When broken is easily fixed: Emergency sever switch goes smoothly; technical glitches resolved; a new way to transfer files to Commons.
A new beta feature for transferring files to Wikimedia Commons was released for all wikis on 16 January. The FileExporter allows files to be transferred along with the file history (previous versions of the file) and description page history. Existing tools can copy files over, but information such as who originally uploaded the file has to be added to the description page, for example with the {{Original upload log}} template.
The feature was initially released in beta on MediaWiki.org, Meta-Wiki, Wikisource.org, and the German, Persian, Arabic, and Korean Wikipedias.
To test FileExporter, activate it in your user preferences; feedback can be left on the central talk page on MediaWiki.org.
The feature was developed by Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes project, in response to a 2013 wish from German-speaking communities. Further information is available on MediaWiki.org and Meta-Wiki.
For a short time on 10 and 11 January (Thursday and Friday), several users reported that hitting the enter key in the edit summary box no longer saved the page. Instead, it opened a menu of common edit summaries, available when the default summaries gadget ("Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries") is enabled. A workaround was added to MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js until the issue was resolved.
An emergency server switch was performed on 17 January at 07:00 (UTC), due to a hardware failure. This impacted most wikis, but not English Wikipedia, nor Commons, Wikidata, Meta, Wikispecies, and several other Wikipedias (full list). The affected sites were read-only for less than four minutes during the switch. Further information is available on Phabricator.
A recent software update to the TemplateData extension caused some templates' data to become inaccessible to various tools. The affected templates were generally those that had been edited since the update was deployed. This resulted in VisualEditor not being able to display parameters or descriptions, as well as errors in gadgets and scripts such as ProveIt (report). The bug report, filed on 16 January, was given the priority "Unbreak now!", and a software patch resolving the issue was deployed on 21 January.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2019 #2, #3, #4, & #5. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
Templates with <templatestyles> could not show the difference between the live template and the sandbox version when they were tested. This has now been fixed. <templatestyles> has a new 
wrapper parameter now. You can use it for selectors like .mw-parser-output <wrapper parameter value> <selector from CSS page>. [2]Module namespace. [3] On several wikis, an account named "Edit filter" has been created on December 17 to perform some technical maintenance on AbuseFilter. This account has sysop rights but it's a system user and no human can use it. The account already existed on wikis where AbuseFilter can perform blocks, which are issued using this account. See T212268 for more information and future plans. The AbuseFilter variable minor_edit has been removed. It was deprecated in 2016. Now you can't use it. You can fix the filters using it. You can find them if you use the search bar on Special:AbuseFilter. In AbuseFilter, the "Throttle" action takes three parameters: count, period and groups. They must now strictly respect the requirements listed on mediawiki.org. A list of broken filters is on Phabricator. If you're familiar with AbuseFilter, please take a look and fix them. [4]Pages with unreviewed translations to translations that might have used machine translations without fixing the problems. This is so others can find them. You can find this category in Special:TrackingCategories on Wikipedias. MediaWiki logstash logging is moving to a new infrastructure. This is an ongoing deployment. [8] codesearch.wmflabs.org has been updated, with new and updated repositories and a new search options for code. [9]
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 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.{{subst:lusc|1=User:Enterprisey/script-installer.js}}
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importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/GlobalPrefs.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/GlobalPrefs.js
importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/MobileView.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/MobileView.js
importScript( 'User:BrandonXLF/GreenRedirects.js' ); // Backlink: User:BrandonXLF/GreenRedirects.js
importScript( 'User:Abelmoschus Esculentus/SATG.js' ); // Backlink: User:Abelmoschus Esculentus/SATG.js
importScript( 'User:DannyS712/errors.js' ); // Backlink: User:DannyS712/errors.js
importScript( 'User:Danski454/cat-next.js' ); // Backlink: User:Danski454/cat-next.js
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