Searching and surveying

Technology report

Searching and surveying

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By Evad37

Advanced Search interface (collapsed view)

AdvancedSearch

AdvancedSearch's form for specifying advanced parameters

A new search interface is now available as a beta feature on MediaWiki.org. The interface enhances the Special:Search page experience, by changing the way namespaces and other advanced parameters are specified. This makes it easier for users to discover and utilise existing search features, such as intitle:.

When you click on the arrow in the advanced parameters section, it expands to give you a form to set parameters for advanced searches. Explanations on each parameter can be found next to each input field. Namespaces can be selected from the "Search in", where you can either type them in or select from a dropdown list.

The idea came from a workshop series on advanced search held by WMDE's software development department, as part of their Technical Wishes Project. The beta feature was made available to test wikis and Mediawiki.org on 21 November 2017, and will also be available on Arabic and German Wikipedias from 29 November.

Further information is available on MediaWiki.org and Meta-wiki.

Time to make a wish

Can you guess what the Community Tech mascot is wishing for?

The annual Community Tech wishlist survey is underway for 2017. Since early November, 220 proposals in 15 categories have been submitted from 284 contributors. The proposal phase has concluded; voting begins on 27 November at meta:2017 Community Wishlist Survey.

So far this year, the team has completed five of the top ten wishes: Rewrite XTools (#5), Wikitext editor syntax highlighting (#6), Warning on unsuccessful login attempts (#7), Fix Mr. Z-bot’s popular pages bot (#9), and User rights expiration (#10). Other top wishes, as well as anti-harassment tools and projects for smaller groups, are being worked on or investigated.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

SkinSwitcher^[1] (source) by User:Eizzen – Allows users to view pages in any of the seven available skins (Vector, MonoBook, Modern, CologneBlue, Minerva, MinervaNeue, and ApiOutput)
AutoPurge^[2] (source) by User:Eizzen – Similar to standard null edit/purge buttons, this script automatically purges certain cache problem pages listed in a user-defined window.AutoPurgePages variable array.
alwaysEditSectionLink^[3] (source) by User:The Voidwalker – Should add section links to pages where there are sections but no editsection links. (For example, archive pages with __NOEDITSECTION__).
Display Contributions^[4] (source) by User:Mvolz – Displays your edit count next to Contributions link in the top bar.
PageDetails^[5] (source) by User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew – Provides links to redirect, GA, FA, and Peer review information to the sidebar of the article you're on.
SetupAutoArchive^[6] (source) by User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew – This script adds an option to the More drop-down that enables automated archival for talk pages.
Backlinks from title^[7] (source) by User:Kku – WhatLinksHere functionality on headline like in original Wiki.
PageCreator^[8] (source) by User:Eizzen – Displays information about a page's creator and links to the first revision of the page.
LastEditor^[9] (source) by User:Eizzen – Provides links to user, talk and contribs pages of page's last editor, and additionally provides a "diff" link, minor edit marker, and summary of the edit in question.
DiffOnly^[10] (source) by User:Mr. Stradivarius – Adds "diff only" links to diff pages, and optionally to history pages, recent changes, and the watchlist. Diff-only pages load quickly, useful for tasks that involve trawling through lots of diffs.
histFilter^[11] (source) by User:The Voidwalker – Adds a button to filter the page's history to only show revisions of blocked users.
Rater^[12] (source) by User:Evad37 – Provides a dialog interface to add, remove, or modify WikiProject banners, including class and importance assessment. Accessible from either the page itself or its talk page. (Beta version, report bugs/feedback at WT:RATER.)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #43 – #47. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes
- When you search in some languages the search function could use specific other languages if the first language didn't work. This is called a fallback language. This didn't work properly and created bad searches. The search index is being fixed to work better. [1]
- You can now block users from emailing you (mute) through the Wikimedia wikis. [2]
- You will no longer see the patrol log on Special:Log unless you specifically select it. [3]
- The diff you see when you compare two different versions of a page has changed on MediaWiki.org and the test wiki. This is to make it easier to find a text change in a moved paragraph. It will hopefully soon come to more wikis. You can report bugs in Phabricator. [4]
- A new user group on Commons will be able to upload MP3 files. The plan is to have this user group from 17 November. [5]
- Wikis using Flagged Revisions will get the New filters for Edit Review by default on the recent changes pages. It will be possible to opt-out in user preferences. [6]
- If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [7]
- You can use ccnorm_contains_any when you create an abuse filter. This can be used to look for multiple words or phrases within a string. It will find words where some characters have been replaced. You can read more in the documentation. [8]
- The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.
Future changes
- There is a Structured Commons community focus group for Commons and Wikidata contributors who want to give input on structured data on Wikimedia Commons. You can sign up to join it. [9]
- URLs that link to sections on Wikimedia wikis with non-Latin scripts have looked like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#.D0.98.D1.81.D1.82.D0.BE.D1.80.D0.B8.D1.8F instead of https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия#История. This will soon be fixed. Old links will still work. [10][11]
- Support for uploading and viewing 3D models is coming soon to Wikimedia Commons. The feature will support the .STL file format. You can see an example on the test wiki. [12]
- Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [13][14]

Installation code

^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Eizzen/SkinSwitcher.js' ); // Backlink: User:Eizzen/SkinSwitcher.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Eizzen/AutoPurge.js' ); // Backlink: User:Eizzen/AutoPurge.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:The Voidwalker/alwaysEditSectionLink.js' ); // Backlink: User:The Voidwalker/alwaysEditSectionLink.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Mvolz/displayContributions.js' ); // Backlink: User:Mvolz/displayContributions.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/PageDetails.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/PageDetails.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/SetupAutoArchive.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/SetupAutoArchive.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Kku/Scripts/BacklinkTitle.js' ); // Backlink: User:Kku/Scripts/BacklinkTitle.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js' ); // Backlink: User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Eizzen/LastEditor.js' ); // Backlink: User:Eizzen/LastEditor.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Mr. Stradivarius/gadgets/DiffOnly.js' ); // Backlink: User:Mr. Stradivarius/gadgets/DiffOnly.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:The Voidwalker/histFilter.js' ); // Backlink: User:The Voidwalker/histFilter.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Evad37/rater.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/rater.js