Wikipedia:Tajmaɛt/yebrir 2017
Please accept our apologies for cross-posting this message. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, I am pleased to announce that self-nominations are being accepted for the 2017 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections.
The Board of Trustees (Board) is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. More information about this role can be found on Meta-Wiki. Please read the letter from the Board of Trustees calling for candidates.
The candidacy submission phase will last from April 7 (00:00 UTC) to April 20 (23:59 UTC).
We will also be accepting questions to ask the candidates from April 7 to April 20. You can submit your questions on Meta-Wiki.
Once the questions submission period has ended on April 20, the Elections Committee will then collate the questions for the candidates to respond to beginning on April 21.
The goal of this process is to fill the three community-selected seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The election results will be used by the Board itself to select its new members.
The full schedule for the Board elections is as follows. All dates are inclusive, that is, from the beginning of the first day (UTC) to the end of the last.
- April 7 (00:00 UTC) – April 20 (23:59 UTC) – Board nominations
- April 7 – April 20 – Board candidates questions submission period
- April 21 – April 30 – Board candidates answer questions
- May 1 – May 14 – Board voting period
- May 15–19 – Board vote checking
- May 20 – Board result announcement goal
In addition to the Board elections, we will also soon be holding elections for the following roles:
- Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
- There are five positions being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.
- Funds Dissemination Committee Ombudsperson (Ombuds)
- One position is being filled. More information about this election will be available on Meta-Wiki.
Please note that this year the Board of Trustees elections will be held before the FDC and Ombuds elections. Candidates who are not elected to the Board are explicitly permitted and encouraged to submit themselves as candidates to the FDC or Ombuds positions after the results of the Board elections are announced.
More information on this year's elections can be found on Meta-Wiki. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the election talk page on Meta-Wiki, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections
wikimedia.org.
On behalf of the Election Committee,
Katie Chan, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee
Joe Sutherland, Community Advocate, Wikimedia Foundation
Read-only mode for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May
ẓregRead this message in another language • Tanemmirt ɣef afus ara d-muddeḍ i tsuqilt ar tutlayt-ik
The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data center in Dallas. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to conduct a planned test. This test will show whether they can reliably switch from one data center to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.
They will switch all traffic to the secondary data center on Wednesday, 19 April 2017. On Wednesday, 3 May 2017, they will switch back to the primary data center.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop during those two switches. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
- You will not be able to edit for approximately 20 to 30 minutes on Wednesday, 19 April and Wednesday, 3 May. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Thursday 20 April and Thursday 4 May).
- If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
- Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
- There will be code freezes for the weeks of 17 April 2017 and 1 May 2017. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. /User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk)
MediaWiki message delivery (amyannan) 17:33, 11 yebrir 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata description editing in the Wikipedia Android app
ẓregWikidata description editing is a new experiment being rolled out on the Wikipedia app for Android. While this primarily impacts Wikidata, the changes are also addressing a concern about the mobile versions of Wikipedia, so that mobile users will be able to edit directly the descriptions shown under the title of the page and in the search results.
We began by rolling out this feature several weeks ago to a pilot group of Wikipedias (Russian, Hebrew, and Catalan), and have seen very positive results including numerous quality contributions in the form of new and updated descriptions, and a low rate of vandalism.
We are now ready for the next phase of rolling out this feature, which is to enable it in a few days for all Wikipedias except the top ten by usage within the app (i.e. except English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese). We will enable the feature for those languages instead at some point in the future, as we closely monitor user engagement with our expanded set of pilot communities. As always, if have any concerns, please reach out to us on wiki at the talk page for this project or by email at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks!
-DBrant (WMF) 08:41, 14 yebrir 2017 (UTC)
New Page previews feature
ẓregNew Page previews feature
Read this message in another language • Tanemmirt ɣef afus ara d-muddeḍ i tsuqilt ar tutlayt-ik
Hello,
The Reading web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working to enable Page previews, a beta feature known previously as Hovercards, as opt-in behavior for logged-in users and the default behavior for logged-out users across Wikipedia projects. Page previews provide a preview of any linked article, giving readers a quick understanding of a related article without leaving the current page. For this project, we are expecting to collect feedback over the following few weeks and tentatively enable the feature in early May, 2017.
A quick note on the implementation:
- For logged-in users who are not currently testing out the beta feature, Page previews will be off by default. Users may turn them on from their user preferences page.
- For logged-out users, the feature will be on by default. Users may disable it at any time by selecting the setting cog available in each preview.
- For users of the Navigation popups gadget, you will not be able to turn on the Page previews feature while using navigational popups. If you would like to try out the Page preview feature, make sure to first turn Navigation popups off prior to turning Page previews on.
You can read more about the feature and the tests we used to evaluate performance, try it out by enabling it from the beta features page, and leave feedback or questions on the talk page.
Thank you, MediaWiki message delivery (amyannan) 16:52, 19 yebrir 2017 (UTC)