ULS Comeback

Runa Bhattacharjee has notified the community of the following:

On January 21 2014 the MediaWiki extension Universal Language Selector (ULS) was disabled on this wiki. A new preference was added for logged-in users to turn on ULS. This was done to prevent slow loading of pages due to ULS webfonts, a behaviour that had been observed by the Wikimedia Technical Operations team on some wikis.

We are now ready to enable ULS again. The temporary preference to enable ULS will be removed. A new checkbox has been added to the Language Panel to enable/disable font delivery. This will be unchecked by default for this wiki, but can be selected at any time by the users to enable webfonts. This is an interim solution while we improve the feature of webfonts delivery.

You can read the announcement and the development plan for more information.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please inform other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.23wmf14) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on February 13. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on February 18, and all Wikipedia wikis on February 20 (calendar).
• You can now use the list of active users again. [1] [2]
• The new search tool (CirrusSearch) now gives more importance to content namespaces if you search in several namespaces. [3]
• You can now directly link to files viewed with MultimediaViewer, the new tool for viewing media files. [4]
• You can read the summary of the Wikimedia technical report for January 2014. [5]

Problems

• On February 9, Wikimedia Labs was broken for about 2 hours due to an XFS file system problem. [6]
• On February 11, there were problems with VisualEditor for about 20 minutes due to a server logging issue. [7]
• On the same day, for about 20 minutes there were issues with page loading due to database problems.
• There were issues with page loading between 21:00 UTC on February 13 and 11:00 UTC on February 14 for users in Europe. It was due to a cache server problem.
• On February 14, all sites were broken for about 15 minutes for users in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the western part of North America. It was due to problems with cache servers.

VisualEditor news

• The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. [8]
• You can now change image display (like thumbnail, frame and frameless) with VisualEditor. [9]
• Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from paragraphs you are editing. [10]
• You will soon be able to create and edit redirect pages with VisualEditor. [11] [12] [13]