimedia-announce: too much?

I subscribe to Tech News. I love Tech News. It seems like overkill to send to everyone on wm-announce every week... I'm not sure there should be any weekly reports on the announce list. If you want to start broadcasting more tech updates, please consider starting with a highly condensed monthly summary to complement the staff monthly report, with links to the more detailed weekly news. Thank you :) –SJ talk  08:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback; This is exactly why we've invited people to comment on this decision :) The reason we thought it might be useful to post to wikimedia-announce was partly that the Signpost posts their new issues there every week, and their "Tech report" has now been mostly discontinued. Tech news could mitigate this loss somewhat. That said, if several people think sending Tech news to the announce list is overkill, I'm completely fine with sticking to the other lists :) guillom 14:30, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, if people think that's too much, then I guess we might stick just to Wikimedia-l or perhaps Wikitech-l. (We already send mails to Translators-l and Wikitech-ambassadors every week to inform those groups that they can translate relevant issues into their languages.) The condensed monthly summary proposal seems interesting — Sj, would you mind expanding the idea a bit? Would you like to see it in the same format as Tech News, but done on a monthly basis? How exactly would you imagine such a summary to be? Thanks, odder (talk) 21:12, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Some ideas: a) syndicate a version of Tech News as a Signpost 'Tech report' column (finding a regular signposter to take up that challenge may be easier than finding someone to write it from scratch!) b) summarize by combining similar items, within each week and across weeks, and shortening the text. (There is lots of overlap between "recent" and "future" software changes over time. And most blurbs can be cut in half. ) For instance:

Recent software changes

• MediaWiki 1.22/wmf10 : on test July 11, enabled July 15 (non-WP) - 18 (WP).
• Extensions: Disambiguator (__DISAMBIG__), Universal Language Selector.
• Bots: CommonsDelinker back online.
• VisualEditor: released on en:wp July 15, with many bug fixes. Warnings are now displayed on edit.

  Multilingual WP release delayed a week: now July 22 (logged in users) and July 29 (IPs).

  Templates in VE: add TemplateData to prepare for VE. "required" parameters now auto-added to new templates.

  Bugs fixed: many RTL issues, CAPTCHA bug [10] [11]

• Meta uploads: restricted to an uploader group, license exemption policy being developed.
• Emergency CentralNotice banners now shown with separate cookie than that for low-priority banners. [12]
• Features: SUL updated July 17. Image resizing updated July 18 (faster, no resolution limit for GIF/PNG/TIFF)

Future software changes

• Edit filters: Global edit filters are in testing.[8] Edit tags (mostly used by AbuseFilter) were added to diff pages. They include a link to Special:Tags before the edit summary. Wikis that use links in tag messages should remove them. [6] [7]
• Wikidata: Wikivoyage will switch to Wikidata for interwiki links on July 22. [9]
• Gallery: A new gallery design was proposed by Brian Wolff; comments welcome. A specific page of a PDF or thumb of a video can be chosen for a gallery.
• Bugzilla: IRC discussion on July 16, 16:00 (UTC) on #wikimedia-office [10]
• Empty Mediawiki: messages can be created, to disable them. [13]
• Features: the Nearby feature will return to Wikivoyage, [14] TOCs will use divs instead of a table.[15]
• Extensions: Notifications will include direct links to diffs on the wiki [15]
• Wikidata: A mockup mobile app has been build by GSOC intern Pragun Bhutani. [16]
• Docs: Minimum documentation practices in MediaWiki is being discussed.[17] A doc sprint is running July 27-29.[18]

140.247.169.126 22:22, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Fallback languages

Visualization of fallback languages as a graph.

Please consider delivering the message in a fallback language other than English for languages with a set fallback. See mw:Localisation statistics. This is certainly not high priority, but it's something to consider. PiRSquared17 (talk) 11:46, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

We are currently using the #switch parser function to serve users content in their language; how do you imagine us serving content in fallback languages that way? I'm not exactly sure this would be possible and, in some cases, even needed; it's not like all wikis which set fallback languages receive the newsletter. odder (talk) 12:18, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree this would be a nice improvement (I put a "TODO" in Module:Tech news a while ago that says: "add switch keys for languages that have a fallback language for which we do have a translation, instead of English.") The way to implement this imho would be, for each translation we add to the delivery, to look up languages that use that translation's language as a fallback, and add them as empty switch keys before the fallback, so they get the same message. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is an existing Lua function that provides a list of languages using a given language as a fallback, so this would need to be reported in bugzilla (and implemented) first. guillom 14:49, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Here is an example of a message which should have been delivered using the translation to "pt-BR" (the fallback language for "pt"), which was complete. Helder 15:18, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

This is something whose implementeation starts on Meta-Wiki. There are ongoing changes in that direction, but lots of preparation to do in sorting the existing languages. Translations on MEta are actively being sorted, and alreasy the {{LangSwitch}} implement a few of them (it will be next supported by a module, because the list starts being quite long, though the performance are not that bad). The number of supported languages is under scrutiny. Various fixes are needed in translatable pages to prepare them with the new Translate extension. Fallbacks will come soon for {{TNT}}, which will be better than existing LangSwitch and LangSelect mechanisms; and custom navbars. verdy_p (talk) 16:33, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Translation to Kazakh

Hello, my English is no good. I write in Russian: - На технический форум казахской википедии постоянно добовляются сообщения с новостями, и просят перевести их на казахский, но здесь перевод на казахский почему то недоступен. Причина не написана. Помогите. --Ablay Tastankul (talk) 14:50, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Проблема до сих пор существует или разобрались? --Base (talk) 11:55, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Все без изменении. Опять тот же запись: Translations to this language in this group have been disabled. Reason: Translate in kk please. --Ablay Tastankul (talk) 03:17, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Category:Wikimedia Foundation technical notices

There is an increasing amount of announcements posted on Meta to take advantage of Translate; I created this category just for maintenance purposes, please add those I missed. Probably not useful as a communication method (though in theory one could subscribe to the feeds for related edits). --Nemo 10:19, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Purging

I translated purging as clearing (or updating) caches. Just letting you know in case you have problems translating it or want to consider using that in future. --Nikerabbit (talk) 10:58, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Back to weekly routine

What happened? How can we help keeping the weekly routine? PS: I came here to sare This week in ElasticSearch.--Qgil (talk) 15:31, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

What happened is that the newsletter was mostly a 2-person effort, and it's really difficult to run it as one person alone. I'm planning to send an issue by next week, and when I come back from my vacation, my priority will be to try and find a couple of people who can contribute as a team on this.

If people would like to help, it would be great to go through the sources of information at Tech/News#contribute and add content to Tech/News/Next. If we can distribute that effort, I can do most of the summarizing / formatting afterward if needed. guillom 14:10, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Ok, I just read Tech/News#contribute and I will try to be disciplined and add there interesting bit I find on the way. Since the situation is quite... desperate I think it would be good to include a call for contributors in the own issue, more explicit than the current "Contribute".--Qgil (talk) 17:08, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm happy to include a call for contributors, however I won't be able to monitor or follow up on responses, so unless someone can do this while I'm away, I'd rather do it when I come back. guillom 09:23, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

The new job queue design

I think the new tech news is missing a note about the new design of the job queue (in relation to page_links_updated). Christian75 (talk) 09:47, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. Do you have a link that would provide more information? guillom 11:31, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Arabic Wikipedia

The latest Tech news wasn't delivered to users on Arabic Wikipedia who are on this list (ar:User:Aboluay and ar:User:Emara). Also, it wasn't delivered to Arabic Wikipedia Village Pump (ar:ويكيبيديا:الميدان/أخبار/01/2014). Please fix this. --Meno25 (talk) 05:58, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the report. I've investigated a bit, and the error log indicates that this isn't a bug. The problem is that the delivery bot can't post on that wiki, because its IP was blocked in November. This IP (127.0.0.1) is the internal IP of the server and shouldn't be blocked, otherwise internal bots like the one delivering Tech news can't edit pages. Once that IP is unblocked, the delivery bot should be able to post on the Arabic Wikipedia. guillom 09:51, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@Guillom: Thank you for taking the time to investigate this. I unblocked the IP and left a notice on its user page, so that, it won't get blocked again. --Meno25 (talk) 17:11, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@Meno25: No problem; thanks for unblocking it :) guillom 20:16, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-07, Math extension, significant under-reporting of problem

When I saw the statement:

"On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension."

My immediate reaction was WOW how disconnected are these people from what is going on? Then: What else are they saying that has little resemblance to reality?

Looking at en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Math aligned environments failing to parse, it appears that the math extension issues were first reported there at 02:05, 7 February 2014 (UTC). Discussion had been going on at en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Problem with multiline equations from 23:46, 6 February 2014 (UTC). Problems were still being reported at VPT through 00:58, 10 February 2014 (UTC). Some errors are still being reported, but those appear to involve MathJax. So, this outage which was reported in Tech News: 2014-07 as "about half an hour in total" was, in reality, impacting en.wikipedia.org for more than 3 days, not half an hour.

The Tech News bulletins provide good and important information. When they get something like this wrong in such a clear and obvious way, particularly when the problem is dramatically under-reported, it results in a significant loss of credibility for the entire process. I would suggest that, at a minimum, a correction be included in the next one that goes out. Makyen (talk) 12:17, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The bug on the math extension is one thing, but the report speaks only about the downtime of complete servers, and effectively this has not been 3 days but half an hour.

issues in extensions, as long as they are not interrupting all projects do not fit in the summary of Tech news in my opinion. Tech news are made for cross-wiki announcements, and not specific to some pages of some wikis, for that there's still Bugzilla; and if something in the correction would affect all wikis, it would be announced. I don't think that the credibility of Tech news are impacted. They cannot report all individual problems (there are really many, too many for this summary. Those interested can start by the Tech News, and then navigate on Meta or elsewhere with the provided links. I think it is enough. verdy_p (talk) 12:29, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

@Makyen: Thank you for your message. I assure you that I am not disconnected from what's going on; indeed, I was on-line when the problems with the Math extension happened, and watched in real-time as they were being fixed by the Wikimedia Foundation operations team.

The outage that occurred last Thursday actually consisted of two smaller downtimes, each for around 15 minutes; the first one between 16:35-16:45 UTC and the other one between 19:30-19:50, when many projects were completely unavailable for users (who could only see HTTP 502 errors). We are aware that Math-related errors were seen much earlier and much later than that, but we cannot report every extension-related issue that's happening on Wikimedia wikis, for the simple reason that it's not interesting for our audience. Thank you for your understanding. odder (talk) 12:36, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

RSS feed

I don't see a need to store these Tech news at contributors' talk pages, mail servers. How can I subscribe to it as an RSS feed? --Gryllida 22:52, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

That's not possible at the moment, as far as I know. You can subscribe to the Atom feed of the "Latest" redirect, to be notified when the latest version is published, but the content won't be included. Our long-term goal is for users to be able to subscribe via their preferences and get a Notification (that would link to the latest edition), but that feature hasn't been developed. guillom 14:38, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

We should set up mw:Extension:FeaturedFeeds to work with tech news. Wikipedia already uses it for article of the day, so the extension is already deployed to our wikis. Bawolff (talk) 22:57, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I submitted Gerrit patch #124272, but it's only awaiting a merge at this point. odder (talk) 21:00, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

It is now possible to subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed to receive Tech News in a news aggregator of your choice; the feed will automatically update at 00:00 UTC every Monday. The feed will deliver an English version of Tech News for now, so you'll need to click on a link to read the bulletin in your language. Per-language feeds might be available in the future if there's need for them (so, if you think that's a good idea, let us know!). We'll be featuring this information in this week's issue of Tech News, and I will also be informing the Wikitech-l and Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list later today. odder (talk) 13:41, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

The RSS/Atom feed is not working anymore, the last post that is visible is "Tech News issue #52, 2014 (December 22, 2014)". I am talking about the link that is visible on the page as "RSS" or "Atom" on the main page for Tech News. Could somebody check this feed system and fix the problem? Thanks. --Galanga (talk) 18:07, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Isolating MediaWiki-centric news

We have a problem of MediaWiki news at http://mediawiki.org (evidence). Now, Tech News is not only a great channel of Wikimedia tech news, it is also a great channel of MediaWiki news. With a bit of organization of the current Tech News content, you could isolate the MediaWiki-centric news (e.g. feature X is coming) separating it from the Wikimedia centric news (e.g. something broke our servers). Tech News readers would receive their news without noticing any change, but the MediaWiki-centric part could be featured in mediawiki.org. Feasible? The prize could be a fixed spot at mw:News and the mediawiki.org homepage, the current one and the potentially new one.--Qgil (talk) 23:15, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Qgil: It's technically feasible, by posting the weekly tech newsletter to a specific page on mediawiki.org, and labeling the content that should be transcluded. We wouldn't want to do that for every wiki that asks, because we'd end up adding a lot of unnecessary tags, but this one is fine imho. Server issues is easy to leave out; however, it'll be difficult to leave out "Feature X is now available on wiki Y". If that's ok, I'll start tagging this week's issue and we can see how it goes, and whether it's practical or not to maintain such a distinction. guillom 08:14, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Does it really make sense to put in MediaWiki news that feature X is available in a WMF specific build which we don't recommend non-WMF people use? Bawolff (talk) 22:58, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Link to translations not working as expected

The link to "Translations" seen at w:la:Vicipaedia:Taberna#Tech_News:_2014-11 takes me to a non-existent page called Taberna here at Meta. Surely this is not intentional? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 12 March 2014 (UTC) --Xcq5678 (talk) 21:13, 22 March 2014 (UTC)这个不知有利于修复

Acknowledgements

It's nice to see Tech News listed by RobLa among the top2 2012–4 achievements for engineering communication/recruitment/community-building/etc. (together with mentoring):[5] volunteer-driven projects for the win! ;) Thanks Guillom (once again) for the long gestation of the idea; to Odder for the constant hard work/leadership; and to all the volunteers who gave ideas during the gestation and who provide suggestions for each issue. --Nemo 10:06, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Huge thanks should also go to the translators, many of whom translate each and every issue. It's thanks to them that Tech News is served in more than 10 languages, week in and week out. odder (talk) 10:11, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Call for contributors

Tech News #16 (2014) features a call for contributors: we are looking for volunteers willing to donate some time to help us publish a new issue of Tech News every week. So far, Tech News has mainly been a two-men operation, with varying degrees of involvement from either myself or Guillaume — so some fresh blood would be greatly appreciated!

Any contribution is useful — you can start by adding a link to an interesting new feature, simplifying messages added by others, etc. It's really easy, and the more of us are involved, the less work everyone has to do :-) All details are explained on our main page, so you can jump right into the next issue! Feel free to ask any questions, and we'll be happy to answer them. Thanks, odder (talk) 21:11, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm happy to help. PiRSquared17 (talk) 18:07, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

@PiRSquared17: I see you already contributed to #17; your help with this and the past issues is very greatly appreciated. Thanks so much for taking the time to help — I hope you'll be able and willing to help with the future issues, too :-) odder (talk) 13:35, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Template for user pages?

Is there a Tech News template like this one for transcluding the Signpost?:

• wikipedia:Template:Signpost-subscription

I prefer transclusion to having to clear out my talk page periodically of the many newsletters I get. I am asking each newsletter for a template instead. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:01, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Timeshifter: There isn't such a template yet, but this seems similar to what we intend to do for mediawiki.org (transclusion of the latest newsletter for possible use on the main page) so I'll look into it in the next few days and let you know. guillom 13:57, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I would like to transclude it from a Wikipedia template placed on one of my user pages, or subpages. I might set up a subpage just for several newsletters. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:57, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Timeshifter: I've set up w:Template:Latest tech news. It should now display the latest issue of the newsletter every week. I'll keep an eye on it to check if it's working properly, but please feel free to let me know if you notice a problem. guillom 17:30, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I started a user page of transcluded newsletters. I will add more as I find the templates.

Wikipedia:User:Timeshifter/Newsletters --Timeshifter (talk) 18:45, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Media Viewer, with a space

I've noticed that Tech News keeps referring to "MediaViewer". It's actually called "Media Viewer". I can understand the confusion, given that VisualEditor doesn't have a space in its name - good job being consistent, WMF Engineering! But it would be helpful if Tech News could refer to it by its correct name in future posts. — Scott • talk 13:53, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

I think the usual standard is "Foo Bar" for what the user sees and "Extension:FooBar" for the software. But in this case, it appears to be "mw:Media Viewer" and "mw:Extension:MultimediaViewer". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Also when words are separated and are not really separate product names but just a feature within the common MEdiaWiki software, it is localisable. Non grammatical titling capitals in the name are typically an English practice frequently abused (especially in US) when in fact this is now a work title. When translating, you are absolutely not required to use these capitals, when this is still a generic term or expression, even if there's a subproject on the MediaWiki extensions portal. As much as possible, even in English, you should avoid unnecessary non-grammatical capitals (even in German within some regional dialects, there's a trend to drop the capitalisation of common nouns everywhere (and keep them only at start of sentences, or only on the first significant term in a work title (after too common terms like a leading article which is typically ignored when sorting work titles in a list of works like movied and published books): this has already occured in western dialects (Saxon) and, in a continuum, in Dutch and is about to occur in Swizerland.

More generally, capitalization just obscures differences and are not more readable.They are a form of emphasis, and this duplicates other emphasing text rendering styles such as bold and underlining, already used for page title names at top of pages or section headings.

The latin script is much easier to read in lowercase than in capitals (simply because it better exhibits better differences at top of glyphs and because they bring a better blackness contrast of the baseline betwee successive lines of text, allowing the eye to follow the line more easily). And this is even more important at small font sizes used in web pages (and notably on Wikimedia sites that alreado reduce the default browser font size, even if they increse a bit the normal line height about from about 1.25 em to 1.5em, but only in an attempt to leave more space for superscripts and keep line-height balanced). We are not writing texts on monumental stones and we are also not designing book cover pages or giant advertizement banners, but even in these "titling" styles capitals are a bit easier to read only with big font sizes, and serif font styles avoiding bold to increse the perceived differences between letters.

For all these reasons, I mich prefer the form "Media viewer" (in standalone contexts) and "media viewer" (in inline contexts, een if they are links to a project page in MediaWiki wiki).verdy_p (talk) 18:54, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Call for Contributors

I see that you've posted a call for contributors in Tech News #28. Is there anything specific to help with? --Asaifm (talk) 18:58, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Links in Tech News headings

Per en:MOS:HEAD, the subheadings created when Tech News is delivered on en.WP should not include links. It would probably be best to remove the links from headings on all projects. Can someone do this, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:17, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

That page says "should normally not contain links", so it's not mandatory, I suppose. Also note that English Wikipedia guidelines do not apply to other wikis. Besides, if we removed links in the section headers, then there wouldn't be a direct link to that particular issue of Tech News. Regards, --Glaisher (talk) 12:48, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Also this guideline only applies to Wikipedia articles in the main namespace (or headlines generated by templates used in the namespace), not to talk pages and forums where these news are posted.

In talk pages it is very common to use a link in a title of a new talk section to reference which page will be discussed in that section.; as this provides both a title for that talk section and a backlink in the same space. verdy_p (talk) 06:38, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

No mention of superprotect

The latest issue of Tech News did not mention the rollout of the 'super-protect' functionality... —Tom Morris (talk) 14:37, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

I tried to add that but it was moved to the next issue. Helder 14:44, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, each issue of Tech News is frozen on Saturday, to give translators enough time. Tech changes that happen after that (like the superprotect feature) are included in the next issue. Superprotection will be mentioned in issue #34. guillom 08:49, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

As there is a call for not translating next Tech News because of that change, maybe it will be useful also to mention this call? -- Ата ^(talk) 08:34, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Not translating Tech News means many subscribers won't be able to read the newsletter in their language, or even at all. This feels counter-productive since the newsletter's goal is to disseminate technical news to as many people as possible. The absence of translations will restrict the number of people who are made aware of technical changes, including the existence of superprotection, so I encourage everyone to continue to translate Tech News for the benefit of the readers. guillom 09:51, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Help Needed: For Project started to improve CATEGORIES on WP

Hi, there has been a serious discussion to set up a technical system on Wikipedia that will allow users to both sort and view categories either alphabetically or by topic. Until now there is no single system or method at work in categories that has allowed them to become disorganized and, well, "un"categorized in spite of being named as such! In order to remedy this situation, please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#CatVisor; Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#JQuery workaround; Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Update requested, as well as the the steady work at User:Paradoctor/CatVisor; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Planned features; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#JQuery workaround by Salix alba; User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Releases (alpha 2; alpha 1; alpha 0). In order to successfully complete and implement the proposed improvements, the input and deployment of the Wikimedia Foundation is needed as well as the attention of its professional staff is required in order to successfully fully implement the project. Please direct this communication and request to the most appropriate technical and decision-making individuals. Thank you so much in advance! Yours sincerely, IZAK (talk) 01:55, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Delivery on English Wikinews

I'll admit I'm guilty of not often reading the tech bulletins, but they're currently being delivered to the "Miscellaneous" section of enWN's Water Cooler (en:wikinews:Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous). There is a specific Technical section/page, which would likely be more-appropriate for these: en:wikinews:Wikinews:Water cooler/technical. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:55, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

You could change it at Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassadors#Community_pages. --Glaisher (talk) 11:13, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

'Collaboration' vs 'Discussion'

Per my comments here on enWN, I'm seeing strange behaviour for the naming of talk pages. I'm not sure if this is something I should raise as a bug, or if I'm just missing a message we'd need to tweak to resolve this. Particularly for the main namespace on English Wikinews, 'Collaboration' becomes most-inappropriate once an article is archived.

Of course, this could-well be something to do with our rather-extensive local .js and .css customisations; something I, personally, am very leery of digging into. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:55, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Hey Brianmc, the collaboration thing was done by BrianNewZealand about 6 years ago - https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Talk&oldid=443970 . Well it could certainly be changed by any admin, in order for it to differ based on archiveness, one would need js magic. Bawolff (talk) 06:20, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Tracking category?

Tech News 2014-43 states "If you add the same parameter twice in a template, it now puts the page in a tracking category." What is the tracking category called? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:02, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

{{int:MediaWiki:duplicate-args-category}}: Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls. Helder 11:45, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Helder! I couldn't use the int: trick in Tech News because the change wasn't deployed yet, and I didn't think of linking to TWN. I'll remember that for next time :) Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 13:20, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Add links to WMF tech blog posts?

See this proposal. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:04, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

I think we feature tech blog posts pretty often in Tech news, as long as they have an impact on editors. Do let me know if I miss any. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Right to left text problem

Hello. There are a lot of problems in right-to-left translations text order of the tech news. Please use the RLM Unicode symbol more frequently. Thank you, IKhitron (talk) 13:04, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

poor indication for breaking changes

every so often, a new software update breaks existing local wiki scripts. this is understandable, and i do not ask to completely avoid these kind of changes.

however, the typical way to detect it is when some user reports that something stopped working. this "breakage maintenance" method is sub-optimal at best: some scripts are used by small number of users, so the reports are slow to come, some wikis use scripts imported from other wikis, which means the same issue has to be debugged over and over again in different locations, and even worse - the importing wiki may not have the local expertise on board to find and fix the problem (you might be surprised - today, after the "resignation" of TheDJ, it turns out that there is practically nobody on enwiki with permission to modify pages in mediawiki space that can actually fix scripts).

the most recent example of such breaking changes are:

• removal of outdated $.borwser . quite a few scripts used to test for brain-damaged browsers with $.browser.msie . not only this test does not work - it actually throws an exception that neutralizes the whole script, even for people who use perfectly sane browsers
• with very last jquesry upgrade, checkboxes no longer return true value with $(selector).attr("checked"), and the code needs to be modified to $(selector).prop("checked") (similarly, checkboxes no longer can be toggled programatically with $(selector).attr("checked", "chaecked") )

both these were deprecated for a long time (i think), but few maintainers on few wikis actually comb the code to remove all deprecated calls in all scripts. even when something is deprecated for a long time, i think tech news should contain a paragraph for "breaking changes in upcoming version", instead of relying on users to report breakages.

ideally, there will also be a link to some "how to fix it" page on mw, with each such breaking change.

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 17:58, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

From what I can see, wikitech-l and wikitech-ambassadors-l both handle this quite well (people tend to use a [BREAKING CHANGE] tag in the subject). I guess a lot of more "techie" users do follow those lists, while TN (from my very personal POV) is more "for the masses"? I would be surprised if the original announcements for both the things you mention weren't featured in Tech News though. I haven't checked though. Seems like you feel more reminders are needed, then. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

קיפודנחש: Thank you for sharing this! A quick search shows several announcements in Tech News about JavaScript. Issues 20, 40 and 50 of the newsletter are recent examples in which we announced upcoming JavaScript changes that required scripts to be updated. This certainly doesn't mean that your concern isn't valid. In your opinion, if the problem that we missed announcements and didn't feature them in the newsletter, or is it that our warnings went unnoticed? I'm genuinely interested in what you and other people think about this. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Elitre: i do not share your assessment that these channels handle breaking changes "quite well". in many wikis, the people maintaining the scripture do not subscribe - the glaring example is enwiki. in addition, some wikis (including, again, enwiki) maintain rich and diversified array of user-written scripts that are offered to the public through a mechanism that predates mw:Extension:Gadget, and is still alive and kicking today ( "add importScript('User:x/script_y.js); to your Special:MyPage/common.js file" ). some/many/most of the authors of these scripts do read technews but do not subscribe to the channels you mentioned.

Guillaume i glanced at the past publications you linked to. i saw two mentions of lua breakages: kudos to the lua maintainer. after reading it, i remembered that indeed i saw them, and i combed hewiki ahead of time to verify we will not be affected (we weren't - we did not have any lua module that used the calls that were about to disappear). i'm asking for similar service when JS breakages are about to happen. i do remember a few in the past, but not consistently, as my example shows. mediawiki library calls are regularly deprecated, but all too often they go out of service with no warning.

to summarize: if it's easy to get a list of "breaking changes", i see no reason and no justification not to include it with tech news. if it's difficult to get such a list, well, it should be made easy, and then, see the previous sentence...

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 19:33, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

קיפודנחש, hi again - the ones I mention are mailing lists (example 1, example 2). Given my work on dozens of wikis, I have the impression that both gadget maintainers and ambassadors currently do a great job, but of course that can always be improved. If adding reminders to TN is your suggestion to make more and more communities aware of what's happening, I certainly accept it. My guess though is that having more translations of TN would probably help more? --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 20:47, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

hi again. i have no opinion as to the effect of having more translations - for the wikis i frequent, tech news is already translated, or simply native, and the natural audience is pretty comfortable with english anyway.

my recent experience with the recent breakages i mentioned above does not agree with your impression that "gadget maintainers are doing good job" (being one of those "gadget maintainers" myself, on hewiki, i absolutely include myself here...). in hewiki we fixed the breakages caused by the changes i mentioned above *after* users reported them. i then reported it on en:WP:VPT as a courtesy, and it felt like i had to drag the maintainers by the ear to make the same changes ( see en:Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_133#javascript: testing whether a checkbox is checked (jQuery) ). i'm willing to bet that if you'll run a global search for ).attr("checked" in all wikis (and limit the search to "prefix:Mediawiki:Gadget-"), you'll find dozens, if not hundreds of cases that are still broken (just to demonstrate, i searched frwiki, and found fr:MediaWiki:Gadget-BlockMessage.js. this is the french wikipedia, which is known and respected for technical expertise, and specifically JS). i am not saying tech-news would be the magic bullet here, but we (that is, the gadget-maintainers on several thousands of wikimedia projects in several hundreds of languages) can use all the help we can get, and mentioning JS breakages on tech-news, just like scribunto maintainers are doing for scribunto breakages, would be a great help. peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 21:46, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

In general we strive to 'not break' things. That means we try to use redirect functions that emit deprecation warnings to keep stuff working for instance. Something like $.browser disappearing had deprecation warnings in the console for some 4 months, giving authors a chance to fix them (this was after this function had already been deprecated by jQuery since January 2009. For our own api's we emit such warnings for up to a year in some cases, depending on how much they are in use. The second issue (checked), I'm not sure if there were warnings for that one, but even if we did miss that one, then that was just one out of dozens of removed behaviors in jQuery that we did not warn authors about. In general, it does remain the case that authors try to avoid making changes at all to something that works right now, so at some point you just have to bite the bullet and deal with the fallout. Things like usage tracking help the teams dealing with that, to assess how tough of a bullet such a removal might be. Experience has shown that the path of the last year is definitely the way forward when it comes to JS deprecations. You have to tackle the problem there where people encounter it, preferably before it becomes a real problem, but even more notes in a newsletter are not going to bring you that last 1-2% that people had missed before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:43, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

thanks for the response. there are some problems with relying on console.log messages for pinpointing JS deprecation:

1. you only see those when running with &debug=true in address line, and then examine the console output. this was very helpful, and we caught and fixed quite a few calls to deprecated methods using this output, but it's not a catch-all. with php deprecation, you can systematically examine the logs looking for those messages, which means that even rarely-used calls will be caught. there is no similar way to deal with JS - there are no logs.
2. this only works if the person looking for the console messages is the same person running the code that uses the deprecated method. this is not always the case: code-path depends on many things, such as permissions, user preferences, sometimes even page accessed, etc.

the bottom line is, that we can't rely on console.log messages alone - we often need to search through the codebase for use of deprecated methods. this would be significantly easier if each new code release would come with a nice tidy list of "these JS calls will not work as of next code release". this will give us a few days to verify our code won't break before the next version is actually deployed. the reason i think tech-news will be good vehicle for such messages is because quite a few users who are not strictly "maintainers" do write and maintain scripts in user space, and for those users, tech-news seems an appropriate channel of communication. it will be enough to include "some breaking changes in upcoming version", which will link to some page on MW or meta: this way, the actual content and explanation of the breaking changes themselves won't have to be translated.

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 16:10, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

2014 feedback request

Hi, one important (but not breaking) change was the introduction of various new Special:TrackingCategories; that spooked me. So "minor changes" causing red links on millions of allegedly broken pages (some real bug or oddity hidden in template cascades for 6+ vears) and costing hundreds of hours to track down on c: and m: MUST be announced in time, not after the fact or never. –Be..anyone (talk) 14:59, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

eo: Ĝenerala opinio

Danke al Teĥnikaj novaĵoj mi povis sufiĉe facile teni superrigardon pri ŝanĝoj gravaj por Esperanta Vikipedio, mia ĉefa viki-projekto, kaj helpi teni ĝin ĝisdata. De tiu vidpunkto la servo estas tre utila, ĉar mi ŝajne maltrafis neniun gravan averton. Tamen, por servoj, por kiu estas bezonata frua limdato (ekzemple malŝalto de lokaj alŝutoj se ne estas provizita malkonsento) mi aprezus, se estus provizita pli multa tempo (2 semajnoj estas minimumo, ne optimumo) ekde anonco. Memoru, ke eĉ mezgrandaj projektoj povas havi problemojn pri teĥnikistoj. Amike. --KuboF (talk) 19:58, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Tell us when things happen

Please report in Technical News when features are turned on or off that have an important effect on editor experience. Example: the GettingStarted feature, which came and went last year. Many of us talk to new editors and patrol their edits, and need to know about what they are seeing and the processes through which their edits are made. I had to ask at Village Pump to find out what was going on.Noyster (talk) 18:36, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the specific example. Summary: GettingStarted continued working as before, but stopped adding a tag at some point. --Nemo 13:57, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Bugzilla is over, links are obsolete

As Bugzilla was closed, links on this page (under "Monitor changes") are unuseful. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:47, 11 January 2015 (UTC)

I love my Tech News Emails, but I'd like a topic in the email

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T64661

I enjoy getting the Tech News email alerts in my inbox, however the emails themselves are rather non-descriptive. Since they're not the only thing I've subscribed to (VisualEditor News as well) I have to wonder what I'm going to read once I click the link. I'm a rather light user and could imagine multiple subscriptions could be even more problematic. Is it possible to include a subject in the email somewhere letting me know it's related to Tech News?

Here's a screenshot as an example. http://i.imgur.com/5WujdCw.png

Would this be better addressed to MediaWiki message delivery folks?

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ckoerner (talk)

The massmessage senders have nothing to do with it. I have noticed that Echo's emails are vastly less descriptive than MediaWiki core's. phabricator:T64661 seems to cover it. --Nemo 18:38, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech news letter head

@Nemo, Guillaume (WMF): I prepped a template for when Tech News is repubed in the Signpost: en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Tech news. Any concerns? Not sure about the report's visual identity, since it seems to lake a definitive logo at the moment. File is here. Thanks, ResMar 14:35, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Resident Mario: Thank you for your message. I don't have any concerns; We've never really needed a logo until now so don't worry too much about visual identity :) The only consistent thing we've done is try to stick to the Solarized color scheme in the header and in charts & diagrams, but that's not a strict rule. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 15:11, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The colours are fine, but the header was always far too wide for my browser window, I hope you'll get rid of some redundant Tech and/or replace Wikimedia Engineering by something smaller such as Engineering at some point in time when all interesting bugs are fixed. –Be..anyone (talk) 17:47, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Header lines of individual copies

The header of the translated tech news in the individual wikis is untranslated. Please amend. -- 46.115.7.28 18:39, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, This isn't technically possible at the moment. The field for the header in the MassMessage tool is too small for us to include the translations. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Wrong category

There is a recurring error in the draft pages of the tech news. They end up in a non-existing category Category:Drafts//ksh, e.g. - note the double slash. --Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 05:20, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

There are two ksh (Ripoarisch) pages in Category:Drafts//ksh, is that an issue only for ksh or a bug in {{draft}} near <includeonly>[[Category:Drafts{{#if:{{{1|}}} | {{Langcat| 1 = {{{1|}}} }} | {{#if: {{pagelang}} | /{{pagelang}} }} }}]]</includeonly> ? –Be..anyone (talk) 11:31, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Future Weeks

• Week 23 June 1, 2015
• Week 24 June 8, 2015
• Week 25 June 15, 2015
• Week 26 June 22, 2015
• Week 27 June 29, 2015
• Week 28 July 6, 2015
• Week 29 July 13, 2015
• Week 30 July 20, 2015
• Week 31 July 27, 2015
• Week 32 August 3, 2015
• Week 33 August 10, 2015
• Week 34 August 17, 2015
• Week 35 August 24, 2015
• Week 36 August 31, 2015
• Week 37 September 7, 2015
• Week 38 September 14, 2015
• Week 39 September 21, 2015
• Week 40 September 28, 2015
• Week 41 October 5, 2015
• Week 42 October 12, 2015
• Week 43 October 19, 2015
• Week 44 October 26, 2015
• Week 45 November 2, 2015
• Week 46 November 9, 2015
• Week 47 November 16, 2015
• Week 48 November 23, 2015
• Week 49 November 30, 2015
• Week 50 December 7, 2015
• Week 51 December 14, 2015
• Week 52 December 21, 2015
• Week 53 December 28, 2015

2602:306:B8E0:82C0:4903:CE81:A219:CA2F 01:59, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Problems of the translation of this page.

1. In Translations:Tech/News/56/en, there is an $isodate, which is unsuited for translations. Please use a localized date format instead.
2. The message Translations:Tech/News/26/en is a link anchor, while all others in the list have their links inside the message. Please make it equal to all list elements, so as to make translating easier.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Purodha (talk)