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Books & Bytes New Years Double Issue

Books & Bytes

Volume 1 Issue 3, December/January 2013

(Sign up for monthly delivery)

Happy New Year, and welcome to a special double issue of Books & Bytes. We've included a retrospective on the changes and progress TWL has seen over the last year, the results of the survey TWL participants completed in December, some of our plans for the future, a second interview with a Wiki Love Libraries coordinator, and more. Here's to 2014 being a year of expansion and innovation for TWL!

The Wikipedia Library completed the first 6 months of its Individual Engagement grant last week. Here's where we are and what we've done:

Increased access to sources: 1500 editors signed up for 3700 free accounts, individually worth over $500,000, with usage increases of 400-600%

Deep networking: Built relationships with Credo, HighBeam, Questia, JSTOR, Cochrane, LexisNexis, EBSCO, New York Times, and OCLC

New pilot projects: Started the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar project to empower university-affiliated Wikipedia researchers

Developed community: Created portal connecting 250 newsletter recipients, 30 library members, 3 volunteer coordinators, and 2 part-time contractors

Tech scoped: Spec'd out a reference tool for linking to full-text sources and established a basis for OAuth integration

Broad outreach: Wrote a feature article for Library Journal's The Digital Shift; presenting at the American Library Association annual meeting

...Read Books & Bytes!

Thanks for your help and advice.

Bill Likelihoodist (talk) 14:27, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #93

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Events
  • upcoming: FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Wikisource now gets its language links via Wikidata
  • Reasonator gets extended functionality
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: PlantList-ID, Danemark Job Code (DISCO-08), Instruction Set, Thailand central administrative unit code, student of, archive URL
  • Showcase items: ethanol
  • Fun Fact: A Space Odyssey (Q2001)
• Development
  • Enabled language links for Wikisource
  • Move more part of an item page from JS to HTML to improve performance and non-JS interface
  • Database performance improvements
  • Work on forward compatibility for new entity types
  • Introducing the EntityStore service to improve modularity
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Contribute to a Showcase item
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:22, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement

File:Oseberg ship head post.jpg An animal-head post found in the Oseberg vikingship, an example of Nordic art Hello, Tom Morris. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Nordic art Previous selections: Gopher (animal) • Meal Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Nominate an article Review nominations Have your say in future selections Posted by: Evad37 [talk] 01:02, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-04

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).
• You can now see relatively recent results on special pages like Special:DoubleRedirects, Special:UncategorizedPages or Special:WantedCategories. They were disabled before because they were very slow. The results are now updated once a month. [1]
• As of January 16, you can make and use guided tours on the Asturian, Farsi and Russian Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [2] [3]
• You can give comments on an idea to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [4]
• You can watch a video to learn how to report problems in Bugzilla. [5]

VisualEditor news

• In the toolbar, the menu to edit the styles (like bold, italic, etc.) now has a down arrow (). The order of the Insert menu has also changed a little.
• You can now edit <gallery /> tags with a very basic tool. [6]
• You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu. [7]
• When you change categories, you will now see them when you save the page. [8]
• When you edit templates, you will now see the parameters in the right order. The ones that you must add have a star (*). [9] [10]
• The page will now be saved faster, thanks to a new way of coding the text that sends 40% less text to the servers. [11]
• Your wiki can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData. [12]

Problems

• There was a problem with search on the English and German Wikipedias between January 6 and January 14. You could not see new pages and changes in search results. [13]
• There were "pool timeouts" errors on several wikis on January 13; it was caused by a code change that was made to fix another problem. [14]
• On January 17, Bugzilla and Wikimedia Labs were broken for about 20 minutes due to network problems. IRC channels with recent changes (irc.wikimedia.org) were broken for about two hours. [15]

Future software changes

Orange bar with new messages

• If you have removed JavaScript in your web browser, you will soon be able to see the orange bar saying that you have new messages. If you have changed how the bar looks with a gadget, you may need to change the gadget again. [16] [17]
• You will soon be able to add a given Flickr user to a blacklist so that their files can't be uploaded using UploadWizard on Wikimedia Commons and other wikis. [18]
• You will see a warning when you try to delete a page included in at least one other page. [19]
• You will so longer see disambiguation pages in Special:LonelyPages. [20] [21]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikibreak

For the next two weeks, I am on holiday and am going to try and take a wikibreak for the duration. I will have internet access but I intend to spend very little time on wiki-related matters. If there is an issue with any of my admin decisions, feel free to ask another administrator to have a look at it. I'd advise you to not do anything stupid but if you are the sort of person who does stupid things, you won't listen to me. —Tom Morris (talk) 10:18, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Please see

this edit. You were right, in the end. GreaseballNYC (talk) 02:09, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #94

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion about using 'instance of' specific for animals
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Next Wikidata IRC office hour on Monday, February 3rd
  • FOSDEM
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • The Wikidata Development Plan for 2014+ has been published
  • Wikidata stats now also includes statistics for ranks
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: ICTV virus ID, rector, fictional analog of, writable file format, readable file format, place made
  • Showcase items: Cactaceae
• Development
  • Daniel and Katie took part in the MediaWiki Architecture Summit in San Francisco
  • Bugzilla:60027 Add language to label and description field to make it less likely that people enter a label or description in a wrong language
  • Bugzilla:58394 Avoid throwing out of bounds error when adding new claims
  • Bugzilla:50570 API now reveals qualifier hashes
  • Bugzilla:57213 API now reveals data type ids
  • Bugzilla:57754 Die if wbeditentity tries to clear from an old revision id
  • Bugzilla:55795 Add API option to show snaks in a list rather than grouped by property
  • Refactor of ChangeOp remove functionality
  • Continued to move parsing and validating of values from the frontend into the backend to improve performance and make the non-JS user interface more useful
  • Finished the Wikidata build script (We use it to pull together code from various git repositories into a single one for deployment)
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:57, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement

The Low Countries as seen from space Hello, Tom Morris. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Low Countries Previous selections: Nordic art • Gopher (animal) Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Nominate an article Review nominations Have your say in future selections Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of Evad37 (talk) 01:54, 27 January 2014 (UTC) •

Tech News: 2014-05

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

Recent software changes

• Pages from Wikimedia sites now load faster in your browser thanks to "module storage", a way for your browser to save data like JavaScript and CSS on your computer to avoid downloading them again. See video. [22]
• The code used to show videos has changed. You should be able to play the video on the page, with the play button on top of the video. If you see the play button on the right of the video, or if clicking on the video leads you to the original file, please file a bug or tell User:Bawolff. [23]
• The Special:ActiveUsers page will be removed because it's too slow. [24]
• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 16. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on January 28, and all Wikipedia wikis on January 30 (calendar).

Problems

• On January 21, Universal Language Selector was turned off on all Wikimedia sites because it makes pages load slowly. If you want to use web fonts, or write in scripts that aren't on your keyboard, you need to add it as an option in your preferences. It will be turned back on when the issues are resolved. [25]
• For about 20 minutes on the same day, there were problems with CSS and JavaScript due to high server load.

Future software changes

• You can give comments about the new version of "Winter", a proposal to have a fixed toolbar at the top of wiki pages. [26]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:47, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Articles you might like to edit, from SuggestBot

Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation, and please do get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.

Views/Day	Quality	Title	Content	Headings	Images	Links	Sources	Tagged with…
32		Any Questions? (talk)						Add sources
38		Organ repertoire (talk)						Add sources
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540		Chris Kluwe (talk)						Cleanup
44		Yury Luzhkov (talk)						Cleanup
134		Robert Kotick (talk)						Cleanup
4		Assamstadt (talk)						Expand
1,559		Conservative Party (UK) (talk)						Expand
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16		PBS HD Channel (talk)						Merge
1,164		Johannes Brahms (talk)						Merge
46		The Master's College (talk)						Merge
331		Timeline of LGBT history (talk)						Wikify
48		Central Bureau of Narcotics (talk)						Wikify
13		Adrian Ettlinger (talk)						Wikify
3		Heinrich (farmer) (talk)						Orphan
19		Agility drill (talk)						Orphan
11		PASS Sample Size Software (talk)						Orphan
5		Thomas Dallam (talk)						Stub
1		Hans Tugi (talk)						Stub
387		Agility (talk)						Stub
8		2BE Belfast (talk)						Stub
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SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!

If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on SuggestBot's talk page. Regards from Nettrom (talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. -- SuggestBot (talk) 02:43, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

UKIP & Guns

Thankyou for your edit re gun ownership on the UK Independence Party page. While what you have added was well sourced, it is not suitable for Wikipedia as it is not ecyclopedic. Indeed your edit was not factually correct as Mr Farage did not unveil this as official policy. Indeed he stated in the same interview that UKIP had "a blank sheet of paper". While your edit is news worthy, Wikipedia is not a newspaper. You may wish to familiarise yourself with this section of wikipedia policy. Many Thanks Owl In The House (talk) 13:08, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Financial Transparency Coalition article

Hi Tom, I made some edits to the Financial Transparency Coalition article which I hope will address your concerns about citation. Wherever there was an external source available for a statement, I included that citation rather than the organization's website. I hope this will address your concerns.

Fleming1974 Fleming1974 (talk) 21:36, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #95

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over P31 as a qualifier
  • Open RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • Wikidata is at FOSDEM in Brussels, Februrary 1st-2nd
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Quantities released on Wikidata!
  • Wikisource phase 2 coming Februrary 25th.
• Did you know?
  • Newest properties: attendance, refractive index, electronegativity, proportion, sandbox-quantity, number of pages, number of platforms , flattening, floors above ground, number of cylinders, masts, number of speakers, g-factor, orbital eccentricity, gross tonnage, total produced, redshift, Mohs' hardness, ELO rating, atomic number, LibraryThing work identifier, EUL control number, capacity, population, Human Development Index, from narrative, launch contractor, valvetrain configuration, KOATUU identifier
• Development
  • Deployed quantities to Wikidata! :)
  • Made patch to make wbmergeitems more reliable Bugzilla::55960
  • Wikidata edit permissions now included in wikimedia OAuth edit groups
  • Moved Diff repo to Github
  • Work put into make the frontend use backend formatters through the api
  • Refactoring of the ValueView extension
  • MergeItems special page merged as an experimental feature
  • Our easy RDF fork is now included using composer
  • Fixed wbmergeitems issues
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 23:37, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 6, 2014)

The life sciences involve the study of living organisms Hello, Tom Morris. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Life sciences Previous selections: Low Countries • Nordic art Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Nominate an article Review nominations Have your say in future selections Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of Evad37 (talk) 02:33, 3 February 2014 (UTC) •

Tech News: 2014-06

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf12) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on January 30. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 4, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 6 (calendar).
• Global AbuseFilter rules are now active on all small wikis. [27] [28]
• The buttons used in pages like log-in, account creation and search are now using the same colors and styles. [29] [30]
• You can now link to diffs using [[Special:Diff/12345]] and similar links. [31]
• There is no longer an option to hide tables of contents on all pages. [32]
• Searching in the File: namespace on Wikimedia Commons is now faster, after a bug was fixed on January 29. [33]
• All Wikimedia wikis now have high-resolution favicons. [34]

VisualEditor news

• You can now see a list of keyboard shortcuts by pressing Ctrl+/ inside VisualEditor. [35]

Future software changes

• Edits and files hidden with the Oversight tool will be moved to the RevisionDelete system. The Oversight tool will then be removed from Wikimedia wikis. [36] [37] [38]
• For languages where not all sister projects exist, you will be able to link to other language projects using double interwikis (:ko:v, :v:ko, etc.). [39]
• It will soon be possible to use the GettingStarted tool on other wikis than the English Wikipedia. You can translate it on Translatewiki.net. [40]
• You will soon be able to include the Special:Contributions page into other pages. [41]
• You will be able to see where a file is used inside MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [42] [43]
• It will soon be possible to send MassMessage messages using the API. [44]
• You will soon see audio statistics on the Special:TimedMediaHandler page. [45]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #96

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Discussions
  • Discussion over the naming of people
  • Discussion over population
  • Successful RfA: Sjoerddebruin
• Events/Blogs/Press
  • See the office hours logs at meta
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • See the FOSDEM slides
  • Thiemo joins the Wikidata development team
• Development
  • More work on badges by Bene*
  • Lots of Lua improvements by hoo (separate announcement with details soon)
  • Created backend Time parsers (yet another necessary step towards doing more in the backend instead of in Java Script in the frontend)
  • Automatic builds created, tested and deployed to beta labs every day!
  • Investigate Elastic Search as possible backend for queries
  • Made Wikibase Query work with our new component structure
• Monthly Tasks
  • Fix a format or content violation for the belongs to jurisdiction (P1001) property
  • Hack on one of these.
  • Help develop the next summary here!
  • Contribute to a Showcase item

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · John F. Lewis 22:37, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

This week's article for improvement (week 7, 2014)

This staircase is an impossible object Hello, Tom Morris. The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Impossible object Previous selections: Life sciences • Low Countries Get involved with the TAFI project! You can... Nominate an article Review nominations Have your say in future selections Posted by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of Evad37 (talk) 01:33, 10 February 2014 (UTC) •

Tech News: 2014-07

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

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf13) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 6. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 11, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 13 (calendar).
• The Vector search box was changed to fix old display and accessibility issues; for example, you can now use full-text search even if you have disabled JavaScript. Please report any problems you see. The option to disable the "simplified search bar" on Vector will also be removed. [46] [47] [48] [49] [50]
• You are now notified when someone adds a link to your user page on wikis where it didn't work before (wikis with dates in the year-month-day order, including Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and some variants of Chinese). [51]

VisualEditor news

• You can now set media items' alt text and position, and directly set their size, in the media tool. [52] [53]
• The gallery tool was improved and several issues were fixed. [54] [55] [56]

Problems

• On February 3, all wikis were broken for about an hour due to a traffic balancing issue. [57]
• On February 6, some wikis were broken for about half an hour in total due to a problem with the Math extension.

Future software changes

• Some methods from Scribunto's mw.message library will be removed after February 18. If you use them in your templates or modules, please check to make sure that things will not break. [58] [59]
• You will soon be able to use GettingStarted on 23 new Wikipedias. It helps new users by listing possible tasks and giving help. The new version was also added to the English Wikipedia on February 7th. [60]
• You will soon see results from other wikis when you use the new search tool (CirrusSearch). [61] [62]
• The WikiLove tool was redesigned and should also load faster. [63]
• Edits made with WikiLove or after a GettingStarted suggestion will be tagged. [64] [65]
• It will soon no longer be possible to hide section editing links in your preferences. [66]
• You will soon be able to use the revision deletion feature via the API. [67]
• You will soon be able to choose mobile view on non-mobile devices using a Beta Feature option. [68] [69]
• If you have questions about Universal Language Selector, you can join an IRC meeting on February 12 at 17:00 UTC, in the #wikimedia-office channel on Freenode. [70]
• Developers are preparing for Google Summer of Code 2014. You can propose ideas. [71]
• bugzilla.wikimedia.org will be updated this week. You won't be able to access it from 22:00 UTC on February 12 until 01:00 UTC on February 13 at the latest. [72]
• The <poem> tag will be renamed to <lines>. The old tag will still work. [73]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:30, 10 February 2014 (UTC)