The Signpost

Technology report

Flow restarted; Wikidata connection notifications

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

  • SkinSwitcher[1] (source) by User:Eizzen – Allows users to view pages in any of the seven available skins (Vector, MonoBook, Modern, CologneBlue, Minerva, MinervaNeue, and ApiOutput)
  • AutoPurge[2] (source) by User:Eizzen – Similar to standard null edit/purge buttons, this script automatically purges certain cache problem pages listed in a user-defined window.AutoPurgePages variable array.
  • Display Contributions[3] (source) by User:Mvolz – Displays your edit count next to Contributions link in the top bar.
  • PageCreator[4] (source) by User:Eizzen – Displays information about a page's creator and links to the first revision of the page.
  • LastEditor[5] (source) by User:Eizzen – Provides links to user, talk and contribs pages of page's last editor, and additionally provides a "diff" link, minor edit marker, and summary of the edit in question.
  • DiffOnly[6] (source) by User:Mr. Stradivarius – Adds "diff only" links to diff pages, and optionally to history pages, recent changes, and the watchlist. Diff-only pages load quickly, so are useful for tasks that involve trawling through lots of diffs.

New gadget

Newly approved bot tasks

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #37 & #38. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

  • Recent changes
    • You can get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [1]
    • The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [2]
    • The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [3]
    • You can now see contributions from an IP range at Special:Contributions. Before you could only see contributions from single IP addresses. Some older contributions from IP ranges could be missing at first because it will take some time to add them. [4][5]
    • Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted. Phabricator projects and repositories have been renamed. [6]
    • OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.
  • Problems
  • Future changes

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Eizzen/SkinSwitcher.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Eizzen/SkinSwitcher.js]]
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Eizzen/AutoPurge.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Eizzen/AutoPurge.js]]
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Mvolz/displayContributions.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Mvolz/displayContributions.js]]
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Eizzen/PageCreator.js]]
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Eizzen/LastEditor.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Eizzen/LastEditor.js]]
  6. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Mr. Stradivarius/gadgets/DiffOnly.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Mr. Stradivarius/gadgets/DiffOnly.js]]
  7. ^ In your gadget preferences, in the "Appearance" section, check the box for XTools, then save your preferences
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Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
  • When are they going to fix that annoying "Content Translation"? Every time I open a blank page on the Dutch Wikipedia that pop-up shows up. But I have switched off the option in Monobook-skin... The Banner talk 09:37, 25 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Really pleased that Flow / Structured Discussions is being worked on again. Flow was a brilliant starting point but needed a bit more work to cover all the use cases. It, or something like it, is sorely needed. Editing wikitext directly needs to become a thing of the past. WaggersTALK 10:26, 29 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

















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