Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Poem extension updated

On September 24th, an updated version of the Poem extension will be deployed to English Wikipedia. Most of the changes are back-end, but there is one change that will effect the formatting of poems. Per the fix to T33146, colons inside <poem></poem> tags will no longer invoke definition list syntax, but instead will invoke a 1 em indentation via a span tag. The visual difference is minor, but some editors may want to make adjustments accordingly. Kaldari (talk) 18:30, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

If you use {{xtag}} to create the tag, it links to the help or extension page: <poem>. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:55, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Ext links as file names

A small number of the pages in Category:Articles with missing files have an ext link as a page name, i.e File:http://SomeRandomLink.com. Can these be fixed with AWB a bot? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 18:50, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I will take this over to WP:BOTS. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:29, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Making an infobox collapsible

I have tried unsuccessfully to make {{infobox D&D creature}} into a collapsible infobox, like {{Infobox video game}} which was locked with tabular formatting to allow the collapse. I don't believe that's a standard infobox option, but I would like to use the creature infobox on list pages and don't want to make the page overly long with full boxes, so collapsible ones make more sense. Can anyone with a bit of technical knowledge help with this? BOZ (talk) 19:55, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

One one hand, that seems like a dangerous precedent. I think MOS:COLLAPSE might need to be re-examined and tightened, otherwise the anti-infobox people are going to request collapsed-by-default infoboxes in more places, which often leads to unchecked/unseen content...

On the other hand, I think you're probably talking about merging many creature-stub-articles into a single creature-list-article, which as a mergist I'm fully in favour of. (Easier sourcing, easier searching, easier comparing, and less deleted topics, plus usually less cruft).

I'd much rather an alternate solution though. Possibly the old sprinkling of {{clear}} and whitespace between sections, as many merged-into-list pages do. —Quiddity (talk) 23:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, I made it work, but whether or not it should be used, or when and where, are other matters. While I updated the documentation to reflect the change, perhaps this might be the sort of thing not worth documenting so as to help prevent abuse? I dunno. -— Isarra ༆ 23:33, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I will try to use it responsibly, if I use it at all. :) BOZ (talk) 13:47, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist star

When you click on it, it happily spins but "never" changes to blue or white, let alone give you a message, although it does execute the requested action.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:46, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

• Bugzilla:40103. --Yair rand (talk) 01:01, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

This is a serious enough issue that we reverted today's deployment for now. It should now be fixed.--Eloquence* 01:36, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

It does, thanks. One aside. We should be able to make the bubble message that appears now when you add or remove a page from your watchlist go away (escape?), or failing that, it should fade after a bit. It covers up the whole area making it difficult to access certain portions of the menu. I often have to refresh the page just to make it disappear.--Bbb23 (talk) 12:27, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

For me (Windows Vista, Firefox 13) it fades away after about 5 seconds. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:37, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Huh, I coulda sworn it didn't, but it certainly does now, thanks, John.--Bbb23 (talk) 22:36, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

A common.js install script

I want to create a url which preloads a script that adds code to a user's common.js page.

Teahouse did this nifty trick using this code:

• http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User%3AJtmorgan%2Fintroductions%2Ftemplate+left&editintro=&preloadtitle=&section=new&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js
• Which loads: User:Jtmorgan/introductions/template_left
• Which calls: importScript("User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/teahouseTalkbackLink.js");

So my version would be:

• (Fixed version)http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User%3AOcaasi%2FWikiLoveinstall&editintro=&preloadtitle=&section=new&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js
• Which loads User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstall
• Which calls: importScript("User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js");

I'm don't know what to do with User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js. How do I go about crafting that code so that it automatically preloads the code that is on my common.js page (or on another subpage) into any user's common.js page. Thanks for any tips! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 11:52, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Try http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User%3AOcaasi%2FWikiLoveinstall&editintro=&preloadtitle=&section=new&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:35, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Works like a charm! Do you have any idea what to do with User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js? That's the core code and I have no clue how to make it call that code to be placed on someone's common.js page. Thanks so much for your help! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 12:39, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Template rather than script

I also tried to preload the page with a template rather than a script. So:

• http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=%7B%7BUser%3AOcaasi%2FWikiLoveinstallscript.js%7D%7D&editintro=&preloadtitle=&section=new&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js

That should load {{User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js}} into the editor's common.js editing screen. But... it's not working. This does work but as before the script doesn't yet know how to transfer the code from User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js to common.js. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 15:43, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

That's not how preload works, I think. It doesn't accept wikitext as a parameter, only the title of a page; the specified page's source then gets dumped into the edit box. So, putting brackets in it isn't going to help. Are you trying to get the text {{User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js}} to be put into the edit box, or are you trying to get the contents of the page User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js (as if you did a substitution like {{subst:User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js}}) into the page? If the latter, than you can just take out the brackets and it'll work. If the former, then you'd need to create a page that contains {<includeonly></includeonly>{User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js}<includeonly></includeonly>} or something like that; the preloader will take out the includeonly tags, leaving only {{User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js}} in the editbox, and use that. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:26, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I'm trying to get User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js, but I hoped to do it as a transclusion if possible so that we could make changes on the fly.

EDIT: Something like http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User%3AWK-test%2Fsandbox&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js should do the trick. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 16:29, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

That works. But it leaves some vulnerability if we need to change the code mid-course. So, again, transclusion would be ideal. If not, we just have to be really careful to get the code right and complete before people start adding it to their common.js pages. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 17:04, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm currently using http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User%3AOcaasi%2FWikiLoveinstall&title=Special%3AMyPage%2Fcommon.js Ocaasi ^{t | c} 17:26, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Right, so use importScript("User:Ocaasi/WikiLoveinstallscript.js"); as the Teahouse example did; that'll have the effect you're looking for. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:07, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Pages added to categories

How do I see what pages have been added to all of the categories that are on my watchlist? Is there a tool or template or what? This is not the same as watching all of the pages in a category. I simply want to know when pages are added to all of the categories on my watchlist. Thank you! Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 23:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Go to the category page, for example Category:Cats. Then on the left side of the page, look for the Related changes link in the Toolbox section. Click it and you'll get a page like this Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Cats. It won't really tell you when pages are added to a category, but if you watch it closely enough, you'll be able to spot new articles. –Fredddie™ 01:08, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Similar thread raised at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories#Pages added to categories. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:22, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

It seems crazy that this can't be done at present, at least for category additions (the categorylinks table already includes a timestamp field which would easily allow tracking of additions since any given time; category link deletions could not be tracked without keeping a separate snapshot of former entries, or creating a hook each time a link is removed from the table). Are there any relevant toolserver tools at present? — Richardguk (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:04, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Fredddie: Thanks for the temporary solution. However, I want to know what pages have been added to all of the categories that I am watching.

RedRose: Yes, this is the same topic thread on the Categories WikiProject. I just thought I'd spread my question around to try to get more responses.

Richardguk: Yes, it does seem "crazy" that this can't be done currently. This should be added as a default function in the MediaWiki software. Or, a gadget should be added to the "My preferences" page. Or, a link to make a page for this purpose (just like the myskin.js on the "My preferences" page) could be added to the "My preferences" page.

If any of you (or anyone else) has a real option to help me, please let me know. Thanks a lot in advance! Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 17:01, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

NAVBOXes extending far to the right of the browser window

I have noticed recently a problem where NAVBOX'es are extending far past the right of the browser window instead of having the elements wrap in a nice way. The navbox at the end of the Operation Nougat article is an example. This behavior is browser dependent. I see the behavior under Firefox 15 and an up-to-date Chrome but the navbox renders fine under Opera 12. I have seen this behavior quite frequently in the last few months although it only affects a small percentage of pages. Can someone shed some light on what is causing this? Jason Quinn (talk) 14:06, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

PS One more thing, if I view the actual NAVBOX template. It wraps just fine. Jason Quinn (talk) 14:07, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

As it happens, Operation Nougat displays the navbox overwide for me too. Firefox 15.0.1 has a neat feature in that if you view the page source (right-click and select "View Page Source", or press Ctrl+U), any "bad" HTML shows up in bright red. Looking at the page source for Operation Nougat confirms my suspicions: some of the HTML closing tags (</li></ul> or </div>) have been misplaced, and don't occur in the proper table cell.

It's not a problem with the navbox itself, but with the HTML Tidy feature of MediaWiki, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 102#Are the HTML generators out of sync on some servers? and bugzilla:38273. The problem server is mw20. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:14, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Great. Thanks, RedRose64. I didn't know about HTML Tidy before now. The reporter of bug 38273 says that reports started around July. This general time period is consistent with when I first started noticing these problems although I don't remember the exact month. It wasn't until now that I decided to investigate it. Sometimes in the past, just loading the page once or a few times would fixed the issue, which was confusing. Operation Nougat is working now so I suppose something got purged. Thanks for the reply. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:53, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Circular Redirects

Just out of curiosity, what would happen if you placed redirect tags on two pages, each redirecting to the other? I thought about trying this in my sandbox, but decided it was a bad idea, in case the situation exploded and could not be undone. Thanks! Ebikeguy (talk) 14:55, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Answer: nothing. I wondered about this myself a while ago, and had the same reluctance to try it. Redirects only happen one time; after you're redirected once, you don't get redirected again, even if you're left at another redirect page. This is why double redirects need to be fixed; it just dumps you at the second redirect, without making you continue along the chain to the intended target. Here, check it out. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:07, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Darn it, Pinky, I will have to search for a new way to take over the world. -The Brain, aka: Ebikeguy (talk) 15:16, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Brain, we just tried to delete you; what are you doing coming back so quickly? Nyttend (talk) 00:45, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

ENWP image syntax usage

Has anybody run statistics on image sizing on ENWP? I'm interested to know what the most common image sizes are, versus how many people leave sizing to user preference (by using the thumb, frameless, frame, etc.). Also I'd be very interested to see how this evolves over time, as screen resolutions increase, but that would require an older data set which I doubt exists. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:35, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Tabs moved to bottom of page in Opera

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T42208

Since this morning, using Opera 12.02, all the tabs and user buttons have moved from the top of an article page to the bottom -- "Read", "Edit", "View history", and "My watchlist", "My contributions", etc. See screenshot. Has there been a change in the code since yesterday that could cause this? It's extremely annoying. Barsoomian (talk) 03:30, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what could have caused that :S. I'll stick it in Bugzilla for you now :). What OS are you on? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:31, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Now tracking :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:33, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Using Win2k (I know...). Also just noticed a similar problem with Google's search page, so it's more likely an Opera bug. Barsoomian (talk) 03:52, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

• Okay, fixed it, an Opera "style" preference, ("View/Style/Disable positioning", CSS override I think) -- which I'm sure I didn't change, but now turned off and pages are back to normal. Can close the issue, thanks. Barsoomian (talk) 04:38, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Edit summary and Subject/headline funkiness

I have come to think of the Wikipedia technology as having mid-life mood swings. One moment it's fine, the next moment it's whacked, and later, it's back to normal as if nothing happened. This just changed on mine within the last half hour - Poof! Right out of the blue! The Subject line I see as I write this has visibly dropped and is now obscuring a bit of the edit toolbar. This one doesn't actually have an edit summary box below. When on articles that do, the edit summary also drops and obscures a bit below it. Since my system and browser didn't change, what kind of mood swing has the Wikipedia software gone through? Maile66 (talk) 00:04, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

And, yes, before anyone mentions it, I cleared my cache. So that isn't it. Maile66 (talk) 00:13, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not able to reproduce this. It would help if you could provide a few more details: 1) a screenshot of the actual issue, 2) browser/OS info, 3) info about preferences (e.g. which skin, with enhanced toolbar or old one), 4) info about gadgets or user scripts you're using.--Eloquence* 01:19, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for posting here. As of this morning, it's no longer doing its funky-drop stuff. Everything is fine. Go figure. Maile66 (talk) 10:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

That's probably due to us reverting yesterday's deployment (see further below). That means the issue will likely re-appear when we re-deploy, so it would still be useful to have the aforementioned info, even if you can't take a screenshot of the problem right now.--Eloquence* 15:50, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

BTW, for future questions, how does one do a screen shot into the Village pump talk page? I know how to do a screen shot. I'm just not sure how to paste within Wikipedia text. I use Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (if that matters), Firefox 15.0.1, Modern skin, Enhanced edit toolbar. Editing gadgets: Citation Expander, HotCat, Provelt, wikiEd. There's other issues going on since early summer, when I was using earlier versions of Firefox. They seem to be getting worse:

• Copy and Paste inserting on a new blank line, it inserts an extra blank line, and THEN does the insert
• Repeating the "delete" key to remove characters - it removes the first character and then jumps to somewhere else and removes the wrong text.
• Inserting a link or inline citation, either from the toolbar or from Provelt, fails most of the time. But when it does insert, it jumps to somewhere else on the page - often to a previous section - to do the insertion. I've had to click "Change" to find out if the insertion happened, and where it actually inserted in the document.

Maile66 (talk) 23:27, 11 September 2012 (UTC)::

The browser is immaterial, but I also have XP with SP3, so here's how I did some of my screenshots (see for example File:Vpt redrose64 thedj.PNG). On the problem screen, I pressed Print Screen which copies the entire screen into the cut/paste buffer. Then I started Microsoft Paint (which I believe is a standard feature of XP) and pressed Ctrl+V to paste in the whole screen. Then I selected the "Select" tool (the dotted rectangle at the top of the second column of the toolbar at left), used the mouse to outline the general area showing the problem, including some of the surrounding area for context, and Ctrl+C to copy to the cut/paste buffer. Then I went for Ctrl+N to start a new document (answering "No" to the question about saving changes). Then Ctrl+V to paste in the cropped section. Then I selected the "Ellipse" tool (bottom of the first column in the left toolbar), picked a distinctive colour from the palette (in this case red), and drew the ellipse to indicate the specific problem. You could draw an arrow if that is more suitable. Then I saved it as a PNG file, then uploaded it and gave it the license {{Wikipedia screenshot|logo=no}} (the |logo=no parameter means that the Wikipedia puzzleball at top left is not included). Then I linked it into the page in the normal way, see here. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:14, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Most or all issues you're experiencing seem likely related to the gadgets you're using, e.g. wikEd, and it's generally best to leave a note for the gadget authors about any issues (usually the talk page of the wiki page linked in the preferences is a good place to start). Try disabling them all and re-enabling them individually to narrow down issues. Just for fun I tried enabling all these prefs and seeing if I could reproduce your earlier problem, but I still couldn't.--Eloquence* 07:59, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Still need parser function #set

When trying to reduce templates for the wp:Expansion depth limit, I keep noticing the need for an assignment operator of a "real language", such as a parser function "{{#set:xx|50}}" or without "#" as "{{set:xx|50}}" to set parameter {{{xx}}} to "50" inside the same template, not require a subtemplate to set the value of a parameter. I realize this simple function would make templates much easier to write, and could then run 10x faster, with an expansion depth of 4, rather than 40 levels, but surely we could invent some other problems to make editors miserable. Here's the deal: the assignment operator, to set the value of a variable, is the most common operator in small computer software programs (the procedure call is most-common in large software). So, anyway, the need for #set is the "elephant in the room" for "Why Johnny can't write templates"  without going wiki-insane. Who decides these issues, to add parser functions? -Wikid77 (talk) 06:35, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Tim Starling —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:36, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

And of course it is being addressed, it's called Scribunto, you just choose not to accept the timetable in which it is being addressed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:54, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

See mw:Lua scripting for the timetable. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:44, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

There is an extension mw:Extension:Variables, not of much help on here though as its unlikely to be installed. --Salix (talk): 10:48, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the news. See note below, "Global variables by mw:Extension:Variables" -Wikid77 (talk) 04:43, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think the rationale for preventing in-page assignment is that it changes the parser environment from stateless to stateful (apologies if I've misused the terminology), instead of relying solely on recursive expansion. Anyway, as TheDJ says, things are set(!) to change. If the imminent testing assessment goes well, Scribunto rollout is proposed for 2013Q1. — Richardguk (talk) 10:51, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

If there were any major parsing advantages by preventing in-page assignment of parameter values, then I would consider them less important, than the potential gains of storing a tedious result in a local parameter. Currently, we have many templates which repeat a calculation, or procedure, numerous times, or pass the result into a nested template, because the result cannot be stored in a local parameter. As a consequence of passing the result into another template, then any related parameters must also be passed, and we can get the 2x-slower templates which pass 200 parameters into a subtemplate because they cannot store the result of some complex calculations inside the current template. One of the worst problems has been the Template:Taxobox taxon-chains, where getting the greatgrandparent taxon of the grandparent taxon of the parent taxon (etc.) causes nested templates to run 35 deep, into other templates to reach 60-taxon depth. However, the careful use of nested subtemplates has allowed for 60-level taxon chains, within the current expansion depth limit of 40 nested levels. It is ironic however, that for years, one simple function as {{#set:taxon|{{taxonomy|{{{taxon}}}|code=parent }} could have avoided 30 levels of nested expansion depth, by the addition of one trivial parser function. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:53, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

• Global variables by mw:Extension:Variables: An even better fix would be to install mw:Extension:Variables, which would define global variables which could span from the top article text into the various templates used. That would be awesome, to allow each article to set global preferences for how templates would function, based on the settings made inside the article text, rather than per-user preferences. In such a case, we could, indeed, have measurement conversions which displayed the Imperial or U.S. customary units first, in article text, simply based on a global variable which triggered the flipping of units. Even though enwiki is kept limited, with relatively little progress, it is refreshing to know how other people have radically expanded to make a MediaWiki installation produce clever, auto-customized results, through such simple, efficient extensions. O, brave new world, that has such creatures in it. I have seen the future, and it has returned. Thank you. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:43, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

  This extension is incompatible with template caching. Ruslik_Zero 06:23, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

  See also bugzilla:7865. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:41, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Image class

File:Vandalism_San_Francisco.jpg

I am curious why one of these images has an 'image' class in its wrapping anchor tag but the second one does not? The only difference between them is |link= parameter. Is it a bug or intended behavior? Ruslik_Zero 19:18, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

It is not the image with the 'image' class, but the link. And one link has an image as a target, and the other link does not. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:25, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I changed the link in the second image to point to the image itself but still there is no image class. It appears that that the class disappears if nonempty link parameter is present. Ruslik_Zero 03:51, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Lol, the system is not THAT smart, it doesn't actually look at the target file, just assumes that when you use link, you want to link to something different than the default, which is the image. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:55, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

There appears to be bug report for this. Ruslik_Zero 06:48, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

These behavior is inconsistent. And currently the 'image' class is just useless. It is impossible to apply any consistent style to all anchor tags with images inside. Ruslik_Zero 10:09, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Template editing

Hi, is there any good tool available for editing templates. I was looking for one that either shows syntax or enables you to hi-light or hop between matching brackets. Keith D (talk) 23:03, 12 September 2012 (UTC)iki

Gadget WikiEd highlights template syntax. Ruslik_Zero 04:12, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Also meta:User:Remember the dot/Syntax highlighter. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:06, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I have installed importScript('User:Ais523/bracketmatch.js');. I cannot find its maintenance page. -DePiep (talk) 07:09, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, the first 2 do not really do much for heavy bracketed templates. The third one looks interesting so I installed it and appears to help trying to get things balanced up again. Keith D (talk) 11:45, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Do come back if it doesn't work, I can write some manual lines. -DePiep (talk) 13:16, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Release 1.20wmf11 re-deployed

Just a quick note that we re-deployed MediaWiki 1.20wmf11 (list of changes) today. This also includes an upgrade to jQuery 1.8.1 from 1.7.2 (release notes for 1.8.0; release notes for 1.8.1).--Eloquence* 01:53, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Could this have broken the timeline extension? See Wikipedia:Help desk#Timeline display issues. There's a timeline at User:John of Reading/X2; go there, click "Edit", make a trivial change, "Preview" - and nothing is displayed. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:19, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Probably related, yes; I know Aaron and Tim have been working on moving the timeline generated images to the new Swift storage system. I've opened T42209 in case they're not aware of the breakage.--Eloquence* 07:41, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Should be fixed now.--Eloquence* 05:18, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD.js

It looks like something has broken User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD.js (documentation) today, and I am guessing it is probably related to the upgrade of jQuery mentioned above. The dialogue that used to appear underneath the "edit" tab now appears in the very top left of the screen, so that the buttons are obscured by the Wikipedia logo. (So it's basically unusable.) Could someone who knows JavaScript take a look and try to figure out what's going on? Thanks — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 09:56, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and this is on Vector. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 09:58, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I think this is the same issue as Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#unable to use WP:AFCH script and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#unable to use WP:AFCH script#Moving the "reviewing" tray because both use User:Timotheus Canens/displaymessage.js. PleaseStand (talk) 10:34, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I think if Timotheus Canens or another admin deletes both occurrences of .parent() from User:Timotheus Canens/displaymessage.js, the script will work how it should again. I think gerrit:19008 is what broke the script. PleaseStand (talk) 10:52, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I've done the edit, and it looks like it works. Thanks! — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 10:56, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorting of CAT:ALLPROD

The sorting of page CAT:ALLPROD seems to be broken when I view it. It should be sorted alphabetically, but the entries for individual numbers which I assume should only list articles whose name starts with the appropriate number, include a random selection of entries. Example: under heading "0" I see 1-2-3 (game), 2008 England national rugby league team season, 2012 Luke Pomersbach molesting charges, Adriano Moké, Alen Halilović... Is this broken? --Colapeninsula (talk) 12:37, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

The sorting is deliberate. Template:Proposed deletion/dated contains [[Category:All articles proposed for deletion|{{mod|{{#time:j|{{{timestamp}}}}}|10}}{{PAGENAME}}]]. The code produces a leading digit for sorting. The digit should be the last in the day of the month of the nomination. This means editors going through the category can often see how long ago a page was nominated (31 or 1 may cause problems). Post to Template talk:Proposed deletion if you want to suggest a change. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:56, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Broken image with a file now on commons

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41615

The image File:Polygon types.svg has been moved to commons commons:File:Polygon types.svg and the file deleted here. Rather than get the normal redirection to the commons page you get (e.g. File:Assorted polygons.svg) I instead get "View or restore 11 deleted edits?" with a broken image. The image also appears broken in the article Polygon. Is there a way to fix this so we don't get a broken image in the article?--Salix (talk): 13:57, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

This is an issue caused by the switch to the new file storage backend. Waiting is all that is required (of users) for this to become fixed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:12, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Metadata needs help

I think this is a very important page, yet it is just a list. Could somebody try to add some prose to it, and generally make it more presentable? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:37, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Protection log entries are obscured when a page is moved

I just noticed in answering a help desk post here that when a protected page is moved and the protection is moved with it, the protection log entry for the new title doesn't show the form of protection, only that the protection was moved. This means that to see form of the protection, you have to look at the log entry for the prior title.

Wouldn't it be cleaner if the log entry said something like "moved protection settings ([move=sysop] (indefinite)) from "Title 1" to "Title 2"..."? (addition in green). I have little experience with Bugzilla searches (to see if this already has been explored) or posting there so I thought I'd lay this out here for comment.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:48, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

bugzilla:38123 is closely related. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:03, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I have posted there and voted.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:16, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

restricted page needs redirect.

http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Pretty_lights has been deleted, and is locked for editing. It should redirect to http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Pretty_Lights. I can't add a redirect. --naught101 (talk) 00:55, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Boy, was I surprised to see that I was the one who originally deleted that page. Anyway, redirect created. Someguy1221 (talk) 01:28, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Text wrap for pie chart template

I'd like to use the {{Pie chart}} template in an article, but it doesn't seem to allow text to wrap around it. Any suggestions? CanadianJudoka (talk) 05:02, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Why do you think it doesn't allow text to wrap around it? Ruslik_Zero 07:57, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Maybe you're viewing it on a browser where it's not rendering right, like mobles? Honestly I would upload a cropped screenshot or make an .svg file. That really doesn't look ready for prime time. —Cupco 08:38, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Ruslik: I'm using the latest version of Chrome on Windows 7, and the template doesn't allow text to wrap around it no matter where I put it. Cupco: I did take a screen shot, but it seems like there should be a better way to do this on Wikipedia. How would you suggest that I make an SVG file? CanadianJudoka (talk) 14:47, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

SVG files may be created using software such as Inkscape, or a plain text editor. Here is an example from Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 (Second Edition) W3C Recommendation 16 August 2011, which shows how a two-slice pie chart may be constructed in SVG. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:21, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I really wish that there was a way to do this by just entering values and having the software draw a pie chart for me, which is why I like the idea of the pie chart template. Manually drawing one in Inkscape or taking the time to figure out the right set of instructions to draw one in SVG seems like a poor use of time. CanadianJudoka (talk) 15:46, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

• Put pie in wikitable align=right: Just use the standard alignment technique, to box any item, by putting the pie chart in a wikitable, higher on the page, while adding the wrap-around text below the wikitable. Example:

         {| align=right
         | valign=top |
         {{Pie chart
            | thumb = | caption = Sizes chart |other = 
            | label1 = BIG    | value1 = 55 | color1 = blue
            | label2 = MEDIUM | value2 = 33 | color2 = red
            | label3 = SMALL  | value3 = 12 | color3 = orange
         }}
         |}
         This text should appear<br>to the left of the pie chart<br>and wrap
         down the page<br>while the pie chart remains<br>at the right-side.

See page Template:Pie_chart/sandbox, which has the above example, to run it on your browser. Remember anything can be boxed within the wikitable tokens "{| align=right" and "|}". The table goes above, and the text after the table, to format along the left side of the table. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:06, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

When I wrote the template, I included a thumb parameter for left- and right- aligning the pie chart, which the user says works. Unless there is something else to align along with the chart, I see no need to wrap a table around it. PleaseStand (talk) 14:50, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it turns out that the problem was that I had left the 'thumb' parameter blank. Doing this defaults the chart to the left side of the screen and does not allow text wrapping. Setting the parameter to either 'left' or 'right' works fine, however. Thanks for the help. CanadianJudoka (talk) 06:53, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Two questions

I have two, entirely unrelated questions. I thought I'd ask them together, so I didn't have to open two threads.

1. I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find the JavaScript to do it—how do you add a sidebar link (in this case I want it to be so that I can view all the logs for any given page)?
2. When I rollback an edit on a page, the page isn't added to my watchlist, despite having "Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist" enabled in my preferences. Why is this happening?

If anyone can answer either of these questions, that would be great. Thanks, David1217 ^{What I've done} 01:24, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

User:Gadget850/Help:Sidebar is a work in progress. However, if you enable Preferences → Pending changes → Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar, then you get a Page tab at the top which includes page logs. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 01:32, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I like that gadget, but I wish it didn't make the history tab go away. Is there any way to change that? David1217 ^{What I've done} 02:16, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

History is a dropdown under the Page tab. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:03, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I know, but I want the history tab to be on its own, like it is without the gadget. David1217 ^{What I've done} 23:54, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Never mind, I figured out how to do that (I should have looked at the script description page!) David1217 ^{What I've done} 00:11, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

1. You can use the addPortletLink function to add links to the sidebar and other menus.
2. Rollback bypasses normal editing procedures, including adding anything to your watchlist; if you want to add a page to your watchlist, you'll need to either edit it a different way (such as twinkle's rollback or another script serving that purpose) or manually watch it. -— Isarra ༆ 05:31, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Isarra, for the link and the explanation. David1217 ^{What I've done} 23:54, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

2001:0:0:0:0:0:0:1

Is User:2001:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 a real user, or is it an IPv6 address like me? It appears when I tell Special:Listusers to search starting at 2001:18E8:2:1020:9A4:966F:1021:7F4A, complete with a log entry, but when I look at contributions I get the normal "Please note: these are the contributions from a user editing from an IPv6 address" warning, and the "log" link accessible from that page has no log entries at all. 2001:18E8:2:1020:9A4:966F:1021:7F4A (talk) 16:28, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

It's a valid IPv6 address. That said, no one has yet edited using that address, as evidenced by the empty log. elektrikSHOOS (talk) 16:48, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

There is a bit of strangeness there. The ListUsers page shows a user named "User:2001::1" created in 2006, long before that syntax meant anything special; but when you try to follow that link, the latest software thinks it has to be clever and takes you to User:2001:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 instead. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:57, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

That account must be renamed, as it was likely created before IPv6 was recognized by MediaWiki as valid IP addresses.--Jasper Deng (talk) 01:16, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I think it would take a developer to do that. Every attempt to use administrative tools on that account sends me to 2001:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1. I assume the rename function would face the same issues. So in fact, what has been pointed out here is likely an unblockable account. Did no one screen for IPv6-like account names before it was implemented on Wikipedia? Someguy1221 (talk) 01:32, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

No; for now it may be possible to stop the user from editing using an edit filter for such usernames. --Jasper Deng (talk) 01:41, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't think the user can even log in. I get "Login error You have not specified a valid user name" when I enter that name at login with a random password. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:53, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Sync the time

How can I make the clock below be synchronized with GMT +8?

<div style="border:1px solid #ccc; background: #fff; border-right:3px solid #ccc; border-bottom:3px solid #ccc; text-align: center; padding:3px; float:{{{1}}}; font-size: smaller; line-height: 1.3; margin-right: 4px;">
<div style="width:100%">{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}</div>
<div style="font-size: x-large; width: 100%;">{{CURRENTDAY}}</div>
<div style="width: 100%;"> {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}</div>
<div style="background: #aaa; color: #000;">'''{{CURRENTTIME}}''' PHT</div>
</div></center></div>
<span style="border:1px solid black;padding:1px;">[[User:TruPepitoM|<font style="color:#1404bd;background:#de0100;">TruPepitoM</font>]][[User talk:TruPepitoM|<font style="color:#de0100;background:#1404bd;">Talk to us</font>]]</span>

TruPepitoMTalk To Me 00:29, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Try this with {{#time: |+8 hours}} formatting instead of {{CURRENT...}}:

<div style="border:1px solid #ccc; background: #fff; border-right:3px solid #ccc; border-bottom:3px solid #ccc; text-align: center; padding:3px; float:{{{1}}}; font-size: smaller; line-height: 1.3; margin-right: 4px;">
<div style="width:100%">{{#time: l|+8 hours}}</div>
<div style="font-size: x-large; width: 100%;">{{#time: j|+8 hours}}</div>
<div style="width: 100%;"> {{#time: F|+8 hours}}</div>
<div style="background: #aaa; color: #000;">'''{{#time: H:i|+8 hours}}''' PHT</div>
</div></center></div>
<span style="border:1px solid black;padding:1px;">[[User:TruPepitoM|<font style="color:#1404bd;background:#de0100;">TruPepitoM</font>]][[User talk:TruPepitoM|<font style="color:#de0100;background:#1404bd;">Talk to us</font>]]</span>

PrimeHunter (talk) 00:43, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

The #time formatting is documented at mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions##time. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:55, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Inflation calculator eliminating "thousand"

Couple questions. For this: ${{formatprice|{{Inflation|US|2500|1883}}}} it spits out $81,750. Anyway to make it show xyz,000 ? Also I have noticed that for calculations that have a dollar or fifty cents or penny for years prior to 1850 there is some symbol that spits out NDA or something I am guessing that the formula as written isn't capable of numbers less than $100? Any formula that is? Thanks. Marketdiamond (talk) 14:50, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I tried to have the formula read but you can see it clearly in the "edit" space. Thanks. Marketdiamond (talk) 14:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Fixed the formatting in your comment.

Try:

• using the {{Inflation}} template's |r= parameter to specify the amount of rounding (positive numbers round to decimal places, negative numbers round to multiples of ten, 100, 1,000 etc – you can probably type different values of r if the magnitude varies a lot in different cases, so that some results are rounded more than others as appropriate);
• using the {{formatnum:...}} "magic word" to format the number with commas separating the thousands.

So: ${{formatnum:{{Inflation|US|2500|1883|r=-3}} }} produces "$82,000".

— Richardguk (talk) 17:56, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! This is working! However I also have a .04 from 1779 $ I have tried -5 and then -3 and still nothing though the $NVANaN thing disappeared. Any suggestions for a .04? Marketdiamond (talk) 19:29, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Glad that's helping. Unfortunately, the template is relying on data for US inflation that only goes back to the year 1800. If you want the template to include older data, you might want to leave a comment at Template talk:Inflation or on the talk page of one of the template editors (the last editor to update the US data was User:Pascal666). — Richardguk (talk) 19:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for all the help, I will take your suggestion. Just for kicks I plugged in 1800 and 1801 for the .04 and $4 and it is now spitting out 0 (which I know is incorrect). Not that it matters but is $10 or $100 the smallest amount it will convert to current value? Marketdiamond (talk) 19:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

You need to increase r to zero (for the amount in round dollars) or a positive value (r=1 to the nearest dime, r=2 to the nearest cent), because even after inflation the amount is less than $1. So ${{formatnum:{{Inflation|US|.04|1800|r=0}}}} produces "$1". Note also that there should be no bar |, only a colon, at the end of formatnum:. — Richardguk (talk) 20:51, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Gotit, after you mentioned putting the - in I had blinders on for that, duh I got it now, excellent help, thanks a million! Marketdiamond (talk) 22:27, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Before or after Inflation? :) Naraht (talk) 15:39, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

• Could also Spellnum: Just a reminder that another numeric format is to show the price number in words, so:

• {{Inflation|US|2500|1883|r=-3}} → 82000
• {{spellnum|{{Inflation|US|2500|1883|r=-3}} }} → eighty-two thousand

That gets the "62" into words, along with "thousand". -Wikid77 (talk) 05:22, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Wikid77 and Naraht . . . you deflated my inflated situation nicely! Marketdiamond (talk) 22:58, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Watch a category?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T3710

To anyone's knowledge, has there ever been discussion about enabling users to watchlist all articles within a category? I mean single-click style. The Interior (Talk) 20:34, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

• Something like this? Bulwersator (talk) 21:25, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

See also bugzilla: 1710. Helder 18:21, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

The RELC link Bulwersator examples comes close. 1. It can be a wikilink to the SPEC. 2. It does not watchlist their talkpages. For a stable category, one can create and maintain a list page (talkpages added, multiple categories and individual pages together). .../List of Articles. RELC: Special:RecentChangesLinked/.../List of Articles. -DePiep (talk) 11:59, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the Related Changes tips. I'll use that for now and maybe create some sub-pages. I've never interacted with Bugzilla, should I leave a report about this discussion? I still think it (one-click category watch) would be a good thing to enable in the future. The Interior (Talk) 19:55, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Table coloring help

Ok I have attempted several times to insert background colors into the standard wiki table headers:

! bgcolor="#ffdaba"test1 ! bgcolor="#ffffcc"test2 ! bgcolor="cyan"test3

but it is not coming back as coloring the whole field. Please help. Also how and what syntax do I use to get borders=0. Thanks. Marketdiamond (talk) 01:09, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

You need a | between the style and cell contents:

test1	test2	test3

74.74.150.139 (talk) 01:34, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, this helps! Marketdiamond (talk) 03:02, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

On an aside, please use "style="background-color: #ffffcc" instead. bgcolor is a deprecated HTML attribute, style is not. --Izno (talk) 15:11, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks will do! Marketdiamond (talk) 22:57, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Font size

I am working on a table and I would like it to use a smaller font than the rest of the article so that it takes up less space. I've looked around, though, and I can't find a page that explains how to change the font size. Any suggestions? CanadianJudoka (talk) 23:10, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Add style="font-size:...%;" to the table formatting. For example, to reduce the text to 90% of the usual size:

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:90%;"
|-
! Example heading
|-
| Example text
|}

which produces:

Example heading
Example text

More guidance at Help:Table.

— Richardguk (talk) 00:52, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks for your help. CanadianJudoka (talk) 02:42, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

See Template:Resize

Also a related/current discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility#Small_print. (Don't go too small. 90% is probably a good minimum) —Quiddity (talk) 20:30, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Pushpin map

I'd like to create a pushpin map from this file File:Ipswich UK ward map 2010 (blank).svg . Are there instructions on how I can do this?

JASpencer (talk) 07:31, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

See Creating a new map template. Keith D (talk) 11:53, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Now sorted. Thank you. JASpencer (talk) 17:45, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Ajax Quick Preview scripts and gadgets

Anyone uptodate or curious about AjaxPreview / QuickPreview / Live preview / etc ?

Please see WP:VPR#Previewing an edit using Javascript instead of the servers and give advice/feedback/synopsis.

(I listed as much as I could find, and have probably overwhelmed that thread with amateur research! >.< ) Thanks. —Quiddity (talk) 20:47, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

a mess: List of residences of Joseph Haydn

List of residences of Joseph Haydn: this article is a mess because of the pictures over the text: i'm not good enough with tables: can someone fix it? thanks 62.203.79.47 (talk) 23:09, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I got rid of the quote box template to uncover the section edit links. The template might have been added to prevent the edit links from "bunching up", which is no longer a problem because of a 2010 change to Wikipedia's CSS code. Nevertheless, this article has too many images, and some ought to go. PleaseStand (talk) 00:00, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

thanks for the fixing + no, i don't think there are too many pics! 83.78.188.3 (talk) 06:37, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Page view referrals

I just noticed that one of the articles that I have been working on had a significant spike in views a couple of days ago, and I was wondering if there is any way to find out where the referrals are from (I assume the link was posted on a website). 'Page view statistics' does not seem to have this option. CanadianJudoka (talk) 06:56, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

No one has any thoughts on this? CanadianJudoka (talk) 01:21, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

The information you seek would be kept in Wikipedia's access logs, which are not available. To my knowledge the closest we get to traffic-related data is a rolled-up number of hits per page per hour (the link in the "statistics" box at left rolls up by day). Oh yeah, you know that already. Could you search Google News for the subject to see if it was recently "popular"? There may be more refined methods of searching for the subject by "recentness" but I don't know what they are; check advanced search on a few search engines. You asked for an answer. :) I agree that it would be useful information to have. Raw access logs can't be released for privacy reasons, but I don't see a problem with aggregating popular referers when they reach a certain threshold number per a certain period of time, for a given article--and making that data available to all. Riggr Mortis (talk) 01:34, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. The article is Judo in Canada, and I haven't found it mentioned anywhere obvious. Your 'threshold' suggestion is a good one. Any idea who to talk to about putting that into place? CanadianJudoka (talk) 22:53, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation error on first attempt to access each page

Resolved

 – As reported by user RichardGuk, the affected servers have been restarted, and pages can now be accessed normally. — DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 17:14, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

For each page, I'm getting a Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation error on the first attempt to access it on Wikipedia. The page loads correctly on subsequent attempts. What's going on? Firefox 15 on Windows 7. — DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 15:32, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Details about this error:

— DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 15:33, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Note that this happened about 55 minutes ago, and I no longer get this error, but I'd like to know why this happened. — DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 15:40, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

The error message stopped for a time but started again. In addition, editing generally is exceptionally slow, although there are intermittent periods of normal (or near normal) response times.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:49, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Trouble logging in?

Is anyone else having very slow logins, not all the icons on the global login page loading, and issues staying logged in (i.e. login, go back to page being viewed, refresh and it says logged out)? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:13, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

And now I'm being occasionally logged out while browsing too. Sigh! - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:18, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, this has been happening to me too. (I'm logged in via the secure server.) It looks like there is some kind of problem with the server connection going on and off. I've had trouble logging in, trouble saving an edit, and trouble with being logged out when changing from page to page. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:27, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm not on the secure server, but I haven't had any login issues. — DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 17:43, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Update: No issues on the secure server, either. — DragonLord ^{(talk/contribs)} 17:57, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is very slow to respond for me; it is suffering some problems with eiter the squids or an internal router. A Traceroute reveals no problem, but the above error indicates an internal connection issue. — Edokter (talk) — 18:09, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Looks like some slow servers have been rebooted. — Richardguk (talk) 19:44, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

I was getting the Wikimedia error that day as well, at approximately the same time as Bushranger. I had so much difficulty signing in (and may never have), though I could have reported this without doing that.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:33, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

HTML 5 mode enabled

Hi everyone, a minor (we hope) configuration change was just deployed that enables HTML 5 mode on all sites. This may result in some problems for some gadgets and other tools that rely on our generated HTML rather than using the standard API. Please join us on the #wikimedia-tech IRC channel, or reply here, if you have problems with this. Thanks! -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 18:15, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

VisualEditor/Parsoid fortnightly update - 2012-09-17 (MW 1.20wmf12)

Hey all,

Below is a copy of the regular (every fortnight) update on the VisualEditor project and its cousin the Parsoid so that you all know what is happening (and make sure you have as much opportunity to tell us when we're wrong, as well as help guide the priorities for development and improvement).

VisualEditor

The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.20wmf12 branch deployment on Monday 17 September.

The last two weeks included the annual Wikimedia Engineering all-tech meeting and the Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting, so this iteration was in effect shorter than others. The team have continued to spend most of the coding time over the two weeks since 1.20wmf11 working on how the code integrates together. This work will provide cleaner interfaces between components of the VisualEditor, so new developers can re-use and extend VisualEditor to support new 'node types' like categories or tables when we work on these later.

Beyond the API work, there have been a few minor changes to the user interface made this iteration. Firstly, the link inspector now checks for invalid titles like "Foo{}bar" (33094), and long titles in the suggestions box are replaced with ellipses in the middle rather than the end so they can be distinguished (39591). The save dialog's length down-counter has been labelled to indicate it counts the number of bytes rather than characters, as that is what the database holds (40035); longer-term, we may wish to find a better way to show this to users. Finally, we fixed a bug where the table of contents was restored wrongly if a user edited and then cancelled without saving (39753).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.20/wmf12 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

Parsoid

In the JavaScript Parsoid implementation, we improved further support for round-tripping of templates and numerous other constructs. We now have an additional thirty parser tests passing, and a similar number of round-trip tests as well. We started work on automated round-trip testing on dumps to validate. We also added new features of edit support for behavior switches and category links.

On the C++ port, the data structures and synchronization / queuing strategies are now nearly complete. The tokenizer can handle very simple content (mainly headings) and populate the data structures. We started work on TokenTransformManagers. However, due to resource constraints the C++ is currently a part-time effort, with most effort going into the temporary JavaScript implementation as the safest bet for the December release.

The full list of Parsoid commits is available in Gerrit.

Hope this is helpful! As I said, feedback gratefully received.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Proposal to add an API/Developer/Developer Hub link to the footer of Wikimedia wikis

Hi. There's a proposal to add an API/Developer/Developer Hub link to the footer of Wikimedia wikis. Further information is available here: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-September/063257.html>. Please comment on the relevant bug, as necessary and appropriate. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:07, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

A 64KiB template and automatic succession boxes

Further information: Project:Administrators noticeboard § Recreating content, and Project:Templates for deletion/Log/2009 April 6 § Template:NYRepresentatives

• Template:NYRepresentatives (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• User:TonyTheTiger/Sandbox/NYRepresentatives

A 64KiB template and its technical impact are being discussed on the Administrators' Noticeboard. You can see the argument there, and at the prior templates for deletion discussion, for yourself so I won't repeat them. As a side effect, however, I have invented automatic succession boxes:

• Template:NYRepresentatives — as usual with Scribbled templates, a fairly short template
• Module:NYRepresentatives — where the data go
• Module:Succession box — where the algorithm goes
• David Woodcock — an example article, that just has {{NYRepresentatives}} as its text

(Ignore the style issues. The Test2 Wikipedia has barely one skin installed.)

An automatic succession box works out where in the succession list, given as a table of data, the transcluding page is, and creates a succession box appropriate to that page. Articles don't get thousands of inbound links, there's no need for multiple templates or collapsible lists, and there's not as much pressure on the template expansion buffers. Also, as you can see, the workload is divided between a data module specific to the sucession and a generic code module that does the work of making the wikitext and can work with a wide range of succession types. Here are some mildly interesting statistics:

Revision 37727 of David Woodcock on the Test2 Wikipedia	Revision 509983251 of Template:NYRepresentatives
NewPP limit report Preprocessor node count: 8/1000000 Post-expand include size: 5618/2048000 bytes Template argument size: 0/2048000 bytes Highest expansion depth: 3/40 Expensive parser function count: 0/500 Lua time usage: 0.007s Lua memory usage: 463 KB	NewPP limit report Preprocessor node count: 694/1000000 Post-expand include size: 21223/2048000 bytes Template argument size: 12449/2048000 bytes Highest expansion depth: 13/40 Expensive parser function count: 5/500

Uncle G (talk) 14:26, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

I have no idea why you are including these two table entries with NewPP limit reports. However, above it seems that in some test environment you are suggesting a complicated template that will call other templates. I am not sure if this alleviates the need to transclude multiple templates or not.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:46, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Please tell me why you think that crappy layout in the test David Woodcock page that you propose counts as a substitute for a congressional navbox. It almost looks like infobox content.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:55, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Have a look at other content in Category:United States House of Representatives delegations navigational boxes and see what we are trying to do.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 15:58, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Why would you start this section and then not come and talk about the issue?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:04, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

if you remain unwilling to discuss your suggested templates, I will revert to my own idea.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:51, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I guess you are going to make me chase you down.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 06:51, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

You seem to have disappeared.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 01:16, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Search only the policy-pages

Is there a way to Search only the policy-pages? Is there an Easy method available (maybe via templates or categories?), or is it manual page-by-page hand search only?

Context: We'd like to check the current way that the words "should" and "must" are currently used within policy documentation (and then guideline) pages, for this discussion. Thanks. —Quiddity (talk) 04:26, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

You can make a book that contains every page in the policy category and then select to download it as a PDF. You'll get the entire set of policies in a single readable file. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:15, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

That'll work nicely. Thanks :) —Quiddity (talk) 05:59, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

FYI: testing feature for new editors

Mockup of the message after saving your first edit.

Hey, this is a heads up that a new feature test is going live today. Current community members or anonymous editors won't see anything, but I wanted to leave an explanatory note regardless.

What

This is an iteration on a previous test, where for two weeks, we gave brand new registered editors a confirmation message after saving their edits. This time, we're only giving feedback for a moment when someone has reached an editing milestone: they'll get a custom message when they've made their first, fifth, 10th, 25th, 50th, and 100th edit.

Why

The rationale for this is that we know that it's fun to know how much you've contributed, even if edit count is not the most important thing. When you're new, it's far less like that you know to go to the bottom of your contribution history and check out the Toolserver edit counters. Like previous tests, we're comparing the editors who get this feature to a control group, and thus will get an idea of its effect on their activity, balanced by the quality of their edits.

Last but not least

during the previous test, we temporarily changed URLs after a save in order to facilitate the test, and all editors saw these. There won't be a URL change like that this time, based on community feedback.

Let me know if you have any questions. If you're curious, there is further documentation here and here. If you want to experience this for yourself, I can show you how to do so without creating a sock. ;) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:47, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Interwiki linking Ignored

I was trying to link the Karl Lennert article to its conterpart on the German wikipedia [1] and used the following the article.

This article is an English translation of the [[de:Karl_Lennert]] article on the [[de:Hauptseite|German Wikipedia]].

This rendered: This article is an English translation of the article on the.

Help Please! --HarshAJ ^{(Talk)(Contribs)} 04:08, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

You should rather write: This article is an English translation of the [[:de:Karl_Lennert]] article on the [[:de:Hauptseite|German Wikipedia]]. The colon in front forces the software to render the link as a normal link, rather than an interwiki. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:13, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

YDone. Thank you! --HarshAJ ^{(Talk)(Contribs)} 04:26, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

See however Wikipedia:Translation#How to translate and {{Translated page}} for the recommended way to mark a translation. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:51, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Page view anomaly

Clearly inter-related:

• http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Best
• http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Price
• http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Cheap

That many excess page views has to be costing at least a few extra dollars. Also asking at User talk:Midom#Page view anomaly as I've been told he's the go-to sysadmin for referrer logs. —Cupco 02:48, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Looks like a spambot(s) to me given the targeted pages. None of the usual suspects (replica, handbag(s), China) show a similar bump. MER-C 03:37, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Domas said, "Looks like that is coming from blog spam (and very few IPs) - requests are coming from Wordpress, probably trying to validate links or something like that," on his talk page. —Cupco 18:58, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Also http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Discount in the same pattern. This is increasing; now at about 700K page views per day. Can someone at the Foundation contact Wordpress and ask them to try to stop it? —Cupco 22:04, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Wiki Markup on PC

I am on a limited connection and therefore cannot access too much of WP without my connection being blocked for the day. Is there any way i could do restructuring of articles{like the one I am doing here on my PC? I have already downloaded MediaWiki, but am unable to run it. I apologize in advance if this is the wrong forum. --HarshAJ ^{(Talk)(Contribs)} 14:57, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

If your "[...] limited connection [...]" is a time-limited dial-up Internet connection, you could disconnect after opening the edit screen and reconnect before previewing or saving the page. Of course, this probably would not allow you to preview pages as they would appear on Wikipedia. However, some text editors incorporate MediaWiki syntax highlighting or other features designed for offline editing; see Wikipedia:Text editor support. Forget about running MediaWiki yourself; it was never designed for offline editing, and you probably will not want to set it up yourself. If you try to do so anyway, good luck. PleaseStand (talk) 19:44, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

The main problem with offline editing, even with a local copy, is that Mediawiki markup is very sensitive to content and configuration. You would want all the extensions (for magic words, parser functions, and parser extension tags, and such), configuration options (blacklisted text, blocked URLs, etc), and templates (for template calls) that a specific wiki uses, because without them your previews would be full of errors and placeholders. You would also not have access to all of the abuse filter settings. Even with all that, images would be missing and all the links would be red. If you want to give it a try, you might take a look at: mw:Manual:Wiki_on_a_stick, but it is rather annoying. You would need Wikimedia's configuration settings as well (and have to install most of the mentioned extensions that deal with markup). --Splarka (rant) 08:35, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

The other problem is edit conflicts. While you are doing all that offline editing, others are editing online. You will have to carefully merge your contributions. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:12, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm..will see what I can do! Thank you for the inputs! --HarshAJ ^{(Talk)(Contribs)} 11:26, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I support fully what User:HarshAJ requests. Seven days on a remote piece of land with just my laptop and a car battery to keep me company, I had the space and time to concentrate on writing and referencing several complex new historical articles but the only tool available was gedit (notepad for Redmond addicts).

All the stuff about edit conflicts does not apply as the article doesn't exist yet- and all the fancy bits will be resolved when the article is created. Much of the stuff on wiki is the work of a single editor- or a small group who regularly cooperate and stand clear if the see someone else is active. It is stuff like populating a table, and writing a complex article to clear a redlink that will be done by one person- with time but not necessarily a internet connection. So in-order of importance-

• an editor that will preview the basic syntax * ; : ==. (just leaving a correctly sized empty box will do for piccies)
• enough of a parser to set up in-page links and references.
• citation help and {-{Harvnb}}
• templates so I can set up and edit list pages.. look at List of mills in Wigan
• open to suggestions to other features-

For those of us who tour around and take piccies for Commons, the evening routine is simple. Backup the days piccies to the puter, post-process and transcribe any details from the visitor guides, xrefing to new piccies. So much easier if gedit would recognise wikisyntax and we could get a quick preview of the subsection we are generating.--ClemRutter (talk) 11:16, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Dissertation including Bot Operator Interviews now available

Hello everyone-

I wanted to let you know that my dissertation, "Network of Knowledge: Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System of Intelligence" is now available on my website with a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Over a year ago I began this project with the WMF Research Committee and the University of Oregon IRB's approval. Nearly 50 bot operators, WP contributors, and WMF administrators were kind enough to participate in the study, offering their time, opinions, and expertise on issues around bots and bot creation. Feel free to download the document or peruse it online, and I look forward to your comments either on the site or via email.

The manuscript is a bit long (~320 pages) and includes some standard dissertation sections (literature review, methods chapter, etc.). Interviewee contributions are featured most in Chapters 5 and 6 (if you want to skip to the good stuff).

I am at a new institution now and will be going through a new IRB approval process to continue this research, but I do indeed want to continue chatting with the bot and semi-automated tool community. Please let me know if you're interested in connecting this fall, and thank you so much to those who have already participated!

Randall Livingstone UOJComm (talk) 23:53, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Syntax highlighter reboot

Hello all, it's been quite a while since I've been active on Wikipedia. How have you been? I have found that I don't nearly as much time for Wikipedia anymore, but I wanted to come back to improve the syntax highlighter I was working on:

The big advantage to my script over something like wikEd is that my script does the syntax highlighting as you type without messing up your browser's undo/redo function. One day I would love to see something like this integrated into the site by default; I think it would really help make editing Wikipedia more intuitive and help attract new editors.

I have successfully resolved many of the issues that plagued the script before. In particular, the performance is much improved and it now works consistently in both Firefox and Chrome. I've moved the description page for the script to Meta. Please check it out and let me know what you think. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:32, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

And Opera? :-) mabdul 00:43, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Opera works better than it used to but it does not handle line breaks in textareas properly (it does not fully conform to the UAX14 standard) which can lead to misaligned highlighting. Generally though, it seems to work well and if you like Opera and don't mind the occasional weirdness feel free to use it! —Remember the dot ^(talk) 04:45, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi Remember the dot, it would be lovely to see this based on the new parsoid model and the annotated edit DOM. It would then basically be an alternative to the new Visual Editor, a new style wikicode editor. I'd love to see something like that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:26, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the VisualEditor and Parsoid projects. My highlighter works differently because it does not replace the textbox with a rich text editor, thus avoiding breaking the browser's undo/redo function as wikEd and Parsoid do. Also, my highlighter is ready to go now--I'm using it as we speak. In the future it probably is going to need a more sophisticated wikitext parser, but the one it has now works great. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 23:54, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I've just installed, and am generally loving it.

1 question: Does it have to be installed in our common.js or can it just as easily be placed in our vector.js ? You might want to clarify that in the docs. (Note: "I know enough to be dangerous" but am not sure if there'd be negative repercussions from the latter (beyond just not working in other skins). Also, if I have 50 tabs open, will having another/separate file to include, have minute performance impact? rambleramble.)

1 request: Could you add the "run-on-demand" feature? (see User:Anomie/linkclassifier#Usage, and this edit plus that for where Anomie added the on-demand function, in case that helps)

A few notes: I am using an older computer (using opera in ubuntu), and I tend to have numerous tabs open, and I'm already using a few page-highlighter scripts (ais523/highlightmyname2.js and ais523/adminrights.js); one/some of those factors are making Syntax highlight a bit sluggish, and timeout fairly frequently. I'll definitely keep using it though. Huge thanks!

Also, I just linked to this thread, in WP:VPR#Differentiating reference syntax in the editing window. ttfn, -- Quiddity (talk) 22:17, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Glad you like it! Yes, you can put the script in vector.js etc. I tried to design the script to be as simple as possible, and I'm not sure I really want to add on/off buttons for each page. I'd be interested in hearing feedback from more users, and the script is open source so anyone can create their own version with more or less features. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:14, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

You will get much less feedback at Meta. I suggest you put it on English Wikipedia at User:Remember the dot/Syntax highlighter.js. This is a useful tool along with Reference Tooltips. See discussion here: User talk:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips#Wish list. Edit link that takes one to reference wikitext.

I wanted to test this out on a long page with many detailed references. See Incarceration in the United States. I got this message:

Syntax highlighting on this page was disabled because your computer is too slow. The maximum allowed highlighting time is 150ms, and your computer took 161ms. If you are using Chrome or Safari, this could be because the syntax highlighter has to work around WebKit bug 17427. Try closing some tabs and programs and clicking "Show preview" or "Show changes". If that doesn't work, try a different web browser, and if that doesn't work, try a newer computer.

I suggest creating a second version (on English Wikipedia) with a 500ms max, and letting people decide which version to use. No one is going to mind a half-second delay if it saves them many seconds in finding references, etc.. I almost always have many pages open. I use a 20mbs broadband connection. My computer is fast with low ping. I kick ass in CrossFire. :)

OK. I looked at the intro section of Incarceration in the United States. It has many references. I would like a version of this gadget that only highlights references. This is a great tool. Thanks! A reference-only version would be great too. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:49, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Did you take the error message's advice and try editing the page in Firefox? Firefox seems to execute the script about twice as fast on my computer and has no trouble with Incarceration in the United States. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:54, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I am using Firefox. It is my default browser. You will not get many people to close windows. So the tool will not get used as much. I suggest you propose this as a gadget at Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:57, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Also try clearing the cache, I made a significant performance improvement literally as we've been talking. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 03:00, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I did Ctrl-Shift-R when I installed it at User:Timeshifter/common.js. I and others are not going to do much more than that in order to use a gadget. There really is no need for the 150ms max for most people. People will uninstall the gadget if they think the gadget slows them down too much. Or they will use the faster version. 2 versions solve the problem for people who think it is too slow for them. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:09, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I made changes after you installed the script, so you need to clear your cache again for them to take effect. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 04:32, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

It works for me now on that page! I still have many windows and tabs open too. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:10, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

(unindent) Further discussion:

• meta:User talk:Remember the dot/Syntax highlighter --Timeshifter (talk) 02:45, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

  So if we want to discuss this further, where should we go? -— Isarra ༆ 18:26, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

  Right here is fine. I want to work on the script for a bit more before asking to make it a gadget. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:06, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Aiight, so I don't think anyone who isn't colourblind is likely to argue with the fact that a syntax highlighter is kind of needed, so thank you for actually implementing one. Once it is more stable and cross-browser compatible it should probably make a very helpful default gadget.

The style, though, is a little odd - why did you choose to go with changing the background colour instead of the text itself like is usually done in syntax highlighters? While this does work, it looks rather blocky and has a somewhat jarring effect when taking in the text as a whole, which wouldn't be an issue were the latter method used.

The colours themselves might also do with some more consideration - not just specific combinations, but also considering why the highlighting would be useful.

• With things like italics and bolding, does the affected text need to be a different colour, or just the characters affecting it?
• What do people need to pick out, and what do people want to ignore? Making those a different colour would help in both cases, but if people tend to do either, like with references, then making it a particularly bold colour would be unwise.
• Template, link, and table beginnings and ends come to mind as things that need to stand out because people can easily forget to close things...

But what sort of complexity could be supported? Could an open tag with no close on the page highlight everything after it to emphasise that it isn't closed? Could template pieces be different colours, with brackets one, parameters another, and values a third, and then these be more muted when used inside a reference or a css definition? Or would that be insane? Mind, I'm not saying that last sort of thing is needed or necessarily even a good idea, just wondering if it would be possible at this stage. -— Isarra ༆ 06:25, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback! Let me answer your easier questions first. I am investigating improvements to browser compatibility, but I expect it will take at least another month before I feel the script is ready to be made into a gadget. The script highlights the background instead of the text because any method that highlights the text itself breaks the undo/redo buttons. wikEd requires you to click a button to update its text highlighting so that it breaks the undo/redo button as little as possible; I wanted something that just works.

Malformed syntax like an opening tag without a closing tag does produce odd results that will make the mistake obvious. The script could also be revised to pick apart individual bits of templates or only highlight beginning and ending syntax, though my inclination is to keep it as simple as possible.

Finally, the script is fairly customizable right now, please feel free to try different color combinations and let me know what you think looks best. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:36, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Wish more people would take their time with things sometimes. Actually get them right... anyway, as for the method of highlighting, why would it be different? Can you not use the method you used to change the background to change the text, or do browsers require some particularly strange workaround based on general position of the text or something? Because yeah, the undo stuff is kind of important; actually working would really help with this sort of thing.

Well, with some things like italics and the contents of divs, it wouldn't really make much sense to change the contents unless something is wrong with the entire thing, since generally speaking it's just more content. And yeah, simple is good, but some complexity helps too - those individual parts would really help, particularly when trying to figure out where things are going wrong in the thing. Unfortunately since it is literal highlighting like with a highlighter, that kind of limits the options, and the potential effectiveness of what we do have as options, so... hmm... -— Isarra ༆ 19:45, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I for one much, much prefer it to highlight the background over changing text colour, for many reasons, but also because variations in text colour are already used in other gadgets/processes. I stumbled on the "old" version a while back and have found it very useful, so I'll happily update my .js in the near future — thanks Remember the dot. Highlighting as if it's a highlighter means that it does what it says on the tin. Perhaps you want to write something different, Isarra? I'm pretty sure you'll find an appreciative audience. Risker (talk) 21:04, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Other gadgets change the text colour in the edit box? If you could point us to them, that might be helpful, although I'm not exactly a developer. And the thing about syntax highlighting, it generally does mean changing the text colour; the term is just a bit of a misnomer rather like 'oversight' here, among other harder to pick out examples because we're just so used to it all at this point.

Anyway, while changing the background colour is a perfectly valid personal preference, my point is that it limits what you can do. It works perfectly well for highlighting one or two general things, like general formatting stuff as formatting stuff or references as references (in fact it would probably be perfect for just references, but that's another matter), but the palette of possible colours is too limited to do much more, as they have to be light enough to not affect legibility and not too bright lest they stand out too much. This means the different highlights all look pretty similar, and sticking to basic pastels, highlighting more than a couple things is also apt to overwhelm a user just because background colours do stand out so much more than text colours. With the text itself any high-saturation colour that is sufficiently dark can be used, which means that many different things can then be highlighted and still differentiated from each other without any of it becoming spatially dominating. -— Isarra ༆ 19:11, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

• The syntax highligher (which I use and think is nothing short of amazing) is actually an important part of the discussion at this RfC I just opened to propose coloring text to references on Wikipedia. I encourage editors who are interested in this kind of functionality more generally to participate. I, Jethrobot ^{drop me a line} (note: not a bot!) 00:00, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Slash open

Per the "slash open" project, it would be a good idea to put something at http://en.wiki.x.io/open about (or to redirect that page to something about) the availability of our content as open data. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:27, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to see and explanation here for those folk like me. I understood every word you used, but failed to grasp what you have in mind Fiddle Faddle (talk) 15:47, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Did you read the project page, to which I linked? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:33, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

I read it. That does not mean I understand your proposal. To make a full proposal one must do more than suggest that something must be done. You need to say what and why. The project page is... vague. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 22:33, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

From that site's home page:

/open is an initiative to help make Open Data easier to find and to help organizations orient themselves in the Open Data community. In the same way you have a /contact or /about page on your website so people can find and learn about you quickly, you should have also have a /open page.

Each organization is different so you will have to craft your own /open page – we can, however, provide some guidance. At a minimum, you should state who you are and your mission, describe the datasets you are sharing and how they can be accessed, and explain the terms under which your data can be used by others.

I therefore suggest that we create a page at http://en.wiki.x.io/open on which we state who we are and our mission, describe the datasets we are sharing and how they can be accessed, and explain the terms under which our data can be used by others (or otherwise redirect that page to a page which already does this, if one exists; or if it means it can be editable). I will start a draft at Wikipedia:slash-open. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:35, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

---

This seems like a better thing to do through Meta than here, as it's the Wikimedia Foundation's mission to promote free knowledge, not just English Wikipedia. MBisanz ^talk 22:11, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

It should be done for every Wikipedia (in the relevant language); and Meta. However, this is the VP for en.Wikipedia. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:18, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

We don't have /about or /contact either. Try it. You'd have to convince the technical people managing the sites to change the way URLs are handled by the servers. Lupo 20:48, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Template limit per page?

I was doing my daily scan of the spam-blacklist page when I noticed all templates appear to stop working after a certain point. See MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#durgapurcity.co.in. There's a fully-expanded {{linksummary}} template at the top of that section that works, then every template that follows on the page, whether it's {{linksummary}} or {{IPSummary}} render as Template:Link summary or Template:IPSummary. Other templates such as section header notices also fail to render. Is there some technical limit to how many template substitutions a page can have? ~Amatulić (talk) 20:54, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Template limits. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:12, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I see. The problem can be cured in part by archiving some of the information, but I am wondering if there's a workaround or exception that can be built in for templates that don't expand to a lot of data, like {{done}}, {{notdone}}, {{declined}}, {{Link summary}}, {{IPSummary}}, etc. which are the ones predominantly used on that administrative page.

The only workaround I can think of offhand is to recommend that the commonly used templates on that page be prefixed with "subst". ~Amatulić (talk) 22:38, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

From a long-ago reading of the WP page on templates, I was wondering if the problem could be resolved by substitution instead of transcluding? --HarshAJ ^{(Talk)(Contribs)} 11:30, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I think so. The problem is getting people to substitute instead of transclude.

I'd rather see a technical solution that omits transcluded templates from the limit counter if the template is something short, like those I mentioned in my last comment. Or maybe a template could have a sysop-controlled flag to designate the template as an exception to the limit count. ~Amatulić (talk) 00:01, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• Split pages but Wikipedia should be reconfigured for higher limits: The easiest fix is to split a large multi-template page into logical parts, and clearly link the parts as related pages. However, long-term, as an experienced computer scientist, I must emphasize that the template-expansion limits are set too low for practical use, although formerly thought to deter denial of service (DoS) attacks. I am not convinced of any harm from increasing the post-expand include size to 3 mb (or 3,000 kilobytes from 2,000 kb), and certainly, the expansion-depth limit should to raised from 40 (actually 41) to 60, 80, or 200, depending on how the limit is enforced. Because mirror sites seem to run the final copy of articles, then template-expansion limits are less of a factor for the mirror websites. However, there are peculiar restrictions with the NewPP preprocessor, which does not follow a context-free grammar and treats sections of pages with different syntax rules, such as no wp:subst'ing of templates allowed inside of reftags ("<ref>") or other kludged processing of markup. Also, long-term, the MediaWiki preprocessor should be rewritten using college-educated methods, rather than clunky, kludged logic, so that templates could be used without miserly restrictions. Also, there need to be character functions, such as {{ch:b}} for a blank character, or {{ch:newline}} to force a newline in the parser, so that a subsequent asterisk "*" would be considered a bullet-indent token. The convoluted treatment of newlines is due to not following a context-free grammar in the wikitext markup language. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:57, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Actually, just so you know, Tim yesterday introduced a new template limit, because some wiki's (not en.wp) were crashing apache processes with GB sized render jobs, by creating databases in templates. However, as such it seems not likely to me that template limits in general will be raised any time soon. Quote from IRC: I renamed the old node count to "Preprocessor visited node count" and introduced "Preprocessor generated node count". An official announcement will probably follow this week. And yes eventually we likely need to rewrite the entire Mediawiki grammer and parsers; Parsoid and VisualEditor are actually steps into making that happen, by first implementing a DOM based on the current grammer, so we have a chance in hell of actually making a transition happen. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:39, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
    • Further to TheDJ's info: Tim Starling set out the new "preprocessor generated node count" limitations in this Wikitech-l post. Apparently frwiki had templates with tens of thousands of #switch cases, which were not caught by the existing limits. — Richardguk (talk) 06:45, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

HTML 5 snafu - pushpin points moved south

From Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Pushpin points moved south:

I posted this in WP Maps and then realized this might be a better place for it: Today I find all the pushpin points placed on File:Uruguay location map.svg moved to the south. I checked with other location maps, like File:Greece location map.svg and I think I see in all of them a deviation of pushpins. Is this visible to all? Was there some change lately that could have this effect? One example as seen at the time I write this is that the coordinates of kilometre 0 of Montevideo Department dispay in the water, though when I placed them 3 days ago, the pushpin was exactly where it should be. Hoverfish Talk 12:27, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I think that this is to do with the recent switch from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 5.0 - might be best to notify WP:VPT.

I copied the relevant code from the page source of Montevideo Department as served by MediaWiki - all the <div>...</div>, <a>...</a> and <img /> elements, plus some more - to a "blank" HTML doc and saved it - it displayed correctly. Then I added one line at the top, pinched from our latest served HTML - <!DOCTYPE html> - and upon saving and reloading, the dot shifted downwards by exactly the same distance as the error seen at Montevideo Department. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:01, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Any thoughts on cause & solution? --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:23, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Also in National Constitution Center in Pennsylvania. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:29, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

And 170-176 John Street Building in New York City, again on the wrong side of a river. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:39, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Yup. I think we can presume that maps on tens of thousands of pages are currently borked. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:43, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Someone must have done something, as the cases mentioned above (where I too was seeing the southward shift a while ago) now look OK to me. Deor (talk) 20:49, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I keep seeing the problem. I cleared my cache too. Hoverfish Talk 21:06, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Confirmed, seems that something has changed in the spec causing this. I suspect it's "an inline element, that appears in HTML5 inline elements defer to its parent 'block' element's line-height". This should fix that, though there might be more templates that need corrections. Please report them here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:30, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm hitting this issue with {{Location map United Kingdom London Westminster}} - see 102 Petty France for example. NtheP (talk) 22:13, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

The fix of TheDJ has cured the problem in location maps. Great job, thank you. Hoverfish Talk 23:42, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

One instance has been fixed. Others, per Nthep, above, remain to be fixed. And presumably other broken templates remain to be found. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:49, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

• STEP 1: Don't panic - many maps garbled for weeks: Other maps have been garbled for weeks/months, so readers already expect bizarre red-dot locations. Fortunately, there appear to be consistent patterns, to enable some consistent fixes. -Wikid77 04:50, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• STEP 2: List the progress of fixes: The addition in the tag of "line-height:{{{marksize}}}px;" seems to work, at least for Template:Location map~. However, other maps were not fixed by that change. Track progress below. Thanks. -Wikid77 04:50, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Philadelphia class=notpageimage| U.S. state of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Site in {{Location map/simple}.

• Fixed National Constitution Center: Used Template:Location_map/simple which shows the correct location with any browser. The default Template:Location_map had been modified to use div class="thumbinner" which no longer worked on some browsers. The dot was dropped to the south edge of the map, not even inside Pennsylvania. The {Infobox museum} is using Template:Location_map_Pennsylvania, so a red-dot on Philadelphia (39°57′12″N 75°10′12″W) should be placed inside south-east corner, in the map nearby, but appears to also drop to the bottom edge when using {Location_map}. The generated div-tags are below:

<div class="thumb tright"> <div class="thumbinner" style="width:222px;"> <div style="position: relative; border: 1px solid lightgray"><a href="/wiki/File:USA_Pennsylvania_location_map.svg" class="image" title="Philadelphia is located in Pennsylvania"><img alt="Philadelphia is located in Pennsylvania" src= "//up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/USA_Pennsylvania_location_map.svg/220px-USA_Pennsylvania_location_map.svg.png" width="220" height="147" /></a> <div style="position: absolute; z-index: 2; top: 85.8%; left: 89.2%; height: 0; width: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"> <div style="position: relative; text-align: center; left: -4px; top: -4px; width: 8px; font-size: 8px; z-index:100;" title=""><img alt="" src="//up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0c/Red_pog.svg/8px-Red_pog.svg.png" width="8" height="8" /></div> <div style="font-size: %; line-height: 110%; z-index:90; position: relative; top: -1.5em; width: 6em; left: -6.5em; text-align: right;"><span style="padding: 1px;">Philadelphia</span></div> </div> </div>

The relative percents for the red-dot seem correct, down from the top margin (top: 85.8%; left: 89.2%), but the starting div-tag seems to have shifted where "0,0" starts, so that "top:85.8%" seems far too low, nearing 98%. Hence, I suspect trouble within the outer div-tags: <div class="thumb tright"> or <div class="thumbinner" style="width:222px;"> have created a vertical down-shift which causes "top:85.8%" to be lower than it should be.

The fix for "National Constitution Center" was to bypass the internal map of {Infobox museum} and use {Location_map/simple} after the infobox. -Wikid77 04:50/05:34, 06:06/08:21, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

One more, better ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:36, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

There is also the problem of non-compatible browsers, where locations near the bottom edge of a map are shifted too low on some types of browsers, which has been a problem for weeks or months. I think that IE 7 and IE 8 (and similar) are the most-common non-compatible browsers, released with Windows Vista a few years ago, and still used in U.S. libraries, hospitals or hotels for guest services. The appearance of Wikipedia can be so convoluted and trashy on those browsers that the shift of a red-dot is the least of their worries. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:21, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Where have these issues been reported ? Also, switching out one template for the other is no 'fix' of course. It's a bypass, we should really try to fix the actual problem. When people report more issues, can they please state which browser they are using ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:53, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• Perhaps IE users just quit or use Firefox: There are so many new problems now with WP in IE 7 (Vista), perhaps most users gave up trying, where the text rolls down the page, no top/left-side menus, and all options listed downward at bottom just like interwiki links. Getting reports from those users would be like swimming in sewage to report a drainage problem. Meanwhile, we were hoping the world would change last year to align with wiki-reality, but they still use IE 7 in 2012, and it has been 3 years, and the planned obsolescence of browsers has not fooled them into paying to install the next scam of "better" browsers. It is clear WP needs to return to supporting simple webpages, such as a "Classic WP" interface to run fast and simple as in 2009. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:06, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Roslyn, New York, showing on South Shore rather than North Shore of Long Island, MSIE 9.0.8112.1641 under Vista. Jim.henderson (talk) 09:17, 20 September 2012 (UTC) Oh. Also Google Chrome 21.0.1180.89 m same computer and OS. From now on I shall report both. Jim.henderson (talk) 09:28, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Fixed Geobox2_map —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:28, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

And Geobox map —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:42, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Reading the spec, it seems like we should actually set line-height to 0 in this case. (we want to replicate the old html4 non-strict (partial quirks mode) behavior). So now in html5, these parent elements inherit a line-height, but we want the parent element to be 0, just as before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:25, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• Perhaps use Location_map/sandbox5: We need a separate test version to allow before-and-after comparisons, and template "/sandbox5" would clue on the "5" in HTML 5. Adjust the line-height or div offsets in Template:Location_map~/sandbox5, and then test data could compare the 2 versions of {Location map}, such as red-dots on bottom-half locations. Once fixed, we could remove {Location_map/simple}. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:22, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
  • This afternoon I applied the line-height 0 fix to all previous mentioned templates and to me this seems to have solved the problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:54, 20 September 2012 (UTC)
    • Double checked Montevideo Department with NetRenderer, MSIE 6 trough 10 seem to match the behavior of Chrome and Safari when placing the dot atm. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:48, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

To Do

Probably {{overlay}}, {{superimpose}} and {{superimpose2}} will need fixing as well. Holding of on that for now, want to check if there are 'better' ways to fix this issue long term. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:57, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Multiple locator templates

Is there any good reason why we have a multiplicity of templates doing the same job (display a map, put a pin in it based on coords)? To the extent there is real variation between them, should they not all rely on a common underlying template such that we could fix this issue once, rather than scurrying around trying to discover all instances of the same issue? --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:16, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• Diversity of templates is safer if cross-noted: In terms of configuration management, it is generally better to have a set of semi-redundant templates, so that not all break for the same reasons, but cross-noted (in documentation) to promote upgrades to the related templates during the same period. Also, the overall regression testing becomes simpler as testing for only part of the whole, rather than facing all cases at once. The strategy is to reduce to a handful of variations, but not force as only one, per ye olde, "Do not put all your eggs in one basket" because one-size-fits-all solutions typically have unforseen problems, where some diverse solutions could use "lightweight technology" in cases where the one-size was overkill for some several cases. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:22, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• LOL. You're not joining my software team, Wikid77. It's a point of view, I grant you, but not one I share. I'll file your advice under 'nonsense on stilts'. Since when is it more easy to manage a plethora of vaguely similar templates than a single consistent template stack? Yes, the latter has a single point of failure; but also a single point at which things can be fixed. By contrast, we currently have an undocumented number of templates, at least four of which are fixed and n of which are broken. In the real world, rather than a mythical configuration managed world, this seems to be the worse position. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:57, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

That's an odd place to put good advice. I suppose it might be easy to remember, anyway. --Nouniquenames 15:29, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

• One man's fix is another man's break: When the one-size-fits-all, monolithic templates grow larger, then broader reality sets in: because in many cases, one person's "fix" becomes another person's "break", or one man's "bug" is another man's "neat feature" being used to provide some indirect functionality. Also, in very complex templates, then the "fixes" are likely to become "breaks" of conflicting features, and the more complex, then the more likely that features are based on conflicting viewpoints, so that changing one requires breaking the others. This is a problem in "creeping featurism". Consequently, WP no longer runs properly on IE 7 installed on computers in 2009. However, by allowing a small diversity, such as a "Classic WP" interface for IE-style browsers, then there is less chance of having to face fix-versus-break trade-offs in functionality. The only catch is to cross-note the related templates, and that might require linking to a common "cross-notes page" because of uncontrolled diversity, such as the more than 100,000 various infobox templates currently in use. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:33, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Switch from XHTML to HTML 5?

I don't recall seeing this announced. Was it? If so where? Rich Farmbrough, 17:07, 20 September 2012 (UTC).

I believe it was announced, though couldn't tell you where. User:RobLa-WMF announced the change in #HTML 5 mode enabled, above, so perhaps you should talk to him? --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 18:27, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

In addition to the above announcement at VPT:#HTML 5 mode enabled (17 September 2012), the recent switch to HTML5 was proposed and announced on the following links:

• wikitech-l: Technical hurdles for enabling $wgHtml5 on Wikimedia sites? (28 June 2012)
• wikitech:Software deployments#Near-term to be scheduled (28 June 2012)
• Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 101#HTML5 is comming (again) (28 June 2012)
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-02/Technology report#HTML5 coming (again) (maybe) (2 July 2012)
• wikitech-l: HTML5, it's a coming (again)! (5 September 2012)
• wikitech:Software deployments#Week of Sept 17 (5 September 2012)
• bugzilla:27478#c45 (5 September 2012)
• Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 102#HTML5 is coming to Wikimedia Wikis... (5 September 2012)
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-09-10/Technology report#In brief (10 September 2012)
• wikitech:Server admin log (17 September 2012)
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-09-17/Technology report#In brief (17 September 2012)
• mw:HTML5 (17 September 2012)

Apart from the locationmap bug raised at the top of this section and at WikiProject Geographical coordinates, the only new problems reported seem related to flawed parser attempts to convert legacy block alignment to conforming HTML5 (see bugzilla:40306 and similar recent bugs).

— Richardguk (talk) 20:06, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

We went from six endemic HTML validation errors to four different errors; documented at Help:Markup validation with bug reports. We will also get errors about tags that are now obsolete, although they are still supported by browsers: <big>, <center>, <font>, <s>, <tt> and <u>. I am checking these and will update the help page with alternatives.

Features of the table sorter that was implemented a year or so ago now work; see Help talk:Sorting#HTML5. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:12, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Interestingly and dissapointingly I brought up all these things in a recent discussion about the release of HTML 5 and they apparently were completely ignored by developers. I appreciate that bug fixes have been created for them but these items should have been obvious to the developers before implementation. Its common knowledge that these HTML parameters are used throughout the pedia so they should have anticipated problems and mitigated them before implementation. Certainly not ever problem can be anticipated and corrected prior to implementation but these are common problems and anyone with more than a basic understanding of the new features in HTML5 should have been aware of them well in advance of deployment. Kumioko (talk) 22:46, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

It's not a problem to not pass the validator if every browser in the world still understands the actual output. The align attribute is a problem (and will be fixed) the dot issue is inevitable and will require fixing the templates, which is being done. The other issues are 'not pretty' but will be dealt with in due time. In the mean time, as always, patches are welcome and if there are any ACTUAL large scale problems then we can always switch back to xhtml 1. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:11, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

There are a lot of places where HTML ids are manually created, especially for some citation templates. We then recommend that pages be validated to detect duplicate ids, which are a problem. Editors then get bogged down in validation errors not specifically related to the issues they are interested in. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:20, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

More places too far south

Thomaston, New York and Manhasset, New York, both on North Shore of Long Island; both shown near South Shore, both MSIE 9 and Chrome 21, both under Vista, both before and after clearing cache for both browsers. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:19, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Both show on the North shore for me. Were you logged in ? If not, you might have received an old copy from the Squid cache. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:39, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Why would logging in get a more updated copy of the page? If that is the case then that needs to be addressed. WE shouldn't be generating a newer version of the page for logged in users than we do for general browsers or else the purpose of the project is failing. Kumioko (talk) 10:44, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Certainly all ought to be repaired and the system is a shambles and more difficult repair than it should be etc etc but anyway the question may be useful for those having the understanding to hope to fix it. I checked with my Android 4 phone and Windows 9 netbook with Chrome and IE9, (still logged in there) and they all showed those northshore places correctly. Back on my Vista desktop, I logged out, and aha, they showed correctly on MSIE 9 and Chrome. Aha, I say, because someone might understand why; just not me. I logged in again and aha, MSIE 9 now shows those places correctly, but Chrome still puts them on the South Shore. I hope this helps. Meanwhile add Casa Amadeo, antigua Casa Hernandez, a building in The Bronx which Chrome under Vista is showing miles to the south in Brooklyn.

Logging in gets the newest version of the page because it has to be tailored for you and nobody else, therefore must be constructed from scratch. Even if you have not altered any of your preferences, the page still differs from that served to logged out users in the links at upper right. Whilst it is true that some of these are generic links that need no tailoring - such as My talk, My sandbox, My preferences, My watchlist and Log out - two of them at least are tailored. I have two links that you won't have - they are Redrose64 and My contributions, whilst Kumioko will have two that I don't have - Kumioko and My contributions. In the first case, it's visually tailored; in the second, the underlying link varies between editors. Both of these must be specially constructed, therefore, since pages can't be partially reconstructed, the whole page is specially constructed. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:23, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Not exactly; logged in users simply use a different cache, as the page can be built using both cached elements and non-cached and not having to render from the wikitext itself again still removes the slowest part of the process. The difference is the cache that anonymous users see is older and less tailored, only updated every couple of days or when someone manually purges the page, if I recall correctly, whereas the cache for logged in folks updates every time an edit is saved, although template changes can take a little longer to propagate. -— Isarra ༆ 17:15, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

See also section looking weird!

Whenever I look at a see also section, it leaves a large space between itself and the [edit] button for the same. Even in edit preview it leaves a blank space on top of it. It only appears in typing ==See also== and its subsections but not in anything else. Another example,

See also

There is problem

See alsos

Here, no problem.

Thank you.···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 05:03, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

A blank space at the top of see also section (from the article 1729).

Just uploaded the preview.···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 05:28, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Are you sure that the picture is of 1729? That article doesn't even have a 'see also' section.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 05:48, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

It's 1729 (number). What is your skin and browser? Does it happen when you are logged out? PrimeHunter (talk) 05:52, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Sorry,. Yes, I referred to 1729 (number). I am using Google Chrome browser and Vector skin. I am seeing them even after logging out. I tried to purge by typing ?action=purge at the url and also reloaded the page using ctrl+⇧ Shift+R; but it is still there.

By the way, I have also provided a see also section in this post. It too have a blank space above it. ···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 07:01, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Odd bug. I have no problems in Chrome. If it also happens logged out then I don't know what could cause it. To check it really is the exact text "See also" regardless of context, does it also happen only for "See also" if you swap the "See also" and "See alsos" in preview here without making any other change? Do you have Chrome extensions you can try to disable? See [2]. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:34, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

See alsos section put above see also.

Resolved

 – ···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 14:02, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes you are absolutely right. It was the problem of the extention. VideoFileDownload 1.0 was enabled in my browser along with Fix-ml Chromium Extension 0.1 And it was due to the former that caused all the problems. Thank you. I disabled it and everything is fine.

I interchanged these two sections but only the '"see also" section has the problem. Further if I put another see also section, there no bug for the second one. The language bar also had a large amount of space before it. And the TOC had space after it. Thank you so much.···Vanischenu^「m/_Talk」 14:02, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi, for future ref, taking a photograph of your screen isn't the clearest way of showing the appearance of a problem. It's better to upload a screenshot - for one means of doing this, see my comments at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103#Edit summary and Subject/headline funkiness, dated 10:14, 12 September 2012. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:29, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

hlist template displayed with nowrap - apparent bug

The hlist template:TRW instance at the bottom of the TRW article was very wide since there was no text wrapping of the displayed contents of the list. This was observed in Windows 7 with Firefox 15.01, Chrome 21.0.1180.89, and IE9(64 bit). I apparently fixed it with this change. After that change, viewing the previous version showed no template width problem. I found the same problem with the hlist template:MSNBC Personalities at the bottom of the Joe Scarborough article. I apparently fixed it with this change, but again the previous version shows no problem. Is this a bug? Overjive (talk) 22:28, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103#NAVBOXes extending far to the right of the browser window. This is caused by HTML Tidy not firing on rare occasions, and any edit seems to resolve the error. This is not a hlist problem, but hlist does suffer from this bug. — Edokter (talk) — 22:41, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Overjive (talk) 00:04, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Feedback problem

I don't know whether this might have something to do with the HTML 5 business; but for the last day or two, when I click on that fairly new "Feedback from my watched pages" link at the top of my watchlist, the list of feedback posts (which I used to see fine) appears only momentarily and then is suddenly replaced with a page saying only "Article Feedback page not enabled for this page". (IE 8, Windows 7, if that's of any use.) Deor (talk) 14:29, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

I've raised the same question (as yet unanswered) at Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5#Viewing feedback (Windows 7, FF 15.0.1) NtheP (talk) 14:32, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, guys :). Yeah, I had another report of this last night - I'm sticking it in Bugzilla :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Any statements on browser/OS combos might speed up a fix, btw :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:34, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Windows 7 with Firefox 15.0.1 and IE9 both have this problem for me.Nigel Ish (talk) 16:15, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

The bug was filed at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40431, if anyone can't find it. wctaiwan (talk) 04:48, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

It only seems to happen if "Don't show article feedback widget" is checked in preferences. SpinningSpark 19:06, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

So it must be a recent change that's done it as I've had that widget switched off for weeks but only encountered this issue yesterday. NtheP (talk) 19:15, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's how I noticed it. I have the widget switched off permanently but sometimes check out feedback on articles on my watchlist. It stopped working yesterday I think. SpinningSpark 21:51, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Table alignment

I'm working on two tables in my sandbox that I would like to be right-aligned, one above the other. The problem is that the second table appears beside the first table instead of below it. How do I force it to appear below the first table instead? I've looked around through the various help pages that deal with tables, and I haven't been able to find a solution. CanadianJudoka (talk) 19:22, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Style="float:right; clear: right;". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:44, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the help. :) CanadianJudoka (talk) 19:47, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Follow-up question: is there a way to remove the horizontal borders between individual cells but keep the border of the table? CanadianJudoka (talk) 21:57, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I did here. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:04, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought it wasn't working at first, but then I realized that the settings of the next cell have to agree with those of the previous cell for it to take effect. If there are two cells, for example, and you don't want a line between them, the first cell has be set to have no bottom border, and the second cell has to be set to have no top border. I'm sure you know that, but I thought I'd make it explicit for anyone else who might be reading this. :) CanadianJudoka (talk) 22:57, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

refToolbar 2.0 on other wikis

According to Wikipedia:RefToolbar_2.0#Porting_to_another_wiki, refToolbar 2.0 has been copied to simple English Wikipedia, with all the script pages transwikied. However, the gadget works perfectly, but there is a bug: the error check dialog shows

Check for the following errors:
– cite-samecontent-desc
– cite-repeated-desc
– cite-undefined-desc

instead of

Check for the following errors:
– Check for references with the same content
– Multiple references with the same name
– Usage of undefined named references

on enwiki. Can this be fixed? --intforce (talk) 15:09, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Those messages are defined in MediaWiki:RefToolbarMessages-en.js, which seems to be copied correctly. Perhaps is should be renamed to MediaWiki:RefToolbarMessages-simple.js? — Edokter (talk) — 15:39, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

No, the issue still occurs... --intforce (talk) 18:25, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

adding extra headers to a table...

I hope this is the right way/place to ask this...

There's a page with a list of vampire traits from various settings. It's a page full of long, long tables. The tables have several columns, and a lot of the entries are relatively uninformative things (on their own) like "yes", "no", and "fatal".

It would make the page about 20 times more readable and intuitive if there was some way to either repeat the header for each table every 20 or so lines, or use framing or the like to keep the header at the top. That way, you wouldn't have to scroll all the way to the top of the table to figure out, for example, whether a given entry was saying that the vampires from Lost Boys are killed by decapitation or by drowning.

And I'd imagine it would be useful for any other really long sortable table with a lot of columns. For example, the list of countries by income equality, the list of countries by distribution of wealth, or any other long table with a lot of statistics.

(just manually adding headers would mess up sorting)

What might possibly be the easiest thing to do is to make it so there's a tag you can put on a line to make it completely ignore sorting in a sort table, and stay in the same place regardless. Alternately, something you can put in the header line that would make the header repeat every (x) lines. But, as I know just about diddly about programming, I don't know which would actually be easier, or if it'd make more sense to go with something else entirely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tamtrible (talk • contribs) 15:37, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

It's possible to add a header at various places in the table manually, and I think you could manage to not make it mess up the sorting. That said, it's not best practice for a data table.

I trust you mean framing as in the Microsoft Excel view, which would be really neat. I'm fairly sure that it should be possible in Javascript (see Facebook behavior). It might be something worth implementing at least in a gadget, if not sitewide, because I would agree that it would be a site improvement. --Izno (talk) 16:25, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

If you manually add headers, then if/when you sort the table, they will all go to one place. Go to the list of countries by income equality, and sort the table there, you'll see what I mean. Tamtrible (talk) 17:45, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

One *really clumsy* way that might work for at least some tables is to add letters/numbers before the header entries, in some kind of tiny or invisible type (if there is such a beast), so that at least the extra headers won't all clump in the *same* place. But there's gotta be a better way... Tamtrible (talk) 15:27, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

tt

With HTML5 now enabled, <tt> has now gone from unsupported to obsolete. Yes, I know that browsers will support it for ages, but we should try to keep our HTML clean. The question is what to replace it with:

• <tt>...</tt>: Text (for comparison)
• <code>...</code>: Text
• <span style="font-family: monospace, Courier;">...</span>: Text

<code> seems the simplest, but I would like the opinions of our HTML/CSS experts. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:49, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I would guess that code could probably replace about 60-70% of tt usage (semantically), with the other bit being span to present a stylistic difference. It may be worthwhile to simply disable support for the element on the server side rather than attempt to present a different element. --Izno (talk) 00:02, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

<code> is the preferred choice, as it preserves the semantic meaning; simply declaring another font does not, and will result in mismatched font sizing. Note that MediaWiki may autoconvert obsolete tags to HTML5 in the future, so <tt> will probably be 'demoted' to wiki markup status. The only gripe that I have for code is the forced background color. — Edokter (talk) — 10:03, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

<code>...</code> is only the preferred choice in some circumstances. There are times when <kbd>...</kbd> or <samp>...</samp> is a better choice. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:35, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

New gadget

I propose to create a tool for detector disambiguations as Spanish Wikipedia (es:Wikipedia:Detector de desambiguaciones, German Wikipedia (de:Wikipedia:Helferlein/Begriffsklärungs-Check), Galician Wikipedia (gl:Wikipedia:Detector de homónimos) and Portuguese Wikipedia (pt:Wikipédia:Detector de desambiguações) have. This tool is used to detect the links that link to articles that are disambiguations. For example, someone put the link Cuatro in an article in a television program, but would have to be this Cuatro (TV channel). And these links are marked yellow.

This gadget also marks the articles with topics of unclear notability.

I have already created the description page Wikipedia:Disambiguation detector. Now an administrator have that copy the code of Spanish Wikipedia es:MediaWiki:Gadget-DetectaDesambiguaciones.js, German Wikipedia de:MediaWiki:Gadget-bkl-check.js or Portuguese Wikipedia pt:MediaWiki:Gadget-desambiguacoes.js There is also that request to the user APPER of German Wikipedia that he duplicates the code in the Toolserver. The administrator have to change the next code:

Categoría:Wikipedia:Desambiguación > Category:All disambiguation pages
desambiguación > disambiguation
Categoría:Wikipedia:Sin relevancia aparente > Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability
SRA > (To the favorite word or phrase)

If anybody wants, can add more thinks to marks. Anybody checks the translation in Wikipedia:Disambiguation detector, because I know little English. -Vivaelcelta {discusión  · contributions} 03:58, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

User:Anomie/linkclassifier does the same and much more. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 04:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

But I don't know to use this gadget. In contrast, this gadget is activated in My preferences marking a box.--Vivaelcelta {discusión  · contributions} 15:11, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

No. Your Gadget does not exist on the English Wikipedia. You first make a proposal at Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:52, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I understand that Anomie's gadget allows you to customize it, but I really don't understand how to customize it. All I would want from the gadget is for the text of dab links to appear as cc6700 and cc8843 so readability isn't affected by a bunch of shading and borders, etc. Does anyone know how I could do that? Ryan Vesey 16:00, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks you Gadget850. I know that my gadget does not exist on the English Wikipedia, so I propose it. And now I know where make a proposal. --Vivaelcelta {discusión  · contributions} 18:11, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Watched

I came here and scanned this page then left to return to my watched pages. The Village Pump is now on my watchlist. I do not want it on my watchlist. Respectfully, Tiyang (talk) 04:06, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

See Help:Watching pages#Controlling which pages are watched. If you mean that you don't know how the page entered your watchlist then I guess you accidentally clicked a watch link while you viewed the page. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:06, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

That or you used a keyboard shortcut; under Windows, Alt+⇧ Shift+W will do this - it's right next to Alt+⇧ Shift+Q, Alt+⇧ Shift+E and Alt+⇧ Shift+S which are the shortcuts to Special:SpecialPages, "Edit" and "Save page" respectively. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:39, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Those keyboard shortcuts are for Firefox; just plain alt would have been the modifier key for Internet Explorer. Graham87 13:11, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Nope, none of the above. Guess it is an unsolved mystery. Thanks for the responses. Respectfully, Tiyang (talk) 20:25, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Toolserver Gateway Time-out error

So for about a few hours now I keep getting a 504 error when trying to access the toolserver. Can someone fix it? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 06:41, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Same problem here in the UK.--Racklever (talk) 09:17, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Me too, whenever I click the coordinates. At least it isn't my PC I guess..♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:39, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

UTRS is down too. Secretlondon (talk) 10:41, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Several of my tools don't work today. Is this a known problem, is it being resolved? RolandR (talk) 13:59, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

_{Same problem for me here in the states. Theopolisme 14:08, 23 September 2012 (UTC)}

status.toolserver.org says that the web servers are down. this says that it's being investigated. The toolserver does seem particularly flaky but I've only recently started using it daily, perhaps it's always been like this.. Secretlondon (talk) 18:50, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Geohack seems to be working again. Simply south...... eating shoes for just 6 years 18:58, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Proposal: Add namespace name "Category" to categories listed at some special pages

Plaese see here. --Meno25 (talk) 13:25, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

deleting subpages of user page

I'd like to know how I can delete subpages I have made in my user page. Three of them are obsolete and empty, but I still use one of them. Is there a way I can delete these empty pages myself? Thanks in advance. Groet, Mark in wiki (talk) 14:48, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Only administrators can delete pages. You can request deletion with {{db-g7}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:11, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

In this case you can also use {{db-u1}}. Either will do it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:14, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Mark in wiki (talk) 15:57, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

How do I chase links that come via a mass of transclusions?

I created Wikipedia:Images and it links to a large number of WikiProject banner templates (perhaps all?). I am having trouble finding out how it is linked but I come up against a dead end. These templates are getting damn complicated! Concerns were raised when I created the page that it was a high use redir so I should not have made the recent changes. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Creating_a_Wikipedia:Images_page. I want to see if the linking via the WikiProject banners goes to the correct target. Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:10, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I searched within the HTML page source of Talk:Agatha Christie. On the page, the link to Wikipedia:Images is part of the "good article review", at "Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?". -- John of Reading (talk) 20:18, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Ah! Thanks for that John. Maybe my dead end was not dead afterall because I did turn up at that neck of the woods. So it looks like the link is appropriate. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 20:23, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Images in columns

I have a large number of images to be arranged in about 6 columns, somewhat like the arrangement at Lilium#Taxonomy - is there any simple way of doing it and leaving the option of adding images at a later stage? thanks Paul venter (talk) 09:05, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

If you'd prefer to convert Microsoft Excel or Google Docs tables, for example, into the MediaWiki-format, there are several possibilities listed at Wikipedia:Tools#Importing (converting) content to Wikipedia (MediaWiki) format. Mephistophelian (talk) 09:29, 18 September 2012 (UTC).

I don't have a ready-made document to convert to MediaWiki format - rather I would build a page using existing Commons images. Paul venter (talk) 09:48, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Try the edit toolbar: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, under 'Show edit toolbar (requires JavaScript)', and replace the examples with images and descriptions as required. Mephistophelian (talk) 10:04, 18 September 2012 (UTC).

I'm afraid that's Greek to me. I don't want this as a personal preference thing, but would like to incorporate a gallery (in columns in the same way as ((Div col|cols=4|small=yes)) arranges the names list) in the article List of Gauteng birds. Thanks for your interest. Paul venter (talk) 13:10, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

What I would do - and in fact how I made my first edit as a registered user - is to find an existing article which already has the sort of thing that you require (and I see that you have already identified Lilium#Taxonomy as a good candidate), and copy the wikicode into the article you wish to add the feature to. Whilst copying, make suitable amendments and remove the non-relevant items. Preview, adjust and save. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:46, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

After considering Paul's work on the list of Gauteng birds, I've prepared a possible solution in my userspace: User:Mephistophelian/sandbox. Mephistophelian (talk) 14:09, 18 September 2012 (UTC).

Thanks Mephistophelian - that seems to work quite well, the only three drawbacks being 1. the repetition of code "|199x120px" after every image, 2. the breaking of the images into sets of six by repeating ' |- align="center" ' at the start of each set rather than specifying 6 columns at the start of the code and having it done automatically thereafter, and 3. the difficulty of introducing an entirely new image which would force the last image in each set to become the first image of the following set (a sort of ripple effect that would be the devil to implement). To summarise - it would be nice to specify any parameters at the start of the list of images, enabling one to add images willy-nilly - very much like the way the ((Div col|cols=4|small=yes)) arranges the names list in 4 columns without having to worry about the effect that adding or deleting a name would have. regards Paul venter (talk) 18:23, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

How about the {{gallery}} template, or the <gallery>...</gallery> tag? You can see the former being used at Andromeda (mythology)#Depictions in art, and the latter in action at User:Redrose64#Images: note how both techniques self-adjust the number of columns according to the available width. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:44, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

The {{gallery}} template is certainly better than the other options, as it does a lot of self-adjusting. Its only disadvantage being the variation in image heights, but one will just have to live with it till something better comes along. As an aside - shouldn't all these gallery routines be listed at Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial? Thanks for all the advice - much appreciated Paul venter (talk) 08:12, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

• Template:Gallery fixed for height with new cellwidth=180: The image-table Template:Gallery has been changed to allow new parameter "cellwidth=180" so that images can auto-widen to have the same height, without forcing all images to the same width. The parameter "height=180" is intended to work. I have used "180x199px" in hand-coded images, so I know the height should work correctly. The subtemplate Template:Gallery/aux is where each image is sized. The technique, for same-height thumbnail images, is to set width=399 (or other large number) to allow each image to auto-widen to the same height. The use of width=399 is a trick, not unlike an artist's trick to dip a paintbrush into 2 colors to allow dual-color paintstrokes, while "cellwidth=180" prevents the width=399 from forcing all image boxes to be 399px wide. In general, the form "999x80px" allows all images to be 80-pixel height, but 999 is too dangerous for the width, so 399 is a safer boundary. Now, Template:Gallery supports same-height images, but I will update the documentation, and explaining the "399" might be much harder than using it. A major reason why many templates are not flexible is probably due to the tedium of explaining the clever functions in the documentation. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:17, 24 September, noted fix 06:34, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Portal:Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

For some reason, Portal:Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not displaying correctly. Rather than fitting onto the screen, the boxes are displaying really wide. I'm not sure how to describe this but I'm wondering if this is only happening to me; so I'd like to hear input from others whether they can see it the same way. This problem was not there before. Is there anything which explains this weird display? Mar4d (talk) 10:31, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

A purge fixed it for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:44, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm it's good now, thanks for the advice! Mar4d (talk) 11:02, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Content from deleted versions appearing in Google search

Can someone with technical know how address the request on User_talk:Bluepenoffun about previously deleted versions still appearing in google search? Thanks. -- The Red Pen of Doom 16:13, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

There was still one rev left that had this visible in the edit summary. I have deleted it now, though it has not been truly revdel'ed yet (If someone wants to, pls do). I seriously doubt this was the reason it was still in google though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:50, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

• Leave a final revision 2 days to allow Google re-indexing: The manner in which Google re-indexes an article being deleted can be a complex process. The elephant in the room: if the article is deleted, without cleansing the wording, then it seems to stay in Google Search indexes for over 3 weeks, still showing the improper wording, on the search-results page, although a click will note the page as deleted now. For an article which remains, Google has reindexed some articles within minutes of an edit, and even re-re-indexed some articles which were edited twice (2x) due to fixing typos in the "fixed" version. However, in other cases, Google has left some articles, non-reindexed for 24 hours, even if changed twice. So, after 24 hours, consider a minor change to spur re-indexing, in case Google is running that day with delayed re-indexing. However, note that each indexed revision is a different copy of the page, and it might take days longer to forget the phrases removed from the older revision, even though all searches will click to the current revision. The Bing search has used a slower schedule to re-index, but the general rules seem similar: cleanse article wording 2 days before deletion. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:34, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes, except when I cancel

Could someone give me some tips how to write a user script to make the Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes (Vector skin only) user preference ignore the "Cancel" link but otherwise function as usual?

I tried looking in MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Vector.js for some inspiration (i.e., the code that implements this preference) but came up empty.

Also, sorry if Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User scripts or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts would have been a better venue. This is not a feature request for Wikipedia as a whole. SoledadKabocha (talk) 17:54, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Since that dialog is created by the Vector extension, you may want to browse its code. — Edokter (talk) — 18:11, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

The code for that is in the Vector extension, modules/ext.vector.editWarning.js. Unfortunately, there is no way to directly turn off the warning from outside that code itself. Anomie⚔ 18:18, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

@Edokter: I apologize for my laziness. I guessed that a few minutes (seconds?) after I had posted this.

@Anomie: I currently have the preference in question disabled. Would that code work if I copied it into a user script? If so, how would I modify it to specially handle the Cancel link (and, ideally, not run if I ever reenable the preference)? If not, why not? SoledadKabocha (talk) 19:09, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

I am withdrawing this request, since my use of Lazarus makes the feature in question less important anyway. I will do my own research on the above questions if I ever decide to pursue this again. Sorry for the inconvenience. SoledadKabocha (talk) 21:31, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

"wikitable sortable" tables are no longer sortable

Resolved

The tables I have checked are Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2012 and List of counties in Ohio. They were working OK yesterday (Sept. 23), but this afternoon (at 1812 Sept. 24, UTC -0700) the tables that are classed "wikitable sortable" are only working as if they were classed "wikitable". I don't know where to look to find the sortable CSS, so I don't know if this is a CSS problem, a JavaScript problem, or some other sort of problem. I tried this in two browsers (FF 15.0.1 and IE 9.0.10), and I can't prove that it's not a problem in my own setup, but everything was fine yesterday and I don't believe I have changed anything. NameIsRon (talk) 01:12, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

There's other JavaScript stuff broken as of this afternoon/evening (UTC −4:00) as well. The enhanced (grouped) recent changes isn't collapsing the groups, and portions of Twinkle are dead. jcgoble3 (talk) 01:16, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I just lost the purge gadget too. --Rschen7754 01:19, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I have no UTC clock/purge link, and the watch/unwatch star reloads the page with just a confirmation message and no article instead of doing it with JS. jcgoble3 (talk) 01:24, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

It may have been fixed in this edit; please clear your cache and see if things are working now. Anomie⚔ 01:40, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Now the Ohio counties article ( List of counties in Ohio ) is sortable in both the browsers I checked, but the other one ( Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2012 ) is working only in IE 9.0.10, not in FF 15.0.1. Win 7 SP1, 64-bit. Cleared my cache in FF, still no joy. NameIsRon (talk) 01:44, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Cleared my cache (in FF 15.0.1 and Chrome 21.0.1180.89 m) but still not fixed! :( Bidgee (talk) 01:45, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Nationwide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2012 doesn't seem to have any sortable tables in the wikitext. Anomie⚔ 01:52, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

It may have been fixed in this edit; please clear your cache and see if things are working now. Anomie⚔ 01:51, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Nope, still not working! :( Though the UTC clock is back! Bidgee (talk) 01:50, 25 September 2012 (UTC) Looks like it working again. Bidgee (talk) 01:56, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I think I got mixed up on which articles have the sortable tables. Sorry about that! Anyway, it seems to be OK. now. NameIsRon (talk) 01:55, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

This is the article I should have referred to: List_of_submissions_to_the_85th_Academy_Awards_for_Best_Foreign_Language_Film. Again, sorry for the red herring and mis-direction. NameIsRon (talk) 01:59, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Everything reported broken seems to be working again. jcgoble3 (talk) 02:35, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

What's this "pef-notification" stuff on every page now?

I've got some scripts that are getting errors because they parse pages as XML, and lately every single page has had the following new code added:

<div style="display:none;" class="pef-notification-container gratitude">
	<div class="pef-notification">
		<div class="pef-icon pef-icon-checkmark">&nbsp;</div>
		<span></span>
	</div>
</div>

Someone able to tell me what this is for? Gary King (talk · scripts) 20:10, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Grepping through the MediaWiki git repos shows that mw:Extension:E3 Experiments adds this code. The experiment in question provides post-edit feedback to new contributors such as "Success! You made your first edit to Wikipedia!" after they save their first, fifth, tenth, 25th, 50th, and 100th edits. See Wikipedia:Editor engagement experiments and m:Research:Post-edit feedback for details. PleaseStand (talk) 20:44, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Excellent thanks. Gary King (talk · scripts) 01:34, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for replying with the necessary docs PleaseStand. :) Gary, this is temporary, and should be ending the first week of October. If it's something urgent we need to do, let me know. In the meantime, thanks for being patient with us, as you have. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:57, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Losing edit summary - Has something changed in the last 24 hours ?

For some months I've had a problem that when I click on the Save button it says "Connecting..." indefinately. This affects uploads other than WP so I think it's a problem with my PC/firewall/ISP. The solution has been for me to press F5, wait a few seconds and then click on Save. This was working (for small uploads) up to yesterday. However, today when I press F5 the Edit summary and checkboxes (but not the text being editted) get reset. The result is that I can make edits, but not leave an edit summary. I'm using Firefox 15.0.1. Any ideas ? DexDor (talk) 19:49, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Do you login through the normal server (URLs beginning http://) or a secure server (URLs beginning https://)? If it's a secure server, are you using the current format (URLs beginning https://en.wiki.x.io/) or the old format (URLs beginning https://secure.wikimedia.org/)? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:02, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I was using http (I assume), I've just tried https and it works fine (fixing the original problem - for WP at least). Thanks very much! DexDor (talk) 20:17, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Talk:Robert_O._Young Archives

The Archives of the page: Talk:Robert_O._Young are missing; as the shortcuts pasted below (which were generated by rolling over the corresponding links) indicate.

http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Talk:Robert_O._Young/Archive_1&action=edit&redlink=1
http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Talk:Robert_O._Young/Archive_2&action=edit&redlink=1

Please repair them.

Thank you,

67.91.184.187 (talk) 22:05, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. The archives had not been moved when the article moved from Robert Young (author). PrimeHunter (talk) 23:55, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your very prompt help. 67.91.184.187 (talk) 00:54, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Image artifacting

Is there a way that I can reduce the artifacting in the thumbnail of this image? I have the vague impression that converting it from a JPG to an PNG might help, but this isn't something that I know much about. Any advice would be appreciated. CanadianJudoka (talk) 06:13, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Leave it as is. The image is on Commons, which has some pretty good image scaling and conversion software. The problem about scaling or converting any JPEG is that you always lose something, so the number of scales/converts should be kept to a minimum. You also don't know how what the user has as their Thumbnail size at Preferences → Appearance, so any size that you pick may well be the wrong one and a further scaling will still be necessary.

That is why the advice is to upload the image in the original resolution, no matter how big or small, and let the software at commons worry about how to serve it. See Commons:Commons:File types#JPEG. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:49, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, resaving the original as a png would fix that, since the problem here is that the thumbnails are being saved as jpegs after scaling, which is where the new artifacting is coming from. Make the original a png and then scaled thumbs will be pngs and that won't happen. You can use something like GIMP to do that sort of thing, but I'll just go ahead and upload new versions of these in a moment. -— Isarra ༆ 16:41, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done for those two. There are quite a few other images on Commons that have the same problem, though, and at least a few other language wikipedias could use their images changed, but... uh... someone else can worry about that. -— Isarra ༆ 16:59, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks! I was really happy to find those illustrations, and it was disappointing to see the artifacting at a lower resolution. I seem to remember somewhere that Wikipedia prefers photos in JPG format, but I don't understand why. Is it just a size thing? There doesn't seem to be any other advantage, and the visual disadvantages seem to outweigh that. CanadianJudoka (talk) 17:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Main thing is that jpegs tend to be a lot smaller, aye, but the compression works best for things with a lot of texture - you encounter problems like with those where there isn't much texture, but for most photos it's fine, since generally a landscape or a portrait or what have you will be full of texture. In the end, no particular format is preferred for everything; it just comes down to picking the right one for the thing at hand. And no, it's not reasonable to expect people to necessarily know what that is. We figure it out as we go. -— Isarra ༆ 18:25, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

PNG version (not closeup), appears fuzzy where 3 branches on white (in center) are not clear.

File:Order of Sacred Treasure closeup.jpg JPEG closeup (but needs to be retouched)

• JPEGs make sharper thumbnails from moderate closeups not large: The clarity of images tends to be a balancing act, where the image-magic "trick" is to save closeup JPEG excerpts from a huge image, scaled to moderate size, and then thumbnails from them will appear clearer than huge-JPEG thumbnails (or PNGs). If those Judo medals could be hand-enlarged (see closeup at far right), with those closeups extracted as JPEGs, the article could show the closeups as even clearer than PNGs (which tend to be fuzzy). Of course, a closeup of any image is, by definition, a "closer" view of the subject, so that justifies splitting an image as "huge original" +1 or more closeup images. When the closeups are scaled to moderate size before saving, then there is less distortion when thumbnailing from moderate versus large JPEG images. This is because many huge JPEGs will thumbnail as scraggly, scratched thumbnails, whereas a moderate JPEG (of the exact same) would thumbnail okay, but act as redundant to the original image. By using the closeup-excerpt trick, then a moderate-sized image can be saved without appearing to be a redundant smaller version of the whole original, and of course, a typical closeup will always appear larger, clearer as a thumbnail in an article. The final part of the image-magic "trick" is to link the full original: "Right-click to see: full original" where the "full orig*" would link to the huge JPEG image from which the closeup was extracted/reduced and saved. But wait, there's more: a closeup could also be "retouched" or repainted to have even sharper clarity than the original (as long as the image description page confessed that the closeup was "enhanced" beyond the original version), while the original image retains the exact detail for data purists. These tactics might sound like "Clarity calculus", so does all of it make sense? -Wikid77 (talk) 22:20/23:33, 25 Sept., 05:20, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Awful page rendering

In Christianity in the 13th century the 13th century timeline put an purple bar across the screen and on top of an image. It could be fixed by removing the {{tl:hidden}} template I guess but it should really be investigated as a bug. Maybe?? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 08:18, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Ehm. hidden shouldn't even be used in article content normally. Anyways, this is a full width element, so it does exactly what it is supposed to do. What you are looking for is to add to the template usage |style="clear:both;", which says that it needs to stay clear of floating elements (such as the image). That will move it below the image (and introduce a bit of a gap) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:57, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't see value in using the template[, either]. --Izno (talk) 13:38, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

This is a quick fix; alternatively, the image could have been moved out of the way. But as noted above, MOS:COLLAPSE should be taken into account. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:06, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Upcoming tutorial for Git & Gerrit

If you've thought about getting involved in MediaWiki development, and you could use help learning how we use Git and Gerrit, there's an online tutorial coming up. Saper is leading a hands-on online training covering basics, branching, and troubleshooting. Check here for testing access to the conference, and lab setup.

Saper will be available for 3 hours, and there'll be a break in the middle. Absolute beginners with Git might want to stay for the whole three hours; people with some experience won't need as long.

Answer this poll to help Saper choose a date: 17:30 UTC on 26 September, 27 September, 2 October, or 3 October. And if you want to attend, please also answer this question: how much Git & Gerrit do you already know?

Thanks. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 21:54, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Has Saper picked a date yet? I'm in the SIP conference and IRC channel, and no one's there. — Edokter (talk) — 17:37, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Good question! I've asked him to please pick a date. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 15:31, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Let's make it on 3rd! Thank you!  « Saper // @talk »  21:24, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Serif font

Is there a way to force a character to display in a serif font? I want to use a typographic dagger in a list beside the names of people who are deceased, but it looks like a cross (†) in sans serif fonts. CanadianJudoka (talk) 06:13, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

{{serif}} → †. Or more manually with †. --Splarka (rant) 07:20, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. The one using the serif template still looks like a cross in Chrome, but the manual one is clearly a dagger. CanadianJudoka (talk) 07:36, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Both look like crosses on my system. Images would probably be necessary if you really care what they look like, but the thingies even in vague fonts are common enough that it really shouldn't matter. -— Isarra ༆ 08:18, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Use {{Dagger}}.--Siddhartha Ghai (talk) 15:53, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. The {{Dagger}} template, Siddhartha, uses a sans serif image that looks like a cross, so that doesn't solve my problem. However, I played around with the {{serif}} template, and it displays a seriffed dagger if I set the font to Times New Roman, so I think I'll go with that. CanadianJudoka (talk) 22:24, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Not everyone has the times new roman font, however. -— Isarra ༆ 23:01, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Pretty much eveyone have 'Times' though, so always use that as fallback. — Edokter (talk) — 15:54, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't serif be sufficient as a fallback font-family? That is, after all, the exact purpose of CSS generic font families. — Richardguk (talk) 18:20, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but to ensure everyone gets Times, or variations thereof, one should use both "Times New Roman" and "Times" before falling back to "serif". — Edokter (talk) — 18:29, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

The {{serif}} template is written in such a way that you only have two possible fonts - the preferred "Georgia", or if not available, the fallback "serif". That is, if you were to put {{serif|Text}}, the result is "Text" or in other words <span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;">Text</span>. There is no way to insert higher-priority fonts, to give <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, Times, Georgia, serif;">Text</span> which yields "Text" - which is what Edokter suggests. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:05, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't really like hardcoded fonts like that, but Georgia seems to match the default sans-serif font in x-height best of all common serif fonts. — Edokter (talk) — 19:44, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for all the input, everyone. CanadianJudoka (talk) 04:46, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I do wonder though... Isn't the point of using a dagger the fact that it looks like a cross? — Edokter (talk) — 19:16, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Nope. :) CanadianJudoka (talk) 19:34, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, they sure do look alike... — Edokter (talk) — 21:26, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Table footer

Is there a way to add a footer to a table that it outside of the cells (basically the same as a header, but on the bottom)? I would like to use it to add a key. CanadianJudoka (talk) 04:50, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• For a footer, add a final row with colspan=99: To have a footer span the entire width of the wikitable, which might be changed later to have more columns, make it a separate row as follows:

|-
| colspan=99 |
: <div style="font-size:87%; ">Footer text goes here.</div>

The option as "colspan=99" will allow the footer to span the entire width in any wikitable, even when more columns are added in later months/years. The font-size as "87%" matches the font in image captions, which would be typical for footer text, compared to the larger font size typically in the remainder of the table. Many tables in Wikipedia articles need footers, where people have been tacking notes below those tables, so feel free to add footers where needed in other articles as well. Thanks. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:56, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. Is it possible to remove the side and bottom borders so that the footer appears to be 'outside' of the table? CanadianJudoka (talk) 06:01, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

All table rows are inside the box: A footer could be simulated, by placing a small-font line after the table. However, the HTML table feature is not yet smart enough to allow an after-the-table footer (even after all these years of knowing about footers), so the choice is either to tack a line at the end, or to put the table within an outer table, with no border, and with a final row for the footer. Adding an outside small-font line is likely the best method. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:25, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Wikid77: Do you realize that according to the HTML5 validator, this generates invalid HTML? It thinks the table is 99 columns wide and then complains about missing cells. Note that section 4.9.12.1 of the current W3C HTML5 working draft includes "If x_width < x_current+colspan, then let x_width be x_current+colspan." and "If there exists a row or column in the table containing only slots that do not have a cell anchored to them, then this is a table model error." PleaseStand (talk) 06:22, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, if that remains their plan, then we will need to avoid the HTML5 validator with tables, until it becomes more sophisticated. Often, formal languages will allow emergency exceptions to deal with reality. I tried "colspan=all" but it is not even that smart, so it treats "all" as "1". However, currently, the "colspan=99" works to display the table, even if it does not know that it is valid in reality. The pitiful limitations of HTML5 could be offset if templates were not so limited and could set internal parameter values, such as {{#set:ncols|7}}, with "colspan={{{ncols}}}". However, all this computer technology is so backward, we end up with "colspan=99" as a last resort. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:25, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Alternatively, we could provide markup which validates for the time being (simply the change from colspan="99" to colspan="<actual number of rows>"). Shocking thought, perhaps. Aside from the validation consideration, it is simply bad web practice and accessibility to layer data tables such that there are merged cells within the table where there would otherwise be several different entries.[1] A key as proposed by the original post is such an example of bad web practice; it would be better to provide this information in the summary attribute or in a footnote or even as a last resort (in my opinion) the text of the document. --Izno (talk) 13:07, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm a political scientist, not a web designer, so you'll have to excuse my ignorance of bad web practice. Could you explain what the 'summary attribute' is, and provide a link to a page that explains the correct convention for what I want to do? CanadianJudoka (talk) 15:56, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Overlooking hundreds of years of page footers, condensed tables, and the sparse matrix: Wikipedia must be able to present information from many centuries of knowledge, where page footers and condensed tables with merged cells were used hundreds of years ago, even though those might require some explanatory comments to clarify the concepts for novice users. Also, in mathematics, the presentation of a sparse matrix has been a topic for many decades. Today's computers need to be improved to better handle those age-old concerns, and provide high-level support for a table-footer or mid-table subheaders (or at least "colspan=all"). This might be a case where "everyone" needs to be trained to use merged cells with colspan=2 (and also "rowspan="), so that such tables will not be a shock to them later. I was a tutor for many years, and I think that most people are not so slow-witted that they cannot comprehend a footer attached to the bottom of a table. In fact, technology tends to be slower to advance than people's acceptance of improvements. When I was developing the early search-engine software in the 1980s, many people instantly thought it was great to search for multiple words, in any order, and match several pages, or hypertext outlines, which contained those words, so I advised that all help pages should be structured for multi-word search to hunt across numerous help pages but limit searches by a search-bracket of lines per page. That was 30 years ago, so many people have always been ready for better technology. And today, presto, people can wikisearch "Help:page footer" where the prefix "Help:" limits the multi-word search to help-pages. Think smarter for people, not just simpler. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:10, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Talk page says view feedback when no feedback exists

Shouldn't it be considered a bug to say "View reader feedback" at the very top of a talk page if there is none? I saw an invitation to view at Talk:Malaria but it's empty. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 20:48, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

This is an example of a talkpage link

It's apparently deliberate. The link seems to be on the talk page of all pages in Category:Article Feedback 5 and Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. Wikipedia:Feedback walkthrough/2 says: "any article that has the feedback form on it will also have a link at the top of the article's talk page, as seen on the right." You can comment at Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:23, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Protection before and after pagemove

See Falmouth High School and Falmouth High School (Massachusetts). Some time ago, the Massachusetts article got semiprotected after a rash of vandalism; at that time, its pagename didn't have (Massachusetts). Shortly afterward, it was moved to the current title, and after being a redirect for a minute or two, the old pagename was converted into a disambiguation page. As far as I can understand, the pagemove had the result of both titles being protected equally — (Massachusetts) is protected, even though I can't see any protection actions since the rash of vandalism, and the old pagename was protected in the same way until I unprotected it (per a request) a few minutes ago. Question. Is this the way it works, or did I misunderstand something? And is this the way that it's supposed to work? Nyttend (talk) 00:15, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

If you're moving a protected page to a new name, yeah, that should leave the redirect protected and also keep the protection on the new name, since the vandalism could just as easily be targeted at the particular title as the specific article. Could be problematic otherwise if folks are still using the redirect, as messing with the redirects would mess things up anyone trying to follow them. -— Isarra ༆ 04:38, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, see Bugzilla:38123. you might want to voice your opinion about the "correct" way of handling the interaction between move and protect. קיפודנחש (talk) 17:04, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Download as PDF

Pages converted to pdf format for a user to download always appear to have the pdf 'Title' tag set to 'Anonymous'. This may not affect users of Adobe reader on Windows which usually displays the file name, but using, for example, the 'Evince' viewer (on Ubuntu) you see this tag displayed in the window title bar. Could the pdf conversion utility also write the page title to the pdf 'title' tag? — Preceding unsigned comment added by NichoEd (talk • contribs) 16:48, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. (and confirmed in Evince and Okular. See screenshot of the problem in both).

(I've pinged Help:Books/Feedback and meta:Book tool/Feedback with a summary and pointer). —Quiddity (talk) 20:04, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Portal Creation/edits

Ok. So, I was kinda being stupid. :/ I noticed there was no portal for Miley Cyrus. So I thought why don't I create it? How hard can it be? I thought wrong. So I tried consulting the Portal creation instructions & I tried doing what it said. But some things didn't work. I know I was doing it wrong. So I tried fixing it. & it didn't really work. I tried following the portal creation instructions but it was complicated & confusing. Now i'm stuck. So can someone show me how to do it? I appreciate you doing it for me. But after you fix it, plz show me how to do it, as I would like to learn the craft of "Wikipedianing." ;) Thank you so much! oh yeah, the page is Portal:Miley Cyrus. Lopezjaylo98 (talk) 20:56, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

• Portals are for large subjects often with hundreds of subpages: I think it might be better to avoid creating a Portal by yourself, because they often involve creating hundreds of subpages to support all aspects. See: "Portal:Computer Science" as an example. Currently, the navbox Template:Miley_Cyrus is probably sufficient to cover most reader interest about actress/singer Miley Cyrus. Wikipedia tends to avoid treatment of people which might resemble a wp:FANSITE, and portals are an area typically reserved for large subjects involving numerous people or objects, where dozens of editors would help create the numerous Portal subpages. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:44, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
  • But if you look at the list of musical portals there are portals for Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Kesha, even Avril Lavigne. So why not Miley? She has a good amount of articles. I'm just confused as to why not Miley, that's all. But thank you for your help & opinions! :D Lopezjaylo98 (talk) 20:24, 28 September 2012 (UTC)
    • Well, if you insist on enormous work, then you could copy from sections of Portal:Justin Bieber, but beware that not all aspects might work. Perhaps try to contact people who worked on those other music portals, and see if they would be willing to spend more hours to help you. I have worked on science portals, and they have required many hours to match the text styles and image formats. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:03, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Template Parameter Wizard

Screenshot of the Template Parameter Wizard.

Hi. this is the first time i write here, so please forgive any breech of protocol - they are not intended.

i contribute mostly on hewiki, and very lightly on enwiki. in hewiki, after some deliberation, it became clear that many editors have difficulty with parametric templates. to alleviate the problem, i developed a "template parameters wizard". the wizard adds a button to the "advanced" toolbar that looks like so: {{}}. pressing this button opens a small dialog box that allows the editor to type in the template name (with autocomplete from the template space. if a template is selected in the editor window, then this step is skipped). after selecting the template, a main dialog opens, with the list of all the parameters this template supports, and an input line for each parameter. there are 2 modes of operation:

• for all templates, the wizard will extract the parameter list from the template itself.
• however, if the template selected has a subpage named "Parameters", the wizard will get the parameters from this subpage instead of the template itself. this enables added features, such as descriptions, define parameters as "Mandatory", give default values for parameters, define parameters as "select value from a list", specify fields as "multiline", and some more useful features.

When selecting a partially populated, existing template on the page and then pressing the button, the wizard will pre-populate all the fields which already have values. the wizard operates in hewiki since around February 2012, and in arwiki since mid August.

if you want to try it, add to Special:MyPage/common.js the following line:

importScript('User:קיפודנחש/TemplateParamWizard.js');

if you want to discuss it, best way to reach me is on he:User Talk:קיפודנחש, although i do occasionally read my talkpage on enwiki. קיפודנחש (talk) 23:23, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

That's a seriously useful gadget, which should be adopted or offered as a preference ASAP, IMO. Thanks קיפודנחש. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:29, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

That's awesome! Could you make / point to an example template that uses the parameters feature?--Eloquence* 00:23, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Try it with Persondata! It's amazing! Ryan Vesey 00:46, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Nice. I don't understand why Wikipedia doesn't already have something like this built in. CanadianJudoka (talk) 00:53, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

per Eloquence request: try to enter "Param wizard demo" as the template name (the autocomplete may or may not offer this - it takes a while for a new page to register for the autocomplete). see Template:Param wizard demo/Parameters for a quick run of how to define the different capabilities.

• Float the mouse over a paramter name to see the description (since the too, uses tipsy, the description can even contain links)
• notice "Mandatory" params with red border
• notice "default value" fileds
• notice multiline fied
• notice multiple-choice field
• note dependency: param #8 appears only after field #7 becomes non-empty
• note the date-type field (param6)
• note you can actually click on the link in the description of param#2. we open this kind of link in a separate tab: you don't want to go to a link and lose all your work.

to see how it can help with incremental editing (i.e., add information to an existing template), e.g., open Pina (film) in edit mode, select the Template:Infobox film (i.e., select the whole template, from the opening "{{Infobox film" all the way to the closing "}}", and then press the button: the wizard will open for the correct template, and will copy the existing content to the correct fields, while presenting you with all the fields of this template.

• click the "preview" button to see how the tempalte will render in the page.

in hewiki we created "parameters" subpage for about 70 parametric templates thus far, but there is no reason why not all parametric templates will have the subpage.

קיפודנחש (talk) 02:08, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

This is interesting, but it is actively hostile to formatting templates with whitespace for readability, as is commonly done with infoboxes. It's simply ripping all whitespace out, which is inappropriate. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 07:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

it's a script - we can teach it to use any spacing is common in specific wikis. it used to use the spacing we ususally use in hewiki, but just to demonstrate, i changed the output to something closer to what's common in enwiki (one space between | and the param name, and push the "=" signs to position 16). if the community in enwiki will decide it wants to use this tool, we can work the precise details then. there are some other delicate points, e.g., whether or not to list empty fields. currently the wizard trims the empties, but it can be told to behave differently, e.g., to list them all, or to leave the ones it finds already existing (if there were any), but not add new empties. קיפודנחש (talk) 08:03, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I get that. And the tweaks you've made will make this much more acceptable to a wider range of folks, here. Some hate any spaces and remove them with scripts; others the opposite. I think much if it stems from people have prefs/browser set to render the editbox in monospace or proportional; those viewing proportional type don't get the formatting. 16 or so is probably reasonable, with the few long ones running-ragged. We do have some long param names, here. The empties will vary; probably leave what you find and not add all will be best. Some templates have lots of params and they are not all ever going to be used in one instance ({{infobox settlement}}). The ones people add as blank are usually fields that are expected/desired, but the information is not at hand. Oh, it would be nice if the green preview expanded when the whole dialog box was expanded ;) Or could be expanded manually. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 08:34, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I’ve added above a screenshot of the script (is is understandable or is it too much arrows and windows?), and I leave a message on the French WP Template Wikiproject. ~ Seb35 [^_^] [fr] 11:34, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

It's not always a good idea to add blank parameters if they are not likely to be used. Some (but by no means all) templates (not just infoboxes) behave differently depending upon whether unused parameters are left blank or removed entirely. See for example this edit. Similarly in {{cite book}}, specifying |last= causes |author= to be ignored. A less well-known feature of that template is that specifying |postscript= (but leaving it blank) causes behaviour different from omitting |postscript= entirely. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:07, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

as far as i understand, the main reason for leaving empty params in the page is so that future editors will find it easier to fill in more data. once a wiki adds "Template Parameters Wizard" to its interface, this rationale loses a lot of importance - the wizard lists all the fields, regardless of whether they crrently ave value or not. this allows for shorter, better readable page, without sacrificing much. so in hewiki and in arwiki, the wizart purges all the empties. קיפודנחש (talk) 22:32, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Just tried this with {{cite book}}

• The template has a lot of aliases— all of these get listed, which is confusing.
• It outputs like {{Cite book|Last = Doe|First = John}}, which is invalid, since the parameters must be lower case.
• Parameters is misspelled on the form and at Template:Param wizard demo/Parameters.

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:48, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

will try to relate one by one.

• this is correct. for central templates like {{cite book}}, it would be better to create the "Parameters" subpage. the ability to define dependency (i.e., the ability to tell some fields to become visible only when other fields become non-empty) should solve a lot of this issue, unless i misunderstood. i am not familiar with the notion of "aliases" WRT templates. all i know are "Parameters".
• this was a botched version of the script - it is back to being case sensitive again, in asmuch as parameter names are concerned. if you perform deep refresh and still see this problem, please let me know.
• thanks for the report about Template:Param wizard demo/Parameters and the misspel in the script itself (fixed).

קיפודנחש (talk) 05:25, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

For a variety of reasons, {{cite book}} uses aliases; for example:

|Surname1={{{last|{{{last1|{{{author|{{{author1|{{{authors|{{{surname|{{{surname1|}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

There are seven aliased named parameters that feed into the |Surname1= meta-parameter. If you define multiple aliased parameters here, only one will show. For example, if |last= and |last1= were both defined, then only |last= will show as it is parsed first. This is a very common technique, and is mused in a multitude of templates. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 12:59, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

technically speaking, these are not "aliases". they are redundant parameters. common wisdom says redundant parameters are bad, and should be avoided (also known as the "he who has two watches, never knows what time it is" rule). i have no idea why those who created this template did it this way - there might be good reasons, and there might not be. either way, for such a template, the problem does not lie with the "wizard" - it lies with the template itself. this is a classic case of the usefulness of "parameters" page: you do away (i.e., do not create rows in the Parameters" subpage) with "author" and "authorN" and also with "surname", "surnameN", and leave in place last1..lastN and first1..firstN, and you build it such that lastN depends on lastN-1 (i.e., "last4" depends on "last3"), and the same with first.

it is true, though, that if a template contains many junk parameters (i.e., parameters supported by the template, but such that are not supposed to be there, left in place in order to support previous uses of the template for historical reasons), then it may be difficult to use the wizard without "Parameters" subpage. FWIW, in hewiki we operate a bot, and whenever any template parameter becomes obsolete, the bot executes the required edits to bring all the places where the template is used to the use correct parameters. קיפודנחש (talk) 19:57, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I suggest that you spend three years (as I have) hanging around the talk pages for {{cite book}}/{{cite journal}}/{{citation}}/etc., Wikipedia:Citation templates and the more-recently created Help talk:Citation Style 1. Most attempts to reduce the number of aliases (synonyms, alternate names, call them what you will) for parameters like |last= are heated and ultimately go nowhere. Even the archives of this very page WP:VPT contain much along similar lines. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:09, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

ok, let me try again: this section is not about any specific template. if there is a template whose parameters are "unruly", in the sense of sporting many parameters which are not actually meant to be used, then such templates can be helped by the wizard if they'll sport a "Parameters" subpage. however, the main question remain: does enwiki want to do something with this wizard. the discussions you mention aren't really related to this question, and will have to be resolved (or not) regardless of whether enwiki will adopt the wizard or not. peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 21:21, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

File:Robert2.jpg

Why, after deleting the redirect that was File:Robert2.jpg, is it still trying to redirect, and not showing the image on Commons, commons:File:Robert2.jpg? I've tried purging it, and undeleting then redeleting it. Weirdly enough, when I undeleted it, the redirect showed, but then the image from Commons did too. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 01:34, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

It's showing the right image for me. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:35, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Sigh. Nevermind. Not sure why it wasn't working; guess it's borked. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 02:03, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

It was probably your browser cache. Replacing an image is something that is a tad problematic, the URL stays the same, so the browser thinks nothing changed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:18, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Edit notice

There's a new notice at the edit box, above the buttons, which says "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used and redistributed by other people at will". I have nothing against it... but I edit regularly, and have been an editor since several years ago. I know those rules, I'm well aware of them, and I don't need to read it every time. How do I turn it off? Cambalachero (talk) 23:04, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Just add the following to Special:MyPage/common.css:

.editpage-head-copywarn
{
 display: none;
}

Then hard refresh, and you should be good. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:09, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

See User:Br'er Rabbit/common.css for much more re-styling of that stuff. <br /> 02:40, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, this is a bit inconsistent in terms of CSS selectors btw. Wouldn't it have been better to add the class "editpage-copywarn" to both the footer and the header elements of this thing, and have IDs #editpage-copywarn (same as before for the footer) and #editpage-head-copywarn ? We should really think more about appropriate classes vs ids when we add these things, they are almost impossible to change in retrospect and it has regularly caused us trouble. I would have pointed this out in a CR. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:11, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Commits welcome. ;) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:34, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Risky connection on Wikipedia

I'm hoping somebody at Wikimedia reads this page, and I just think I need to mention this. I was working on a DYK Template, wherein the nominator got the image from a questionable "Free Uploads" source on Wikipedia that is a subpage of User Multichill. I tried to open the user's main page, and my anti-virus blocked the page - prevented me from opening it - as a risky connection. I have no desire to open the page. But I think someone should know there is a user page on Wikipedia that anti-virus software doesn't like. Maile66 (talk) 01:20, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

By "user's main page", do you mean User:Multichill? I got no warning from my AVG anti-virus or from my browser (Firefox 15.0.1). What anti-virus product are you using, and what browser? Sometimes the browser can throw up a warning that looks like it came from your anti-virus (I know Google Chrome can sometimes do this). jcgoble3 (talk) 02:37, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I have the exact same Firefox 15.0.1 as you do, so maybe my anti-virus was just being zealous. The block message very specifically said it was from my anti-virus. That is the user my anti-virus blocks, so it's good to have someone else check it out, and it's ok. Maile66 (talk) 11:13, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

What has Norwegian done to deserve this?

In the "Languages" group in the left column, all languages using some variant of the Latin alphabet are listed with an initial capital letter, except the two flavors of Norwegian, which appear as "norsk (bokmål)" and "norsk (nynorsk)". See the main page for an example. Why, oh why? Admittedly, the names are written in lower case in Norwegian, but a similar situation prevails for Danish and Swedish, and Wikipedia treats them the same way as all the other languages. Favonian (talk) 11:24, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

This has been fixed, but the fix has not been deployed yet (scroll down on bug #37705). It will be a week and a half, should the current schedule be stuck to. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 11:27, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Great! Thanks—also for reminding where to look for geeky bug reports. Favonian (talk) 11:33, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

This is related to comments first posted three months ago at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 100#MediaWiki 1.20wmf5 deployment complete. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:08, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

QuickiWiki Look Up - Error

Hi,

Only in the last few days my edits on saving are coming up with a warning message...

'Warning: An automated filter has identified this edit may contain a technical error. Sometimes, especially with Mozilla Firefox, added text may be distorted while it is being posted to Wikipedia's servers. Please quickly scan your added text for strings such as "QuickiWiki Look Up", "Proxy-Connection: keep-alive", "begin_of_the_skype_highlighting", or "<a class="inlineAdmedialink" href="#">" before clicking 'Save page' again, which will bypass this filter'.

The 'QuickWiki Look Up' had been inserted into the content. I remove this 'QuickWiki Look Up' text then save again and the 'QuickWiki Look Up' text remains in the saved page. This happens on nearly all saves. An example page where this exists is Bathurst, History of infrastructure development. I use Mozilla Firefox 15.0.1 on Windows 7. my talk page, Thanks Geez-oz (talk) 11:39, 30 September 2012 (UTC) QuickiWiki Look Up

I don't have this problem here. Perhaps you have some malware? Just a thought. HumphreyW (talk) 11:48, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

This is the message at MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-codespill, used by Special:AbuseFilter/345. I sometimes search content namespaces for "QuickiWiki" and removes it but I don't know what causes it. Do you have Firefox extensions and does it help to disable them? See http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-remove-add-ons? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:54, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

There is apparently an extension called WikiTweak which does this. Do you have that? Maybe the warning should mention WikiTweak if QuickiWiki is added. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:01, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

There is a previous discussion that confirms it is WikiTweak: See here. HumphreyW (talk) 13:52, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/wikitweak-wikipedia-enhancer/ indicates that "QuickiWiki" is an option which can be turned off in WikiTweak. According to User talk:Snowolf/Archives/201007#X-15 inadvertant spam/edit reversion it's apparently sufficient to turn off the QuickiWiki feature. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:55, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes the Firefox addon Wikitweak was the problem. Thanks to HumphreyW, PrimeHunter for your help. Geez-oz (talk) 23:09, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I have suggested an edit filter with a specific message about WikiTweak: Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested#Adding QuickiWiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:40, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Overriding magic words

bsd i hope here's the right place for this question: is there a way of overriding magic words, maybe by tweaking the url? specifically, i need to override the _NOGALLERY- tag, without editing the page. i need this to more easily find images to improve. thanks, --Ben Stone 16:21, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

You can use preview for that (I've done that myself in the past), but beyond that I'm afraid I don't really know of a good way. -— Isarra ༆ 16:36, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I've used it too, but preview is only good for the first 200 files. --Ben Stone 17:48, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

If you check the 'Show preview on first edit' option in your preferences, the previous and next 200 links still work in the preview, though you'll lose any changes you might have made. Need to have the option checked since clicking the show preview button resets the offset, however. -— Isarra ༆ 21:39, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

The Block Log

One of the problems with some block outcomes is the unfair approach that blocks can sometimes have. If one user provokes another, but immediately recants their provocation, they would not get a block. If the other editor responds to being provoked, and doesn't immediately recant, they will be likely to get a block.

In many cases, the block log is the worse thing than the block itself. It is a 'permanent record' of sorts, providing ammunition for others to say, "Look how terrible this editor is, block them now, lest we see hell on Earth!" I would suggest one of two things. Either we remove overturned blocks from the visibility of editors, including admins, but perhaps not higher 'ranks'. Or alternatively, in a situation where a block would have been issued, but was not, per the "blocks are not punitive" rationale, we issue a 1 minute block to serve as a record that whatever action it was deserved a block but was immediately corrected. Personally, I would prefer the visibility option. -- Avanu (talk) 20:54, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

• Switch to system of demerits/merits: I have advised to switch to a system which scores actions by demerits for improper actions, to be offset by merits gained by performing helpful tasks, such as adding valid several sources in 20 unsourced articles. The blocking of a user would be a last resort, such as after logging many demerits for falsely writing 2 celebrities into "Deaths in 2012". Each improper action would incur demerit points, but perhaps cleared by discussions with admins, but also offset by helpful editing, of tedious but simple tasks, which could be verified as better edits. Many good-faith users would see the looming "too many demerits" and change course before getting a "block" in their block log. Eventually, with fewer blocks, then the less they would look like typical vicious long-term editors, not that those people are necessarily bad, but rather "branded" by their block-logs. The best response, currently, is to point to worse users with "20 blocks" in their block-logs. The whole concept is based on "proportionate punishment" (or "an eye for an eye"), although the Code of Hammurabi also levied punishments for false accusations which gave the punishment to the accuser (weighted by social class). That way, baseless snarking in wp:AN/I would get "the usual accusers" many demerits for falsely hyping how "this user will destroy Wikipedia" and other over-the-top fake crap and shutdown their antics as their demerits pile into final blocks due to "700" false accusations (or perhaps "699" false accusations). By turning blocks into a multi-step, reversible process, then people would be more likely to alter their actions to better fit the system. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:00, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

God, no. This is life, not school. Users are blocked to prevent harm to the project - doing good content work doesn't oughtweigh racially abusing another editor, and being an active anti vandal patroller doesn't get you a free pass for POV pushing. I'll agree that sometimes the block was a wrong 'un, in which case there ought to be a method of revision deleting it from the record, which we don't have at the moment.Elen of the Roads (talk) 23:11, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

"Another ten points from Gryffindor." —Severus Snape

And who among you will be Snape?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:28, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

It is unfortunate that folks put so much stock in that a block log exists regardless of whether or not the blocks stuck or in some cases even what they were for, but that seems as much a problem with that folks are putting too much stock in it as anything else. Pity we can't just add a shiny button to make more people use their heads when acting/speaking/editing. -— Isarra ༆ 23:51, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Gadget MOS

Is there a manual of style of gadgets? A guide for consistency of general form and function, from format to compatibility to coding style to load methods to... whatever... -— Isarra ༆ 17:36, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, there's mw:Manual:Coding conventions (and subpages) for code in MediaWiki; that's probably a good starting point. Although that does recommend using tab characters for indenting, which are problematic to enter when editing gadget code on-wiki. Anomie⚔ 18:02, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

General coding conventions are certainly a start (and something many of these really seem to need help with), but <obligatory rant about how using spaces just results in inconsistent numbers of spaces, which can result in a worse effect than no indentation at all> - and typing tabs needn't be problematic. If you are working directly on the wiki, there is a gadget you can use to make the tab key insert tabs in the editing window, so perhaps that would be something to consider importing? Using tabs in general does help make the code smaller as well as easier to both read and work with, especially since it also tends to be more consistent as a result.

But as for the matter at hand - what about about description format, what to have in documentation (or about having it at all?), the possible use of separate script pages for things that need only load on some pages (would that actually help anything?), header information, naming conventions, yadda... if there is indeed no real guideline on that stuff, is this the point where we just make something up and mandate it as law? More consistency there might be rather nice to have as well, after all. -— Isarra ༆ 21:30, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

AFAIK, the only guidelines are

1. these seven points
2. it should have a [[Wikipedia:GADGET#Header|header comment]
3. it should work properly

It's pretty laid-back, really. — This, that, and the other (talk) 01:29, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

We should totally fix that. Wikipedia style. -— Isarra ༆ 04:56, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Why? Each gadget currently has its own style, and there is no problem. I'm certainly not intending to modify the 13,000-odd lines of Twinkle to fit any kind of new convention. — This, that, and the other (talk) 08:04, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, I guess I mean more the summaries and documentation - more consistency with the former and being able to find the latter would be really nice sometimes. -— Isarra ༆ 15:40, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

And mention of anything that might impact overall performance might be useful to have available, if there is anything simple and definable, for that matter. Is there? As for coding style, I'd be happy to go through things and work on improving existing ones myself, but more than that, would there be any harm in encouraging following the mw conventions more in the first place? They aren't exactly new, and make code a lot more portable - a concern especially here as so many other sites borrow our gadgets. -— Isarra ༆ 16:52, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Consult other source-code standards which abandoned tabs: Many organizations have studied helpful coding techniques, but the use of tabs, to indent data structures and control structures in source code, was finally rejected because they made the source code non-portable to other apps which can display, edit, or analyze program code. Also, some structures can benefit from mid-tab indentation, which adds extra spaces, and might not align properly when indented or undented along with the surrounding code. Meanwhile, using pure spaces (no tabs) will always retain the relative nested indentation when shifted left/right, and for those reasons, interative source-code editors tyically store the results as pure spaces, even when they sport point-and-click indentation features. The best indentation is done with line-graph bars because it can clearly indicate the scope of nested control structures (such as indented template parameters by "| xx="), even when scrolled partly off-screen, so there has been talk of creating computer languages which treat left-side bars and underbars "|_" as comment characters to show multi-level indentation structure, but there is the danger of confusion when wrapping long lines which contain those characters in mid-line. In general for coding standards, try to find an "industry standard" source-code guide and adapt for use. That way, issues such as tabs will already be avoided, from lessons learned about long-term maintenance of source code. -Wikid77 (talk) 06:34, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
  • Why do standards even exist in the first place? Or policies? Or anything for that matter? Because it makes sense. Having common coding standards — those used by MediaWiki, the engine powering this very website — for gadgets that use CSS or JS makes sense. It avoids the code from turning into a crippled mess that no-one bothers to look at, let alone maintain.
    To Wikid77: if you mention something as vague as "many organizations", please be kind enough to cite your sources. "[...] finally rejected because they made the source code non-portable to other apps which can display, edit, or analyze program code" sounds to me like a problem with the apps in question, not a problem with the original source code. Personally, if an app designed to work with source code chokes on simple tab characters, I'd say the app in question is garbage and you're better off without it. "The best indentation" is subjective at most. MediaWiki's coding conventions are our industry standard and history has proven that they are good. I see no reason not to use them for gadgets' CSS and JS code. --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 18:58, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
    • I see no reason why they couldn't be used either, if a new gadget were to be created, or if someone decided to clean up an existing gadget. However, imposing a code standard is really only important for large collaborative works like MediaWiki. For local gadgets, a convention is unnecessary. — This, that, and the other (talk) 00:14, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

      Good conventions are going to be more important if we want to make it easier to exchange code with other wikis, and work on global gadgets (which are comming with mw:Gadgets 2.0). Helder 00:23, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

      Many tools reshift tabs or do not allow tabs: In many browsers, the tab key will jump to another data field, rather than insert <ctrl-i> in the data, but perhaps the most common case would be to show source code in a word-processor program, where the tab stops did not match the indentation style, and the tab stops had to be reset to match. It is a problem in large organizations where technical writers would be updating the software documents. There are even "detab" programs to insert spaces. Numerous software tools just do not allow tab characters, which avoids all the issues about how to position them. Search Google or Bing for: "does not allow tabs" (and ignore talk about browser window tabs). -Wikid77 (talk) 21:47, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

      This was already addressed above. -— Isarra ༆ 16:10, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Media files linking directly to Wikimedia Commons

Dear community, I've noticed that German and Spanish Wikipedia are linking their media files directly to Wikimedia Commons (except for exclusive local uploads). This feature is very convenient, removes a redundant step and therefore allows everyone to access the Commons directly. Was this feature/bug requested before? Do you think it is useful? Are there serious concerns against implementing it? Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 19:53, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I support this proposal. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:58, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Don't we tag some images locally as featured or whatever without actually uploading them locally, though? How would that work with that? -— Isarra ༆ 20:04, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Assessments remain available through Commons:Template:Assessments. Local categories remain unharmed - compare de:Kategorie:Datei:Exzellent and es:Categoría:Wikipedia:Imágenes destacadas. Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 20:08, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

The German Wikipedia goes to Commons if the file page but not the file exists locally. For example, the top-right image at de:Anthroposophische Gesellschaft goes to commons:File:Goetheanum Dornach2.jpg and not to de:File:Goetheanum Dornach2.jpg which is in de:Kategorie:Datei:Exzellent (a German category for featured images). As Peter says, the Commons file page may have information about the status of an image at the German Wikipedia. It does in this case. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:23, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. To be more precise about this: each media file will still be mirrored on the local Wikipedia (otherwise the legal information about the media file would vanish from wikipedia.org which then could lead to legal trouble). From what I know it's just the thumbnail links that change. It might be useful if those who implemented it in German and Spanish Wikipedia comment on the technical details - unfortunately I don't know these people. Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 21:15, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

But if the thumbnail links are removed, how will people get to the local descriptions and see any specific whatnots there? Or is it all maintenance stuff at that point? -— Isarra ༆ 02:25, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Example from German Wikipedia: If you click on the title image of de:Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg you'll be forwarded to Commons:File:Karl-Theodor Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.jpg. You can still access the local version through de:File:Karl-Theodor Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.jpg. You would access it via the local URL (by adding File:Karl-Theodor Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.jpg after .../wiki/) or the search box (by looking for File:Karl-Theodor Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg.jpg). See https://de.wiki.x.io/wiki/Datei:Karl-Theodor_Freiherr_von_und_zu_Guttenberg.jpg The local version would only be changed for maintenance issues (adding a local category, a local template, etc.) Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 09:51, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

It may still be accessible, but is removing the main point of entry really wise? How will people find out about the maintenance categories at all without that? The project gets new users in many cases when they see things to do, and subareas of the project get new folks in much the same way. -— Isarra ༆ 03:19, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

• But surely we already have this feature? For example, Today's Featured Article includes this image, which is on Commons. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:07, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Clicking on the image on the main page brings me to File:Armillaria luteobubalina 67511.jpg whereas the expected page would be commons:File:Armillaria luteobubalina 67511.jpg. Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 20:11, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

There is no local page for that image just a page indicating it is on Commons and displaying the Commons information. Keith D (talk) 20:24, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, you're wrong. All images that appear on the main page are copied over to this project because of the frequency of vandalization of images that appear on our main page. Commons doesn't babysit the images we use, and won't protect them while they're on our main page. That's entirely fair, since we're only one of thousands of places that use them as a source. But it leaves our main page wide open to abuse, which used to occur on a regular basis. Risker (talk) 21:34, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

If Keith D is wrong, why does clicking the image in the main page take me to a page showing "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below."? That's merely the default mirror which appears when there is no File: page on English Wikipedia. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:21, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

IIRC, someone trustworthy has started to run a script on Commons that includes all the images used in our main page into a cascade-protected page, so we've relatively recently stopped the reuploading of main page images. Anomie⚔ 14:44, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Those WPs also have far fewer files than we do, and also far fewer free files. I don't think it's a bad idea, but it would be better to wait until we've finished moving the free files to Commons. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 20:28, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I think this issue wouldn't be too complicated. The change would only affect files that are available on the Commons already. Fair use and other local files are not available on the Commons and therefore linking wouldn't be possible. The "page indicating it is on Commons", as Keith D put it, would still be there, it's just the thumbnail linking that changes (see my comment above). Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 21:27, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I know, the point is that we'd create unexpected results. It's one thing if free files are on Commons, and only non-free are here. We still have free files here (over 343,000), so we'd be creating a crap-shoot of a landing page. This is a decent idea, but should not be implemented until we move all of those files to Commons, so users know if they're about to leave WP. Also, I'm almost certain that no other projects do this (see de:Datei:Asia on the globe (white-red).svg), but that doesn't lessen the validity of the idea. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 21:47, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

The fact that there are currently 327,428 files (as of now) per Category:Copy to Wikimedia Commons that could&should be moved to the Commons is a backlog related issue. We are unlikely to ever finish this process since there'll always be new files which are ready for the Commons. For comparison: German Wikipedia currently has 144,462 files that are ready for the Commons per de:Kategorie:Datei:Commonsfähig. As for the user experience: The initial idea behind this request is to enable more people to change image descriptions, add categories, etc. Your point about the consistency of landing pages is valid, yet we are about to establish a consistent landing page for all Wikipedias in the long term - not only the local version. I think we enable more people to add&alter information about our images, if we tear down the barrier of the mirrored file page, wherever possible. Svg files still linking to the local version seems to be a bug itself. Thanks for pointing this out. Regards, Peter Weis (talk) 10:27, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Personally I don't much like this idea, or the thinking behind it that we somehow need to force more people to have to deal with Commons. I find Commons to be a good idea in theory that just hasn't worked out in practice, and judging by things like this or this I'm not the only one.

But I'll note that, should consensus go against me, the central location for the code for the gadget that does this is at mw:Snippets/Direct imagelinks to Commons. Anomie⚔ 14:44, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Unusual search advice

Is there an easy way to discover which articles have been unedited for longest and, in a similar vein, to discover which have fewest (or even no) watchers? Some of us might prefer to be quietly dusting the relics in the cellar, instead of always shouting out the news from the rooftop... Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:57, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

On the first point, Wikipedia:Dusty articles. On the second point, there is Special:UnwatchedPages (Talk page). It's only for admins, though, and probably doesn't cover minimally watched or inactively watched pages. Chris857 (talk) 22:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you indeed. A real curatory treat. But I'm really not sure why that second one is for the grown-ups only. Happy fossicking, Kim and Aggy. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:30, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

The theory is that a vandal intent on spreading malicious text without fear of being reverted would target the pages which were watched least of all. So we keep the identities of those pages quiet. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:11, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Makes sense, but not very convincing. Those least-watched pages are very likely to be the least-read pages and thus any vandalism would probably do least harm. If it was a real concern, perhaps Admins should be auto-allocated as soon as they become unwatched, or maybe they should be auto-semi-protected. But am just intrigued. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:25, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Is it possible to make that visible to anyone with any special userright other than confirmed (the logic being that someone who has been given a userright would not be a vandal)? Ryan Vesey 23:33, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, that seems sensible. I am just interested, not desperate. And I think anyone who takes the trouble to ask, especially here, is hardly likely to pose any threat. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:45, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

The place to ask is at Wikipedia talk:Special:UnwatchedPages, which is public. If you look through that page you will also see several previous requests to open up Special:UnwatchedPages, and the reasons why not. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:39, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll take a look. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:45, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Most of those seemed to be proposals about opening it to registered accounts which is much less restrictive than my idea. If it is technically possible to create the restriction I stated, I'd consider opening a discussion at WP:AN. Ryan Vesey 23:49, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Quite agree, they do. Thank you, Ryan, for your helpful advice, as ever. Having just taken a quick look over at WP:AN, I see that it seems to resemble a bizarre cross between an out-take episode of Upstairs Downstairs and the latest shouting match from EastEnders. I think I'd be happier locking myself in the cellar for a while longer, thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 23:52, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

LOL! I've immortalized that quote at Wikipedia:Talk_page_highlights#Description_of_WP:AN. jcgoble3 (talk) 03:48, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Note that Special:UnwatchedPages is not particularly useful. It lists the first 1000 pages in ASCIIbetical order (or, more likely, "UTF8betical" order). And right now that gets it to somewhere in the middle of the articles beginning with "A". Although that's better than last time I looked, when it didn't even get through all the articles beginning with numbers thanks to numerous unwatched asteroid articles. Also, I believe that an article will not count as "unwatched" even if the only watcher is someone who hasn't logged in since 2005, a bot, a blocked vandal, or someone else who is unlikely to actually be watching (but I haven't actually checked the code behind the page, so I may be wrong on that). Anomie⚔ 02:47, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

The famous Seigenthaler incident (that led to the creation category:living people) shows how vandalism in an obscure article can cause a lot of hassle. Note though, it's possible to monitor articles in various ways besides the Wikipedia watchlist feature. Also, edit dates don't say anything about when an article last had human attention, since many (most?) edits are by bots and scripts, or by people making (e.g.) spelling corrections without taking note of the article's actual content. 67.117.130.72 (talk) 01:04, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

I think the idea of semiprotecting articles that aren't on anyone's watchlist (not even the creator's) is not a bad idea, if there was an easy way to flag to a casual editor that to get the article unprotected, they just needed to click here. Elen of the Roads (talk) 21:29, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

There is a tool at http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/watcher.py which returns the number of watchers. However, it deliberately does not return the result for pages with fewer than 30 watchers so that vandals cannot use it to find entirely unwatched pages. SpinningSpark 09:35, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

talk page archiving

Resolved

Hello,

On my talk page, the links to my monthly archives runs from December 2007 to December 2011, but then the links cease from self-formatting. How do I get the links to months after January 2012 up on my talk page? Thanks. (Some input was already provided here). Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brewcrewer (talk • contribs) 03:49, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

The HTML source of the page contains the comment: "Expensive parser function count: 540/500", most likely due to the heavy use of #ifexist to determine whether the archive pages exist. See Wikipedia:Template limits. Perhaps {{MonthlyArchive}} or one of its subtemplates needs to be rewritten or replaced. Graham87 10:20, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Y Done, should be sufficient for now, but the whole thing should be replaced by something smarter once we enter the Age of Lua. Amalthea 14:18, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

one way to reduce use of #ifexist is to introduce a new class to css, e.g.:

.hideredlinks  a.new {display: none;}

which will allow us to get rid of all the #ifexist, and instead just wrap the whole thing with some div having this class. peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 17:54, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be like reintroducing the (deprecated) HiddenStructure class, but for red links? Helder 23:09, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Templated block rationales

Just to remind myself, am I correct in thinking that when an administrator blocks an account with one of the templated rationales, such as {{Vaublock}} or {{anonblock}}, the template will be transcluded in blocked account's "cannot edit because you are blocked" screen? I think this is the case, but I wanted to make sure (asking here because it's a technical matter...and I wasn't going to block myself to find out! :D). Thanks! Acalamari 22:18, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

You are correct, unless something has recently changed. --Bongwarrior (talk) 06:22, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Just to be certain, I blocked an old alternate account of mine - it still works as it should. --Bongwarrior (talk) 06:33, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I appreciate the confirmation. :) Acalamari 14:32, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Has the font become smaller for everyone, or just me?

While it could be the result of something I did, the size of the font in all articles has become a lot smaller for me in the last 20 minutes or so. Does this reflect a Wikipedia-wide change, or did I somehow manage to mess up my browser? Other websites look the same as normal. Nick-D (talk) 23:22, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

First suggestion: Press Ctrl+0 to restore your browser to default zoom. Chris857 (talk) 23:37, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Browsers will often remember your zoom setting for a specific domain. Many people accidentally activate the zoom feature of their browser (there can be several ways to do this). Try to reset the zoom to 100% with Ctrl+0, or adjust it with Ctrl++ and Ctrl+-. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:39, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that fixed it (the funny thing is that I don't remember zooming, but I was messing around with the aircraft infoboxes, which always does my head in!). Thanks a lot for your suggestions. Nick-D (talk) 23:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Seems to be a frequently asked question! Have added the answer to the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/FAQ. — Richardguk (talk) 00:52, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I doubt anyone actually looks at the FAQ now that it's collapsed by default in the header; not sure why that happened. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 06:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I checked the FAQ first ;) Thanks for adding this Richard. Nick-D (talk) 11:50, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Just change your font and size in your browser and zoom as said above. On Safari browser yeah the text is tiny!!! I use Firefox with my own spiffing font and size option, currently Calibri.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:56, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Adding a new table class to Common.css [CSS]

(I understand that this might be somewhat frowned upon, as I am looking for help for a Wikia wiki, but Wikia could not assist)

I don't understand adding new table classes to Common.css - I have made a new class, copied it over, reset my cache and it didn't work. That was OK, as I might have made a mistake, so that's why I went and copied over a custom table class from another wiki - still not working. Even copying "wikitable" and editing just the name doesn't seem to work. Can anyone help with this? Darkgamma (talk) 09:37, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki questions unrelated to Wikimedia projects can be asked at at mw:Project:Support desk. Anyway, it's hard to say what you do wrong when you don't show what you do. Always post or link your code when you ask for help with code that doesn't work. You also failed to say where you copied "wikitable" from so I don't know whether it was http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/skins/common/shared.css?view=markup where we define it. MediaWiki:Common.css makes some adaptations for the English Wikipedia. http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/skins/common/commonPrint.css?view=markup has code for how to print wikitables. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:29, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

And the Vector and Monobook stylesheet [3] defines styles for lists within a wikitable. By coincidence, I started documenting the wikitable class at User:Gadget850/wikitable. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:52, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Link colors

I apologize for missing something, but when and why did the colors of links change? Blue links now appear purple, and purple links that have already been clicked now appear very dark purple, almost indistinguishable from the black text. Red links also seem slightly darker than before. What can I do to restore the brighter original colors, such as in my CSS? Thanks, Reywas92^Talk 19:50, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

See Help:Link color#Making links appear a different color just for you. One of the reasons that I switched back to MonoBook skin from Vector a few days after Vector's original introduction (in May 2010, see rev:66383) was because the link colours were not very distinguishable. It's sad to see that they are apparently now even worse. So, you could alternatively switch to MonoBook skin, where the red has recently brightened but the blue and purple are, I believe, just the same as they have been for years. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:46, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Install Direct imagelinks to Commons gadget

Could someone please install this gadget? I use it at other Wikipedia's and I like it a lot. It should probably be installed at MediaWiki:Gadget-Direct-link-to-Commons.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-Direct-link-to-Commons. Thank you, Multichill (talk) 20:10, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

See mw:Snippets/Direct imagelinks to Commons for the source code of the gadget (its a simple snippet). Its is installed on about half a dozen other Wikimedia wikis. Most of them enable it by default after a short trial. Krinkle (talk) 20:12, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Is this the same feature under discussion at #Media files linking directly to Wikimedia Commons above? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:49, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I think that one is proposing that it be turned on for everyone right away, whereas this one merely proposes that it be installed as an optional gadget that those who want it can turn on for themselves. I would support this one on the basis that I feel the option should be available, even if I won't personally use it. I would oppose turning it on for everyone unless I can turn it off for me in a very simple way (i.e. checking or unchecking a box). jcgoble3 (talk) 23:47, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Feedback on project pages

After posting feedback on an article, I decided to look at other people's recent feedback on everything. I just noticed that 84.49.197.75 left feedback on Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia. Are we supposed to be able to leave feedback on non-articles? 66.244.68.64 (talk) 21:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, in the Help namespace or if Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles has been added to the page as in [4]. See Wikipedia talk:Help Project#Feedback tool. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:43, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there an image-specific alternative to Template:Media

Category:Warhammer media is being speedily renamed to Category:Warhammer images.

However, it is populated by {{media|Warhammer}}, and I can't find an alternative template to put the images in the image category. Does anyone know what template should be used? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:49, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Don't we usually go the other way in renaming? Anomie⚔ 19:51, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm only the clerk. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:58, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

VisualEditor/Parsoid fortnightly update - 2012-10-01 (MW 1.21wmf1)

Hey all,

Below is a copy of the regular (every fortnight) update on the VisualEditor project and its cousin the Parsoid so that you all know what is happening (and make sure you have as much opportunity to tell us when we're wrong, as well as help guide the priorities for development and improvement).

VisualEditor

The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.21wmf1 branch deployment on Monday 1 October.

The team have spent most of the two weeks since 1.20wmf12 working on re-designing how the code integrates together, providing clean interfaces between them so new developers can re-use and extend VisualEditor to support new 'node types' like categories or tables when we work on these later.

Beyond this API work, we added a few updates. Firstly, you can now set the 'annotation' where the caret is, without a selection — i.e., you can click somewhere, type Ctrl+B (or press the 'Bold' icon) and start typing with the text appearing bold (33140). We also now switch around the order of the undo and redo buttons for right-to-left languages (38548). Finally, we fixed a bug where applying a link to some text would remove any other 'annotations' (such as bold or italics) already set on it (40337).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.21/wmf1 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

Parsoid

JavaScript implementation:

• Many improvements to template round-tripping and DOM source range calculations
• Reworked paragraph wrapping to be more bug-for-bug compatible with the PHP parser
• Many small tokenizer and round-trip fixes
• Added many new parser tests
• 603 round-trip tests passing, 218 to go

C++ implementation:

• Basic token transformer skeletons with boost.asio integration is hooked up
• New XML DOM abstraction interface for the separation of DOM-based code from used DOM library; Using PugiXML DOM backend for performance and memory footprint
• Takes back seat to JavaScript prototype implementation due to resource constraints

The full list of Parsoid commits is available in Gerrit.

Hope this is helpful! As always, feedback gratefully received.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

This is going very nicely team, well done and keep going strong. !!! —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:06, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

What is Required to Release a Photo Under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License?

Hi All,

I have a friend who has a very bad photo of herself posted on her Wikipedia page. She has provided me with a better photo, to which she owns the rights, and she has indicated that she would be willing to release it under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. However, she doesn't have a Flickr account or an account on another photo hosting site that would allow her to release it in that manner. She is not highly technical. What is the easiest way for her to release the photo? Can she do so via an email to me? Via a signed letter? Is there somewhere on the web she can post the photo, without having to create an account under her own name, and release it? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Ebikeguy (talk) 03:46, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

She should follow the process set out at WP:IOWN to e-mail her permission to Wikipedia.--ukexpat (talk) 03:57, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You can upload the photo to Wikimedia Commons using the old upload form at commons:Special:Upload, putting {{OTRS pending}} in the "Permission" box as described on that page. Have her fill out our WP:CONSENT form (including the URL or filename of the uploaded image) and send it to permissions-commons@wikimedia.org. A volunteer will review the form, and if everything is OK, he or she will confirm the permission on the image's description page.

By the way, this forum isn't really the proper place for these sorts of questions; if I didn't know the answer, I would have asked at Wikipedia:Help desk. PleaseStand (talk) 04:11, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Or at WP:Media copyright questions.--ukexpat (talk) 12:56, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Help needed to remove default to placeholder image

Template:Infobox named horse (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) will default to an ugly placeholder image if no image is added to the infobox. Everybody (well ok - two editors) want the placeholder removed. See the talk page. Placeholder images tend to be frowned upon in many situations. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 09:12, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I think this edit worked. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:53, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Yep. That's done it. See Dream Flyer. Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 09:55, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I removed an extra }} you left in there.[5] PrimeHunter (talk) 10:02, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Is Toolserver down?

For at least the last 90 minutes, I've been unable to connect to both these two on Toolserver

• Duplication detector
• DYK on Toolserver

Initially, it was just its usual "Waiting for Toolserver". Then I was getting a Timed Out message. Then it said Unable to Connect. Another message was "500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.0.4" And right now, the message for the last hour is that the connection was reset and is temporarily unavailable. Maile66 (talk) 14:09, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

The links seem to be working now.

See http://status.toolserver.org/ for current status of the various Toolserver services.

For Toolserver resourcing issues, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-01/Technology report#WMF and the German chapter face up to Toolserver uncertainty and discussion.

— Richardguk (talk) 16:29, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I had read that in the Signpost. What a coincidence this morning. Maile66 (talk) 19:29, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Layout problem when printing references with long URLs.

A user described to me a bug (on a private mailing list) that when he printed Metric_system and Gaussian_units, they printed in different sized fonts. I was able to reproduce this behavior on my Mac in Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox. Eventually, I was able to track this down to a very long URL in a reference. It looks like Chrome and Safari just keep shrinking the font (for the entire page) until the URL can fit on a line.

I was able to generate a minimal test case (http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=User:RoySmith/Metric_system&oldid=515805875)

I'm not quite sure if this is a wikipedia style sheet bug, or a browser bug, or a webkit bug, or even an intentional behavior. Any ideas?

-- RoySmith (talk) 16:01, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Better now ? I added a line to tell it to forcefully break URLs if they don't fit. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:21, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Cool, thanks! -- RoySmith (talk) 18:54, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Inline linking offsite images

Resolved

I'm pretty sure that I've read that our code enabled inline linking of images at one time, but it was disabled because of the potential for abuse of copyright, shock images, etc. Can someone provide me with a link that shows how it worked, either a MW help page or a diff of a page that was set up to do this? I'm active on a small wiki whose version of MW enables inline linking of Google Maps with a <googlemap> extension that we don't have here, and I'm wondering if such an extension might be related to an inline linking extension. I was going to ask User:Manning Bartlett, since he should remember, but he's not been very active lately. Nyttend (talk) 00:53, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

See mw:Manual:$wgAllowExternalImages. mw:Manual:$wgEnableScaryTranscluding may also be of interest. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:07, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

A quick page test shows that the wiki in question doesn't permit inline linking, which is too bad, since I have tons of images on Commons that would be useful over there, and it's not part of the WMF family. Thanks for the help! Nyttend (talk) 01:45, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I just started to wonder — what if something could be turned on at the small wiki to make it display Commons images as if they were locally uploaded, just like we do here. Is that something that could be done with a little code change at the other wiki? Or would Commons (and/or some other WMF site) need to enable this type of linking? It might help if you could point me to a page explaining how the various WMF sites are set up to use Commons images. Nyttend (talk) 01:48, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Never mind; I found mw:InstantCommons. Nyttend (talk) 01:50, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't know their settings or policies but mw:Manual:$wgEnableImageWhitelist may also be relevant if it's already enabled and only requires an admin to whitelist Commons. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:56, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

All I was meaning was "is it technically possible". I've contacted the Jimbo equivalent to ask for the feature to be turned on, since he's the sole developer. Nyttend (talk) 02:42, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) There is absolutely no relationship between core MediaWiki's external image linking feature and the Google Maps extension. The two even run during distinct phases of the parsing process. (Tag extensions run during preprocessing, the parsing stage in which template expansion takes place. In contrast, external links are processed much later, although the extension does manipulate the fully rendered HTML after that is done.) PleaseStand (talk) 02:05, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

... although in MediaWiki 1.17, an option was added to allow HTML img elements. PleaseStand (talk) 02:15, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Was my intermediate-header issue addressed?...

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T42763

Long tables with a lot of individually low-information entries (like the Vampire Traits page) could really use intermediate headers or framing or something to help people keep track of what's going on, but if you insert them manually it messes up sorting. Any help for that?... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tamtrible (talk • contribs) 22:14, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Your old section is at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103#adding extra headers to a table... PrimeHunter (talk) 22:47, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

So, the only available solutions are my clumsy ideas that should kindasorta work? Tamtrible (talk) 15:32, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Or someone needs to improve the tablesort software, to repeat headers automatically or at least understand them. It's possible, but will require some work. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:26, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

'k. (I am not that someone, I have no programming know-how). If someone could do that, that'd be cool... I'll try to keep an eye out here to see if someone's done that... Tamtrible (talk) 09:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I filed a feature request in 40763 but it might take quite long for someone to get around to it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:38, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

HTML 4.0 introduced the THEAD, TFOOT and TBODY elements; the idea was that in a table, the header row(s) would be enclosed in the <THEAD>...</THEAD> and each group of data rows would be enclosed in a <TBODY>...</TBODY>. This way, browser features could be written in such a way that if the rows enclosed by one of the <TBODY>...</TBODY> were manipulated in some way (by scrolling, sorting, collapsing, etc.) the rows enclosed by <THEAD>...</THEAD>, <TFOOT>...</TFOOT> and other <TBODY>...</TBODY> would remain static. Additionally, when printing, the rows enclosed by <THEAD>...</THEAD> could be repeated at the top of each new page, and those enclosed by <TFOOT>...</TFOOT> would be printed at the bottom of each page.

The MediaWiki software doesn't emit these elements, so a Wikipedia table is essentially a single <TBODY>...</TBODY>. I don't know of any browsers that make use of these elements except as grouping elements intermediate between DIV and SPAN (i.e. for applying class or style). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:46, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Despite the lack of support in wikitext, the current tablesorter javascript (activated with table class "sortable") automatically converts mediawiki output to wrap header rows in <thead>...</thead>, and footer rows in <tfoot>...</tfoot> (presumably to identify them as non-sortable), with everything in between wrapped in <tbody>...</tbody>. The routine seems to identify header/footer rows as the row(s) at the beginning/end containing <th> and no <td> elements (or the wikitable markup equivalent). — Richardguk (talk) 16:54, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Correct. it's not 100% perfect, but good enough for sortable tables. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:20, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for filing the feature request. Though, basically, there might be another way to handle it... there doesn't necessarily need to be a fixed header at the top, if there's a way to insert new headers but have them ignore sorting. Either a way to make the table automatically repeat the header every 20 (or whatever) lines, or a way to make manually inserted headers ignore sorting. The header doesn't need to be at the top for you to be able to follow it, it just needs to be *somewhere* that you can see it without scrolling up 3 pages. That might be easier than a header that stays at the top of the screen regardless of where in the table it is, since it only involves fiddling with how the table is *created*, rather than how it displays. I don't have an account on Bugzilla, so if you'd be willing to write a note to that effect (feel free to copypaste my note), that would be lovely... Tamtrible (talk) 17:50, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I started an initial attempt with User:TheDJ/jquery.stableTableHeaders.js it works, but it needs more work to nicely co exist with sortable tables. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:20, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

If/when someone gets around to doing this, are they likely to leave a note here?... Tamtrible (talk) 18:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Edit buttons in Monobook

Some of the buttons (small and subscript) seem to have disappeared from the edit window in monobook. Is there some reason for this. I am using the old style edit window. SpinningSpark 23:09, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Krinkle made some change and it seems he accidently missed those two buttons. I added them back. A purge of your browsercache should bring them back. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:03, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I just could not work out where that was. I found Monobook.js but did not think to look at Common.js. I had assumed that the old editor was special to Monobook. SpinningSpark 10:35, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion for programmers - finding images

Copied from the Help Desk of October 3:

Title: Suggestion for programmers - finding images

I was searching for an image and I tried the following terms in the search box...

• 488824530.jpg
• File:488824530.jpg
• File:Vol 488851659.jpg
• File:Ap cov 488824530.jpg
• Image:Bott 488824530.jpg

Could the programmers at Wikipedia make the search process a little more intuitive and forgiving?

Or has this image actually been deleted? In that case, wouldn't it be more helpful to tell the user? And more important, shouldn't old images be preserved (even if not used in an article) so that prior copyrights can be examined?

Last questions: where to put suggestions for Wikipedia programmers? Do they read this page? (posted by me)

File:Ap cov 488824530.jpg was deleted because of a copyright violation. All the intuitive and forgiving programming in the world cannot find an image that does not exist on a website. BTW, you can search for a filename at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en by entering the file name in the search field and specifying en.wiki.x.io in the domain field. As for "preserving" old images, that depends on why they may have been deleted. Images that have copyright restrictions and not licensed for use by Wikipedia cannot be kept for legal reasons. (posted by user Cresix)

And to answer your last question, see WP:VPT for adding suggestions for the Wikipedia programmers. (posted by user Dismas)

Helpful response, thank you. Cresix, your answer goes to my point that the Wikipedia interface should return *something. You must have had a magical way of knowing that 488824530.jpg was deleted. How does a typical user know this? Wikipedia must store this information somewhere and it really should be reported to a searcher. I will post this issue to Village pump (technical). By the way, an advanced Google search for "488824530.jpg" in the W ikipedia domain returns no results. (posted by me)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by User:3dimen (talk • contribs) 15:04, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Well it's likely that you also uploaded the image you ask questions about. As such Cresix probably looked at your talk page first. Here is a notification (so you WERE notified of deletion) of the upcoming possible deletion of the file File:Ap cov 488824530.jpg. When you click that redlink to the file, you get a page with "A page with this title has previously been deleted". However I think it might be a good idea if users were able to find back their OWN deleted contributions straight in their user contributions list. Would make it a bit easier. Someone can file a request in bugzilla. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:33, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I can say with some certainty that that change has been (at least informally) RFCd in the near past, with a large number of people not supporting the change for anti-vandalism reasoning (at the very least). --Izno (talk) 22:40, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm surprised. As an administrator, I often wish that I could search for deleted pages because I need to see deleted revisions for one reason or another, and it's sometimes hard to remember precise page names. The problem in question would be resolved if non-admins had the ability to view a list of deleted contributions. Imagine if admins and non-admins had the same list of deleted contributions, except that non-admins couldn't see any of the content or edit summaries for the deleted edits, and admins could check a box to prevent a page from appearing on the list if necessary, e.g. for Hagger-style pagemove vandalism. It wouldn't risk the dangers that WMF counsel mentioned would arise if we permitted universal access to all deleted content, since only page names (many of which are already mentioned on user talk pages already) and metadata such as oldids, dates, and numbers of bytes added or removed would be publicly visible. Nyttend (talk) 01:00, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Dear people: As the original poster of this problem over on the Help pages, I have been getting a lot of advice on how to find the names of the deleted files. But everybody is missing the point. Please allow me to summarize my final thoughts which I posted over there...

* Point taken that the names of my photos were not useful. It was four years ago and I thought I had assigned proper names but apparently I hadn't.

* All of the above discussion results in very limited information: basically who deleted the file and why. This is not what I am ultimately looking for. In my original post, I tried to communicate that I want to look at the prior copyrights (meaning the original licensing information that I provided way back then). I feel my hands are tied because this information is apparently not available to me without going to an administrator. I was hoping the Deletion log would provide this but apparently not.

* To be precise, clicking the red link on my user page takes me not to the deletion log, but to a Creating file page, which indicates the page once existed but has been deleted. No links to the original File: page.

* Again, to be precise, looking at a previous version of the article and clicking on the file name only gives me a File Upload Wizard. Again, no links to prior licensing information.

* I must stand by my claim that this is not user friendly. If Wikipedia feels they need to delete an image, OK, but just delete the jpg itself and keep the rest of the File: page that was associated with it. The only price Wikipedia is going to pay is that a unique file name is used up - no big deal. Also make sure the main search box and the Deletion log "search box" point to this page.

How do I know if an RFC is filed on this? Thank you for listening. 3dimen (talk) 08:53, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

• 'want to look at the prior copyrights' this is a valid point, but unfortunately that information is not kept separate from other information at the moment so we cannot avoid it being deleted. However ANY administrator will gladly provide this information to you. There have been plans to separate license information for images from the other images, but it is a very complex task to implement this properly in the software and migrate all existing copyright information into this. In this particular case, you indicated "cc-by-3.0". This probably matched the flickr license indication back then, however this image is a clear case of 'flickr washing'. So a flickr user marking a file with the wrong license, stating it is free while it is clearly not a freely licensed image and often it is very unlikely that the flickr user owns the image.
• 'clicking the red link ... indicates the page once existed but has been deleted' As I stated indeed. For me this page also includes the deletion log of the file. It does not for you ?
• 'clicking on the file name only gives me a File Upload Wizard' Unfortunately a case where one improvement leads to problems for other users. The upload wizard is something specific to the English Wikipedia. When the 'normal' but less friendly upload process is used, you DO get a warning that this file has previously been deleted.
• 'this is not user friendly' I don't think anyone disagrees with you. The issue is to create proper plans to fix it, actually finding someone ABLE to implement the plans and then guiding it all trough the system towards it's final deployment, then dealing with all of the users who will get angry because 'something changed'. That's a lot of work and someone has to do it. And as you most people here are volunteers :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:33, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Filed a feature request to make the list of deleted contributions visible if the creator == the logged in user. That might at least partially help. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:49, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Special:Log includes upload logs for deleted files, for example Special:Log/3dimen. The "uploads" link on user contributions pages goes to Special:ListFiles where deleted files are not shown, for example the empty Special:ListFiles/3dimen. By the way, a deletion tag log was recently added. Special:Log/pagetriage-deletion shows deletion tagging, also for deleted pages, but only since the log was created in September. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:40, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

RSS/Atom Feed

Hi, when I am on my watchlist, in the toolbox to the left is an atom feed. My blackberry has a feed application so is there a way to get my watchlist on my blackberry feed? I tried puttin a whole bunch of urls but I kept getting error messages. Any help?--Dom497 (talk) 20:20, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Can you specify the error message? The URL should look something like https://en.wiki.x.io/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&allrev=allrev&wlowner=Dom497&wltoken=d234567f456789e098765a56789b&feedformat=atom (token is indeed incorrect), so maybe you didn't copied not the full URL? Does Blackberry support Atom feeds? Maybe it only supports RSS web feeds! mabdul 06:38, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Picture posting problem

I am trying to post a JPG photo on Wikipedia but only the name of the file appears - not the actual image.

Any ideas of what I am doing wrong?

Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barkerpj (talk • contribs) 06:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Posted by Barkerpj (talk · contribs)

Your uploads are File:Greg Flynn.jpg and File:Greg Flynn - author.jpg. Earlier you had an upload File:Greg Flynn Berlin Cross.jpg which was deleted because the picture was moved to commons. I don't know what happened to that. I updated the image name to your new upload. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:38, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Semi-protected articles and new editors

A new (non-auto-confirmed editor) asked me to help her with the Nina Burleigh article which she could not edit. I found the following:

• Looking at the article, it doesn't appear to be semi-protected. The lock icon is not displayed (her experience too).
• When one clicks on "Edit", it is apparent that the article is semi-protected, as the following message is displayed:
  • Note: This page has been semi-protected so that only autoconfirmed users can edit it. If you need any help getting started with editing, see the New contributors' help page.
• This message is, however, not helpful at all because non-auto-confirmed editors can't see it - they can't click on "Edit" in the first place.
• As a consequence, one would expect new editors to be confused and possibly frustrated because the article's status is unclear, and it is not apparent what - if anything - could be done to remedy the situation.

Is something broken here, or I'm missing something? GregorB (talk) 13:21, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The lock symbol is added manually with {{pp-semi-blp}} or another protection template. It was removed in this edit. Users who cannot edit a page see a "View source" tab instead of "Edit". Log out to see it. "View source" has the same url as "Edit". Users will see MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext if they click it, but the tab name "View source" does not encourage clicking if you want to edit and don't know the system. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:37, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - makes sense now... You are right about "View source" - it works, but it's far from obvious. I've reinserted {{pp-semi-blp}} - looks ominous, but new editors are definitely confused without it. The entire mechanism looks a bit crude to me. This is food for thought: it can be really hard for the newcomers, even in such straightforward situations, and 99% of established editors (myself included) are unfortunately not fully aware of this fact. GregorB (talk) 14:05, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The tab name "View source" could be changed at MediaWiki:Viewsource, or on a namespace skin basis at for example MediaWiki:Vector-action-viewsource. There is old discussion at MediaWiki talk:Viewsource. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:15, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, so it did read "View source" beforehand? Interpreting the comments above to mean that something was wrong with the display, I unprotected it and immediately self-reverted. Nyttend (talk) 14:44, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, MediaWiki automatically chooses between displaying MediaWiki:Viewsource and MediaWiki:Edit (I haven't seen reports of bugzilla:27978 since MediaWiki 1.18 was introduced in the English Wikipedia 5 October 2011). The only error was the missing protection template. Non-protected pages with a protection template are shown in Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates and sometimes fixed by User:DumbBOT and maybe other bots. I don't know an automatic way to find protected pages with no protection template. Maybe a tool could compare Special:ProtectedPages (MediaWiki-generated) to subcategories of Category:Wikipedia page protection (usually template-generated), but it sounds expensive. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:16, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

"The only error was the missing protection template." Quite correct. Still: 1) since forgetting to include it may lead to unpleasant experiences for new editors (and possibly a degree of confusion to others), it would be nice to try and prevent this error in some fashion, and 2) including it does the job in a rather inelegant and visually unappealing way; maybe the interface should warn you the article is protected, rather than its content. GregorB (talk) 18:13, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I thought that there had been some sort of error in the protection process. Nyttend (talk) 23:20, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I have long been a fan of changing MediaWiki:Viewsource to simply read "Edit". However there is a valid argument to NOT do this and it's that you loose the visual cue that the page is protected, which many people would miss. So we would have to add some styling (append a lock icon?) to that tab in all skins to make it clear visually for those who DO know that the page is locked. If anyone has any bright ideas on that. Oh, and we need a cue for blind users as well... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:09, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The flip side is that many, if not most, of our most popular articles don't have an edit button on them for the indefinite future. That's kind of a disaster for communicating to readers that this is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. I would be in favor of a middle ground such as "Contribute", since the alternative methods of an edit request or simple talk page thread is at least potentially a contribution to the article, even if you can't edit. Anyway, copy discussion aside, this is a workflow for entering Wikipedia that my team is paying a lot of attention to right now. When we look at things like the articles that people are coming to account creation from, a decent chunk of them are from semi-protected articles. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Extreme loading times and errors due to scripts.

It's getting worse by the day and I can assure you that plenty of potential or existing editors will leave or at least do less work, like myself, since I'm not clicking on article changes if not really sure there is something more or less important to do. One editor I asked about the problem (Wikid77) taught me a new word: "Wirth's Law". That might apply to some commercial sites but sure shouldn't be needed to use in connection with Wikipedia. Not everybody has a state of the art computer available and even my quite decent laptop can't always keep up with what I call a Wiki overload of unneeded software (or whatever you profs wanna call it).
I think it's time to change this and go back in time, to a time where things were working just fine.TMCk (talk) 00:01, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Try switching to Chrome. I was having achingly bad problems with scripts hanging, but not no more.-- Dianna (talk) 00:18, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Using adblock plus to block geoiplookup and miniatlas.js helps with both speed and privacy. 67.117.130.72 (talk) 02:51, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Every browser has an option to disable javascript. you can consider using it. You will get a whole lot less functionality, but there will always be a trade off. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:03, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

• Those are all nice meant suggestions but my question is not what can I do to make wiki work better but what should wiki do to be again more user friendly. Once again, the problem is not the user but wiki.TMCk (talk) 13:36, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

  Indeed, there is a lot more js in use here than is necessary, and many aspects of it are less than optimal (nevermind in combination with other aspects), but given that what we have is a bastard combination of mediawiki js, wikimedia js, extension js, wikipedia js, gadget js, and user js, what can we actually do about it, realistically speaking? -— Isarra ༆ 20:10, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

  We can either remove many tools, or further optimize. But this is not an easy task. It requires many experienced JS developers to review all the code out there. So the alternative is to remove tools. Good luck with that RfC :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:34, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree with TMCk. It is frustrating to have to respond to prompts to stop scripts running. I tried Dianna's suggestion of using Chrome but navigation around the edit box is not as good as it is in IE. I know virtually nothing about JS but I find it hard to believe that there aren't just a few scripts that are causing the worst problems. Don't review all the code; start by just identifying the most problematic one or two scripts and optimize or remove them. Nurg (talk) 20:20, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Four primes and six primes

Please look at this edit. The display is messed up due to four adjacent primes (twice toggling italics) mechanically inserted but being misinterpreted on display.

I feel that the edit is in fact logical, and that the display of four primes should be changed, so:

• one prime: display as prime ['abc']
• two primes: toggle italics on/off [abc]
• three primes: toggle bold on/off [abc]
• four primes: elide (interpret as two sets of two primes: new) ['abc'] (currently: a prime then toggle bold)
• five primes: toggle each italics and bold [abc]
• six primes: elide (interpret as two sets of three primes: new) ['abc'] (currently: a prime then toggle bold and italic)
• seven or more primes: change? (currently: the last five primes toggle bold and italic)

The interpretation of four primes as a prime followed by a bold toggling is of little use, and illogical since the order cannot be swapped. — Quondum 14:11, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Meanwhile, I improved AWB's logic to first merge html italics and bold tags and then replace with wikimarkup to reduce this kind of problems. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:47, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

• Change might impact thousands of articles: Changes such as re-defining the typesetting directives for multiple apostrophes (primes or tics) can have a vast impact, and currently, the treatment of 4 as apostrophe+bold does seem logical in comparison to the common form of quote+bold (" ' ' '), to be unbolded as 3+space+1 apostrophe. In cases where 2 sets of 2 apostrophes coincide, then perhaps separate with a null-nowiki tag ("<nowiki/>"), such as in template parameters which would join together, where each could have double-apostrophe ends. The concept of "continual improvement" does not mean "continually change everything" but rather, to change aspects which would have a significant improvement to overall quality, as prioritized to make the most-helpful changes or enhancements first, where possible. It would be difficult to prove that 4 apostrophes treated as 2 pairs (' ' & ' ') is better, since an accidental 4th apostrophe, after 3, now can be seen as a spurious extra " ' " whereas treating as 2 pairs would make 3+1 seem like a non-functional bold. When seeking improvements, also consider how incorrect usage of the new feature might be more confusing than the prior feature, such as 4-apostrophe form treated as 2 pairs would do nothing rather than show a spurious extra " ' ". Plus, also consider the impact of a proposed change, with retro-formatting, in many thousands of prior articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:49, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I expected some of this reaction. We actually have no idea of whether there will be many articles affected ("vast impact") without analysing them. The comparison of a bold with a double quote doesn't work at both ends of a quote, as I already pointed out (one single quote will be bold the other not). However, I'm sure there would have to be a demonstrable benefit before a global change would be considered. — Quondum 14:49, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

This is MediaWiki markup. MediaWiki is used by thousands of wikis. We have no way to tell how many problems it would cause other wikis to suddenly change it. If we could get developers to make a configurable meaning of four primes with a non-default setting in Wikipedia then it would confuse lots of people who edit multiple wikis powered by MediaWiki. Another problem it's hard to determine the scope of: Some pages accidentally have 4 primes instead of 3 to start or end a bolding, but only at one of the ends. This only causes a prime to be displayed now, while your change would often cause a lot of text to be bolded. But if we were designing MediaWiki from scratch then I would still prefer the simple rule that at least 3 primes give a bold, and then the remaining primes can count as other things. It's a common principle that you first try to match as large a part as possible to the syntax rules. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:27, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. Broader than I realized... Suggestion withdrawn. Actually, any primes-only system has inherent ambiguity under general substitutions without considering adjacent symbols; a "consistent" redesign would have to be more sophisticated. — Quondum 21:19, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Table shows up in wrong section

At Pete Seeger the table that is placed in the "selected discography" section does not show up there but instead shows up in the "Quotes" section (browser = Firefox). Can anyone figure out / fix? Thanks North8000 (talk) 22:57, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Done. GregorB (talk) 22:59, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! North8000 (talk) 13:04, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Something wrong with Semi-protected and protected edit request categories as of 2 October

Anyone know what's up at semi-protected edit requests or the edit requests categories? The template usages at the bottom of the page seem to be added correctly, but the boxes at the top that list the request along with reason for protection seem to have stopped updating around 2 October. This disconnect may be part of the reason why edit requests are taking longer than usual to process, which was the subject of an ANI. Sailsbystars (talk) 15:52, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

The category pages transclude User:AnomieBOT/SPERTable and User:AnomieBOT/PERTable. They have not been updated by User:AnomieBOT since 2 October. I don't know why. You can contact the bot operator at User talk:Anomie. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:07, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

The OOM Killer on AnomieBOT's server apparently killed some of its processes. I'll have to think about some way to make such problems clearer for myself in the future. Anomie⚔ 19:33, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

1/6 3/5 "Symbols"

Hi all, under "Special Characters" can someone add or link to a 1/6 or 3/5 as a single character? Thanks so much! Marketdiamond (talk) 06:32, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

⅗⅙ HumphreyW (talk) 07:32, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Excellent!! Thanks much! Marketdiamond (talk) 08:06, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Note that MOS:FRAC says: "The use of the few Unicode symbols available for fractions (such as ½) is discouraged entirely, for accessibility reasons among others." I'm not sure we should even keep the current Unicode fractions ½ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ at MediaWiki:Edittools.js and elsewhere. ½ is the only which is easily readable to me. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, as a screen reader user, I can confirm this is a problem. FWIW the characters for ½, ¼ and ¾ read out fine here as they're part of ISO/IEC 8859-1, but the others certainly don't. Graham87 09:51, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Eh, how does your screen-reader not understand say Unicode ⅔? I'd expect exactly that is not a problem. -DePiep (talk) 00:37, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

If Graham87 (talk · contribs) says that his screen reader has problems with these characters, I believe him without question. Just because a character has a Unicode character encoding, it doesn't necessarily imply that it is universally recognised.

To take a visual example: my PC has Windows XP, as does my mother's laptop; yet they each have problems displaying certain Unicode characters, but the problems differ. My PC displays certain Asian text, including Chinese and Japanese text, without problem, but fails to display part of one of the signatures on this page (specifically, the talk page link in Anomie⚔) - to me, it's a square containing the characters 2694. Conversely, my mother's laptop displays that talk page link, which is a pair of crossed swords, but won't display either Chinese or Japanese - these both show as rows of numbered squares.

Since it has been proven that different machines (with the same operating system) do not recognise the whole Unicode set, I don't expect that all screen readers will necessarily recognise the whole Unicode set either. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:17, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I understand MOS:FRAC mentions accessibility because the fractions are likely illegible in regular fontsize. A screen reader does not use fontsize, so that aspect cannot be in play with Graham87. The other aspects mentioned (not picked up by a screen reader, and Unicode character not recognised by an OS/font setup) is not specific to these fraction characters. If it were that, there would be a more general restriction on Unicode characters. -DePiep (talk) 18:41, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

There are MANY characters that screenreader software does not understand (does not have an audio fragment for), this has nothing to do with them being unicode or not. Supporting all possible characters would probably be cost prohibitive and not to mention create a program of a dozen or so gigabytes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:14, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

If that were the reason to mention these characters in WP:FRAC, it would be far too limited (too few prohibitions), then WP:ACCESS should mention this. Since this is not in WP:ACCESS at the moment, I maintain that the access-problem is the visible character: too small to read. -DePiep (talk) 20:55, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, there is a patch for my screen reader, JAWS to teach it the audio representations for almost all Unicode characters, but every time I've tried to use it, it's ground my system to a halt (even when I copied it to the correct folder per the instructions on the site). Specialised sets of Unicode audio representations for things such as IPA and mathematics work much better, but I don't think they're widely used by general screen reader users. Graham87 07:27, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

So what is the lowest common denominator that Wikipedia should support? I don't mean to be nasty here, but is it possible that JAWS is not the best option for a screen reader? Perhaps we are not encouraging its development by stagnating upon the set of characters that we a permitted to write with? Or is it that JAWS is the best-of-breed and we just have to live with such restrictions? I really don't have any experience here so these are genuine questions I have. HumphreyW (talk) 22:42, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I can't speak to the advantages or disadvantages of different screen readers (I assume Graham would know more about that), but JAWS (screen reader) is one of the most popular (the most popular?) screen reader in the world. We could also stop supporting IE because it sucks balls, but that wouldn't be fair to all the IE users out there. But as to what we should actually be doing, ½ was the only fraction I could read off the bat, and barely. I had to toggle the font higher three times before I could read most of the fractions at a comfortable distance. Someguy1221 (talk) 23:03, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

JAWS is one of the best Windows screen readers around, especially for working on the Internet. I'm not familiar enough with other operating systems to comment on them. Graham87 09:20, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

This page which is linked from the "On this day..." box has three occurrences of -->   <--. For me that renders as a box with 202F inside. Is there a policy or guide page that states which characters are considered acceptable, or not acceptable, to put into an article? HumphreyW (talk) 07:17, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

That character is a narrow no-break space, which is disallowed on Wikipedia for exactly that reason. I've replaced it with a regular non-breaking space. Ironically, although I'd copyedited that article earlier in the day, I didn't notice anything wrong with the characters, ironically because JAWS read them out as "space". I don't think there's a centralised list of allowed and disallowed characters; I think they're just mentioned in the various sections of the Manual of Style (e.g. non-breaking spaces, quotes, etc). Graham87 09:20, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

That could be related to the UDL blacklist: such a space could show a misleadding IDN address (one cannot discern that it is an irregular space), and so is banned from IDN addresses. Technically, that does not apply to page content, but those "some browsers" might not know that. Interestingly, ½ and other vulgar fractions are blacklisted too, but I cannot test whether the WP disallow-rule and associated errors occur with these characters. -DePiep (talk) 20:49, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

I have suggested to remove all fractions except ½ from MediaWiki:Edittools. Discussion at MediaWiki talk:Edittools#Proposal to remove fractions. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:32, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Test for comparison:

Unicode, normal size: ½ ↉ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅐ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ⅑ ⅒ ⅟

Unicode, zoomed in: ½ ↉ ⅓ ⅔ ¼ ¾ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅐ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ⅑ ⅒ ⅟

Template, normal size: 1⁄2 0⁄3 1⁄3 2⁄3 1⁄4 3⁄4 1⁄5 2⁄5 3⁄5 4⁄5 1⁄6 5⁄6 1⁄7 1⁄8 3⁄8 5⁄8 7⁄8 1⁄9 1⁄10 1⁄ 

Double sharp (talk) 02:54, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

0/3? What a silly thing to write. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:30, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I guess you don't keep score in baseball matches then. I don't either: but see here under "Comments". --Redrose64 (talk) 18:45, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

For me the template generates the clearest rendering.

Also, in the edit window the "Symbols:" section has many square boxes with hex codes. If an editor decides to use a symbol from the list on a page then I would not know what it is meant to be. The current list is this:

~ | ¡ ¿ † ‡ ↔ ↑ ↓ • ¶ # ∞ ‘ ’ “ ” «» ¤ ₳ ฿ ₵ ¢ ₡ ₢ $ ₫ ₯ € ₠ ₣ ƒ ₴ ₭ ₤ ℳ ₥ ₦ № ₧ ₰ £ ៛ ₨ ₪ ৳ ₮ ₩ ¥ ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦ m² m³ ♭ ♯ ♮ © ® ™

The boxed symbols in my browser are between: ¤ & ฿, ฿ & ¢, ƒ & ₭, ₧ & £ and £ & ₨. That is five symbols that, if used on a page, would just be meaningless boxes to me, and presumably other readers also. HumphreyW (talk) 04:34, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

If you can read what it says inside the boxed-hex code, you can determine what any character is supposed to look line. Go to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/xxxx/index.htm where xxxx is the hex value from inside the box. The characters that you have difficulty with are: ₳ ₵ ₴ ₰ and ៛ (follow the links to see what they should look like). Of these, the first four display properly for me, but the last one is the fallback boxed-hex code. This goes to show that not everybody has the same set of Unicode characters available to them. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:44, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that each time a symbol like those is used that it should link to the external site? If so, then I think that is the wrong way to solve the problem. For some of the mathematics symbols WP can generate images, perhaps it could do the same for these non-universal Unicode glyphs. HumphreyW (talk) 01:11, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

No, not at all. What I'm saying is: if you're curious, this is how to find out what they look like. I was curious to know what "៛" looks like, so I checked. It's not a symbol that I am likely to need in future, so I'll almost certainly forget about it again.

But mainly I'm saying not every user has every possible Unicode symbol among their computer's installed fonts. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Sure, I think we can agree on that point. But what would be a way to solve the problem? Does generating an image, as is done for some of the mathematics symbols, help? I'm not sure how users like Graham87 would be able to deal with images. HumphreyW (talk) 04:18, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Images that substitute for unicode symbols, such as {{eqm}}, should have alt text so that screen reader users can make sense of them. Graham87 10:54, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Now that the one-half character has been removed from the edit symbols box does that mean that it is officially not valid/allowed? Do I have to go back and edit pages where I have previously put the one-half character and replace them with the frac template? HumphreyW (talk) 07:31, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Not allowed is to big a word. 'discouraged' I would say. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:04, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Bizarre edit history

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41062

The user contributions for blocked ip editor 65.28.248.135 have five blank entries. Elen of Roads said on ANI [6] they are not oversighted. Nobody Ent 22:33, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

The API only returns three results. Bugzilla time, perhaps? — This, that, and the other (talk) 05:29, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, definately need to go to bugzilla... Although first we need to figure out what the bug in the rendering engine actually IS (It's not a bug in the API obviously...) and if it can be recreated or if it's just a one-off thing. Barts1a / Talk to me / Help me improve 23:11, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Reported in Bugzilla. --Meno25 (talk) 08:39, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there a usable monobook .js skript

Hi, I'm searching for some usable skipts for monobook, as I have in german wp. --WSC ^® 10:15, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, there are many user scripts here, and I think you should be more specific in what you want a script to do, but you can find some useful scripts in the corresponding WikiProject. --intforce (talk) 13:34, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Picture upload problems ?

I'm getting :
'Could not read or write file "mwstore://local-multiwrite/local-public/6/66/SweeneyAstray.jpg" due to insufficient permissions or missing'directories/containers.
Any ideas ?
GrahamHardy (talk) 13:03, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

According to Ariel on wikitech-l: "We're going to swap out ms7, the current media server fallback, for a netapp. We'll start this on Friday Oct 5 at 11am UTC, to conclude at 2pm UTC or earlier. This will entail turning off uploads to all projects during the switchover. It is possible that ExtensionDistributor and captchas will be affected during this time as well; other services should be fine." Sounds like something is/was not configured right. Is it working OK again? — Richardguk (talk) 13:38, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Now OK, Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 13:46, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Note in case of further issues: Friday's server uploading update was cancelled after technical problems but has been rescheduled for 11:00–14:00 (UTC) on Monday. — Richardguk (talk) 03:50, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject discussion pages ranked by liveliness

How would I get a list of discussion pages of WikiProjects (so I'm talking about pages called "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Whatever") ranked by the frequency with which they are edited---in effect the most active WikiProjects listed first? Michael Hardy (talk) 01:27, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Recent changes - new pages

I see this has changed. How do I now get a list of new articles I created? I used to be able to filter the article and category space to see a flat-text output of what I've done over the last 7/30 days. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{And the horse} 12:57, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you have JavaScript enabled and have you clicked on "Set filters" at Special:NewPagesFeed? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes and yes. I can get the new-look list for new articles I've created, but I can only search across the main article space and not at category (or template) level. Lugnuts ^{And the horse} 09:17, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Problems saving and using preview

Just noting here that I'm having problems today using preview and saving. Preview and diffs are painfully slow and I'm getting lots of time-outs (Wikimedia error messages). I've also had the error messages when I've tried to save. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:36, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

There have been some server issues with database access. Leslie was looking at it (from the airport) and it seems to have stabilized a bit. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:44, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Same problem here, been going on for several hours. Watchlists loads normally for some reason as does access via WP:AWB. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 18:10, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I got the error page repeatedly on trying to save an edit, although in checking the page history now I see that my changes were saved. I got the error page again when I tried to log back in an hour later (about 10 minutes ago). Saves are taking an unusually long time and pop-ups are hardly working at all, but everything else seems to be loading normally. Rivertorch (talk) 18:13, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Opening my preferences and many other pages is oftentimes slow too. I just enabled "Use live preview (requires JavaScript) (experimental)". In hopes of faster previews. But I don't notice anything with it. What am I missing? I clicked Ctrl-Shift-R also. Still see no difference in previews.

After a Google search I found this: User:Js/ajaxPreview. It says this at the bottom of the page: Option "Use live preview (requires JavaScript) (experimental)" in preferences does AJAX preview/changes (using standard buttons at the bottom) but it requests the whole HTML page from the server (no traffic savings there).

So I guess I will have to try the other choices listed there in order to avoid traffic to the server. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:16, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Currently having timeouts on previewing and submitting edits as well. Silverseren^C 18:18, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm having problems with slow server function too. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:20, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

This is almost the exact same problem I'm having, it takes forever and times out a lot. Go Phightins! (talk) 18:21, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

We had issues with our old fallback media storage server (the one we're replacing on Monday), causing cascading issues on the cluster. The outage affected editors and readers viewing uncached pages. Everything should be back to normal.--Eloquence* 20:05, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

It is back to normal for me. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:28, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Non existing template linking issues!

In last 3 days I have seen 3 non-existing template issues. Any recent changes? Or old problem?
Go here G._Sankara_Kurup#External_links and click on the "V" at the templates' upper left corner. The template does not exist, actually editors have made some errors in template (title etc) I think! If you can not see any problem, see older version, someone has fixed error in between. --Tito Dutta ✉ 23:18, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

• Template vandalism, I fixed it. Ryan Vesey 23:22, 7 October 2012 (UTC)
• Excellent! But the view, edit, talk should be linked to page URL and not page title, so that it does not get broken even after changing the title etc. Is not it? --Tito Dutta ✉ 23:34, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

There is no automatic way to get the right link with the current software. When the template code is transcluded in G. Sankara Kurup, it doesn't know that it was transcluded from Template:Jnanpith Award. That's why the template has the line name = Jnanpith Award (which is independent from the title displayed by the template). I have thought about making a bot request to periodically check and fix name parameters in navigation boxes which should link to themselves. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:58, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Changes to the Vector buttons

Here's how it will look

Hey all

So, as you see discussed above, we've made some changes to the edit window. I'm happy to report that the edit tools will be returning on Thursday (touch wood). We've also got some changes we'd like to make to the "save page" , which we want to run by everyone. It's worth noting that these would exclusively apply to Vector, and can be seen in the mockup on the right. We'll have a prototype to kick around in a bit, but we wanted to get feedback before coding rather than after.

Our rationale is basically this: the current interface doesn't do much to indicate to users what buttons are important or unimportant. Save page, show preview...they're all displayed in the same way, when in fact some are more important than others. We'd like to make this a bit more intuitive and provide some focus and direction by using colour as an indicator. There's research that supports the idea that this is pretty helpful. We've chosen blue because it's wikipedia's "action" colour: links are blue, the 'edit' button is blue, it seems only appropriate that these be blue as well. We will NOT be introducing any color for Show Preview/ Show Changes. We will increase the height because the labels are too small.

At the same time, in line with suggestions by some editors, we've moved the edit summary guide text (Briefly describe the changes you have made) into the edit summary box itself, when that's supported by browsers. This will save space while not actually losing any information.

Questions, ideas, comments? The earlier you give feedback, the sooner we can look at implementing changes to it :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Add a temporary notice to MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning with a link to explain the changes and the dates so that editors understand what is happening. Now I have to figure out how to do button colors to update {{EditOptions}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:22, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think it is a change that is needed. Aesthetically speaking, it is much worse. Functionality wise, the blue doesn't tell me more importance. I just showed my wife, who doesn't edit Wikipedia, the three buttons from a few feet away. She thought the darker "Show Preview" looked to be more important and I think the same way. Having them different colours seems to be a solution looking for a problem. The background of the buttons is the same colour of the rest of the background... having the button background be slightly darker would make them stand out better. Bgwhite (talk) 21:34, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Personally, the grey button looks 'disabled' to me. But if we want to change Vector button, I have a personal design in use:

(CSS here.) — Edokter (talk) — 21:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Agree with you that the Grey looks disabled. That is a valid piece of feedback.
So the only change would be the Save Button which is consistent with the link colors used today and with the Agora color Pallette.Vibhabamba (talk) 22:21, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's how it could look

I like this look, better ;) Gonna make em a bit smaller, though.

div.editButtons input
{
 padding: 8px 15px;
 font-weight: bold;
 line-height: 1;
 color: #444;
 border: none;
 background-color: #fff;
 -webkit-border-radius: 23px;
 -moz-border-radius: 23px;
 border-radius: 23px;
 text-shadow: 0 1px 1px rgba(255,255,255,.85);
 background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#fff), to(#bbb));
 background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(0% 100% 90deg, #bbb, #fff);
 -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.5);
 -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.5);
 box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.5);
}

needs the other states, of course… Br'er Rabbit (talk) 21:52, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh please don't do that. my that's ugly. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:45, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the colour of the buttons makes much difference. What I would like to see in another colour, or format, is the text at the top of an editing page: "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used and redistributed by other people at will." It would be better if this was more conspicuously different from the text of the article: perhaps boxed or on a coloured background? PamD 22:21, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Can you go into why you'd want different style more? Is it for more emphasis (to make it "jump out"), or is it just to make sure that it is visually apparent that it is different than the other text on the page? Either reason is valid, I just think clarifying why might help make a design decision. The only potential conflict with using a box with background or border is that it would be in addition to any editnotice templates on a page (such as MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning). Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:58, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Arbitrary break, and two things:

1. Oliver, you're on holiday. Go away.
2. The buttons should really match the other buttons - unfortunately since none of the other ones match each other anywhere, I have absolutely no idea if they do or not in that example. But really, all the buttons in vector should be using the same style, including in preferences, various forms, etc, and the ones AFT5 uses look nice in vector... which probably means that isn't the right style, doesn't it? Damn. -— Isarra ༆ 22:31, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   (edit conflict) Er, not AFT5, the new pages feed... the former uses Agora, as Vibha said this is supposed to be above, and which they should all be using, but the latter uses something else that actually matches the skin and doesn't result in all the secondary buttons appearing disabled. But while I just don't like Agora's current appearance, a random mish-mash of styles is even worse. -— Isarra ༆ 22:58, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   Having all buttons be the same size and style would only make sense in a world where all buttons are equally important. They're not. Different buttons have different functions and relevance to users, which is why styling like this is used all across the modern web. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:52, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   They can be consistently styled with interfaces on the rest of the wiki with individual buttons having emphasis. That was my point, not anything about the individual ones here. -— Isarra ༆ 22:58, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   You're right that we need consistency across the encyclopedia, that why we have to start with a few limited places. Reality is we dont have the developer resources to change a lot of different areas at the same time. This one is critical since its a first touchpoint for new editors. Vibhabamba (talk) 23:02, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   Yes, 100% internally consistency is good, but not always possible or even a reality in Vector at the moment. The point of incremental changes such as this is to gradually move to a new style without trying to redesign the entire site all at once. Making the argument that no change should be made in order to comply with an old style that is less functional doesn't make much sense. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:08, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

   Please don't put words in my fingers, Steven Walling. This proposal is to style the editform buttons - while already styled buttons are out of plausible scope, is there any reason this cannot extend to all input buttons currently defaulting to system style, as these do? Same change, different selectors. -— Isarra ༆ 23:33, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Er, nevermind about the whole agora/not agora thing; I got a little confused, as apparently AFT5 and NPF are both agora, as is this. This variant looks fairly good, though the secondary buttons should probably not be an average colour so similar to the background. -— Isarra ༆ 00:20, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

The other two buttons will stay as is, exactly the way are they styled right now although they will increase by a few pixels in height. Ignore anything other than the Save Button. Thanks! Vibhabamba (talk) 00:36, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

That will not work - the way they are currently styled is not at all, which means they are defaulting to the system theme of the window manager or operating system of the user. As different window managers and operating systems can have very different themes (compare various ubuntu themes with the style used by OSX, for example), specifically styling (changing) only one button will just result in a complete mismatch of button styles on many systems. -— Isarra ༆ 03:14, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Good Point. Lets see what it looks like once we have it prototyped. I will try and get a live screenshot on this page. We may not be able to accommodate styling of everything for this iteration. Vibhabamba (talk) 03:45, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Remember aqua buttons in pre Mac OS X Lion ? That's why you can't style just one button. Either style nothing and let defaults take care, or style everything. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:45, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

• Comment: Frankly, I'd rather see the buttons rearranged. For readers of English, and I would guess, other left-to-right, top-to-bottom languages, the eye wants to start at upper left and progress to lower right. These buttons should follow that convention. It has always bothered me that they don't. Buttons gain importance relative to their position with regard to the other buttons. Save page is most important so position it rightmost. Show changes is the least important so position it leftmost.

By using a positional hierarchy that doesn't conflict with user expectation, other mechanisms that indicate relative importance are unnecessary. In the buttons on this editor page that I'm using, the Save page button uses a bold font to identify it as the most important button. Were they flipped around and positioned on the right, then that bold font would not be necessary nor would the blue color. Blue as a color for the most important button doesn't relate to any real world indicators of importance that I can think of – red and green? yes, blue? no.

Of course for readers of right-to-left languages the position of the buttons is correct. Don't break the editor page for them.

–Trappist the monk (talk) 00:43, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

No, emphasising the save would be necessary either way - nevermind what seems logical, what people are used to will still play a huge part into where they expect the button to be. So for instance anyone used to using windows, facebook, or google will probably expect the main button to be on the left just because that is what those do.

That said, I agree it is backwards and strange, but to put the save on the right the entire row of buttons would probably need to be aligned with the right side of the textarea for it to really make sense, and the way the rest of the stuff in the area is currently laid out, that would just look weird. Would need some major rearranging to work well, but it would be doable. -— Isarra ༆ 03:14, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

+1 Isarra. Color Coding is absolutely essential and is a rule of thumb in any visual design exercise.

Blue is an action for continuity on many community driven sites and is widely employed for information design. The sites you cited (Windows, Google, Facebook), they all use color coded call to actions along with icons. We are pretty sparse on iconography. References: http://www.paulolyslager.com/call-to-action-buttons-psychology-color/ Eliminating color is not an option, we need clues other than color for accessibility concerns.

Hope that helps. 67.164.99.159 (talk) 03:32, 3 October 2012 (UTC) Vibhabamba (talk) 03:35, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Could propose this... see how many people revolt.

I made another mockup of a possibility of how it could look including using right-oriented buttons with styles I found in Commons' css. Not all of the mockup would apply here, but regardless I don't think the general gist would go over too well, even if only because button position is just hard to get used to. -— Isarra ༆ 21:09, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

That's one huge mouse move between "This is a minor edit" and "Save page". --Redrose64 (talk) 21:45, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

A very good point - may even be a primary blocker for ever doing this sort of thing... -— Isarra ༆ 06:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Some legal issues with this: We cant disconnect Save from the legal copy. Thanks for taking a crack at this, its going to be slow and incremental. What are you thoughts on making this area persistent? So it never scrolls below the fold? Vibhabamba (talk) 00:08, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Which area, and what do you mean by persistent? -— Isarra ༆ 04:06, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The Entire Box Field Carrying the Edit Summary, Terms of Service and Slew of actions > Save, Preview, Changes, Cancel. 67.164.99.159 (talk) 06:58, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

What do you mean by 'persistent'? -— Isarra ༆ 16:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

And why do you say there would be legal issues with this? How is it a disconnect between those elements any more than the current has? -— Isarra ༆ 06:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Well Because the Legal copy and the Save action are in different quadrants on the Page. Editors could easily say that they didnt read the TOS before hitting Save which has massive legal implications for us. This is a very different mental model than users are used to right now. Changing the order of the actions is also not trivial. We could get severe community lashback for that.

67.164.99.159 (talk) 06:58, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The comment on Legal copy + Save action was added by Vibhabamba (talk) 08:07, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The copyright warning is right above the buttons in this same as has been in mw1.20 (the buttons in the wikiEditor toolbar would at most be a gadget, unless someone wants to yoink the entire VE save dialog and add it to wikiEditor), although editors could just as easily say they're not reading the thing now, either, but they're still agreeing to it regardless by saving. And yes, that folks probably wouldn't take kindly the reverse of button order was kind of my point here. They might accept it, if given time to discuss and come to terms with it, but that would be quite the undertaking were any somewhat representative portion of users to be involved and certainly out of the scope of anything we could do. -— Isarra ༆ 16:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

These comments apply to Editor Isarra's mockup and the concerns about legal issues arising from the legal notice being too far away from the save page button.

1. leave the Save page button where it is
2. move Show preview and Show changes up and to the right so that Show preview is directly above Save page
3. move the legal text down and right so that it is adjacent to the Save page button
4. enclose both the legal text and the Save page button within their own box – perhaps a thin line or a change in background color around the text and the button to clearly show that they are connected
5. delete the Cancel button – it serves no purpose (as I've ranted on before)
6. move the Minor edit and Watch checkboxes right so they are near the Show changes and Show preview buttons
7. delete Editing help link – it should be a button on the toolbar (all toolbars) (Editor Isarra has pointed out that the Help link has been removed from his mockup)

Left-to-right and top-to-bottom hierarchy leads the editor through the process. Save page button and the legal text clearly associated with each other. Requires no more room than is required now. Special colors not required.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:15, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your input, however breaking things up in the manner you suggest would unfortunately detriment the flow of the page even more. -— Isarra ༆ 16:39, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh isn't is wonderful to be dismissed out-of-hand by our betters? I have said nothing to you that deserves a reply like that. Do me the courtesy of a reply that shows how what I have suggested is detrimental to page flow.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:11, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Isarra's mockup of a suggested layout by Trappist the monk

My apologies - it would seem that by trying to avoid insulting you I wound up insulting you in the process, but unfortunately the changes you suggest just don't make a whole lot of sense. I'm not entirely sure which version they are based on, for instance, since you refer to things that shouldn't appear together in any of them (such as the editing help and the cancel button), so saying to leave the 'save page' where it is is ambiguous at best. The relative positioning of all the pieces also seems a bit odd... but here. I've done my best to make a mockup based on what you describe - is that at all what you meant? -— Isarra ༆ 04:40, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Brilliant! That is exactly what I meant. The only really obvious change I would make to your mockup is to remove the line break ahead of "You agree that a hyperlink ..."

This mockup is the one to which I referred. I'm not clear about what you mean when you say that I "refer to things that shouldn't appear together in any of them (such as the editing help and the cancel button), so saying to leave the 'save page' where it is is ambiguous at best." Clarify?

Does this button layout still seem detrimental to page flow?

With the minor change that I noted above, I think that you should publish your mockup as an image rather than a link so that others can see it. I fear that left as a link, others who read this part of the discussion will presume that we are having an argument and ignore whatever else is said.

Thank you.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:07, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

The linebreak is in the system message and would need removing there, there hasn't been a help link since before the first batch of changes, and putting the buttons all in the corner like that makes it harder to get to any of them, makes it easier to misclick, and deemphasises the relevance of the lot while also resulting in an awkward piece of white space where one would expect there to be stuff. And I have now added the image as a thumb. -— Isarra ༆ 08:17, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree with removing the line break ahead of "You agree that a hyperlink ...". Turning those two sentences into a paragraph will improve the use of screen space. Nurg (talk) 09:45, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

See here for why the sentences were broken up in the first place. -— Isarra ༆ 02:45, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, you're right about the help link; not sure now where I got that so I've struck it from my list.

If misclicking is an issue, is it not also an issue with the Edit summary link above the summary text field and the minor edit link in the minor edit check-box label? I know that I've misclicked the minor edit link often enough but rarely get the Edit summary link. Of course if I just remembered to use the tab key more often that wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, that blank space is blank. But is it really awkward space? Blank space isn't necessarily a bad thing. The eye is attracted to things, so the blank space enforces the eye's tendency to move to the minor edit and watch check-boxes. I suppose that we could move the summary text field label into that space, or move the minor edit and watch check-boxes back to the left side, or use the space to remind editors that the Tab ↹ and ⇧ Shift+Tab ↹ cycle to the next or previous input field, or leave it blank.

How does the layout "deemphasise the relevance of the lot"? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:22, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Mon, please, I have said what I could; I have neither the time nor the energy nor the neuroscience background to go into the details of the whys of the whys. -— Isarra ༆ 02:45, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I am disappointed and confused. Neither the time nor the energy yet you devoted time and energy to create an accurate mockup of my suggested layout. It isn't clear to me that anyone needs a neuroscience background to expand upon or clarify for others their own fully-formed thoughts and opinions. Sigh.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:23, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

• Another comment - now that I've had a chance to sit down and read the thing in full, I have a couple more questions.
  1. "We will increase the height because the labels are too small." - Too small for what? They're not any bigger in the mockup, either.

     The height of the button is 17px and the labels "Save/ Preview/ Show changes" in the current type size make small target areas. The buttons need to go up in height by a few pixels and the type size needs to go up by a notch just to match type size on the rest of the page. The mocks are not an exact representation. Vibhabamba (talk) 17:29, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

     The specific height is relative to the system scheme, but indeed specifying something generally larger would make sense. -— Isarra ༆ 21:26, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

  2. In the previous thread, it was established that using a placeholder text for the edit summary field would only work when editing the entire page (not a section) for technical reasons. What are your plans to get around this?

     If an editor is editing a section, the section title will appear in the Edit Summary box. The reasoning is that if the editor knows that they can edit specific sections they dont need the basic guide test of what an edit summary is. Vibhabamba (talk) 17:29, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

     This might be a flawed argument. There have been indications in the past, that new users actually find it easier to find the edit section links, then the main "edit" tab at the top. I'm not saying it is so, but you probably want to check if the experience bias really is as much as you assume it to be, with this edit section links. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:39, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

     Carrying guide text within the input fields is a pattern we are establishing. this will also be seen in the new signup experience. For the short term, the guide text will not appear if you edit a section. Vibhabamba (talk) 20:52, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

     html5 doesn't support that, and for good reason - even if you make a js version of the placeholder attribute, people still probably won't notice it at all since the field is already filled in to their eyes.
     And meantime many folks do indeed seem to catch on pretty quickly about section editing, judging from a lot of the test edits I've found myself having to revert. This is good, since editing most full pages at once would be kind of overwhelming. -— Isarra ༆ 21:23, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

  3. There are some other interesting styling changes in the mockup, namely to the edit summary field (including the placeholder text font size) and the grey area (both width and shadow); are these intended changes as well, either with this or future builds? -— Isarra ༆ 04:45, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

     Those are not intended changes in this iteration. Vibhabamba (talk) 17:29, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

• My original request, above, was:-

Any chance of moving the linked part of the "Edit summary" text, immediately above the Edit summary box, away from the beginning of the line? - I'm forever accidentally clicking the link when trying to enter an edit summary

You have almost done the opposite - removing everything except the linked part of "Edit summary", and keeping that immediately above the Edit summary box, at the beginning of the line.

What we have done here is not solving or exacerbating the problem you mention. We are looking into a pattern where any type of label might carry a help hook or a whats this link next to it.

Also the reason you hit the label is because the edit field is not a proper target size, it is below the standard height of an input field. We will increase the height of the field by a pixel or two. Vibhabamba (talk) 20:52, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

• Request - can there be a way to ensure that, for a simple edit, the "save page" "show preview" "show changes" buttons will be on the screen, without scrolling down, whatever (reasonable) screen resolution is being used, and whatever messages appear at the top:- "Welcome to the Village pump for technical issues" like this page, BLP warning etc. as scrolling down is a nusance and new editors may be unaware of buttons off the screen, causing frustration. I've already had to cut the size of my editing window down to 12 rows with the current changes and this layout looks no shallower measured vertically from the toolbar to the buttons. - Arjayay (talk) 08:44, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Arjayay, you bring up a very critical point. making the Edit Summary/ Save persistent is key in improving the UX for new editors. We havent quite considered it for this iteration. But Ill work with Okeyes to evaluate this for the next one. If the save area persists and never goes below the fold, we need to accommodate View Templates and View Hidden Categoires so they are easily discoverable. Those sections are used by a lot of editors. Any thinking or comments here would be useful. We will propose the behavior and gather feedback from the community. Thanks for raising. Vibhabamba (talk) 17:21, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

• Use of contrast, grey: The contrast between light-on-dark and dark-on-light buttons feels jarring. I'd feel more comfortable with say, charcoal grey "default" buttons (with white text) and blue for the "important" one(s), and that might also avoid the issue people have identified with grey buttons feeling "greyed out" and inactive. Grey buttons work well on a white background, where their inherent contrast helps mark them as active, but the edit-button area currently has a grey background: the lower contrast worsens the "greyed out" effect. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 19:16, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

  Aye, better contrast is definitely needed. Using the appropriate button styles should help, but if not I′m sure the background can be adjusted accordingly. -— Isarra ༆ 06:29, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

  We're going to try increasing the shading in the other buttons to make more clear "this is a button". I'll let y'all know when we've got something to show you on the live prototype :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

  Are you not using the agora library? -— Isarra ༆ 15:11, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• I like the color of the Save button, the other buttons might need some work though. One more thing with the placeholder. I'd argue that if it is in the textfield, it will not need the (). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:32, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

  Good point; we're including it now :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

  • I absolutely the current layout, it's far less clunky and everything is easily accessible. The moving and inclusion of the note at the top is a great idea, although I'd go for a more direct cautionary note. Also, in the new interface: "This is a minor edit" has the last two words have been omitted leaving behind a somewhat meaningless string which might confuse some. Is it just something on my end or was it an error in the code? I also prefer the design in the mockup, the buttons as they are look out-of-place. Great work, though! :D James ^{(Talk • Contribs)} • 9:43am • 23:43, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
    • That shouldn't be happening (and isn't for me) but if you can email me a screenshot/OS/browser info I'll try and get it looked into :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
    • It's because you're setting display:none on #minoredit_helplink in User:M.O.X/vector.css. See MediaWiki talk:Minoredit#Hiding the link for details and new CSS to remove the link without leaving the checkbox label as "This is a". Anomie⚔ 16:27, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Testing new account creation page

The current account creation page

The new version as currently deployed

This is a heads up that we're going to be doing a trial of a new version of the account creation page, starting today.

How we're testing it

This is going to be run as an A/B test for a few weeks. That means trying to see it via creating test accounts is both a hit-and-miss strategy and could muck with the results. If you do so anyway, it would help us if you marked them with {{User alternative account}}, so we can find them.

For account creators: if you're already logged in and you visit Special:UserLogin, nothing should change. Account requests in general should be unaffected, since both interfaces still include the necessary link.

Why

Our accout creation page is pretty old, to be frank, and it's almost certainly one of the reasons why registrations have declined over the years.[7] You might remember that back in summer 2011, that there was a past account creation improvement project, which conducted some tests of their own (that are now over).

The goal of that project was to increase the number of newly-registered people who made edits. While my team—editor engagement experiments—is also aimed at increasing the number of active editors, for this launch we're just focused on making the account creation page something that gets out of the way of new people. There are also some secondary goals, like making the design comply with other work from the design team, and making the interface much more usable on mobile browsers.

What happens after the test

After the test, we will use data such as how many people created an account and how many were blocked (especially for username policy violations) to get an idea of whether it was more or less successful at helping people register. There's more about how we're collecting and analyzing the data on Meta. If you're curious, there is more about our goals and fancier things we might do in the future in these docs, which you're welcome to comment on.

Thanks! Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:57, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

I love the new design. Great work. --Meno25 (talk) 08:29, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Aye, it looks good. Should certainly be interesting to see the results of this, too, among other things comparing effectiveness of full descriptions to mere links... -— Isarra ༆ 08:39, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

It does look nice, yes, although if we were to keep it, could we have "(recommended)" instead of "(optional)" for email addresses -- we do get a lot of password reset cases we can't do much about with it. On a general point, Steven, you link to the previous tests: did these factor into your present trial at all? - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 09:27, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Loving it, but I support Jarry1250's comment with regard to 'recommended' —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, when we thought about the language here, we realized that if we really think people should be providing an email address so they can recover their account, we should just think about making it required in the future. You can already turn off all ways to receive email from other editors or automated email. Obviously this would not be a spur of the moment decision though, since it would require an update to the privacy policy. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:43, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I always have difficulty with input boxes that have already populated "help" text in them. I think it is the wrong place to put such text. Firstly: because before I start typing I have to manually erase the text (without JS the text does not vanish when I select the box), and secondly: because once I manually erase the text there is no way to get it back again (without a full page reload) in case I forgot what it said. I think it could be improved if there is no text in the input boxes (keep them blank upon load) and instead the help text is placed either above, below, left or right of the box. HumphreyW (talk) 12:27, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Good point - support for that varies; some browsers won't even show the text at all. And while this can be worked around with js, aside from the captcha they all seem mostly redundant anyway, so perhaps just moving the captcha explanation and the email '(optional)' or '(recommended)' (I'd prefer the latter as well) into the labels would be better? -— Isarra ༆ 20:43, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Having tested it prior to launch, I can say that the number of browsers and users who won't see the text is relatively small. We're mostly talking IE6, maybe very old versions of Firefox or Opera, and some mobile browsers. In the majority of browsers that visitors to Wikipedia use, the text works just fine, and does not require manually erasing the text. What are you using Humphrey? Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:36, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

My comment was intended to be general since I don't know where your test page is to try it. My past experience with these boxes preloaded with text has always been frustration and annoyance. If you have done some sort of non-JS magic then I would like to test it. Do you have a link to a page where the test page is used? HumphreyW (talk) 01:39, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

The test is delivered only 50% of the time, and once you visit it remembers you if you're using the same browser, so it might be a bit of a pain. Anyway, it's a good thing for us to make sure that we don't launch a permanent version that makes people remove the suggestion text just to type in the fields. It is very annoying. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:09, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I disabled and cleared existing cookies but I only ever see the old page. I reloaded it 30 or 40 times but still I see the same thing. Am I using the wrong link? HumphreyW (talk) 02:20, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

That's the right link. If you want to force seeing the UI of the new version, just enter mw.e3.acux.modifyPage() in your browser console. Disabling cookies makes it impossible to get put into the test, because that's how login sessions are remembered. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:01, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Umm, I don't have JS so that means I don't have a JS console either. If I enable cookies and then I always get the previous version. HumphreyW (talk) 00:40, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Not having JS turned on is another reason why you wouldn't see it, since the test version requires JS. If you're not a user that has JS turned on, the future permanent changes will really be only skin deep, as in changes to the size and color of fields and buttons you can just see in the screenshot. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 05:30, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Highlighting disambiguation links

Hello, in many language WPs (e.g. in my german home WP) I can choose highligthing of links to disambiguations in personal preferences, but I can't find this here in en:WP. Do I need new glasses or really isn't such a possibility here? Thanks for help, eryakaas (talk) 19:29, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Try User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js. Add this to Special:Mypage/skin.js (your current skin) or Special:Mypage/common.js (all skins):

importScript('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js'); // Linkback: User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js

PrimeHunter (talk) 19:34, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Does that line work by itself? The example at User:Anomie/linkclassifier#Usage follows this with a second line

importStylesheet('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css'); // Linkback: User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css

-- John of Reading (talk) 19:53, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Right. You also need that if you don't make your own color selections in Special:Mypage/skin.css or Special:Mypage/common.css. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:06, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Now I see a lot of colours ;-) eryakaas (talk) 20:11, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't yet have anything in Special:Mypage/skin.js. Can I create with this one addition? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:20, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't it before too ;-) eryakaas (talk) 20:29, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Martinevans123 (talk) 20:41, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

@Martinevans123: if you don't have a Special:Mypage/skin.js, it's probably best to put the code into Special:Mypage/common.js; that way it will operate regardless of the currently-selected skin. If you don't have Special:Mypage/common.js either, just create it with both of the lines referred to above (and shown in the first dotted box at User:Anomie/linkclassifier#Usage). --Redrose64 (talk) 21:21, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Redrose64, that's really very useful. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:55, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Diff view

What happened to diff view? It is completely unusable. Improved diff view works fine though. Ryan Vesey 05:23, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

What do you mean by "diff view", the built-in diff feature or a script or gadget? How is it unusable? PleaseStand (talk) 07:12, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

The built in diff feature. There are no colors in the diff so it is very hard to see what is being changed. Consider this diff. When you don't know that yes is being changed to no (and one no is being changed to yes) it is almost impossible to read. I didn't figure it out until I went to the improved diff view using the gadget. It's much easier on something like this because you can tell there was an addition, but when there are just changes and no modifications it is worthless. Ryan Vesey 14:59, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Consider the appearance of this screenshot I uploaded. It is extremely difficult to tell what occurred just from looking at the diff because all of the color is gone. Ryan Vesey 15:10, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Looks like you are missing some CSS. Try by passing your browser cache. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:12, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

This occasionally happens to me (I'm using the blue and yellow diff colors), but reloading the page always seems to fix it. David1217 ^{What I've done} 16:18, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

It also happens for me (I use Google Chrome). Helder 12:51, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

common.css file

Add the following code to your Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering skins Custom common.css CSS file [[Special:MyPage/common.css]]

table.diff, td.diff-otitle, td.diff-ntitle {
        background-color: white;
        border: 1px solid gray;
        font-family: Arial, san-serif; font-size: 12pt;
}
td.diff-addedline {
        background: #cfc;
        font-size: smaller;
}
td.diff-deletedline {
        background: #ffa;
        font-size: smaller;
}
td.diff-context {
        background: #eee;
        font-size: smaller;
}
.diffchange {
        color: red;
        font-weight: bold;
        text-decoration: none;
}
 
td.diff-deletedline span.diffchange {
        background-color: #FFD754; color:black;
}
 
td.diff-addedline span.diffchange {
        background-color: #73E5A1; color:black;
}
 
.d{
        overflow: auto;
}

Will take your diffs from trying to spot a fish in water to a clear display. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 18:24, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with colors, and everything with failing connections causing incomplete CSS being cached by the browser (or a router or ISP). Adding another set of colors won't help. Getting a stable internet connection and a good browser is better advice. BTW. you should use [[User:<Your User Name>/common.css]] these days for anything that is not skin specific. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:31, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Good point on common.css. Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 18:39, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmm,I bypassed my cache and then reset my computer when that didn't work. I've got a good internet connection and I'm using chrome. Still nothing. Perhaps adding the css above will override whatever isn't working? On the note of which page to add it to, I usually link people to Special:MyPage/common.css or Special:MyPage/common.js Ryan Vesey 18:41, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

My diffs are working beautifully, there's some poor formatting with the twinkle options, but everything else is great! Thanks for the css Sun Creator. I'm still curious why I seem to be the only one affected here though. Ryan Vesey 18:43, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Ryan, you're not the only one having this problem. I have recently encountered it multiple times. In each case, reloading the page successfully loads the CSS. This time, I opened View Page Source and found the URL the relevant CSS was supposed to load from:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="//bits.wikimedia.org/en.wiki.x.io/load.php?debug=false&amp;lang=en&amp;modules=mediawiki.action.history.diff&amp;only=styles&amp;skin=vector&amp;*" />

I clicked the link and got this message: "Scripts should use an informative User-Agent string with contact information, or they may be IP-blocked without notice." After reloading the page, reopening View Page Source, and clicking the link again, I did see the CSS. I was using Firefox 15.0.1 on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 (with a few browser add-ons) to access the new secure server. Hopefully this information will help in diagnosing the problem. PleaseStand (talk) 07:38, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T42856

Really ? That is NOT supposed to happen. Perhaps such an error state got stuck in squid or something, causing all users with a similar config to get a cached copy or something. I'll try to find a sysadmin to ponder this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:05, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

I filed a bug report about this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:19, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Buffering

Sometimes i press my edit count button it just buffers and doesn't direct to the edit count page. Is this a glitch? Pass a Method talk 11:18, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

There can be many reasons for this, but for me most often it means my internet connection is just below par. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I guess you refer to the "Edit count" link at the bottom of user contributions. This is an external link to http://toolserver.org/~tparis/count. Toolserver links are frequently slow or non-responsive in my experience, independent of my connection speed to Wikipedia itself which is at wikipedia.org. The two sites are run differently. Special:Preferences here at Wikipedia is fast but only has a total "Number of edits" field with no details. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:19, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

A toolserver query such as X!'s Edit Counter may take a long time due to the number of database rows which need to be retrieved. Sometimes, when toolserver load is high, the query may time out or even be "killed" for consuming too many resources, such as memory or CPU cycles. When this happens, it's normally worth waiting an hour or so before retrying, to let other activity be completed. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:20, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there something I can add to my js or css page to hide links in the toolbox?

Resolved

It's rather crowded, especially on user pages, and I'd like to hide some links that I never use. Is it possible? - Purplewowies (talk) 23:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Look in the HTML source for the page, and you'll see it looks something like this:

<li id="t-whatlinkshere"><a href="/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)" title="List of all English Wikipedia pages containing links to this page [j]" accesskey="j">What links here</a></li>
<li id="t-recentchangeslinked"><a href="/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)" title="Recent changes in pages linked from this page [k]" accesskey="k">Related changes</a></li>
<li id="t-upload"><a href="/wiki/Wikipedia:Upload" title="Upload files [u]" accesskey="u">Upload file</a></li>
<li id="t-specialpages"><a href="/wiki/Special:SpecialPages" title="A list of all special pages [q]" accesskey="q">Special pages</a></li>

The bit at the beginning of each line is what you need (e.g. <li id="t-specialpages">). Just take the id value for whichever ones you want to hide, and add appropriate rules to your common.css, e.g.

#t-specialpages { display:none; }

HTH. Anomie⚔ 01:16, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

You can do it with code from mw:Manual:Interface/Sidebar#Add or remove sections (JavaScript) in Special:MyPage/common.js or Special:MyPage/skin.js. You can omit the link parameter in "remove" calls of form ModifySidebar("remove", "toolbox", name), where name is the displayed name for a link, for example "Upload file". PrimeHunter (talk) 01:29, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Huh, well. I've been trying to hide "Upload file" since it's technically a duplicate of a new link I added to the toolbox, and I cannot for the life of me get it to hide with either method. I've only been trying the css method (though I did see the other page, but missed the other method Facepalm ). I have managed to successfully hide "Permanent link", though (but it won't hide through css... if it's alone). Why can't I get the upload one to hide at all? - Purplewowies (talk) 02:54, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

How about just removing the logo and some links above to give you more room? Regards, Sun Creator^(talk) 03:10, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

/* ********** REMOVE ELEMENTS IN THE LEFT HAND SIDEBAR ********** */
/* Gets rid of the Wikipedia logo in the left hand sidebar */
div#p-logo
{ display: none; }
 
/* Move up text to where the logo was */
div#mw-panel
{ top: 0; }
 
/* Remove "Donate to Wikipedia" */
li#n-sitesupport
{ display: none; }
 
/* Remove "Wikipedia Shop" */
li#n-shoplink
{ display: none; }
 
/* Remove "About Wikipedia" */
li#n-aboutsite
{ display: none; }
 
/* Remove "Contact Wikipedia */
li#n-contact
{ display: none; }

I don't really want to do that, mostly because it's the box itself that's bothering me. There's just a lot of links in it on a user page. That and the redundant upload buttons bother me. - Purplewowies (talk) 03:37, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

You had correct code in [8], but $('.mw-rollback-link a').text('rollback'); in the above line is meant for your js and not your css. If you want to use mw:Manual:Interface/Sidebar#Add or remove sections (JavaScript) then copy the whole code and change the ModifySidebar calls in CustomizeModificationsOfSidebar. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:35, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Gah. Facepalm . Removing the js code seems to have solved the problem of the css not working. I'm successfully hiding it all. - Purplewowies (talk) 01:44, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Try adding an important:

#t-upload { 
	display: none !important; 
}

Might help. Or it could just be caching issues or whatever. special:MyPage/common.css, purge, hard refresh, and all that. -— Isarra ༆ 15:35, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

The commons:MediaWiki:IPadSidbarSlider.js might be useful. See also bugzilla:14501. Helder 15:50, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

link isn't linking

Any idea why the link to International Council on English Braille in the lead of IPA Braille isn't linking? Checked in FF and IE. — kwami (talk) 18:54, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

The link was broken across two lines. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:58, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, now I feel stupid! — kwami (talk) 19:09, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Left side menu bar

First, has it always been the case that the "navigation" "search" etc. section headers have always been lowercased at the start ("interaction", not "Interaction") or have I only just noticed it? Also is it just me or do the results popping up when you type in the "Search" box now have a smaller font size? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 22:33, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Assuming that you refer to the Monobook skin - no, this is not just you: it's changed in the last 24 hrs, presumably to be more like Vector. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:54, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

...changing to be more like Vector would rather defeat the purpose for those of us who use it because, y'know, we don't like Vector... - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 01:59, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

File:Monobook.css.png also shows lowercase in 2008. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:49, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

The gif width bug？

When the width of the gif file is multiple of 50, the image can't be displayed properly.

http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/User:Xh286286/temp2

--Scoooooorpio（留言） 04:58, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Loading the image's description page and then adding ?action=purge at the end of the URL (see WP:PURGE) fixed the problem (the GIF thumbnail not animating) for those images. PleaseStand (talk) 05:51, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

"Cite" link is not appearing in edit toolbar

The link "Cite" (beside "Help") is not appearing. I have bypassed cache, tried in multiple articles, tried from a browser where I am not signed in. Is anyone else facing this? --Tito Dutta ✉ 11:24, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Anyone? Or any help? --Tito Dutta ✉ 14:58, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

It is there for me right now. At times it has disappeared on me. There is a similar citation tool if you turn the advanced editing toolbar off at Preferences → Editing. You could try doing that. Ryan Vesey 15:04, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

To be clear, you turn it off by unchecking enable advanced editing toolbar. Ryan Vesey 15:05, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I have to insert a bunch of references and named references now. For last few hours I have been either adding content without reference and adding the article's titles in notepad to add sources later or using this universal reference formatter. How can I add named reference now (I have unchecked enable advanced editing toolbar) --Tito Dutta ✉ 15:21, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Is this related to MediaWiki talk:RefToolbar.js#Error: mw.usability is undefined? Have you seen any warnings on your browser's console? Helder 15:26, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I am using Firefox 14.0.1 Ubuntu 12.04. I have not seen any warning. :-( --Tito Dutta ✉ 15:32, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

At the very right of the new toolbar it gives you is a button that says cite with curly brackets around it. If you click that, you get a new bar directly under that has buttons for web, news, book, journal, named references, error check, more, and cancel More gives you encyclopedia, press release, map, and ref section. It's all pretty awesome really, and way better than the normal toolbar's citation tool. If you choose one of those buttons (say web) there is a field for a named reference at the bottom. Ryan Vesey 15:33, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Tito Dutta, it happens to me frequently. It's been going on for months, since one or another upgrade happened. Sometimes it's there. Sometimes it's not. I have, and have always had, WindowsXP. I have Firefox browser, but the version has changed and upgraded many times since this issue began. That cite button can be completely absent. And then it will magically be there. It's the nature of the beast.  —  Maile66 (talk) 15:35, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I am experiencing the same difficulty. This is quite an inconvenience. --Jprg1966 ^(talk) 16:44, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Flagged Revisions and Templates

would flagged revision be suitable for the now high-vis-editprotected templates? That would allow nonadminto make the changes and others then to approve them. Agathoclea (talk) 15:11, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Unless things have changed since the last time I checked, transclusion always takes the most recent version rather than the flagged version. So this would not work. Anomie⚔ 19:40, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Citation button on the unenhanced editing toolbar is infiinitely better.

The citation button on the unenhanced toolbar is infinitely better than the citation button on the enhanced editing toolbar. Is there any way to get the latter button on the enhanced editing toolbar? Ryan Vesey 15:35, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Preserve wikilinks when archiving

Is there a way or a proposal or is it at all technically possible to preserve wikilinks to section headers on wikipedia (talk) pages when these pages get archived? bamse (talk) 19:45, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

It depends upon the archiving method. Archiving done by ClueBot III (talk · contribs) usually fixes link from elsewhere so that they point to the archive, not to the (newly non-existent) original; but many other archiving bots (such as the MiszaBot II (talk · contribs) family) don't. Where manual archiving is in use, fixing up these broken incoming links is so tedious that most people don't bother. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:56, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Mobile wikipedia

I am experiencing a problem using wikipedia on mobile phones. I am now only getting subject headings which when selected do not open up the relevant text. Please help — — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.146.144.73 (talk) 21:30, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

What kind of phone is this? What browser? --brion (talk) 22:00, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

This problem is occurring on various phones using different system. My phone is a Nokia C3. Up to a couple of weeks ago the access was perfectly normal!

Do you use Opera Mini? I've had issues with the Android app for that on mobile wikis running MediaWiki like Wikipedia (except not Wikipedia itself because I use the desktop version). - Purplewowies (talk) 01:56, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Character insert box keeps disappearing

What's going on with the character insert function (the bit below the edit window where you can click on special characters to insert them)? Sometimes it's there (it is as I'm making this edit, for example), but other times it's not. (This is in IE9 on Windows 7.) Victor Yus (talk) 09:09, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, this happens with me, too. Safari 5.1.7 on OS X 10.6.8. David1217 ^{What I've done} 23:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Logging in on mobile is broken

Attempting to log in at http://en.m.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin is failing (submitting form returns you to form). Tested on a mobile device using IE 9 Mobile and a PC using Chrome 21.0.1180.79. — Hex (❝?!❞) 21:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

There's not yet anything you can do while logged in on the mobile interface, so that's ok for now. ;) We're retooling the mobile login as we're working on support for watchlists and such, so it'll come in the next couple weeks (at least for beta mode). --brion (talk) 22:05, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, cheers :) — Hex (❝?!❞) 09:28, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Unable to access Wikimarkup (symbols, diacritics, Latin, etc.)

I have to raise this here because it is seriously impacting my editing abilities and my ability to sign any comments I make. Over the last week to two weeks, at least, I have been unable to access wikimarkup (with symbols, diacritics, Latin, etc.) I left some stuff unsigned hoping the Sign-bot would do it but of course it didn't. It isn't the computers, because it's like this in Internet rental places, at public libraries, etc. Most pages do not automatically have the wikimarkup where it used to be. Some do, most do not. Just thought I'd let you know. There is a note that says "View hidden categories on this page" but that has nothing to do with this problem. Unable to sign, so .... User:Rms125a@hotmail.com

Are you referring to the edit toolbar? Make sure you have javascript enabled on any browser you use. (If that doesn't work, try disabling any firewall you might have in place.) --regentspark (comment) 17:54, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The markup was taken away with the changes to the edit window. It might be coming back; however, it is likely to be in a new place. You can get it back if you go to Preferences → Editing and uncheck enable enhanced editing toolbar. Ryan Vesey 18:46, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I guess it's the edit toolbar. I am at the library now and it does not appear, although it does say: "View hidden categories on this page". I am on a library computer and I couldn't remove Javascript even if I knew how. Why would they take away the markup?? How can anyone sign anything or use diacritics, etc.??

Well, signing things isn't incredibly hard. As far as diacritics are concerned, you can find out how by doing a google search for alt codes for (language) if you're using a PC and a search for mac codes for (language) if you're using a mac. Alternatively, there is a special characters dropdown menu from the toolbar that can deal with the diacritics. That being said, I unchecked the enhanced editing toolbar and I actually like the cite function on the toolbar better (it was the only thing I used on the old one), and I have my wikimarkup back so everything is good. Ryan Vesey 18:56, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Signing in is impossible if you don't have the symbols you need. As per your advice, I went to preferences but did not see anything called "enable enhanced editing toolbar". I am not a computer whiz and everything is not good with me.

OK, I found it. Thanks!! Quis separabit? 19:07, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

There are other ways of signing posts if you don't have the Edit tools: see WP:SIGHOW. I normally use the "type four tildes (~)" method. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:24, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Backwards twinkle rollback buttons?

Anyone else seeing the twinkle rollback buttons backwards at the first edit at Special:Contributions/Σ? (as (‮) (top) [rollback] [vandalism]

Looks like some bizarre left-right movement glitch (like Arabic text?)? Or am I missing something that makes this like this? Just curious as I've never seen this before... – Connormah (talk) 23:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Yup, me too. Not the only crazy contributions page reported here; see #Bizarre edit history. David1217 ^{What I've done} 23:53, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The edit summary for that edit contains U+202E, the right-to-left override character. Anomie⚔ 00:41, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That would make sense - should these controls be affected by it though? – Connormah (talk) 00:44, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Probably not. It could be mostly avoided by wrapping the comment text in a span with dir="auto", but that apparently causes problems in a buggy browser (e.g. T36432, T41912). Anomie⚔ 01:02, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Images

For about fifteen minutes now images haven't been loading for me at all: any of them, the Wikipedia logo, images in articles, the wee Commons symbol on image pages. I see no images at Commons either. Am I alone here?  ^davidiad_.:τ 00:52, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

... and now they are back.  ^davidiad_.:τ 00:57, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Still gone for me... – Connormah (talk) 01:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Queer.  ^davidiad_.:τ 01:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

A large scale cache purge (performed by WMF to clean up some stale URLs) caused a temporary overload of the image scalers / storage cluster (whenever a page is purged, thumbnails are re-generated); this should be fixed now. Eloquence* 02:55, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, looks fine now. – Connormah (talk) 03:16, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Something weird with POTD (need quick response before POTD is changed)

Hope you have both FF and IE. Have a look at my userpage (User:Rehman). You see a different POTD on each browser... Some coding issue with POTD? Rehman 13:00, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Same phenomena with DYK and ITN as well... Rehman 13:04, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I flushed your userpage, forcing the server to update its cache. They now display the same. Reaper Eternal (talk) 13:11, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks :) Rehman 13:14, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

For information on how to do that, see Wikipedia:Purge. Graham87 09:52, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Reduce Template:La size

We should improve Template:La to be much smaller, to allow pages using {la} to be much larger (see: Template:La/sandbox2). For months, there have been questions about the page WP:Copyright_problems breaking on the final day-entries, as exceeding the post-expand include-size limit of 2,048,000 bytes (2,000 kb). As suspected earlier, a possible fix is to optimize the heavily-used Template:La, repeated thousands of times to link article names & edit/history/watch, to be much smaller. But we were thinking: It couldn't be that simple a fix. Well, yes, it could. That would make the size of each day's article links smaller, to allow perhaps 70-80 days to fit in the overall WP:Copyright_problems, so that 25-35 more days could be fully displayed. I propose to condense {la} by embedding the markup from Template:Lx and optimize the combined markup, as in Template:La/sandbox2. The results:

• {{La | Continual improvement}} → Continual improvement (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
• {{La/sandbox2|Continual improvement}} → Continual improvement (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• {{La | 80/20 Rule}} → 80/20 Rule (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
• {{La/sandbox2|80/20 Rule}} → 80/20 Rule (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)
• {{La | better Than Ever}}   → Better Than Ever (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
• {{La/sandbox2|better Than Ever}} → Better Than Ever (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

Of course, the results should be tested with secure-login "https:" because we do not want to risk an accidental link to http-protocol URLs. However, let's try to improve this template soon. It would make numerous article-maintenance pages almost 2x smaller (60%) and faster to process. Sometimes, the simplest changes can have the greatest impact, when used in "200,958" pages. However, we still want editors to reduce the size of large maintenance pages, in the future, but this quick change should give them another year (or 2) before seeing the current size problems again. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:21, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• Submitted {editprotected} after checked for secure https: I verified all options will work during a secure-login session with "https" and there were no objections here, so I submitted the formal update request at the related talk-page Template_talk:Ln. Meanwhile, I verified how reducing {La} will solve the include-size error in page "WP:Copyright_problems" by using {La/x}, which handles article-link menus as 3x smaller. -Wikid77 (talk) 10:01, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Problems with templates and tables at the bottom

Hi,

I hope that this is the right place for posting this.

Time and again I see articles on which templates, usually at the bottom, are not displayed correctly. Sometimes it's a bug in the template and sometimes it's a bug in a table that appears on the same page.

When I see it, I try to fix it. I managed to fix it myself in the articles Moscow State University and Isobel; I couldn't find how to do it in Untitled Korn album, but it seems fixed now.

Isn't there some automatic way that would detect it? For example, an invalid table as appeared in Moscow State University before I fixed it, should be reasonalby easy to detect, and then a warning could be shown to the editor who tries to save it. --Robkirwan (talk) 09:04, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

• Error detection and correction requires specific rules: Wiki-markup is a hodge-podge of different language formats, not easily predicted or explained to the user. Looking for the end-table marker "|}" is only one of many problems, because a wikitable could also be ended by "</table>" as in HTML. However, there are warning messages issued for undefined reftags "<ref name=xx>" or for reftags not used but defined within {Reflist|refs=...}. Previously, in major computer languages, the keywords or "tokens" have been specifically chosen, by the language designers, following a context-free grammar, to spot errors in logic and suggest, or auto-correct, the logic to continue checking the rest of the source code. Those languages have clever features; for example, an if-structure uses tokens if-else-endif, so when the word "else" appears outside "endif" then a warning can be issued. To locate an error, then line numbers should be used to pinpoint the problem, such as: Found "if" at line 456 but no matching "endif". Some older languages lacked unique keywords, such as LISP, which was clueless to how simple errors could go undetected, over and over, with a syntactically boring language. Note also, how wiki-markup does not use a clever plan, and instead, everything is a blitz of curly braces "{{{1}}}" and vertical bars (pipes: "|") with few or no keyword-tokens to indicate a structure of following clear rules. Because the wiki-markup does not follow that logical format, then detection or rejection of "errors" might be rejecting some editor's pet peculiarisms of markup. There is an old saying in computer software, "One man's bug is another man's neat feature". For years, many computer systems have stopped issuing "error messages" because what seems like a bug or misspelled word, today, might be an optional feature, or a new enhancement next year, or even some poor soul's desperate way to force the spastic markup language to choke out some half-baked result.

  

  The design team which created wiki-markup.

Of course, for people who have experience with error-reporting systems, then the lack of feedback just seems like hack-software from some novice tinkerer. Consequently, there are systems which provide optional "warning messages" perhaps at the request of each user, but again, unless the markup language was developed by educated people who knew about mnemonic token keywords, context-free grammar, and production rules, then most warning messages are likely to be misleading, as not really related to the peculiar cockeyed squirrelling of the spastic languages features.
For example, a wikitable can be coded with leading spaces before the "{|" or indented by leading colons ":::{| class=infobox" but if there is a space after the colons ("::: {|xxx"), then the table becomes literal text "{|xxx" after the leading space, even though leading spaces can precede a wikitable when no colons are present. For that, thank the wikitable squirrel (). The rules change because the space followed the colons "::: " whereas leading spaces would format the table as expected. For decades, convoluted source code has been called "spaghetti code" and templates can be so peculiar that I call them "spaghetti-plates". So, anyway, I hope that helps explain why obvious problems with tables are not detected with warning messages. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Making it easier to clean up the Feedback Dashboard

Hey everyone. I just wanted to drop a quick note here that, per discussion at Wikipedia talk:New editor feedback, we've enabled to two changes to Special:FeedbackDashboard today:

1. There is now a delete function available to sysops. Because this is not content, but is ephemeral feedback, there is no undelete. This should pull double duty as a tool for dealing with content would otherwise be a candidate for oversight or revdeletion.
2. The "hide" function is available to all autoconfirmed editors. This isn't dangerous, since it can be unhid by the same group. We should now be able to use hiding to remove feedback which is completely incomprehensible or otherwise very low quality, in order to narrow down the list of feedback comments to respond to.

I've tested these new features out, but please speak up if you see any bugs. We also deployed a fix, so that preview of your response works again. Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:38, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

WP:Copyright_problems hitting Post-expand include size

Y RESOLVED: see WT:Copyright_problems. -Wikid77 16:07, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Looking at Wikipedia:Copyright_problems template substitution breaks about half way through as it seem to be hitting Post-expand include size: 2048000/2048000 bytes. Is there anything which can be done?--Salix (talk): 08:25, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes -- start clearing the backlog. MER-C 12:55, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

• Split page to separate at 2 months prior (August): I think the post-expand include-size limit will restrict the total page to about 45 days, not 3 months of days. So, I see 2 options: either split prior month data to page 2, or list months in reverse order so that August data truncates (not October data). Consider moving the 2-month prior days to a separate page; in this case, all of the August 2012 entries should be moved into a separate page, then in November, move the remaining September days out. However, if the current October+September entries were not partially cleared soon enough, then they would total over 45 days, although so far, it seems the backlog kept September (prior month) to less than 20 days now, allowing to fit 25 days of October (subtract 45-20). I am not sure who to contact, and how to coordinate, but it would be a trivial task to edit all the August days into a separate page, as long as "everyone" knows to split the entries in that manner at the end of each month. I agree that losing direct display/search of 8-day prior entries is horrible, and would prefer August days truncated instead, so another (easy) option is to simply re-display whole months in reverse order (but keep day order), so that month of August is at bottom of list. Anyway, splitting 2-month prior (August) data into a separate page, might be easiest solution for all, perhaps as page "Wikipedia:Copyright_problems_older" and tell everyone about that planned split. Those are 2 easy solutions to the very annoying problem. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:45, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• Numerous Template:La can be reduced almost half to allow 70 days: Another option, as suspected earlier, is to optimize the heavily used Template:La, repeated hundreds of times to link article names & edit/history/watch, to be 40% smaller. That would make the size of each day's article links smaller, to allow perhaps 70 days to fit in the overall WP:Copyright_problems, so that 25 more days could be fully displayed. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:09, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I have to ask: the problem is very annoying to whom? Is it actively discouraging anyone who is otherwise willing to work on clearing the copyvio backlog, since that's who the page is largely targeted at. Others who visit the page shouldn't actually need to see the contents of the latest pages anyways. I think splitting the page or forcing reworking pages at the end of every month would just be making more work for the few who already spend their time there.

The listings at CP proper don't use {{La}}, those are the listings at the {{SCV}} subpages. The listings at CP are already using {{subst:Article-cv}}, so maybe MadmanBot/CorenSearchBot/VWBot can be set up to substitute something as well, although some other optimization of the template certainly seems a reasonable step.

All that said, I'm with MER-C on this one, clearing the backlog is really the best and only long-term solution. That of course requires more editors and admins with the time, skills, and interest to deal with them all. VernoWhitney (talk) 18:02, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

There reason it is annoying is for people who want to submit a new copyright problem, thats how I came to the page. You can't actually see the todays as the Wikipedia:Copyright problems#New listings is not transcluded correctly. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to put the new listing first, so these would be visible. The broken page did discourage be from listing two problems, but I did manage to sort them out myself.--Salix (talk): 19:20, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

That's an issue with the documentation then, rather then a technical problem. The technical issue certainly isn't helping the situation, but you shouldn't have been put in the situation of needing to scroll to the bottom of that page in the first place.

If you read from the top of the page you get to "Instructions for listing text-based copyright concerns". Both that section and the instructions on the {{subst:copyvio}} template link directly to today's subpage where new taggings are listed, bypassing the whole template-transclusion-overload problem.

This is getting away from the technical issue, but what made you go looking down the page by hand (so to speak) to try and figure out how/where to list a copyright problem in the first place? How could we make it clearer/easier for you or others in the future? VernoWhitney (talk) 22:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• Template:La/x cut size 3x smaller and can omit redlinks: The new Template:La/x is being used to make article link-menus 3.3x times smaller than {La}, and so the overall page is almost 3x smaller as well. Also, there is still the option to split the page, but maintenance editors are accustomed to seeing whatever will fit before the size-limit truncates later days. Also, there is talk of changing some Bot programs to remove redlink entries of copyvio pages which were deleted, to reduce overall page size by about half for the prior week. Discuss at WT:Copyright_problems. -Wikid77 16:07, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

what is the purpose of { { Citation | } }

on this page, Vlad (musician), under discography, there is such a format: {{Citation| last =[[Ruslana]] | title =Euphoria | year =2012 |publisher=[[EMI]] }} : what is the purpose of it and where is it explained please - 62.203.78.121 (talk) 15:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The purpose is to provide a citation to a source that supports the information in the Wikipedia article. That particular method of producing a citation is explained at Template:Citation. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:03, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• {Citation} formats a cite with commas: The Template:Citation will format a citation, with parts separated by commas, but with no ending dot "." as in the following example:

• {{Citation |last=[[Ruslana]] |title=Euphoria |year=2012 |publisher=[[EMI]] }}

Result:   Ruslana (2012), Euphoria, EMI

The alternative Template:Cite_book will format a similar line, but with dots "." (not commas) between the parts, plus putting a final dot "." at the end. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:21, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

thanks. i understand the word "citation" as "enumeration" here, right?, BUT, in the mentioned article (vlad), what is the reference, what supports the information? 83.78.52.112 (talk) 07:47, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

The {{citation}} template appears to be being used here merely to format the discography rather than provide a reference. In other words, the material is unreferenced. SpinningSpark 09:19, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

The word "citation" here means "citing a source to verify the text" but it appears the album Euphoria by singer Ruslana is being mentioned, not a text source. Perhaps run Google Search with "Ruslana * Euphoria" to see if "Vlad" is connected with Ruslana in the text of those webpages. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:33, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

thanks all of you 62.203.206.171 (talk) 07:25, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Tool to rank editors by number of contributions

Is there a tool that quickly lists the editors of an article by number of edits? So if I wanted to alert editors about an article, or maybe ask for assistance with a similar article, I could see at a glance who'd be the most interested? Obviously number of edits doesn't equate to amount or quality of editing, but it seems like it would be a useful metric. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 00:43, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Go to the history page, and there will be a list of external tools near the top. "Contributors" will give you exactly what you want. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:51, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikichecker is supposed to do this. It only seems to work at the moment for the last 500 edits to the article, but that should be all you need for your purpose. Someguy1221 (talk) 00:57, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks! ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 01:38, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Also WikiSense/Contributors; view the page history, then select External tools: Contributors. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 09:33, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

That's precisely what I suggested. jcgoble3 (talk) 19:14, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, but people believe it more when Gadget says it --SPhilbrick(Talk) 20:30, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:08, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Can't add image to infobox

When an editor moved the image of Modern Age (periodical) to the infobox, it disappeared. I tried to correct it by omitting the prefix, brackets and other extra info, but it still doesn't show up on the screen. The article about the American Conservative uses the same syntax as I used. What is wrong? --Jonund (talk) 09:16, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

 Fixed The template {{Infobox magazine}} uses |logo=, not |image=. When template does not work as expected, check the documentation. There are no proscribed standards for template parameters. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 09:30, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

The documentation at {{Infobox magazine}} states "logo A logo relevant to the magazine. ... image_file An image relevant to the magazine. (Usually the cover).". The image concerned is not a logo, but the cover; therefore a better choice of parameter would be |image_file=Modern age magazine cover.jpg. That /doc page is very out of date since it does suggest that "The image parameter is available for backwards compatibility, but is deprecated" - the reality is that |image= is unrecognised, and has been since this edit; it's had no visible effect since August 2008. I shall get onto that /doc page right now. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:19, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

?updated since my last visit?

in some page histories I am starting to see "updated since my last visit".

What is the rationale for this notation? What is being implemented here?

What triggers the annotation? Is the color of the annotation supposed to be meaningful?

Do all editors see this? --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 11:23, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

It's always green. If a page is on your watchlist and you view the page history without having viewed the current page version then all versions since the last one you have viewed will get the annotation. If you want to remove it then add this to Special:MyPage/common.css (applies to all skins) or Special:MyPage/skin.css (your current skin):

span.updatedmarker{display:none;}

PrimeHunter (talk) 11:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 15:15, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Symbols shortcut row gone

I realize from skimming through the top of this page that this has been discussed extensively, but it's too chaotic to make out whether (a) there's a plan to return the symbols shortcuts that used to be near the edit summary window, or (b) if it's been decided that that the shortcuts are gone for good. One recurring suggestion offered for those who opposed the removal of the easy access to the symbols has been change the preferences such that the citation templates bar and the other things at the top of the editing window are disabled and then the symbols reappear at the bottom near the edit summary window. Question is, Is there a way to preserve the citation templates bar at the top and the symbols shortcuts near the edit summary window at the same time?—Biosketch (talk) 16:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Also beware other editors think the edit-window is too slow, with extra tool buttons, JavaScript, and whatever numerous CSS sub-sub-sub-classes being processed. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:59, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

There's a way to configure the preferences to restore the row of symbols near the edit summary window, but that's not the problem. It's that there doesn't seem to be a way to configure the settings to make the row of symbols and the "Advanced/Special characters/Help/Cite" bar at the top appear together.—Biosketch (talk) 17:49, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Headings in javascript

On Wiktionary Common.js there is code to allow wiki style editlinked headings on javascript pages (search for "Turn headings" to find it). It imports the code from here. I have tried importing it into my monobook.js page here, but I can't get it to work. I tried pasting it directly but that fails as well. Any ideas? SpinningSpark 16:47, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Anyone? SpinningSpark 11:24, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Bring back the Cite function

It was a bad idea to get rid of the Cite function. WP:VERIFY is a policy that states that information should be verifiable. This means we need citations. This can't happen if there is no user friendly function for it. I propose that the Cite function be put back in or maybe a place down where the "Insert", "Wiki Markup", "Symbols", etc are. Kingjeff (talk) 16:53, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

The cite function wasn't gotten rid of, there are occasionally some problems that make it disappear, I don't know what those problems are. I suggest going to Preferences → Editing and unchecking enable enhanced editing toolbar. There is a cite button there that works even better than the current one. Ryan Vesey 17:01, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

That doesn't look very user friendly. Am I only suppose to put the link there and nothing else? Kingjeff (talk) 17:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

If you click the cite button, it gives you all the buttons the normal editing toolbar gives you and more. Maybe the cite button is missing from both toolbars? Note that the cite button should be on the far right and it has two left curly brackets on the top, the word CITE in the middle, and two right curly brackets on the bottom. Ryan Vesey 18:33, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

This one: --Redrose64 (talk) 18:45, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I think it is just a bug: MediaWiki talk:RefToolbar.js#Error: mw.usability is undefined. Helder 17:17, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I see both cite functions in both the enhanced and unenhanced now. But if a bug is an issue, it might be better to have a reference options where "Insert", "Wiki Markup", "Symbols", etc are. I know I had to referesh my page a few times before because it wasn't there. Kingjeff (talk) 02:08, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• No link Most probably you don't get that "Cite" link in unenhanced toolbar when you can not find cite link in enhanced toolbar. Yesterday when Ryan suggested me to click on cite link I did not see any (see my thread above). Now my cite link is back in enhanced toolbar and I can see the extra buttons in unenhanced toolbar too! Very useful I must say, but, it'll be helpful too if it is found when needed!--Tito Dutta ✉ 05:56, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
• Or on a second thought, are both the cite links getting affected at the same time? --Tito Dutta ✉ 05:57, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

• I haven't had a Cite button on my enhanced toolbar for at least two days, if not more.  —  Maile66 (talk) 13:16, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The Cite button had gone missing on my toolbar this past week also. This morning, I reset all my preferences to default, and then went page by page to add variations, and now the Cite button has re-appeared in my toolbar by magic. Just suggesting to give it a try... --Funandtrvl (talk) 15:44, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Tried it. Changed skins, too, and changed back. Nothing worked. Cite button still not there.  —  Maile66 (talk) 19:15, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

You could go to Preferences → Pending changes and check the box under the section "Editing" and check the box to enable ProveIt. I'm not a fan of it as a reference tool, but I usually use it when the normal cite button is missing. Alternatively, you could use Google Books for all of your sources and use this reference maker. Ryan Vesey 19:19, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

By the way, thanks for mentioning the Google Books reftag maker. I didn't know about this and use Google Books a lot, although not exclusively. Still don't have my cite button back. Goodness knows, I have tried unchecking and checking everything. It's just one of those things. — Maile (talk) 15:41, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, boy! I've had Provelt as a backup since this first started acting funky months ago. The citation template from the Cite button is somewhat easier in that it doesn't hog my entire screen while I'm working in it. The Provelt offers more options. It's just nice to know I can use either one, depending...but this is not one of those times. Thanks for mentioning Provelt. — Maile (talk) 22:10, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

"View history" link moved into a javaterror submenu

On 10 october I found that using the default skin, the [view history] link has been deported into some messy java drop-down-box using Firefox. Despite using Ctrl+0 and with no option in preferences to fix it. Could someone revert these changes to the last working version?, in addition the javascripts has been causing "Busy javascript - [Continue] [Abort]" for at least many months by now. This is indeed counterproductive. Perhaps my contributions over the years are not valuable, but there's likely other that are affected by these counterproductive javascript "additions". If javascript shall be used, it better be done right or it will just cause trouble. Electron9 (talk) 12:43, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I replied with a possible solution at Wikipedia:Help desk#History link deported into javascript hell. As mentioned, many things can affect how many tabs there are room for. If there is not room for the "View history" tab in the default Vector skin then it's moved. Or do you have plenty of room for a wide tab but still get it in the drop-down-box? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:04, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm reading using a 9" screen so there's plenty of space between the Talk and Read tabs. And there was plenty of space before too. I tested now to disable javascript and clear cache, then it works like it should. Please have wikipedias javascript programmers to correct their wrongs. This doesn't work out. Electron9 (talk) 15:19, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you have the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" gadget enabled, per chance? EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:35, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

It's unchecked (Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar. Works in Vector, Monobook and Modern skins) Electron9 (talk) 02:28, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I checked the Atari ST article just to test how things works now, and with javascript enabled. Seems someone has put "View history" back. Thanks for whoever fixed this. I certainly didn't change anything. Electron9 (talk) 02:34, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I visited the article Ammonium chloride and it first showed "View history" and when the javascript had started to run it disappeared. So obviously it has not been fixed, or reverted. Please someone remove this bullshit from the javascript code! Electron9 (talk) 11:24, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

It's part of the Vector skin that if the JavaScript detects there isn't proper room for the tab then it moves to the drop-down box (in other skins some users have to scroll right to see tabs there wasn't room for). If you don't want this to happen in any circumstances then select another skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. If you want to keep Vector and avoid the tab moves then please answer the questions at Wikipedia:Help desk#History link deported into javascript hell. As I keep telling you, it depends on many things, for example the number of tabs on a given page, the amount of text on each tab, the font size, and the precise width of the browser window. If the tab sometimes moves for you then it doesn't imply that any code is broken. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:25, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

PC protection revisions and GoogleBot

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T43003

A serious issue has been raised about PC protection that the devs need to fix. The purpose of PC protection is to prevent unreviewed revisions from being seen yet the API lets the latest revision get pulled. This GoogleBot can see the unreviewed version of a PC protected article. The API should only be allowed to pull the latest unreviewed version to reviewers only while releasing the stable version of the article who does not have access to approve revisions.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 14:26, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you have any reason to believe that GoogleBot is using the API? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 14:55, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

See this.—cyberpower ^Chat_{Limited Access} 15:19, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

File a bug? - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 15:29, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Quite frankly I don't know how because I never had to at this point. I also don't think it's appropriate because the tool is still being developed.—cyberpower ^Chat_{Limited Access} 15:33, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Pending changes is not in development for everyone, it's in permanent use on a number of wikis. To file a bug, you register an account at //bugzilla.wikimedia.org (if you don't have one already) and then follow the instructions. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 17:47, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I saw that. I didn't find it very illuminating. I suspect this may be a conflation of the API and RSS feeds, but time will tell. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 15:43, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

@Cyberpower: once you find out how/where to alert the developers, please let me know. There are other problems that need fixing as well. For instance, having PC on a page roughly doubles page loading times, making it unusable for longer articles. ~Adjwilley (talk) 17:41, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

@Adjwilley: There are no active developers for PC atm and issues go where they always go, namely bugzilla:. I have reported this one. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:30, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Why no table of contents at Talk:Racial identity of Tutankhamun

I tried to fix this, what am I doing wrong? Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 05:47, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

According to WP:TOC, a table of contents only appears if a page has at least 4 headings. On that page, there are currently only 3. — Richardguk (talk) 07:13, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I've added a TOC. DH85868993 (talk) 07:23, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. All these years and I didn't know two wasn't enough. Shame on me. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 08:28, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Where is the css for diff view?

I am trying to change the colour of the diff view highlighting in my personal css but cannot find the variable names. The links on Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes to diff.css and diff.js are deadlinks (as are numerous others in the Page/action specific section. Where is this css really kept? SpinningSpark 09:24, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

It's in the core of MediaWiki, more specifically in /core/resources/mediawiki.action/mediawiki.action.history.diff.css. — Edokter (talk) — 09:30, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

ta SpinningSpark 10:34, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Sort in tables

I have been trying to improve Athletics at the 2012 Summer Paralympics – Men's discus throw. I show { using ( here. I've been adding ((sort|0|x)) and ((sort|0|-)). But the actual numbers sort alphabetically rather than numerically so we get 1,10,11,2,21,22,3 etc.

Is there a parameter that I can give the table to say sort numerically or do I have to put every number in every table in as ((sort|008.35|8.35)) etc? Is there a limit on the number of ((sort))s in a page? -- SGBailey (talk) 10:57, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Main Page hiding its h1 outside of ?action=view

Discussion is here: MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Main Page hiding its h1 outside of ?action=view. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:31, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist: Editors are invited to comment on the following:

This now appears on my watchlist (in green) with a list of items. I don't have a problem with that, but even if I dismiss all the items, the green phrase remains; it shouldn't.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:09, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

• Indeed, I was just going to say the same. How was this introduced? Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:12, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
  • It was done here. It's already gone too. — Edokter (talk) — 17:17, 13 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Yes, it's now gone from my watchlist.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:22, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

MD5/SHA hash of page version

Hello!

I was wondering if it were possible to easily access an MD5 (or SHA-2, etc.) hash of a particular page version? I could, of course, compute the hash myself; this would require downloading the entire page, and would put a greater load on resources.

Thank you for any help; figuring out a clever way to do this would be of aid in my research (on the nature of collaborative/decentralized editing -- please see my userpage for details).

Sincerely,

Simon DeDeo Dedeo sfi (talk) 17:19, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

You can use the API to retrieve a precomputed SHA-1 hash for any revision, which has been possible since MediaWiki 1.19. Just specify rvprop=sha1 when making an action=query&prop=revisions query. You can try it out at Special:ApiSandbox, and more information about the API (including documentation and our usage guidelines) is available at mw:API:Main page.

If you use your unprivileged user account to query the API, each query can return up to 500 SHA-1 hashes. Bot and sysop accounts have the "apihighlimits" user right, which allows requesting 5000 hashes at a time. PleaseStand (talk) 18:34, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, again, PleaseStand. Dedeo sfi (talk) 18:37, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Accounts in the "researcher" group also have the "apihighlimits" user right, as well as the ability to view deleted history entries (but not the actual deleted text), though that requires special approval. PleaseStand (talk) 18:42, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks -- this is very helpful. Is there a standard procedure for requesting "researcher" user status? I dropped Dario a line, following this suggestion, last week, and have not yet heard back. Perhaps there is a more standard request form for this technical change? Dedeo sfi (talk) 18:53, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, m:Research:Access to non-public data does say "Requests submitted to the RCom usually take 1-2 weeks to be reviewed", although I can't find a page about your research project on Meta-Wiki. Perhaps you could create one at m:Research:Projects and send the link to him to help him review your research project. You can log in to Meta-Wiki using your Wikipedia user account. PleaseStand (talk) 19:11, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Terrific, thanks. Let me ask an additional, technical question -- is it possible for the API to return the total number of revisions made to a page? I can't seem to find this (seemingly simple) option at the API listing. Dedeo sfi (talk) 19:24, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Not unless you count them yourself; see bugzilla:17993. On the server side, it is currently not possible to count the number of revisions in an efficient way. (It is not even possible using the API to find reliable edit counts of users, although in most cases, action=query&list=users&usprop=editcount yields a useful approximate value that includes "edit-like actions". This led to the development of Toolserver tools such as X!'s edit counter, which work using a replicated copy of the database.)

The number of "intermediate revisions" between two specified ones is available on diff pages (e.g. here's one for Barack Obama). Automatically requesting diffs to old revisions, however, burdens the servers, so try not to do that. Instead, try to get WMF assistance if the API does not meet your needs. PleaseStand (talk) 21:02, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

The recently-enabled action=info URL parameter states "Total number of edits". For example, http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?action=info or http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&action=info — Richardguk (talk) 21:43, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

(drifting offtopic, but) Actually, I'm reasonably certain that action=query&list=users&usprop=editcount contains only edits, and does not contain the dummy revisions added by various log actions. But it also doesn't get decremented if the page gets deleted. Anomie⚔ 22:21, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. However here's a minor correction to the history presented above; the edit count field, which was introduced in December 2006, while the first edit counting tool – Kate's tool – was released in late 2004 IIRC, though I can't find the link for that off-hand and I'm in a bit of a rush. Graham87 03:32, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Kate's edit counting tool dates from some time earlier than December 2004 per this discussion. Graham87 03:56, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Commons:Template:GFPLM-image-full

I'm trying to nest commons:Template:GFPLM-image into commons:Template:GFPLM-image-full, but the empty params seem to be showing through. Can someone let me know what's wrong with the code? This template will be used by commons:Commons:Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. (Originally posted at Commons:Village_pump#Template:GFPLM-image-full.)Smallman12q (talk) 00:05, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I added pipes between the template parameters.[9] Does it do what you want now? And how dumb do you feel now? ;-) PrimeHunter (talk) 00:48, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Hehe. I guess I was staring too long at a whitespace indented language. Thanks again!Smallman12q (talk) 01:40, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Smallman12q (talk) 01:41, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Informal RfC: help design a great mobile watchlist and page history view

The WMF mobile team is interested in developing more editor-centric features for the Wikipedia mobile site, and two of the things we're currently looking to create mobile-friendly versions of are watchlists and the page history view. Before we start development, though, it would be tremendously helpful to get a quick round of Wikipedian brainstorming on how (or if...) these particular features might be useful. If you'd like to help, please take a moment to answer the following questions:

• How do you currently use your watchlist? (e.g., just to track changes to articles/discussions you care about, to patrol & revert, something else..?)
• What kinds of information and functionality would be most important for you to have on a watchlist that you could access on a phone or tablet? (e.g., just article name/username/edit comment, diff view, something else..?)
• How do you currently use article history pages?
• What kinds of information would be most important for you to have on a page history that you could access on a phone or tablet? (e.g., list of top contributors, first/last edit date and username, something else..?)

If you have other comments/suggestions, feel free to give them! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

1. Watchlist page: Mostly used for checking/verifying changes & reverting vandalism, tracking discussions, reminder to work on an article, reminder to learn about a topic.
2. diff/hist/article name/username/byte-change/edit comment - those are all very useful for me. (username linked to special:contribs not to userpage)
3. History pages: I most often use them to find out if the vandalism I'm about to revert is more extensive. I regularly use them for a quick glance to get an overview of any ongoing disputes or recent large-changes.
4. prev/date/username/byte-change/edit comment - those are the bits I click or read the most. Links to "earliest diff" and "top contributors" are handy when needed, but not essential (for me). —Quiddity (talk) 01:20, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

The navigation popups gadget is an invaluable tool for inspecting watchlist changes. But it only works with the mouseover/hover event, so is not compatible with touch-based devices, even though Wikipedia can be edited fairly easily on an iPad.

Could the gadget javascript be enhanced to provide change the mouseover events to click events on touch-based platforms? Even though the gadget has a lot of JavaScript, I think this would be a fairly simple change for someone familiar with JQuery.

Indeed, perhaps many mouse-based editors are unaware of navpops and would enjoy editing more if the existing gadget were promoted more prominently.

— Richardguk (talk) 01:56, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

This might also save bandwidth for users on low-data allowance plans. (Popups is glorious. Definite wishlist.) —Quiddity (talk) 02:15, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I use my watchlist to track changes, watch for vandalism, and since its in my Bookmark's Bar, I often use it to jump to other pages, like my Talk page or my sandbox. I'd like the watchlist to show the article name, the user (a red userpage is always suspicious), and a link to the diff and an undo button. I use article history to check to see if there are other edits since I last edited and what they did (I'm a bit protective over some articles). I also like checking the Page View Statistics. • Jesse V.^(talk) 15:55, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for weighing in, everyone! This is very helpful as a starting point. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)
• Howdy. I've put together a quick demo mobile watchlist view. What do you, and people, think? It's pretty basic, but I'd happily use it if it looked like that. It should easily support being modified to add more features as well. — Hex (❝?!❞) 10:18, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

P.S. It currently uses generic CSS3 but browser-specific properties could of course be added. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:47, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

The quick demo is nice. Suggestion: maybe add a small left padding to the text below the title (section, summary, editor). Eran (talk) 07:36, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Done; any better? I also tweaked the styling for improved contrast. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:45, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I read on my phone and regret I cannot easily remove vandalism - I wouldn't feel safe editing on a small phone screen. Secretlondon (talk) 22:19, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Problem on Special:UserLogin?

Resolved

 – The fix has been merged into the wmf/1.21wmf1 branch in gerrit:27963 and then deployed. PleaseStand (talk) 00:31, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T42789

I just noticed that when I logged in just now, and clicked on the 'Return to...' link, it sent me to https://, the secure server, instead of the normal en.wikipedia one, when the page I had been on before clicking login was in fact the http:// link. This seems like it should be addressed? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 02:13, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

It might be a bug in the MediaWiki code. I'm investigating it right now. PleaseStand (talk) 05:11, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

It is. See the Bugzilla link for details. A patch has been posted on Gerrit but has not yet been reviewed, merged, or deployed. PleaseStand (talk) 05:37, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

redirect ambiguities

I think it was a couple of years ago that someone explained on some Wikipedia discussion page---maybe it was this very page---how to find a comprehensive list of instances of the following kind of thing.

"Xmith's hypothesis" redirects to A

"Xmith's Hypothesis" redirects to B

"the Xmithian Hypothesis" redirects to C

The three are synonymous but A, B, and C are _different_ articles, and it's absurd that synonymous terms with minor spelling differences should redirect differently.

From time to time I come across that situation. After that discussion two or three years ago, I clumsily failed to save for future reference the means by which the comprehensive list was found. Can anyone identify it? Michael Hardy (talk) 18:00, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

A toolserver query could identify some potential duplicates by listing redirect pages with different destinations where the titles are nearly identical (apart from upper/lower case or punctuation), as in your first two examples. But this would not identify "the Xmithian Hypothesis" in your third example.

Toolserver database queries can be requested at Wikipedia talk:Database reports.

But I don't see how a more comprehensive list could be compiled automatically.

— Richardguk (talk) 21:58, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Richardguk. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:00, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Connectivity issues over IPv6 from 2a02:3d8::/32

Hi,

I am the admin for an ISP and we are now deploying IPv6 to some customers

bits.wikimedia.org is failing over IPv6 from the the range 2a02:3d8::/32

the routing is broken upstream of our primary IPv6 provider between tele2.net and wikimedia so it may also be affecting other ip6 address ranges

[[bminish@redbox ~]$ tracepath6 bits.wikimedia.org
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                        0.017ms pmtu 1500
 1:  gw6.mayo.lan                                          0.178ms 
 1:  gw6.mayo.lan                                          0.146ms 
 2:  2a02:3d8:1:ffff::1:1                                  0.757ms 
 3:  brendan1-brendan2.westnet.ie                          0.983ms 
 4:  isl-kw-brendan1.westnet.ie                            1.766ms 
 5:  2a02:3d8:ffff:104::1                                  2.549ms 
 6:  ktm12-kw.westnet.ie                                   4.917ms 
 7:  piglet-eth2v3006.westnet.ie                           5.308ms 
 8:  mole-ge2.westnet.ie                                  12.328ms 
 9:  2001:978:2:60::3:1                                   11.503ms 
10:  te3-7.ccr01.dub01.atlas.cogentco.com                 27.049ms asymm 17 
11:  te1-4.ccr01.man01.atlas.cogentco.com                 26.786ms asymm 17 
12:  te1-6.ccr02.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com                 26.927ms asymm 17 
13:  2001:978::112                                        27.599ms asymm 17 
14:  peer-as174.cbv.tele2.net                             27.216ms 
15:  cbv-core-2.gigabiteth4-4.tele2.net                   29.172ms 
16:  cbv-core-3.tengige0-0-0-0.tele2.net                  35.459ms !N
     Resume: pmtu 1500

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:7B8:2000:A6:0:0:0:10 (talk) 13:49, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I forwarded your message to the wikitech-l mailing list. — Edokter (talk) — 16:19, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Your range doesn't look very healthy at RIS. Are you sure your transit providers are accepting it etc? Multichill (talk) 17:08, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Redirected page not redirecting

So if I go to Dispensing Assistant I see the content of the page; however, another editor redirected it to Optometry. I've purged the page using ?action=purge and nothing happened. If I go to edit the page, it shows a redirect. If I look at the page source, it shows that the page is in the mediawiki class of redirect, but it still shows content. What's going on? Ryan Vesey 18:49, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

It redirects properly for me. It sounds like your browser is giving you a cached version of the page with the URL ending "/wiki/Dispensing_Assistant". You could try bypassing your browser cache on that page. ctzmsc3|talk 19:38, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Raise include-size limit to 3 mb

After further analysis, I have concluded that, for processing templates, the post-expand include-size limit (now 2,048,000 bytes) should be increased to 3 megabytes or more. For a cautious approach, the limit could be raised by increments, such as +300,000 bytes each week/month. The reason the limit of 2,048,000 bytes has been far too small, for practical use, is because the way the include-size is counted, for each template, causes templates to artificially double the include-size bytes. The generated page stays the same size, but the include-size can be counted double when a template is used inside another nested template. The suggested limit of 3 mb was chosen to allow current templates to fit within the limits, but avoid encouraging slow pages which would exceed the 60-second formatting limit with wp:Wikimedia Foundation error, which might conceal the page actually running too long due to excessive include-size usage. It is better to show a specific error message for size, rather than have the page die totally as a fatal time-out error with no specifics. Currently, multiple templates which would all fit within 3,145,000 bytes have been formatting within 30-45 seconds, so still comfortably short of the 60-second timeout. Anyway, the post-expand include-size limit should be raised to 3 mb, by weekly or monthly increases, due to the current 2,000 kb limit not allowing for the doubly-counted size of templates within other templates. Of course, alternatively, the partial counting of include-size for each template could be changed to not double in nested templates, but I think just raising the include-size limit to 3 mb would be far easier, and simpler to control. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:54, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

That seems like a very bad idea. All it would do would be make it easier for excessively long and excessively templated articles and pages to exist. If editors took note of the raised limits and started expanding articles then it would lead to more large, slow and difficult to edit articles existing. The proper approach is take that limit not just as a hard limit but also an indication that the article or page has other problems. Probably it is too long: too long to read, too long to comfortably edit. Maybe it overuses templates: instead of a lot of single line templates it could be organised into a table or tables which provide the structure the templates did. Maybe there too many references or links. It could on project pages be an indication of another problem such as a backlog. On a talk page it might mean archive settings need adjusting.

It might be worth considering articles which have this problem. Barack Obama is one but it's also a very long article - it appears on the first page of Special:LongPages so is among the longest 0.01% of pages, the longest 0.005% of non-list pages. The obvious thing to do with that and other long pages is make them shorter, much shorter, by splitting, moving more content into sub-articles, or better editing. The template limit is a hint to do this but it shouldn't be needed: editors should have noticed it's excessive length already.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 00:51, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

• There is always a Cite_quick: Using some technical template-usage limit is not a substitute for policy to reduce the size of articles. What would happen is the creation of other short, quick templates to bypass the limit, and allow some editors to create large pages anyway. Hence, after months of development, the new Template:Cite_quick was able to the rescue the major article "Barack Obama" to no longer crash on the bottom 14 templates (3 navboxes, {Persondata}, Authority control, and the wp:FA/GA interwiki links to the other-language wikipedias). That is a prime example, because {cite_quick} not only allowed all prior "405" of the current citations to be formatted 9x times faster, it also allows another 500 more. In fact, I tested the use of {cite_quick} by copying the text of article "Barack Obama" doubled in the edit-preview, and it formatted all 810 uses of {cite_quick} in 20 seconds, as only half the time used by {cite_news} or {cite_web} to process just 405 cites and crash the article navboxes. If an editor wanted to edit-preview two U.S. president articles combined, then Wikipedia could do it, when using quick templates. A template-processing limit should not be used as a substitute for article-size policies, because some people will find a work-around (eventually), to bypass the limit more than 200% double or triple. Again, a huge, huge article with no large templates, but 25 images, can be reformatted within 2 seconds to redisplay with any default image size. That is the power of Wikipedia. For large maintenance pages, Wikipedia has the capacity to show lists of the past 5 months of activity (to allow top-to-bottom searches), but even quick templates can experience the unfair double-counting of include-size bytes when used inside other templates of a maintenance page. Currently, the larger, longer website URLs can crash the wp:CS1 cite templates, and we do not want people to "shop" for only sources with short URLs or tell others that long newspaper names violate size limits. So, I recommend raising the include-size limit higher, to 3 mb, to avoid artificial limits of page size. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:12, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely not. John makes the exact point I was going to--raising the limit will just cause people to make larger and more uneditable articles that take even longer to parse. With Lua on the horizon, I especially can't see us doing this. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 12:14, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Unwatch link in my watchlist?

Can a genius who frequents VPT tell me if it is possible to add something to my common.js page to add unwatch links to pages in my watchlist? Thanks to anyone who can do this. Ryan Vesey 19:12, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

You should try this script: User:Js/watchlist. Works like a charm.--ukexpat (talk) 19:24, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

It works beautifully, thank you! Ryan Vesey 19:31, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

No problem.--ukexpat (talk) 00:25, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

See mw:Snippets/Unwatch from watchlist. Helder 19:50, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Please notice and report glitches - backend changes coming

On Monday we start deploying a new version of MediaWiki, 1.21wmf2, to the wikis, starting with mediawiki.org and 2 test wikis -- see mw:MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap for more. English Wikipedia gets the update on October 22nd. 1.21wmf2 will have 3 big new backend things in it and we need your help to test now to see if there are any really critical bugs, especially bugs that affect your bots and gadgets.

The three biggest changes

1. The new ContentHandler might affect handing of CSS and JavaScript pages, import/export (including PDF export), and API stuff, especially when rendering and editing. Also look out for issues in template rendering, images and media handling, localisation, and mobile device access. (merged on Oct 9)
2. High-resolution image support. This work-in-progress will try to give higher-res images to high-density screens that can support it, like new Retina displays (more info). One of the bigger risks of the high res stuff is load-based, since we may see substantial new load on our image scalers. So *all* image scaling might be impacted. (merged on Oct 11)
3. "Sites" is a new backend to represent and store information about sites and site-specific configuration. This code is meant to replace the current interwiki code, but does not do so just yet. Still, keep an eye out for site-specific configuration or interwiki issues.

Please test on the beta sites, report defects, and look out for these issues on your sites in the weeks ahead. (Right now the version of MediaWiki on the beta sites dates from 9 Oct and thus has ContentHandler but not the high-res image support or Sites.) These test plans give some ideas on how to find errors.

Thanks! With your help we can find bugs early and get them fixed before they affect lots of readers and editors. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 12:40, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

The new code is now deployed to mediawiki.org, test.wiki.x.io, and test2.wiki.x.io. So if you want to test it there, please feel free. Two additional notes:

• The ContentHandler changes may affect diff rendering, so please especially keep your eyes open for that.
• The CologneBlue skin has been refactored, so if you use CologneBlue and notice problems, please let us know.

Thanks. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 23:55, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

So, here's a better list of what to watch out for. If any of the following functionality breaks on your site after the deployment on 22 October, please report it as soon as you can:

• revision diffs
• templates
• CSS and JavaScript pages (like user scripts)
• bots
• PDF export
• images, video, and sound, especially scaling sizes
• the CologneBlue skin

If you notice any problems, please report problems at our defect tracker site. You can test for possible problems at test2.wiki.x.io and mediawiki.org, which have already been updated.

Thanks! With your help we can find problems fast and get them fixed faster.

Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 05:43, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Are there any setting to let template show specific content after specific time?

Do someone study it before? Asiaworldcity (talk) 17:59, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Have a look at #time parser functions. — Edokter (talk) — 18:34, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

{{Show by date}} does it for a date. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:59, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I mean, such as after I put a template 70 days on the page then show specific content automatically. Is it use #time +70 days to input at {{Show by date}}? Asiaworldcity (talk) 19:18, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

{{#time:format|+70 days}} will give you the date 70 days from the current date – i.e. always in the future. To get the date 70 days from when you add the text, you must substitute it – e.g. {{subst:#time:format|+70 days}}.

Also, {{Show by date}} takes the date as separate year, month and day parameters, so need to use #time three times. Like this: {{Show by date|{{subst:#time:Y|+70 days}}|{{subst:#time:m|+70 days}}|{{subst:#time:d|+70 days}}|before text|after text}}. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 20:39, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Thankyou very much! Asiaworldcity (talk) 11:41, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Vector script stops responding in Firefox 15-16

I've been getting messages like this one for the last few months:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete. Script: http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wiki.x.io/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20121009T222616Z:11

It doesn't seem to affect anything as I can edit that page(s) without any problem, but it's annoying because the message overrides my currently selected tab and takes me to that one. Has anyone else had this problem or seen anything else like it?

Currently Firefox 16.01, Mac OS 10.6.8.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 02:11, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Do you have any gadgets enabled? If so, which ones? PleaseStand (talk) 06:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Help request

I know this sounds odd, but I really need developers for WP:AFCH. It's a huge script but only has two active developers, one of which is on indefinite wikibreak. If anybody is JavaScript inclined and want to give me and hand, I can use all the help I can get. Thanks, Nathan2055^{talk - contribs} 17:04, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Weird rendering

Anyone know why the article Minister of Justice (Sweden) is rendering a list of colour codes, and how to get rid of them? Ezeu (talk) 22:36, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

It can be fixed by encoding # in the used templates as in [10]. I will fix the rest of the templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:52, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Done. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:01, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Ezeu (talk) 23:08, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Help needed - Wikipedia AutoEd

This discussion started at the Help desk. It was briefly at the VPT talk page. I've copied it here to get more attention. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:59, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I have been using Wikipedia:AutoEd since June 28, accessing it from the link at the top of the article page and/or the edit page. Now neither are available. I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent changes to editing Wikipedia earlier this month. Can anyone advise? -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 09:11, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Try asking at WP:VPT.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:14, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay. Thanks. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones/GG-J's Talk 21:23, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

You should try replacing the document.write(...) lines in User:Gareth Griffith-Jones/vector.js with just importScript('User:Kbh3rd/whackamole.js');. The lines in question contain a JavaScript syntax error, and AutoEd seems to work fine for me when I make that substitution. A syntax error anywhere in your user JS page prevents all scripts you have installed from working. PleaseStand (talk) 23:26, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Glitched logs

Is anybody else having glitches with the pending changes log, as at here? I see:

• 16:36, 14 March 2011 Dabomb87 (talk | contribs | block) configured pending changes settings for <a href="/wiki/Jeff_Foxworthy" title="Jeff Foxworthy">Jeff Foxworthy</a> [Accept: require "autoconfirmed" permission] (Violations of the biographies of living persons policy) (hist)

Thanks! Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:01, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I see that broken markup too, using Vector and Firefox 15.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:25, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I see it as well with Firefox 16.0.1, using both Vector and Monobook. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:36, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Where the log displays

<a href="/wiki/Jeff_Foxworthy" title="Jeff Foxworthy">Jeff Foxworthy</a>

the HTML source says

<a href="/wiki/Jeff_Foxworthy" title="Jeff Foxworthy">Jeff Foxworthy</a>

Something was encoded where it shouldn't have been. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:35, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The change that broke the log view is gerrit:24420; in particular, the new wfMessage() function automatically HTML escapes the second argument, in contrast to the deprecated wfMsgHtml() function it replaced. (In line 21 of frontend/FlaggedRevsLogView.php, wfMsgHtml( "stable-logentry-<nowiki/>{$action}", $titleLink ) became the incorrect wfMessage( "stable-logentry-<nowiki/>{$action}", $titleLink )->escaped().) The fix is, of course, simple and obvious, and therefore, it should happen soon, as everyone who reviewed the change should have gotten an email about MaxSem's comment. By the way, one reason the developers introduced the new functions and deprecated the old ones is for security – would you really want vandals to be able to insert malicious JavaScript into Wikipedia because of a comparable oversight? PleaseStand (talk) 00:59, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

This seems to have been fixed in gerrit:27846. The patch apparently is still awaiting deployment to Wikimedia sites. PleaseStand (talk) 01:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

new edit window makes me a) wanna leave wikipedia or b) I will just deliver sloppy work from now!!

For a few days now when I want to edit at the bottom of the edit window is a grey box instead of the wiki-markup! What? Where is the wiki markup menu? When I click on edit, the markup menu actually appears for an instant, but then disappears! and going through my preferences I can not find any way to change this; and as editing is a annoyingly difficult without the wiki markup tools at the ready, I would like to know what the hell the person in charge was thinking! no wait - not thinking!!! Are we now supposed to know all the markups by memory? What is with new editors?? yeah - every person on the planet knows all the wiki syntax by birth! I am not gonna reference anything anymore - I will just but it into [] for someone else, who has memorized the syntax to come along and do a proper ref! This is utter garbage! "wikipedia is on a quality drive!" oh yeah! so lets remove all tools required to properly reference, layout and edit an article! if WMF thinks is is helpful, then know this: I am not bothering to edit until I get the wiki markup menu back!!! even the ~ I have to type by hand now!! WTF??? hey - whoever had the great idea to remove even the four ~ come here and do it for me! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noclador (talk • contribs) 18:08, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Until the markup comes back, you can get it by either changing your skin or going to Preferences → Editing Then uncheck Enable Advanced Editing Toolbar. Ryan Vesey 18:13, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

thank you!!! thank you!!! I got the markup back!!! I was writing on a huge well referenced section today with over 20 refs and in the end I became so furious! ah - now it is much better!!! thanks again, noclador (talk) 18:22, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, thanks from me too. I missed many special symbols which don't seem to be duplicated in the set of special characters above the edit window. Thanks × 2, or should I say, thanks ∞ ? StuRat (talk) 18:31, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about this, guys :(. We're meant to be re-enabling this today: I'll find out what's happening with it. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

note that the "re-enable" did work partially: the edittools is back there if you use IE, but not if you use a sane browser (chrome/ff).

peace - קיפודנחש (talk) 18:58, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Is it possible when editing as an IP to have the "rollover" feature available?

The reason I got an account was becasue I really like the "roll over" feature that previews stuff. I still like to edit as an IP. Is there any way to have this feature as an IP? I hope this makes sense for my first village pump post. Thank you. --Malerooster (talk) 20:13, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I guess you mean Navigation popups at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups#Installation says: "You must have a user account in order to install and use the Navigation popups feature. If you do not have an account, you will need to create one and log in." PrimeHunter (talk) 22:28, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I think we should make the popups something readers can use. It's a great feature and it is better for readers than it is for editors. We could save if someone wants it on or off using a cookie. We'd need to make some modifications, I'd say take all of the editing tools out of the reader one. Ryan Vesey 22:31, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Is popups expensive on the servers? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:52, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you and yes, it would be very nice for IP readers to be able to use this feature as well. --Malerooster (talk) 00:42, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

PrimeHunter - No more expensive than an API call. Osarius - Want a chat? 14:24, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

See

• bug 29301 - gadgets for anonymous users (WONTFIX)

Helder 01:00, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't see this as specifically excluding the second idea. There's a difference between enabling gadgets for ip editors and creating one gadget that can be used to increase Wikipedia's utility to the readers. (There's an easy justification for not allowing ip editors to use these in that using these gadgets is a benefit of creating an account) This might be something that would need to be a WMF project though. On that note, perhaps promoting the existence of this gadget would cause readers to create an account just to use the gadget. Once the account is created, some of them might be more likely to contribute. Ryan Vesey 02:17, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Its why I got an account :). I actually prefer to edit as an IP, that is why I asked. --Malerooster (talk) 02:40, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

There's nothing conceptually wrong with enabling gadgets for all readers - for example, the "cite" buttons in the edit bar are functionally a gadget enabled for everyone, AIUI. However, would this involve setting it up for all readers and then saving a "turn off" cookie? I can imagine this being quite unpopular... Andrew Gray (talk) 18:02, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I would assume it would work that way. Although, it is entirely possible to have a turn-on cookie. Leave a link in the sidebar or at the bottom of every page. When it is rolled out, a message can be displayed at the top of the screen informing readers of the change and allowing them to turn it on if they wish. Ryan Vesey 14:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Template limit

I was editing a fairly large userspace page (over 270,000 bytes) with an extensive {{Reflist}} with almost 400 individual citations when I got the following editnotice: '''Warning:''' Template include size is too large. Some templates will not be included. After my latest edit, {{Reflist}} no longer displays and is instead a link to the template (which does help since it is a list of citations, not a static template). Under what circumstances does the template limit kick in? Is there are work around for this? – Zntrip 19:26, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Template limits#Post-expand include size. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:46, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

• Template:Cite_web exceeding limit: The typical wp:CS1 templates are limited to about 400-500 instances per page. The new Template:Cite_quick allows over 800 citations, in the same CS1 format; however, some people dislike {cite_quick}, so it is intended for rare, large articles, such as yours, to reduce the edit-preview, or reformat, time from 40 seconds to within 10 seconds. Another (older) fast option is to switch to Template:Vcite_web as the Vancouver style of cites. However, the current use of {cite_web} requires that you reduce to fewer than 400 {cite_web} templates, or else change to another cite template. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:23, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

How about you stop canvassing for your template, and get that damned thing working properly? This is getting ridiculous. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:30, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

• Well, other editors have had no problems using {cite_quick} for 300-400 citations, so I agree the complaints do seem "ridiculous" on balance. However, when considering the bugs in the {cite_web} or {cite_journal} templates, then it is easy to see why many people imagine other templates are "perfect" when they contain far more problems, due to their greater complexity. For example, consider using {cite_journal} to show a journal's volume & issue number:

• Parameters: {{cite journal|author=John Doe|title=Article ABC|volume=3|issue=11|date=8 May 2012}}
• Cite_journal result:  John Doe (8 May 2012). "Article ABC". 3 (11). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Cite_quick result:    

Older template {cite_journal} is broken, as unable to show the issue number "11" whereas newer template {cite_quick} still shows issue "11". Other people have incorrectly claimed {cite_quick} was broken, even though it shows more data than the so-called "perfect" {cite_journal} template. Some people even claimed a template "broke" articles when those articles actually used incorrect parameters for the template (articles were broken before the template was added). In general, beware skewed complaints, as not representative of broader reality. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:32, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

{{cite journal}} only appears "broken" here because you're misusing it. You have not provided the parameter |journal= (or one of its aliases |work= |newspaper= |magazine= |periodical=). An issue number is meaningless unless you state exactly which journal it is an issue of.

• Parameters: {{cite journal|author=John Doe|title=Article ABC|volume=3|issue=11|date=8 May 2012|journal=A Journal}}
• Cite_journal result:  John Doe (8 May 2012). "Article ABC". A Journal. 3 (11).
• Cite_quick result:    

The displayed output is almost identical (the space between the journal name and the volume is plain for {{cite journal}}, but   for {{cite quick}}); but {{cite quick}} completely lacks the COinS metadata. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:30, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

{{Cite quick}} works well on the page. Thanks! – Zntrip 00:38, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I see using {cite_quick} reduced that article include-size to 46%, over 2.1x times smaller, while also much faster. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:32, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

So you are still promoting your unapproved and buggy template, in spite of the clear consensus that it shouldn't have been deployed in its present state? AndyTheGrump (talk)

1) What is your alternative, leaving the page broken? Stop citing sources? 2) Lua is coming. Franamax (talk) 05:20, 16 October 2012 (UTC)