Wikipedia:Community Portal

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• en: Requests for the bot flag should be made on this page. This wiki uses the standard bot policy, and allows global bots and automatic approval of certain types of bots. Other bots should apply below, and then request access from a steward if there is no objection.

Old talk entries have been archived to Wikipedia:Community Portal/archive

New Wikipedia Library Accounts Available Now (May 2018)

Hello Wikimedians!

The TWL OWL says sign up today!

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

• Rock's Backpages – Music articles and interviews from the 1950s onwards - 50 accounts
• Invaluable – Database of more than 50 million auctions and over 500,000 artists - 15 accounts
• Termsoup – Translation tool

Expansions

• Fold3 – Available content has more than doubled, now including new military collections from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Oxford University Press – The Scholarship collection now includes Electronic Enlightenment
• Alexander Street Press – Women and Social Movements Library now available
• Cambridge University Press – Orlando Collection now available

Many other partnerships with accounts available are listed on our partners page, including Baylor University Press, Loeb Classical Library, Cairn, Gale and Bloomsbury.

Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: sign up today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 18:03, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

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

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

Update on page issues on mobile web

Update on page issues on mobile web

Please help translate to your language Hi everyone. The Readers web team has recently begun working on exposing issue templates on the mobile website. Currently, details about issues with page content are generally hidden on the mobile website. This leaves readers unaware of the reliability of the pages they are reading. The goal of this project is to improve awareness of particular issues within an article on the mobile web. We will do this by changing the visual styling of page issues.

So far, we have drafted a proposal on the design and implementation of the project. We were also able to run user testing on the proposed designs. The tests so far have positive results. Here is a quick summary of what we learned:

• The new treatment increases awareness of page issues among participants. This is true particularly when they are in a more evaluative/critical mode.
• Page issues make sense to readers and they understand how they work
• Readers care about page issues and consider them important
• Readers had overwhelmingly positive sentiments towards Wikipedia associated with learning about page issues

Our next step would be to start implementing these changes. We wanted to reach out to you for any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions you might have before beginning development. Please visit the project page where we have more information and mockups of how this may look. Please leave feedback on the talk page.

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Global preferences are available

Global preferences are now available, you can set them by visiting your new global preferences page. Visit mediawiki.org for information on how to use them and leave feedback. -- Keegan (WMF) (talk)

19:19, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Consultation on the creation of a separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS

(Please help translate to your language)

Hi all,

I'm preparing a change in who can edit sitewide CSS/JS pages. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Vector.js which are executed in the browser of all readers and editors.) Currently all administrators are able to edit these pages, which poses a serious and unnecessary security risk. Soon, a dedicated, smaller user group will take over this task. Your community will be able to decide who belongs in this group, so this should mean very little change for you. You can find out more and provide feedback at the consultation page on Meta. If you are involved in maintaining CSS/JS code, or policymaking around adminship requests, please give it a look!

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 08:45, 12 July 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

New user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS

(Please help translate to your language)

Hi all!

To improve the security of our readers and editors, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed. (These are pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Vector.js which contain code that is executed in the browsers of users of the site.) A new user group, interface-admin, has been created. Starting four weeks from now, only members of this group will be able edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage).

You can learn more about the motivation behind the change here.

Please add users who need to edit CSS/JS to the new group (this can be done the same way new administrators are added, by stewards or local bureaucrats). This is a dangerous permission; a malicious user or a hacker taking over the account of a careless interface-admin can abuse it in far worse ways than admin permissions could be abused. Please only assign it to users who need it, who are trusted by the community, and who follow common basic password and computer security practices (use strong passwords, do not reuse passwords, use two-factor authentication if possible, do not install software of questionable origin on your machine, use antivirus software if that's a standard thing in your environment).

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 13:08, 30 July 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

Enabling a helpful feature for Template editors

Hello.

The team working on TemplateStyles at the Wikimedia Foundation would like to enable TemplateStyles on this wiki.

TemplateStyles is a feature to allow non-administrators to write and manage CSS styles for templates. It allows contributors who edit templates to separate content and presentation. A good web practice that makes it easier to manage the layout of templates. If you don't edit templates, this will not have any impact on your contributions.

TemplateStyles is useful for a few reasons.

• It makes it possible for templates to work better on mobile.
• It cuts out confusion on where to apply CSS rules.
• Editing CSS is currently limited to administrators, which is a major barrier to participation.
• All stylesheets must be loaded on all pages (whether they actually use the page or not), which wastes bandwidth and makes debugging style rules more difficult.

You can learn more about TemplateStyles on MediaWiki.org. Technical documentation is also available.

This is an optional feature and no one must use it, but template contributors are encouraged to do so! Please discuss and let us know if there are any concerns. If there are no concerns we will proceed to deploy the feature on the 9th of August.

Thank you.

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Editing of sitewide CSS/JS is only possible for interface administrators from now

(Please help translate to your language)

Hi all,

as announced previously, permission handling for CSS/JS pages has changed: only members of the interface-admin (Interface administrators) group, and a few highly privileged global groups such as stewards, can edit CSS/JS pages that they do not own (that is, any page ending with .css or .js that is either in the MediaWiki: namespace or is another user's user subpage). This is done to improve the security of readers and editors of Wikimedia projects. More information is available at Creation of separate user group for editing sitewide CSS/JS. If you encounter any unexpected problems, please contact me or file a bug.

Thanks!
Tgr (talk) 12:39, 27 August 2018 (UTC) (via global message delivery)

Read-only mode for up to an hour on 12 September and 10 October

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that 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 do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre 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 secondary data center on Wednesday, 12 September 2018. On Wednesday, 10 October 2018, they will switch back to the primary data center.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop when we switch. 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 up to an hour on Wednesday, 12 September and Wednesday, 10 October. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 13 September and Thursday 11 October).
• 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 code freezes for the weeks of 10 September 2018 and 8 October 2018. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Johan(WMF) (talk)

13:33, 6 September 2018 (UTC)