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Technology report

Tech news in brief

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The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

There is now an experimental Wikimedia maps service. You can give feedback here.[1][2]
Last week a few issues with UploadWizard were fixed. Before this was done, UploadWizard would stop you from uploading your files if something went wrong.[3][4][5][6]
More Wikipedias can now use information from any Wikidata item in any Wikipedia article. Previously they could only use the Wikidata item that matched the subject of the article.[7]
The VisualEditor welcome dialogue has been changed. The intention is to make it more helpful for new users.[8]

Problems

Wikimedia Labs' HTTPS certificate expired for most of Tuesday 15 September. To reach Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs securely you had to ignore your browser's security error message. There was no risk to data security during this time.[9]
Last week the notification system was split into two parts. This was temporarily undone because of a bug and performance concerns. It will return to two parts this week.[10][11]
UploadWizard couldn't upload files larger than 5 MB when using chunked uploads. This has now been fixed.[12]

Changes this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 22. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 23. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 24 (calendar).
The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms.[13]
You can now choose whether to extend a link or not when editing one in VisualEditor. This means it is easier to choose how much of what you type before and after the link is part of it.[14]
Wikibooks can now use data from Wikidata.[15]

Meetings

You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. It will be on September 23 at 17:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can register to the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016 in San Francisco 4–6 January 2016. Gadget, template, bot, and tool developers are welcome as well. Call for participation and travel sponsorship requests are open until 2 October.

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