Dedicated Wikidata database servers

Technology report

Dedicated Wikidata database servers

Among this week's technology upgrades, tools and other tidbits, Wikidata received its own database servers (not necessarily this one)

In brief

Structured discussions, formerly known as Flow, received an editor upgrade

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

WatchlistSorter^[1] (source) by User:The Transhumanist – sorts your watchlist by namespace, making it much easier to browse.
TextDiff^[2] (source) by User:Evad37 – Adds a button to diff pages that shows a simpler, text-only diff. It is often difficult to see the actual changes to the text amongst the templates and other markup.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #2 & #3. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes
- On Wikidata, the "save" button when you edit is now called "publish". This means all Wikimedia wikis have now changed from "Save page" to "Publish changes". This is to help new editors understand what it does. [1][2]
- Some edits will get an automatic tag on all wikis. This will happen when making a page a redirect, blanking a page, removing almost all content, undoing an edit, or rolling back an edit. You can see the tags for example in the recent changes feed, article history, user contributions or on your watchlist. Some wikis had already marked edits like these in other ways. [3]
- Special:UnusedFiles shows files that have been uploaded but are not used. It will show a file that is not used on the wiki it has been uploaded to, even if the file is used on another wiki. The new Special:GloballyUnusedFiles page on Commons only shows files that are not used on any wiki. [4]
- Structured discussions now uses the 2017 wikitext editor instead of the old custom editor. This will work with your preference for wikitext or visual editor. The documentation has been updated. [5][6]
- Wikidata moved to its own database servers. This is because it is growing and needs more resources. Because of this you were able to read but not edit Wikidata and the German Wikipedia between 06:00 and 06:30 UTC on 9 January. [7]
- The font size in the editing window will change slightly for some users. It will now look the same on all browsers and operating systems. [8][9]
- Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis where the Translate extension is installed can now add and remove the translation administrator permission by default. Administrators of wikis where this extension is enabled can add and remove this permission to or from themselves. Wikis that used a different configuration before have not changed. [10]
- WikiEditor's ResourceLoader modules have been simplified to one: ext.wikiEditor. All the other modules are now deprecated aliases and should be removed. [11]
- There is a new Discourse test support channel for Wikimedia developers. You can ask questions or answer others questions about MediaWiki and Wikimedia software development. [12]
Problems
- Older versions of the Chrome web browser on mobile devices may see the PDF download button, but it does not work. The developers are looking into the problem. [13]
- With the new filters in the recent changes, "Exclude selected" in "Namespaces" did not work for "Saved filters" between 13 December and 2 January. When you loaded the saved filter all other namespaces were excluded instead. This has now been fixed. If you made any changes to your saved filters between 13 December and 2 January, you need to save your filters with excluded namespaces again. [14]
- The latest version of Google Chrome broke how section links are shown in the address bar. You now see #R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9 instead of #Résumé even if MediaWiki did not encode it that way. This happened in early December. This problem has been solved. The fix will be in Chrome 64 (23 January) or Chrome 65 (6 March). [15]
- Last week's MediaWiki update was rolled back. This was because of a bug that changed non-ASCII characters when a page was edited. [16][17]
- Some POST requests to the API took longer than usual in parts of December. This affected the Wikidata UI and some gadgets the most. It has now been fixed. [18]
Future changes
- A few hundred wikis with less than ten high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 31 January. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [19][20]

Installation code

^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:The Transhumanist/WatchlistSorter.js' ); // Backlink: User:The Transhumanist/WatchlistSorter.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Evad37/TextDiff.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/TextDiff.js

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In this issue

16 January 2018 (all comments)

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'Publish page' button. I believe this is confusing new users who are working on drafts, in their sandboxes, or in other user sub pages. Some may believe that this implies saving to mainspace already. IMO, if it's technically possible, that button should display 'Save' when in those namespaces. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:48, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Agreed. Abyssal (talk) 18:54, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes. I ran into this exact problem a few weeks ago, coaching a newbie writing her first article in sandbox. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:32, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, that picture above is not of a server. It is a switch. (Unless Juniper offers 2U servers with multiple ethernet ports.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:43, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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