Tech/News/2014/18

The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe and contribute.

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf2) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on April 24. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on April 29, and all Wikipedias on May 1 (calendar).
You can now use interwiki prefix c: to link to pages on Wikimedia Commons. [1]

VisualEditor news

You will soon be able to set content language and direction with VisualEditor. [2]
VisualEditor now works on all Wikipedias after broken MediaWiki:Common.js pages (and similar) were fixed last week. [3]
VisualEditor dialogs now use an animation of moving lines rather than animated GIF images.

Future software changes

CirrusSearch will be enabled as a beta feature on 41 new wikis, including Meta-Wiki and the Swedish (sv), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Japanese (ja) and Chinese (zh) Wikipedias next week. This change means that CirrusSearch will now be enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
MediaViewer will be enabled for all users on the French (fr) and Dutch (nl) Wikipedias on May 1. Feedback is welcome. [4]
The mobile version of Wikimedia wikis will soon include filters to limit the number of uploaded files that are copyright violations. [5]
CodeEditor will soon have a status bar about errors and warnings. [6] [7]
You can test a new version of Winter, a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. Comments are welcome. [8]

Problems

For about 30 minutes on April 21, there were problems with image scaling due to a high server load. [9] [10]
On April 22, it was not possible to use the Collection extension for about 90 minutes due to a server move. [11] [12]

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