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Reference things, sister things, stranger things

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By Evad37

Previews of references

Popup with reference details displayed over article text
An example of Reference Previews

A new beta feature has been deployed which allows you to preview references by hovering over the inline footnote. Reference Previews display the reference and its type in a popup with a link to navigate to the reference. Similar functionality has been available through gadgets on several wikis, such as Navigation popups and Reference Tooltips.

Sudden script stoppages, semicolons, and other strangeness

Several userscripts stopped working suddenly on October 21, as reported on the technical Village Pump. This was due to code being deprecated and removed over a shorter timeframe than usual and without much forewarning. Following this incident, XFDcloser was made into a gadget.

The Contributions special page had its limit of 5,000 results per page decreased to just 500. The lower limit was implemented to prevent potential denial of service attacks due to the impact of certain queries with long date ranges.

Extraneous semicolons started appearing on the Watchlist and other listings on November 8. The issue arose from improvements to the mobile watchlist that unexpectedly impacted the desktop view.

Little sisters' wishes

Popup of page preview, with a header containing the Wikibooks logo and text "From a related project: Read on Russian Wikibooks"
Interwiki popups concept, one of many wishes on this year's survey

The Community Wishlist Survey 2020 is open for voting until December 2nd. The WMF's Community Tech team, as per previous years, will work on the top wishes decided on by the community. Unlike previous years, this survey is exclusively for the smaller sister projects, with wishes for Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata specifically excluded. There are a total of 72 wishes in the survey, mostly for Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikiversity.

In brief

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Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2019 #45, #46, #47, & #48. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

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