Category sorting has been revamped on English Wikipedia. Titles are now sorted according to the Unicode collation algorithm (phabricator task). The most noticeable change is that characters which differ only in diacritics are now sorted together. Also, numeric sorting is now supported, closing a 10-year-old bug. This should, in many cases, alleviate the need for custom keys to be defined using the DEFAULTSORT behavior switch.

It took approximately a week to regenerate all of the sort keys for English Wikipedia. During this time (29 August to 6 September), sorting in categories was unreliable, prompting reports and discussion in several threads on the technical Village Pump (now archived). One remaining issue is that hyphens are now sorted before commas. This means that hyphenated surnames are sorted earlier if articles use DEFAULTSORT keys of the form "Surname, First name". For example, sorting Jessica Ennis-Hill (sort key "Ennis-Hill, Jessica") before Andy Ennis (sort key "Ennis, Andy"). The issue is being investigated. One proposed solution is to switch to using "Surname First name" in DEFAULTSORT keys.

Improvements to category sorting were one of the projects worked on by the WMF's Community Tech team. The "Numerical sorting in categories" proposal was ranked #5 on the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey, having received 85 support votes. The new collation has also been deployed to Swedish Wikipedia, and may be rolled out to other wikis which agree to switch to the new sorting system.

The Template Parameters tool is now available on Tool Labs, for viewing template parameter usage. It works with TemplateData to show the validity of parameter names that are used in template transclusions. For a required parameter, it can display a list of pages where the template is missing the parameter. The tool also shows commonly used values for each parameter. The data is updated monthly.

As an example, the parameter usage for Template:Multicol is as follows (as of 1 September):

Newly approved bot tasks

• FastilyBot (task 12) – Leaves courtesy notifications for users whose files are nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Files for discussion, if they were not notified.
• BU RoBOT (task 27) – Tags articles related to WikiProject College football as requested by the project.
• Dexbot (task 7) – Changing <ref name="foo "bar"> to <ref name="foo bar">
• Bender the Bot (task 2) – HTTP → HTTPS conversion for Google News and Google Books links

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available. [1][2][3]

• Recent changes
  • Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [4]
  • Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [5]
  • When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [6]
  • The Wikimedia Commons app for Android can now show nearby places that need photos. [7]
  • You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [8][9]
  • <maplink> and <mapframe> can now use geodata from Open Street Map if Open Street Map has defined a region and given it an ID in Wikidata. You can use this to draw on the map and add information. [10][11]
  • Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will now be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [12][13]
  • The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [14]
  • A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [15][16]
• Problems
  • Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back because of bugs. Creating new accounts did not work between 15 September 19:10 UTC and 16 September 12:50 UTC. [17][18]
• Changes this week
  • The new version of MediaWiki will hopefully be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar). This is the version that was meant to go out last week.
• Future changes
  • The CheckUser extension could work differently in the future. There is a Request for Comments to figure out how. [19]
  • When you search on the Wikimedia wikis in the future you could see results from sister projects in your language. You can read more and discuss how this could work.
  • Wikidata will start working on adding support for Wiktionary. The Wikidata development team is now taking one last look at the development plan. [20]