Wiktionary:News for editors

Archives: 2007 to 2017, 2018 to 2028

• This page notifies editors of recent clarifications of or changes to policy or best current practice, major changes to templates, and the like.
  • All editors are encouraged to watch this page.
• Wikimedia-wide tech news is available at meta:Tech/News/Latest.
• Please note that older news listed here may no longer be current, and may in fact have been supplanted by newer standards of practice among editors.
• Please add news at the top!

{{col}} has replaced many column templates, including {{col-auto}}. The old templates will probably remain for now.

• WMF has "had to interrupt the enwiki dump for 20241220 and delay the start of the enwiki dump on January 1st."
• The new gadget ShowIDs has been added to display {{senseid}} and {{etymid}} IDs directly in pages.

• For taxonomic-name linking there are now two distinct templates: {{taxlink}} (Now with more Lua!!!), which is for taxonomic names for which enwikt DOES NOT have an entry, used as before, eg, {{taxlink|Rosa noentry|species}}, and {{taxfmt}} (New!!!, with Lua!!!), to be used for taxonomic names for which enwikt DOES have an entry, used just as {{taxlink}}, eg, {{taxfmt|Rosa multiflora|species}}. {{taxfmt}} will soon (months) have been applied automagically to all taxonomic names that currently have some link and eventually (many months) even to all now-unlinked taxonomic names. At present this just addresses formatting (various configurations of italics) and makes searches easier. In the more distant future it may make other changes (improvements???) easier. The resulting taxon formatting should be the same for both templates, but categorization will be different, mostly effecting only those with an active interest in taxonomic names.

• February 29: Following WT:RFM discussion, the Khanty (kca) and Mansi (mns) languages have been split into the Khanty and Mansi families, respectively, each consisting of three languages.

• "Revised proposal to encode Book Pahlavi in Unicode" by Anshuman Pandey

• October 24: The Lua memory limit was raised from 50 MB to 100 MB, and other improvements are being made relating to the way modules allocate memory. According to Tim Starling, this should give each page "3.6 times more memory" and essentially eliminate Lua memory errors. See discussion at Wiktionary:Grease pit/2023/October#Lua memory errors and Lua garbage collection.

• March 16: the vote to remove the horizontal rule passes, and WingerBot deals with all of them.

• February 5: Lite templates can now be used with reconstructed terms, using the normal syntax.
• Category:Pages using deprecated templates has been emptied of low-priority pages such as archived discussions, talk pages, and user pages. The category should now be empty in ordinary circumstances, just like our other maintenance categories such as CAT:E.
• February 2: Preliminary proposal to encode Ranjana

• January 16: {{trans-mid}} has been deprecated.
• January 14: The family code for the Finnic family of languages has been changed from fiu-fin to urj-fin, and the language code for Proto-Finnic respectively from fiu-fin-pro to urj-fin-pro.
• January 11: The language code for Eastern Mari has been changed from chm to mhr.
• January 5: The number list modules for Pite Sami (sje) and Ume Sami (sju) have been made.
• January 2: The number list module for Skolt Sami (sms) has been made.
• January 1: The number list modules for Inari Sami (smn), Kildin Sami (sjd), Lule Sami (smj) and Southern Sami (sma) have been made. Happy New Year, editors!

• Proposal to encode Tolong Siki
• Proposal to encode additional Tai Viet characters for the Jinping Dai

• Just in time for the new year, the translation boxes now use CSS columns (a second attempt after the first aborted try in August). This means that the number of columns in the translation box adapts to the width of the user's screen. There are also width options: an entry can contain {{trans-top|column-width=narrow}} to create a box with many short translations, or {{trans-top|column-width=wide}} to hold exceptionally long translations. If you find that you are now seeing too few columns on your screen, follow the instructions at T:trans-top#Personal customisation to tweak it to your tastes, or leave feedback at the Grease Pit.

• November 14: "The Unicode® Standard – 2023 Release Planning" by Peter Constable, Chair of the Unicode Technical Committee
• "Proposal for a compromise of the recent Old Hungarian proposal"
• "Proposal to Encode Latin characters for Initial Teaching Alphabet"
  • For more information on the Initial Teaching Alphabet:
    • http://itafoundation.org/about-us/what-is-i-t-a/
    • https://omniglot.com/writing/ita.htm

• As a result of the vote at "Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2022-09/Meaning of consensus for discussions other than formal votes created at Wiktionary:Votes", "Wiktionary:Voting policy" has been updated with the following:

Meaning of consensus for discussions which are not formal votes

Where the consensus of editors is required for discussions other than formal votes at Wiktionary:Votes (for example, in discussion rooms such as Wiktionary:Beer parlour and on discussion pages such as Wiktionary:Requests for deletion and Wiktionary:Requests for verification), the support of at least two-thirds of the editors taking a supporting or opposing stance in a discussion on an issue is a hint for the threshold for consensus, but it is not set in stone. As a result, the consensus determination is somewhat indeterminate and can take into account considerations other than pure tallying. Tallying does play a role.

• September 13: Version 15.0.0 of the Unicode Standard® has been released.
  • Specifically, the following blocks:
    • Kawi (Kawi; U+11F00–U+11F5F)
    • Nag Mundari (Nagm; U+1E4D0–U+1E4FF)
    • CJK Unified Ideographs Extension H (U+31350–U+323AF)

• User:This, that and the other/broken interwiki links contains lists of entries that have defective links to sister projects. The August 1 edition has such defective links (to WP) sorted by language section of the entry page with the defective links to make it easier for those who would like to correct the errors in entries in their favorite languages.
• The translation boxes now use CSS columns. This means that the number of columns in the translation box adapts to the width of the user's screen. There are also width options: you can specify {{trans-top|width=narrow}} for a box with many short translations, or {{trans-top|width=wide}} to hold exceptionally long translations. The {{trans-mid}} template no longer has a purpose and is now blank. This change has been temporarily reverted owing to a bug.
• The number list module for Maranao (mrw) has been made.

Following a vote, Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion has been updated to require a derogatory term to meet the usual attestation requirements within:

• two weeks of the term being created, or if this period has passed,
• two weeks of the term being nominated for deletion or verification.

Otherwise, it may be speedily deleted after that period. The template {{derogatory}} can be used to tag derogatory terms, or to generate boilerplate text when nominating such terms for deletion or verification.

Number list modules have been made for Burmese (my), Chakma (ccp), Oriya (or), Rohingya (rhg), Sylheti (syl), Santali (sat), Friulian (fur), Shan (shn), Lü (khb), Khmer (km), Uyghur (ug) and Yakut (sah).

• The pronunciation template {{lo-pron}} has been created.

• enwikt-translations, a Toolforge website to search the contents of translation templates extracted from Translations sections in the latest XML dump, was created.