Paying attention to your mobile

Technology report

Paying attention to your mobile

Wikimedia developers are improving the mobile website.

“

The Readers web team is working on improving the contribution features on the mobile website. The team is working on showing pages that are currently unavailable on mobile. We are starting by designing improvements to the mobile navigation. We want your feedback on the latest navigation prototype.

Earlier this year, we collected feedback on a previous version of our mobile navigation design in a set of 30 interviews at Wikimania. We worked with the results of the interviews and now have a new version of our prototype.

We would like your feedback on the latest version! In particular, we are curious for your thoughts on the layout of the mobile navigation as well as on the larger number of links available. We appreciate any and all comments.

Right now, we’re researching the navigation for the new feature set. We want to focus on making it feel more familiar and useful for contributors than the current mobile menu. We want it to include pages that contributors are likely to navigate to and will find useful. Please visit the project page and try out the demo on your mobile device. Then help answer a few questions about your experience. Thank you!

”

— CKoerner (WMF), Village pump post

You can read more about advanced mobile editing and other things the developers plan to work on over the next year; there is also a presentation you can watch.

Making the wikis work better on mobile phones is also something editors can help with. There is a list of recommendations for making content easier to read in the mobile view. You can add things to the page and ask others to help.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

up-one-lvl-kbd^[1] (source) by User:Enterprisey – The "U" keyboard shortcut now goes up one subpage level.
Invert^[2] (source) by User:BrandonXLF – inverts the colour of all Wikipedia pages.
link-section-edits^[3] (source) by User:Enterprisey – The grey text is now a link in edit summaries, just like the "→".
cv-revdel^[4] (source) by User:Enterprisey – Quickly add {{copyvio-revdel}} to a page.
Subpages^[5] (source) by User:BrandonXLF - Adds a sub pages link in the personal toolbar.
What Links Here^[6] (source) by User:BrandonXLF – Adds a WhatLinksHere link in the personal toolbar (note: There's one in the left toolbar already).
UserLogToolbar^[7] (source) by User:Danski454 – replaces the Logs link on user page with Logged actions (like the old Logs link) and Target logs (logs where the user or main user page is the target).
SectionRemover^[8] (source) by User:Flooded with them hundreds – removes selected section(s) from a page.
PageMoverClosure^[9] (source) by User:Flooded with them hundreds – closes RM discussion, includes (page mover nac) in the closure.

Bot tasks

Recently approved tasks

PrimeBOT (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 29) – Approved 14:38, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
RonBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 9) – Approved 23:01, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
RonBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 10) – Approved 17:06, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
Ahechtbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3) – Approved 10:54, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
PrimeBOT (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 28) – Approved 15:00, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
TWLBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 13:02, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
KadaneBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 12:50, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
Krdbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 16:39, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Current requests for approval

ZackBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 10) – Open
MusikBot II (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 2) – Open
FRadical Bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Open
EranBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3) – Open
Galobot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Trial complete
TokenzeroBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 6) – Trial complete
Texvc2LaTeXBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Trial complete

Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #36, #37, #38, and #39. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes

There is a new user right for users who can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. Before this all admins could edit CSS and JavaScript. This was a security risk. This group is called interface administrators. Administrators can delete user CSS and JavaScript pages. [1][2]
There will be an A/B test on the Wikipedia mobile website. It starts this week. It tests how we show templates that show information about an article. The test will last two weeks. [3][4]
You can now use different CSS rules for different skins when you edit templates. This is because of TemplateStyles. [5]
wp10 in ORES is now called articlequality. [6]
When you get a new message on your talk page you get a yellow message in the toolbar. The preference to show or not show this has been removed. [7]
When you added or edited a template with the visual editor the input boxes were very big. This has been fixed. The input boxes will now be smaller until you click on them. Then they will change size to fit the text. [8]
The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. Images uploaded using Nearby are now automatically added to the associated Wikidata item. You can browse other images on Commons. You can see your achievements and your upload statistics. It has also fixed some bugs. [9]
MediaWiki web requests now have a time limit of 60 seconds for GET requests and 200 seconds for POST requests. [10]
Special:AncientPages can hide disambiguation pages. [11]
The preferences form has changed to use the standard look. If you see any problems please report them on Phabricator. [12]

Problems

UploadWizard had problems with campaigns. Users could not upload files. This has now been fixed. [13]
You can get a notification when a link is made to a page you created. This has not worked since June. It was fixed last week. [14]
Some diffs showed lines in the wrong order. This was fixed last week. [15]
Marking a cross-wiki notification as read didn't work every time. The other wiki was not updated. This has now been fixed. [16]
<maplink> did not work for a few days. This was because of a bug. This has now been fixed. [17]
{{subst:REVISIONUSER}} is used by some templates. For a period edits saved with {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} would save the previous user's name and not your username. This is now fixed. Edits made before the bug was fixed will still be wrong and need to be corrected. [18]
When you move a page the title still shows the old page name. The developers are working on fixing this. [19]
You could not see the menu on the notifications page on the mobile version. This has now been fixed. [20]

Future changes

The RelatedSites extension will be removed from Wikivoyage.
Unused projects on the Wikimedia Cloud virtual private server will be removed. This will happen in October. Projects can be marked if they are being used. [21]

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.

Installation code

^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/up-one-lvl-kbd.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/up-one-lvl-kbd.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/invert.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/invert.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/link-section-edits.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/link-section-edits.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js' ); // Backlink: User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/subpages.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/subpages.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/WhatLinksHere.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/WhatLinksHere.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Danski454/UserLogToolbar.js' ); // Backlink: User:Danski454/UserLogToolbar.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Flooded with them hundreds/sectionremover.js' ); // Backlink: User:Flooded with them hundreds/sectionremover.js
^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Flooded with them hundreds/PageMoverClosure.js' ); // Backlink: User:Flooded with them hundreds/PageMoverClosure.js

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1 October 2018 (all comments)

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It took me six months to get around to reading this. Why do they say we get a yellow message that we have a new message on our talk page? Mine have always been orange.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:08, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The colour is #FC3, which is somewhere between yellow and orange. - Evad37 [talk] 00:09, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And two months later, because there was no purple link after I cleared my history, I ended up reading this again. But I have additional information.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:44, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

User:Flooded with them hundreds/SectionRemover was deleted by editor request while User:Flooded with them hundreds/PageMoverClosure was moved to User:DannyS712/PageMoverClosure.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:50, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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