Introducing TechCom

Technology report

Introducing TechCom

New TechCom

The Architecture Committee (ArchCom) has adopted a new charter and renamed itself the Wikimedia Technical Committee (TechCom). The new charter defines the committee's scope, purpose, operation.

TechCom is the guardian of the integrity, consistency, stability, and performance of the software supporting the Wikimedia projects. It acts as the senior advisor and the convergence point of all decisions related to technical work that is strategic, cross-cutting, and/or hard to undo.
— Mission statement

The commitee's authority over technical development at the WMF is also specified – it acts as an extension of the Chief Technical Officer.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Improved user script sandbox^[1] (source) by User:Kephir/gadgets – Adds syntax highlighting and allows you to type tabs in the User script sandbox, which allows you to carry out experiments with user JS and CSS code locally.

Newly approved bot tasks

PrimeBOT (task 18) – Remove deprecated parameter from {{infobox video game}}
Yobot (task 54) – Replace ISBN / PMID / RFC magiclinks with ISBN / PMID / RFC template
TohaomgBot (task approval) – Replacing raster images (png, jpg, gif) with their vector analogues (svg)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #29, #30 & #31. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Problems
- On some pages, the Table of Contents is not being shown. It will normally appear if you edit the page again. Investigation is currently ongoing. (Phabricator task T168040)
- Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. (Phabricator task T170039)
- Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.
Recent changes
- "Wikimedia Labs" is now called "Cloud VPS". "Wikimedia Tool Labs" is now called "Wikimedia Toolforge". This is to help clarify the purpose of these services. (Wikitech-l mailing list)
- Page Previews, previously a Beta Feature, was enabled for logged-out users for all remaining Wikipedias (with the exception of English and German) the week of 24 July. An A/B test will be run on English Wikipedia to collect data before approaching the community for further discussion. (Phabricator task T70860)
- It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications on a wiki. This new feature will accessible in your preferences, in the Notifications tab. Please see the documentation. (Phabricator task T150419)
- CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. (Q&A/discussion on MediaWiki.org, Phabricator task T170863)
- .mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. (Phabricator task T155203)
- Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. (Phabricator task T162849)
Future changes
- New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.
- The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. (Phabricator task T171201)