Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #35 & #36. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

• Recent changes
  • Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [1][2]
  • You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that has logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [3]
  • You can block users from sending you notifications. [4] (see documentation page)
  • The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [5][6]
  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [7]
• Problems
  • Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [8]
  • Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [9]
• Future changes
  • In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [10]
  • New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [11]
  • The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.
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