User talk:Matt Heard/Archive 8

The Signpost: 10 December 2014

• Op-ed: It's GLAM up North!

• In the media: Wikipedia is "a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess"

• Traffic report: Dead Black Men and Science Fiction

• Featured content: Honour him, love and obey? Good idea with military leaders.

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:51, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 December 2014

• Arbitration report: Arbitration Committee election results

• Featured content: Tripping hither, tripping thither, Nobody knows why or whither; We must dance and we must sing, Round about our fairy ring!

• In the media: Wikipedia's year in review video; Checking in with Wikipedia's founders

• Traffic report: A December Lull

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:08, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014

Did you know?

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

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

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

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

Recent improvements

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

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

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

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing "*  " will make the line a bullet list; "1.  " or "# " will make it a numbered list; "==" will make it a section heading; ": " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: "[[" for opening the link tool, and "{{" for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl+K to open the link editor, still work.

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

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead

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

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
• File requests for language-appropriate "Bold" and "Italic" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
• The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

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

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2014

• From the editor: Looking for new editors-in-chief

• In the media: Wales on GamerGate

• Featured content: Still quoting Iolanthe, apparently.

• WikiProject report: Microsoft does The Signpost

• Traffic report: North Korea is not pleased

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:26, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 December 2014

• News and notes: The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers

• In the media: Study tour controversy; class tackles the gender gap

• Traffic report: Surfin' the Yuletide

• Op-ed: My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation

• Featured content: A bit fruity

• Recent research: Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:11, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 January 2015

• In the media: ISIL propaganda video; AirAsia complaints

• Interview: Interview with Jakob, one of Wikipedia's more prolific waterway contributors

• Featured content: Kock up

• Traffic report: Auld Lang Syne

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:39, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 January 2015

• Op-ed: Articles for creation needs you

• WikiProject report: Articles for creation: the inside story

• News and notes: Erasmus Prize recognizes the global Wikipedia community

• In the media: Wikipedia's birthday brings tributes, app, award; Castro death rumors

• Featured content: Citations are needed

• Traffic report: Wikipédia sommes Charlie

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:27, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 January 2015

• From the editor: Introducing your new editors-in-chief

• Anniversary: A decade of the Signpost

• Interview: WWII veteran honors shipmates through Wikipedia editing

• News and notes: Annual report released; Wikimania; steward elections

• Op-ed: Let's make WikiProjects better

• In the media: Johann Hari; bandishes and delicate flowers

• Featured content: Yachts, marmots, boat races, and a rocket engineer who attempted to birth a goddess

• Arbitration report: As one door closes, a (Gamer)Gate opens

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 January 2015

• From the editor: An editorial board that includes you

• In focus: Thirteen editors sanctioned in mammoth GamerGate arbitration case

• In the media: A murderous week for Wikipedia

• Forum: Evaluating the Arbitration Committee's handling of GamerGate

• Traffic report: A sea of faces

• Recent research: Bot writes about theatre plays; "Renaissance editors" create better content

• Special report: Traffic in the fog—most-viewed articles of 2014 include death, Facebook, and Ebola

• Featured content: Like Jack Kerouac's On The Road, this week's issue was written on amphetamines

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• MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:15, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News 2015—#1

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

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

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

Recent improvements

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

Let's work together

• Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
• Please help complete translations of the user guide for users who speak your language.
• Join the weekly bug triage meetings beginning Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at 12:00 (noon) PST (20:00 UTC). Information about how to join the meeting will be posted at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal shortly before the meeting begins. Contact James F. for more information.
• Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Thursday, 19 February 2015 at 19:00 UTC.

Subscribe or unsubscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter. Translations are available through Meta. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)