The Signpost

Technology report

Coming soon: Books-to-PDF, interactive maps, rollback confirmation

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #16 & #17. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

  • Recent changes
    • Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10,000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [1]
    • Advanced item Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [2][3]
    • All Wikipedias now have Page Previews.
    • The iOS and Android apps now have synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
    • The icons in the 2010 wikitext editor have changed. [4]
    • The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step. [5]
  • Future changes
    • The new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki. PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function. [6]
    • Advanced item Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3. [7]
    • <mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of flagged revisions will not get this feature in May. [8]
    • The rollback function could change. This was a German community request. All editors with rollback rights can leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).


This is what the rollback confirmation could look like – what do you think?

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:The Transhumanist/SearchSuite.js' ); // Backlink: User:The Transhumanist/SearchSuite.js
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:KATMAKROFAN/retroambox.css' ); // Backlink: User:KATMAKROFAN/retroambox.css
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/adminhighlighter.js' ); // Backlink: User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/adminhighlighter.js
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:AnAwesomeArticleEditor/voteSymbolsLite.js' ); // Backlink: User:AnAwesomeArticleEditor/voteSymbolsLite.js
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Anchorvale/scripts/Sandbox2.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anchorvale/scripts/Sandbox2.js
  6. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Sam Sailor/Scripts/Sagittarius+.js' ); // Backlink: User:Sam Sailor/Scripts/Sagittarius+.js
  7. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck.js' ); // Backlink: User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck.js
+ Add a comment

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 is the book-to-PDF coming? UserboxMaker35 (talk) 18:13, 26 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

PediaPress are investigating and will hopefully be able to answer that question soon. We honestly don't know right now. This is plan B, after all – we had hoped to already have it working, but the solution we used for individual articles ended up not working for books. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:48, 4 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/Technology_report