This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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.
From what I see, every citation is made through a shortened footnote save one and those to Google maps. This lone citation has likely been added against the existing style via the WP:RefToolbar or similar. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}12:27, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
No, that was a deliberate decision when I expanded the article. The pre-expansion text had ref tags and didn't know anything about page numbers, so I decided to adopt a hybrid sfn+ref citation system. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:53, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Non-uniform distribution of namespaces in “pagelinks.sql” dump
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm analyzing some Wikipedia data using the provided SQL dumps. Doing so, I noticed that in the “pagelinks” dump, all links in the 0 → 0 (main to main) namespace reside in the (roughly) first half of the dump, and none in the latter half (that's almost 30GB of text). I get the overall expected numbers of positive matches, so my counting method seems correct.
If someone more familiar with the database structure of Wikipedia/MediaWiki has an idea why this might be, I'd love to gain some insight. Does the pagelinks SQL dump get grouped/partitioned by namespace? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MSUGRA (talk • contribs) 15:42, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Technical maintenance planned
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
A maintenance operation will be performed on Thursday 30th April at 05:00 AM UTC.
It impacts all wikis and is supposed to last a few minutes.
During this time, new translations may fail, and Notifications may not be delivered. For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Please help making your community aware of this maintenance operation.
I purged the file page on Commons and the problem went away (you may have to clear your browser cache—e.g. by Ctrl+F5—to see the effect). I don't know how it happened in the first place though. Nardog (talk) 11:30, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
Yup, even the archive is correctly rotated for me too now. Which is worrisome. But the immediate problem is solved. --GRuban (talk) 19:50, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
It's all because of client-side caching. Your browser is lazy, so it tries as hard as possible to not actually have to download new content when you load a page.If there's something's strange, on the interwebz? Who you gonna call? Cache busters! --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:49, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
I have reported this problem at mw:Talk:Reference_Tooltips. That very long note may be better reformatted as a regular article section or a collapsible section (even though MOS says not to use collapsible text in general). – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:54, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
What is the difference between yellow and green open access icons of locks in references? I just saw a link to arXiv with a green lock icon that redirects to arXiv and shows "freely accessible" in tooltip. I remember yesterday seeing a yellow lock icon somewhere else that linked to the wikipage Open access. What do the different colors mean? 89.172.8.118 (talk) 21:25, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
If you mean the green lock in Recher, C.; et al. (2010). "Supersymmetry Approach to Wishart Correlation Matrices: Exact Results". arXiv:1012.1234. vs the yellow/orange lock in , they mean the exact same thing. {{open access}} was never updated to the green lock, but probably should be. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}21:33, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for clearing that up. In the end I didn't click on that yellow link because I presumed it meant something like free for academics like ResearchGate or free to browse bits and parts on a crappy webpage like Google Books. It is counterintuitive. 89.172.8.118 (talk) 00:59, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
Color in Microsoft Edge
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
An example of the issue from here on Microsoft Edge 44.19613.1000.0
In Microsoft Edge (the original version, not the Chromium version), I noticed that text at the bottom of history, user contributions, or watchlist pages sometimes shows in black instead of the correct color, and hovering over a link in black will make it turn blue. Can this issue be fixed in MediaWiki? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:54, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Looks blue to me (I am using MS Edge Chromium as well). I do not know what you are talking about. Can you give more details? Like skin? Aasim05:22, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
In the Vector skin, that is. Also, I am using the non-Chromium version of Edge. For anyone who is using non-Chromium Edge with the Vector skin, just look at the bottom of this page's latest 500 edits, and the timestamp; user page, user talk page, and user contributions links; and red and green size difference numbers in parentheses will appear black instead. I also tested Cologne Blue, Modern, Monobook, and Timeless, and found out that the issue does not occur in those skins. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 18:36, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Some time in the last little while, two or three weeks perhaps, I notice that many pages now have harv warnings on them. This is a bit annoying because there is no citeref on the text.
For instance, go to Newmarket Canal and scroll to the bottom. On my machine, I get "Harv warning: There is no link pointing to this citation. The anchor is named CITEREFDodge2009." As you can see by pressing Edit, there is no CITEREF on this entry, and there shouldn't be.
I suspect the problem is in the tool that is reporting these errors, not the page? If so, I no longer recall how to find what tool this is. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:42, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
This time there was an automated report. Nothing immediately stands out as to what happened, but I'm investigating! There's a task at phab:T251595. I'll follow up there. — MusikAnimaltalk17:04, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
Notification icons blurry rendering
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I don't know how the community feels about pixel peeping in UI elements, but here's a very minor nitpick about rendering of some of the notification icons (Commons category). They are originally 20x20 pixels SVG files. In the notifications UI they are rendered in size 30x30 pixels. Positions of some vertical and horizontal edges in these icons relate to the size 30x30 in such a way, that some edges are blurred. The size 30x30 pixels is set through the following CSS rule, which is independent of the skin (
A table would work fine actually. I tried ch and that seems to line it up in my browser/skin/zoom combination. Besides those, I just wouldn't care to be honest and not have any styling. It looks fine without being lined up on the colon. --Izno (talk) 01:33, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
For what it's worth, {{0}} is a lot better (and "easier to understand") than using a <span> across the entire thing. I updated the list, and it's essentially adding four invisible 0s. Primefac (talk) 02:52, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Collapsing half a table
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm working on an update to Template:Hatching table, whereby everything after the "Historical systems" row is collapsed. However, this doesn't really seem possible with what I know of tables. Posting here so that more enlightened brains can teach me something new, or confirm my suspicions. Primefac (talk) 02:54, 2 May 2020 (UTC) (please ping on reply)
Wikitable headings
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Has it always been the case that the dividing lines between cells in headings have been missing in "wikitable" class tables, or is this a new thing? If it is a new thing, how do I get the lines back? SpinningSpark17:12, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, it was the gadget. I was also getting a really weird effect (before I turned the gadget off) with the table at the bottom of this sandbox history page. The row headings of the bottom half of the table (with the missing cells) were being pushed over the top half as the page was scrolled up. SpinningSpark17:52, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Technical maintenance but no server switch
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I was alerted just today that there will be a technical maintenance that will affect all wikis (if my understanding of [1] is correct). The banner appeared only today, not since Monday, when it was supposedly announced. Unlike past occurences, there is no server switch like what happened at least thrice before. How is today's non-editing time going to be different from those server switches? Was this made necessary by the 502 and 504 errors that happened earlier this month? LSGH (talk) (contributions) 04:55, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
From the editors' perspective, the only difference is that it was much faster (just 81 seconds of read-only time). From the tech folks' perspective, I gather that it had something to do with a Certificate authority that was going to expire in June. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
It's half a year, and the problem persists. Friday I had problems with this. Persistance of clicking on the "try again" and then, in the popup box, Retry, seems unfriendly to the edit community. Bang head against wall harder?
Now I'm documenting a specific (attempted) edit.
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 857280943
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 08:40:40 GMT
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 849665645
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 08:43:04 GMT
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 849896892
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 08:58:59 GMT
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 853603024
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 09:14:37 GMT
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 883744841
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 09:54:06 GMT
## Request from 72.251.70.94 via cp1083 frontend, Varnish XID 888745235
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 03 May 2020 10:09:43 GMT
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
<ref name="foo">...</ref> generates <li id="cite_note-foo-#">...</li> in the reflist (where # is the ordinal of the note). So we can link to it as in see [[#cite_note-foo-#|this footnote]], but this will stop working, or need to be updated, whenever the position of the note changes, so I think we tend to just avoid the construction and refer to footnotes in more abstract ways.
But wouldn't it be fabulous if we could just link to a footnote on the same page by something like see [[#{{#refid:foo}}|this footnote]]? Or is this possible already? Nardog (talk) 00:35, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but wouldn't text like "See note <ref name="foo"/>." work for an already named note? 24.151.50.175 (talk) 16:58, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes and no. "See note [1]" doesn't work nearly as well as "See this note", given the superscript text is semantically non-essential (i.e. something you would skip if you were reading out loud). It would also create an unnecessary backlink ("^"). Nardog (talk) 22:10, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Come to think of it, why do the anchors (#id) for named references have dynamic numbers at the end in the first place? Were it not for them, we would be able to reliably link to them not only on the same page but even from other pages. Nardog (talk) 22:10, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Automatic redirects from non-breaking hyphens in page titles?
Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments8 people in discussion
I was interested in doing a search-and-replace of 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic to replace all the hyphens in mentions of "COVID-19" and "SARS-CoV-2" with non-breaking hyphens[2] to prevent unwanted line breaks in the middle of those words. However, doing so broke a ton of wikilinks when I tried to preview the page, since it seems the software doesn't automatically redirect from non-breaking hyphens to breaking hyphens in page names, the same way it does for some capitalization differences. I can see this being an issue at other pages where one might want to make a similar fix, and even if I had fixed things manually at 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic, the issue would come back as the page evolves. So is there any chance we could do something to the automatic redirect software to take care of this? {{u|Sdkb}}talk00:41, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
"COVID-19" and "SARS-CoV-2" are using hyphen-minuses instead of hyphens, so really titles with non-breaking hyphens and normal hyphens should redirect to the title with minus-hyphens. For example COVID-19 vaccine exists, but COVID‐19 vaccine and COVID‑19 vaccine do not. We could fix this by using a bot that would create the appropriate redirects and move the page to the version using hyphen-minuses when needed.– BrandonXLF (talk)21:23, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
Some other solution would be better because using something other than a hyphen will confuse editors and break searching for "COVID-19" with the normal hyphen. Johnuniq (talk) 00:03, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
@BrandonXLF and Johnuniq: yikes, hyphen-world is complicated haha. Trying to get this straight: so hyphen-minus and hyphen are separate things. And the page titles are all at hyphen-minus. Is hyphen-minus also the grammatically correct option? Is hyphen-minus what you get when you press the button on the keyboard (and thus what people will be searching for)? A bot to fix this sounds fine, if it can't be done more directly than that. Do we know what allows redirects via miscapitalization to work, and could we replicate whatever process does that? This seems more analogous to that situation than anything else. {{u|Sdkb}}talk07:58, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
@Johnuniq and Sdkb: They're different. Hyphen-minus (-) is the hyphen on the keyboard and can be used as a hyphen or as a minus sign whereas a hyphen (‐) is only used as a hyphen and is not used as much and its use is discouraged here on Wikipedia. – BrandonXLF (talk)19:28, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
@BrandonXLF, Redrose64, and Johnuniq: Okay, so what we need then is a way to automatically redirect any title with a hyphen or non-breaking hyphen to a hyphen-minus. Any ideas on how to do that? I can't figure out how the software does it for capitalization — trying to go to foobar (with a lowercase f) just goes to Foobar (the page title) without even showing there was any redirect. {{u|Sdkb}}talk01:14, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
I would oppose these generally. People will copy-paste whatever they can find, and in that case I actually don't think you should be replacing them at all. People will not understand what they have is non-breaking and having to teach the distinction is a time waste here. --Izno (talk) 12:41, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
@Primefac and Sdkb: AnomieBOT is currently approved only to create hyphen-minus-using (U+002D) redirects for titles containing en-dash (U+2013). It would be pretty easy to do the same for titles containing Unicode hyphen (U+2010), non-breaking hyphen (U+2011), and/or other similar characters, but I'd want to have a decent consensus (here or on WP:VPR) to point to before submitting the BRFA. Note I'm taking a wikibreak at the moment, so if such a consensus is reached please ping me again. Anomie⚔23:35, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
As an alternative, Sdkb, would it help to have a template, say {{nobl}}, that combines no-break with wikilink? E.g. {{nobl|SARS-CoV-2}}. Or is it just as easy to write explicitly {{nowrap|[[SARS-CoV-2]]}} → SARS-CoV-2, avoiding yet-another-template overload? You can pipe the link, but the source gets ugly with entity references, and confusing with lookalike characters: [[SARS-CoV-2|SARS‑CoV‑2]] and [[SARS-CoV-2|SARS‑CoV‑2]]. The difference between nowrap styling and displaying actual no-break-hyphen characters is what the user gets when copy-pasting rendered (not source) text. Pelagic (talk) – (08:32 Mon 04, AEST) 22:32, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
@Pelagic: Using the nowrap template seems like a good solution. And for many cases, we don't want to wikilink, so all the better that it's optional. My hesitation for adding it to the big COVID-19 pages is that many are already bumping up against the post-expand include size limit, and adding more template calls might push it over, which wouldn't be worth it for such a small change. {{u|Sdkb}}talk22:37, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
It seems there isn't a super easy way to do this (for find-and-replace, there's also the issue of URLs within references being broken in some cases), so I think I'm going to just give up on it for now. {{u|Sdkb}}talk22:38, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Help regarding IA Bot
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hello everyone!
Can someone help me with a very problematic behavior regarding IA Bot? We use IA Bot on SqWiki (I'm an admin there) and it works fine but at some pages it keeps going on and on, archiving and unarchiving or doing some strange loop-kind of behaviors. At first I hoped it would sort itself out, then I hoped that maybe our links were problematic and someone interested in those articles would fix them in the near future. When none of this happened, I did write to Cyberpower678 countless of times but he appears to be too busy and many of my requests have been automatically archived without any solution to the problem.
Please, check the talk pages of those articles and you'll immediately understand what I'm talking about but you can check the article's history too for more information. (We have talk page messages set on and that's good because the problem is not with the messages themselves.)
Actually Cyber appeared to be very responsive at first and he helped me set up the bot for SqWiki. Since we have talk page messages set on, I kept monitoring the bot's activity closely for bugs or mistranslations and that's when I found out of this kind of behavior. As I said, I did write to him many times for help regarding this problem (and even some bugs related to its messages) but as he stated himself, he was very busy these months so those things just kept persisting. Since then, other articles have started to have the same problems as the ones above. Not knowing exactly what causes that kind of behavior (and therefore how to stop it), I've unfortunately stopped monitoring IA Bot's contributions for some months now. I returned now after some weeks to check the first article at the aforementioned list and it was a disaster. The bot is going crazy in there.
We've come to see the bot's work as very beneficial to our citations so we wouldn't want to set it off or exclude certain pages from its list of work (although I'm afraid we might be forced to consider those options too). Is there someone who can help me deal with problems regarding it other than the mentioned operators at the bots page? From past experience I know that some aspects of l18n regarding its use at our project have not been fully accomplished, and the initial deal was to fix and optimize those on the way as we discovered them (hence a continuous support would be the best option) but at this point, maybe just helping to fix behaviors like those mentioned above would be enough.
Normally I would have written at its operators but given the circumstances (to my knowledge, Kaldari doesn't deal much with it anymore and I've already written countless of times to Cyber already) I wrote here as a last resort. - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:27, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
Klein Muçi, entirely my fault for the lack of response. I have indeed been busy. Let me take a look at this problem. I will report back tomorrow. Please ping me if I forget. —CYBERPOWER(Around)01:23, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: I'm really sorry I had to write here but literally I didn't know what else to do except for stopping the bot altogether. I fully understand your lack of time since you do get requests from many projects in different languages. I was indeed hoping to find someone else to deal with it so I wouldn't put too much pressure on you (since you've told me yourself you needed help regarding the bot) and that's why I wrote here but... - Klein Muçi (talk) 01:46, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Klein Muçi, I'm still here, but will have to push this to tomorrow. I'm in college which eats at my time as well, and I'm involved with finals right now. —CYBERPOWER(Chat)00:10, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Allow mobile web editor to undo changes
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I'm usually logged in but when I'm on a different device or something I like to either use my alt or go anonymous.
I was hopping on Random article and later RC and after finding a vandal-esque edit, I tried to undo but couldn't find the option to undo, only manually edit the changes.
I understand bringing the undo button to the mobile app editor may invoke an influx of edit warring and all that jazz, but Undo is already available for desktop for all users. Happy editing!
Category redirects populated by templates, scripts and extensions
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
General
A number of populated category redirects have piled up that are impossible to fix with either the redirect maintenance bot or simple changes to the templates to move the contents over to the correct target. Does anyone have the technical knowledge to move over the contents of any of the following?
Category:Foo to Category:X1 - something seems to have brought the Foo category back to life and it's populated by a lot of script pages that are near impossible to amend
The user script pages are all because they have [[Category:Foo]] as an example somewhere. I think that back in the day (circa 2015?) these wouldn't be processed as links, and since they are all ancient, they were never reloaded to have the category on them. Recently, though, Krinkle mass-fixed some old variables. Pre/appending <nowiki> and </nowiki> respectively should work, as would inserting a colon in the link; if desired I can handle that. ~ Amory(u • t • c)14:09, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
These redirects are populated by users using the Babel extension with dialect codes that are not part of the overall system. This has been raised by me over several years and eventually a workaround was posted at Wikipedia talk:Babel#Category redirects; however one user doesn't like the outcome and insists first on reverting to the incorrect format and now threatening admins who try to fix it with being reported for vandalism. Their first suggestion of using lower case with Babel does not work and the Babel extension itself is impossible to amend for all but the deeply versed in code. I have asked for help at Extension talk:Babel but the extension does not appear to be monitored (there has been no reply at all for a month) so we have an impasse with the problem remaining. How can this be fixed? Timrollpickering (talk) 11:46, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
I fear so but wanted to explore technical solutions first as a calmer solution. However this is a problem that's been flagged for nearly four years and the solution at Wikipedia talk:Babel#Category redirects is the only one that's ever been forthcoming so this may be a vain hope. Timrollpickering (talk) 10:58, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
PetScan
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
It's been down for a while. A Wikimedia Cloud Services admin restarted it, which brought it back for a little while. Magnus is the sole maintainer, so he's the only one who can do the investigating. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 14:48, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
It's up again. Since it's not hosted at Toolforge, it cannot be put up for adoption by another maintainer either. --qedk (t愛c)15:54, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Is a fix needed
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed that the {{Infobox company}} has a red error message in the example box that is to the right of the "short version" description. It reads "error: {{lang}}: text has italic markup". As the page is fully protected I can't examine the situation further. I don't know whether this is a problem or not so I brought it here for others to check on. Thanks for your time. MarnetteD|Talk15:32, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 5 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [4]
Some wikis will be on read-only for a few minutes on 7 May. This will also affect CentralAuth. This can for example affect global renames, password changes, changing or confirming your email address and logging in to new wikis. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [5]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can soon turn these notifications off for individual pages. [6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed that changing redirect targets got a new AES two years ago. But since I like to what I call "go retro" as I did here, I would like to know if there is a way to make this standard.
The automatic edit summary is MediaWiki:Autosumm-changed-redirect-target. If you want it changed for everybody then you have to get that message changed. If you want your own edit summaries changed without entering them manually then I don't know whether some JavaScript could do it. It sounds complicated to detect automatically with a script which then inserts your wanted summary. I guess the MediaWiki feature cannot be used since it works after you click save and the edit is already being processed without a summary. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:25, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Creating template redirects with parameters
Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion
Is there any way to create a redirect to a template that includes defined parameters? I'd like to have {{Don't ping}} redirect to {{Please ping|no}}. Just calling the template on the redirect page itself doesn't work because then it doesn't substitute properly. {{u|Sdkb}}talk18:48, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
As in #redirect [[Template:Please ping|no]]? No. The closest you can get is to make the content of the 'redirect' page the particular template you are trying to use. You can also make the target template a subst version with some clever transcluding tricks; between the two, I think you will get where you are trying to. Unfortunately, I don't remember how exactly to make that trick work. --Izno (talk) 19:40, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
The main impetus behind my proposal was consolidating overproliferated templates (I'd like to make {{Please ping}} good enough that the four (4!) other duplicates can be merged into it, but that won't really be possible for ones like {{Nw}} unless I can get that to redirect to {{Please ping|Nw=yes}}. So duplicating at the redirect definitely wouldn't be my preference. Overall, this seems like it'd be a useful software feature to help combat the overproliferation of templates that make them so hard to maintain (just see e.g. Wikipedia:Current event templates) — they should all be merged). {{u|Sdkb}}talk19:50, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
@Primefac: I just read through Wikipedia:Wrapper templates, but it's not all that thorough. Would you or someone else be able to show me how to use it in this case? I could then try updating the documentation to pay it forward to others. {{u|Sdkb}}talk23:33, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
@Primefac: Ah, that's a million times simpler than the page made it seem. Thanks! I still had a little trouble with making the substitution safe but figured it out after some fiddling around in the sandbox. I'm going to go ahead and perform the consolidation as I mentioned above and here. If you have any issues with wordings being changed too much, feel free to let me know and we can make tweaks as needed. {{u|Sdkb}}talk02:41, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
@Primefac: if I can badger you with another question about wrapper templates, is there a way to pass parameters not specified by the wrapper itself through them? For instance, I turned Template:Welcome-autosign into a wrapper a month ago, but I wasn't able to figure out how to get it so that you could use, say, {{Welcome-autosign|cookie=y}}. Is there a way to do that? {{u|Sdkb}}talk00:19, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
In a word, no. If {{B}} is a wrapper for {{A}}, and A has a |p1=, the only way you can pass |p1= to A via B is if B specifically uses or includes the param in the call to A. Primefac (talk) 19:10, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion
When I first learned about the pseudo-namespaces such as H: for Help: and T: for Template:, I tried using them, but they only rarely were set up. They don't seem to function anywhere near as well as the aliases built into the software. Is there any reason we haven't converted some of them to aliases? {{u|Sdkb}}talk23:12, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for catching me up, J947! The line that stands out to me is the second clause of this: There is no consensus to treat such redirects (eg "T:" and "MOS:") as being as acceptable as "WP:" and "WT:", which work through software magic; whether the developers should be asked to make similar provisions for such shortcuts as they did for the project namespace is a matter for further discussion. Did anyone ever follow up on that? MOS: seems like a tricky case since it has a different meaning than Wikipedia:, so ignore that one, but for T:, H:, P:, and CAT:, I'd think we'd want to ask the developers to make them aliases. Would there be support for that? {{u|Sdkb}}talk23:29, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
The obvious reason for not making an alias of H: is that it would need a matching HT: and therein lies the problem: HT (or any case variant) is the language code for the Haitian Creole Wikipedia so [[ht:<something>]] creates an interwiki link to ht.wiki.
I wouldn't think aliases would be supported. It's one thing to expect people to absorb WP: and WT: which are common, but using H: instead of Help: is not useful, and T: is too mysterious for those who don't spend their days dreaming about templates. Similar for others. Johnuniq (talk) 23:46, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
those who don't spend their days dreaming about templates you got me there haha... I guess I'll feel a little better about typing out "Template:" now that I know it's for the sake of the Tatars. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯{{u|Sdkb}}talk06:29, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion
i've noticed (on article pages) the dropdown option to switch between visual and source editing disappears.it will apparently randomly appear and disappear even for the same page. I use firefox 75 64bit. I tried using opera and for the same page firefox won't have the dropdown while opera will. so i think it's a firefox issue. (I've cleared cache, cookies, etc).ToeFungii (talk) 20:28, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
@ToeFungii: I've not managed to reproduce that using Firefox 75.0 (64-bit) myself. Did the black pencil icon disappear during one single editing session, or between different sessions? What actions were you performing just before you noticed the dropdown editing option had disappeared, and can you recollect what action you were doing before it returned again. Was it on just one article, or many? Have you checked your Editing Settings in Preferences, and have you got 'editing mode' set to 'show me both editor tabs'? Knowing these things might assist someone to offer suggestions Nick Moyes (talk) 21:56, 1 May 2020 (UTC)
The pencil seems to disappear randomly and in multiple editing sessions. It disappears, or should say doensn't appear, upon clicking "edit source." If I publish while in visual mode, visual mode always seems to open the next time I edit.
In preferences I don't see in 'editing mode' the text you're talking about. There is 'Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta' which is unchecked.
In 'Beta' the following are unchecked: 'New wikitext mode', 'Visual differences', 'Two column edit conflict'.
I've yet been able to replicate in Opera. So I think it may be just a firefox issue.
I've only been editing with an account for a month. I don't remember seeing it as an issue before a couple weeks ago, but I honestly can't swear to that as it was all so new.
I'd say based on a quick check that makes the problem go away.(I didn't notice before that it's the tool bar at the top of the edit frame that is actually disappearing). Based on reading the safemode that I have to find what's causing the problem. Can I get a little help with that? Is it something in my browser or some setting on wp? thanks. ToeFungii (talk) 17:26, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
ToeFungii, that's useful news, since it tells us where the problem is. It's almost certainly not something in your web browser (unless you have tons of extensions installed). It's probably caused by a user script. If you scroll down on the mw:safemode page, there's a basic list of the steps for figuring out which script is causing it. You don't seem to have installed any scripts manually, so it's probably a user-script gadget that you turned on in Special:Preferences. Maybe make a few screenshots of your prefs settings, reset everything to defaults, and see if that helps? If it does, then you can use the screenshots to figure out what you wanted to turn on/off again. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
I tried turning off everything in gadgets and still had issue. Could it be something in Beta? I've reset all to default and I'll add slowly to see if I can id what caused the break. ToeFungii (talk) 18:06, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Don't know if you keep a log, but if you do go ahead and close this. I've re-turned on a # of things and don't have it back to the look it had (I should have capture all the pref pages:() but the vis edit isn't broke and I actually now see some icons that I don't ever remember seeing before. The one thing that's really annoying is the preview of a wp link i see now as it is really odd, but over time i'll figure out what broke it and post it. Who knows, maybe i'll never break it again. ToeFungii (talk) 19:01, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), Found what is causing the break. pref-gadgets "wikEd: alternative full-featured integrated text editor for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome (documentation)". When I turn this on it breaks showing the vis/source edit.
Planned maintenance operation on May 7 @ 05:00 AM UTC
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi, There's a planned maintenance operation that will be performed on Thursday 7th May at 05:00 AM UTC. CentralAuth-based services (rename account, change password, etc.) may not work. See also: phab:T251157. NB: This wiki will not go read-only during this operation. -- Kaartic correct me, if i'm wrong11:08, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
get revision number of edit that you are making
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I couldn't find any way to do this, and I think it must not exist because otherwise people would probably use it more. Basically I'd like some kind of magic word or variable that when you save the page, is expanded to the revision id of the revision being saved. I think that's different from {{REVISIONID}} which is expanded at rendering time, and which is now disabled (miser mode) on WMF wikis for performance reasons. The purpose is to make self-referential edits: i.e. there would be a template like "{{THISDIFF}}" which you can subst into an edit, which would turn into a permanent diff referring to the edit itself, and that would appear in the text. People could then click the diff to see what change you made in the edit. You normally wouldn't do that in an article, but on talk pages and the like, it's often useful to change something and include a link to what you changed. 2602:24A:DE47:B270:DDD2:63E0:FE3B:596C (talk) 09:36, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
I think that's not possible as the revision ID is created automatically when the edit has been saved to the database, and so you can't include that in the data being saved. –Majavah(t/c)09:40, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
As it happens, I asked User:Catrope about this last November, and he said it was "pretty much impossible". I gather that it would require re-writing MediaWiki core to make it possible. phab:T14694#177118 from 2008 provides some information.
QEDK, I've re-added and corrected the official website claim on the Wikidata entry since the article had the updated version in its external links section. As for the bot...probably too much of a WP:CONTEXTBOT problem to be worthwhile. creffett (talk) 18:06, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
I think that this is a question about automatic tagging in edit summaries. I see that an edit summary consists of two parts, the summary provided by the editor, and notes that are sometimes provided by the code. Where do I report concerns about the automatic tagging? This is not at all urgent. What seems to have happened has to do with Draft:Ute Lotz-Heumann. On 5 November 2019, I accepted this draft, which moved it to article space, and created a page in draft space that is a redirect to article space. The tag correctly says: New redirect. Another tag was then applied to the redirect that says, "Removed redirect". But the redirect was and is still there. As a result, six months later, today, 6 May 2020, an editor came and requested a speedy deletion of the redirect as an abandoned draft. I have described this in more detail at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation#Weird_Incorrect_G13_tagging. So was the tag incorrect, and what should be done?
Robert McClenon (talk) 13:59, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: the "removed redirect" tag related to this edit is a bit misleading perhaps - so you didn't remove text on that page about the redirect, however you did conceptually remove this page from being a redirect - by placing text before the redirect declaration readers would no longer be redirected. Admins can remove a tag from a revision if it is really needed, but in most cases it isn't a big deal. That specific tag appears to have come from the backend software, specifically mw-removed-redirect for being an Edits that change an existing redirect to a non-redirect - which it was. — xaosfluxTalk14:13, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Not sure what you were trying to do, but you probably shouldn't have made that edit at all - since those tags don't normally apply to redirects. If that was some sort of twinkle error - you will want to follow up with the twinkle maintainers still. — xaosfluxTalk14:20, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
User:Xaosflux - I don't really remember what I was trying to do, since this was six months ago, but I would infer that I was trying to tag the article. I can't imagine why I would have tried to apply a tag to the redirect. What is the mechanism for reporting issues to Twinkle? Robert McClenon (talk) 14:36, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Robert McClenon, it'll be nigh impossible to pin down unless you remember exactly what happened, but my guess is that after you moved the draft to mainspace, you tagged the draft page without reloading it. That is, it was in your browser, possibly from the history tab or something where the content, unchanged since you moved it, so when that page and Twinkle were loaded it wasn't a redirect. I can look into making some additional checks, but it's generally a good idea when editing content to ensure you're editing the most recent version of the page. ~ Amory(u • t • c)18:31, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
User:Amorymeltzer - Yes, that is probably what happened. I accepted the draft, which does various things including moving it to mainspace, and invisibly creating a new page that is the redirect from draft space to article space. This is another lesson that I will try to keep in mind, which is that when moving a page or doing something that creates a page, be sure that you are where you think you are. Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:05, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Good article nominations
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello Jonteemil. On first look, it seems like the links are broken if the file is hosted on Commons (such as the example above), and fine for those hosted locally. I will try to look into this, if no one else figures it out by then. Cheers, Rehman06:08, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion
Hello!
Can someone help me with a thing related to (I believe) parser functions?
I want to write something depending on the number of entries on a specific category.
The logic would be:
If there are 0 pages, say there are no pages;
If there is 1 page, say there is 1 page;
If there are more than 1 page, say there are X pages;
I tried using an #ifexpr function but it only takes 2 values if I'm not wrong and not three so... Is there any workaround to this? Maybe a better way to do it than what I'm doing? Or is there no way to accomplish this? I can show more details on the specific task if so needed. The point is to make grammar match automatically the status of the category.
{{#switch:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}}
|0=There are no pages
|1=There is 1 page
|#default=There are {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}} pages
}}
You could also do
{{#ifeq:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}}|0
|There are no pages
|There {{plural:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}}|is|are}} {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}} {{plural:{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Example}}|page|pages}}
}}
Yes. ≥ is a special character and nearly all programming languages are restricted to ASCII characters so they say >= instead. Similarly for ≤ versus <= (or =< in rare cases). PrimeHunter (talk) 16:31, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
More on that: for ≠ ≤ ≥ use <> <= >= respectively (a few languages use the two-letter acronyms NE, LE, GE instead of (or as well as) the two-character operators). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:05, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
What it comes down to is that you can't use ≤ or ≥ unless you're coding in ALGOL-68 or APL - both of which have wacky character sets in any case. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:37, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
reFill deadurl/url-status and a new userscript
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
in /backend/refill/formatters/citetemplate.py change template.add('deadurl', 'y') to template.add('url-status', 'dead') and find and replace "deadurl" with "url-status". In /backend/refill/models/citation.py change 'deadurl': bool, to 'url-status': str,.. probably. I literally looked at this for two minutes.
Unrelated but related, I herd U liek ciatations. So I made a userscript. It doesn't do everything reFill does (..YET), but some may find it helpful. It could be expanded later on. Add importScript('User:Alexis Jazz/FUC.js'); to your common.js to enable it. A new button will appear in the edit window near the "Watch this page" checkbox. As an example, clicking it and publishing the page results in these fixes. - Alexis Jazz18:39, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, Capankajsmilyo, and BD2412: While adding it to the popular pages report might be the most expedient solution, I think that's conflating two different things together. It seems to me that what's really needed here is a bot/template that can list all the pages of a given wikiproject (along with details like page creation date, size etc.). The popular pages list is capped at 500 or 1000 articles so it wouldn't give a complete list for a lot of wikiprojects. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
The original request was for pages in a wikiproject, so pages in a category seems ideal? At any rate, the tool is down at the moment (at least for me?) so can't troubleshoot. ~ Amory(u • t • c)10:00, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I can't get an audio file to work that's positioned right under the first photo under the header July 16 questioning in the wikipage titled 'Alexander Butterfield.'
Latest comment: 4 years ago116 comments37 people in discussion
Arrgh, WP:ITSTHURSDAY and in the last two minutes the font of diffs has changed to monospace, which is smaller and harder to read, causing an accessibility issue. The line height has increased, causing larger gaps between lines --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:07, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
I have always used a monospaced font for both the editing area and diffs. But in the last few days I've noticed a font change in the diff area to something that's still monospaced but lighter and harder to read, almost like what Latin characters in an Asian font look like. The editing area is unchanged. Has anyone experienced the same? -- King of♥♦♣ ♠ 13:55, 30 April 2020 (UTC) Huh, I just realized that my memory is totally disfunctional, and diffs have always been in a sans-serif font. Must be the Mandela effect... -- King of♥♦♣ ♠ 18:06, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Hideous. I fixed the diffs page ugliness per the directions above "Edit area font style" in Preferences -> Editing, but my edit window font is now tiny, much smaller than what I see on a page when I'm not editing it. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:07, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
This is absolutely not going to be intuitive for anybody else. I don't know nothin' about css. Also, now that i'm thinking about it, I sort of feel like my edit window displayed mono-spaced fonts. Isn't that the only way to get infobox parameters to align vertically on the equals = signs? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:38, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
At the risk of breaking some hearts, the font change is expected to return as soon as the unrelated bug gets fixed.
I have two thoughts from the above conversation: First, if you remember the mw:Typography refresh from years ago, one of the things to remember is that we hate having our fonts changed ...for a week or two. After that, we pretty much get used to it, and it's okay. So you might want to wait a few days, and see whether the benefits (e.g., making it easier to see narrow punctuation) outweigh the costs. Second, I hate font changes at least as much as the average person, but I think the size is a bigger problem for me than the font itself. So it's possible that a few tweaks to the size and leading would give me (and perhaps some of you, too) the best of both worlds. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
I, at least, still strongly dislike all of the changes that that refresh included, although I have resentfully accepted them. I seriously hope someone will engineer and provide a CSS way to cancel or reverse this diff change. —烏Γ(kaw)│22:36, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
@Johnbod: You may want to point out what makes you think that such changes would need some approval by the/a community. That would be news to me (and would not scale). Also see mw:Bug management/Development prioritization. (Note that I was not involved in making this change but am personally curious about understanding what such expectations are based on.) --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): Simply: Wikipedia:Consensus. Yes, I'm aware that such changes by the developers are specifically exempted from it by WP:CONEXCEPT. But you'll find a few threads in the talk archives suggesting that I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable about this, because it feels like a violation of the spirit of the consensus policy, even if not the letter. And no doubt this is what drives such expectations, although you'd have to ask Johnbod to know for sure. Double sharp (talk) 13:02, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
Other people will be better able to answer the previous point than me. Meanwhile the font change is back, but at a larger size, possibly even in response to the outcry among users. But it is still in the same unhelpful font, and will remain disliked. People might like to comment on whether this is more important than whatever the supposed problem the change fixed was. Johnbod (talk) 16:38, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
AKlapper (WMF), you asked Johnbod "what makes you think that such changes would need some approval by the/a community". This is the community's workplace. You wouldn't think much of an organization that suddenly moved its workers' desks around, or turned up during the night and messed up all their paperwork, or made the filing cabinets harder to open. Then asked in the morning "what makes you think such changes need your approval?" The point is we have to do a lot of diff reading, including long and complex ones, and we need to be able to do it quickly, often at a glance. This change makes that harder. SarahSV(talk)18:30, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
AKlapper (WMF), I second SlimVirgin's point. This change makes it very much harder for editors to edit. It especially makes it harder for us to spot subtle vandalism. I wouldn't go to your workplace and change all the settings on your workstation and then tell you off for complaining about it, could the Foundation try to have the same respect for us? DuncanHill (talk) 18:45, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Something that would be interesting to check is how many active users have various things in their .css and .js pages specifically to rollback WMF-imposed changes they don't like. I guess it would be a rather nontrivial proportion. ;) Double sharp (talk) 06:22, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
It looks fairly uncommon, especially if you exclude gadgets. Personally, I'm finding it easier to spot some things. With a monospace font, it's easier to see punctuation and the difference between similarly shaped letters such as I and l. I agree with User:SlimVirgin that the wide characters mean that fewer words appear in the same amount of space. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, the monospaces font makes it much easier to see punctuation changes, which was sometimes hard to see with the old fonts. I think the line spacing is the main problem. It looks much better with 1.2em (rather than 1.6em), with the padding on the highlighted text also reduced. — Jts1882 | talk11:33, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm finding it harder to read punctuation at all, as the font is so small. That's despite implementing the changes recommended above & below. It's a big problem, hampering my editing considerably. Johnbod (talk) 12:34, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I some time ago enlarged the edit window font because it was too small, using common.css #wpTextbox1 {font-size: 110%;}. If what you say is correct, it appears I have no choice but to do the same for diffs. What's the CSS for that? ―Mandruss☎17:27, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
If you've implemented one of the changes above, you can set the font-size property to a larger percentage. For example:
Blargh, it's back, and bigger than before, and on a Monday no less. Here's a modified version of the Special:MyPage/vector.css change shown above. I don't know if I have the font-size exactly right; I just played with it until I looked reasonable to me. If someone knows where to dig in the site-wide CSS to get the font-size setting exactly right, feel free to change this code to reduce confusion:
I spoke quite in length about why there should be an option before this change was implemented. Unfortunately, the change was still made without an option, I don't know what we can do about that anymore than just telling the developers we want an option at the Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T250393 Don't fix what ain't broke comes to mind here. :/ --qedk (t愛c)18:39, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank God! Finally! This is a wonderful change! Thanks to the devs who implemented this after many horrible years of proportional fonts in diffs. This will make it so much easier to see things now. I can't tell you how overjoyed I am. Elizium23 (talk) 20:03, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
@Double sharp: The selector #pt-notifications has no declaration block applied to it, so it's being interpreted as a required parent to the .diff-editfont-monospace .diff-addedline, so the code won't run for anything that's not inside an added diff line inside a #pt-notifications element. You can fix this by either re-adding the {display: none} line you removed last week or by removing the #pt-notifications line entirely. --Yair rand (talk) 21:16, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
I'd be happy with the new typeface if the font were a point or two larger. My eyesight isn't quite good enough for the current size. And I shouldn't need to apply personal CSS to get basic accessibility (which is, by the way, supposedly a WMF priority). ―Mandruss☎12:47, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
Rather than change my common.css file directly, I created a separate CSS file and a Javascript file to load it so it can be managed by the script installer gadget. The script is User:Isaacl/script/diff-mono-font.js if anyone is interested in using it. If you don't have the script installer gadget enabled, see Wikipedia:User scripts § How do you install user scripts? for instructions on installing the script manually. Be aware though that the font used may change based on my own personal preference. If you find a font you like, you can clone the CSS file and script and set the font you want to use in the CSS file. isaacl (talk) 06:22, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, my CSS file will retrieve the font from Google's web site if you don't have it installed already. (I may remove this later, in which case you will have to download and install one of the fonts listed in the CSS file, or default to whatever font is configured in your browser as the monospace font.) If you want to use a specific font and don't mind having your browser use it on other sites as well, you can use the CSS modifications others have proposed but change the font-family to "monospace", download and install the font you want to use, and change your browser configuration to use it as the monospace font. Alternatively after downloading and installing the font, you can use the CSS modifications but change the font-family to your preferred font. isaacl (talk) 16:18, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
We do warn people that tweaking their scripts if they don't know what they are doing could compromise their account, and warn them especially that using import is even riskier. basically, for anyone asking about this now: if you import this in to your User:xxx/xxx.js page then isaacl can make your account do most anything they want in the future without you asking; forking it by copy-pasting the code will mean you trust what it is doing now, and isaacl's future changes (good or bad) won't go to you. And yes, if you include external links, they can be used to track you. — xaosfluxTalk16:24, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Sorry for not providing the appropriate caveats. Upon reflection, I no longer suggest using my scripts directly; Xaosflux is correct that the risk is high. I strongly encourage anyone to clone my changes to your own personal scripts if you want to be able to enable/disable them using the script installer, as I did. You can take out the @import statement now and download and install your font of choice, and trim down the CSS file to just include the font you want. (Is there a way for me to block my scripts from being used by others?) isaacl (talk) 16:40, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
@Isaacl: There's nothing wrong with offering user scripts... there are thousands of them here. The risk you run with this script is the same you run with any other. It just wasn't obvious that this one sends your IP to Google, was my complaint. I see you've clarified that, so no concerns on my end. — MusikAnimaltalk16:53, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I know; but Xaosflux is correct on highlighting the general concerns and I can't in good conscience say that the benefit/risk ratio is all that high. I've removed the @import statement now to avoid the concern about third-party servers (to be honest, I think referrer information was a bigger problem; yes caching would have alleviated it but that of course is uncertain). isaacl (talk) 16:59, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't see the point. If people are unwilling to amend their common.css, why are they going to be more willing to amend their common.js? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:49, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Be careful, some of us are 63 years old, and not scriptkiddies. Some of us are even older. Imagine that. The word used shouldn't be "Unwilling" perhaps "unable" would be more suitable. Most of us are here to write an encyclopedia, not to become scriptkiddies. -Roxy the effin dog .wooF17:57, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
With the script installer gadget enabled, you don't have to edit your common.js file directly. An install link is shown on the user script page that you can click. If you're not willing to enable the script installer gadget, then I agree there isn't much point. (Personally I have no issues editing those files, but I like the ability to enable and disable the addition through the gadget.) isaacl (talk) 18:09, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Primitive font in diff views
Suddenly, the article text in diff views is in a primitive-looking font, a bit like a 60's attempt to look futuristic. It's horrible. It's also got the letters f a r t o o f a r apart from each other. How do I get rid of it? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 18:34, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi, Currently I'm using the previous Wikipedia font at User:Davey2010/vector.css (because I dislike the new one), Anyway now whenever I preview someones edits both preview boxes are now using the new font,
Is there a way around this ?,
FWIW the vector.css coding was copied from VP/T when people didn't like the font,
Anyway thanks, Regards, –Davey2010Talk19:57, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
@Davey2010: Hmm, you copied the wrong snippet from somewhere I guess.
Hi QEDK, To my knowledge it was copied from here, Up until now the old font was used both in diff box and everywhere else, Also that code doesn't appear to work unless I've done something else wrong ?,
FWIW a whole of people here are using the exact same code as mine however by the looks of it people copied it all on the 4th April 2014, Also found a discussion here however that makes no mention of "bodyContent" (which is in the vector page) so I have no idea where I copied the code from, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk20:43, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
@SlimVirgin, Redrose64, and Jonesey95: I love you all thank you os much!, I'm convinced the diff view isn't the same font but I can live with it, Hell of a lot better than the new font that's for sure!, Thanks to you 3 as well as everyone above for their help :), Thanks, –Davey2010Talk22:08, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
Similar question, i guess: Has something changed in the way diffs are shown? I didn't edit yesterday, i think, so sometime between two days ago and today diffs are showing in a very different size and format and so on, that is not nearly as convenient for me to look at. I haven't made any edits in ages to any .js or .css files, so i can't have done anything wrongly. Any ideas, especially ideas on how i can get my previous view of diffs back? Happy days, LindsayHello08:32, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, what? Is it me you're shouting at? If so, i'm afraid you've lost me. This particular section, when i added my comment/question, was in a different spot on the page, so the context was entirely different. In addition, i have added the code to my .css file and the diffs still show in a different font from that they used to be in. If it was not me you were shouting at, then please ignore my explanation. Happy days, LindsayHello15:43, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Wasn't you. It was a general complaint about Life, the Universe, everything and pointless font changes, and impossible to follow instructions. Additionally, it was frustration at the WMF fixing something that isn't broken, and nobody asked for. -Roxy the effin dog .wooF15:46, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
When this change first happened, I wondered if my browser was playing up, nope, it has been done deliberately. Not a fan of the new diff font.--♦IanMacM♦(talk to me)15:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
User:QEDK, it sounds like you missed Elizium23's comments above. Also, it's worth remembering that people who like it, or who don't care either way, have very little reason to come to this page to say so. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
No offense @Whatamidoing (WMF): but "no one" obviously does not mean no one, it means most people (here atleast). You are choosing to assume the opinion of the silent majority in the favour of the change instead of appropriately highlighting the complaints made here at the appropriate board, that's in extremely bad taste, imo. --qedk (t愛c)16:49, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
I have no idea what most people think. If there is a silent majority, then it hasn't spoken to me. Perhaps it hasn't yet decided what it thinks.
I believe, based on research by other/non-wiki websites into website development, that when you change something as visible as the font, and as obvious as this change is, that it takes people a week or two of seeing the new thing to adapt.
I can tell you that when I saw this the first time, I expected more complaints than have appeared, and I expected them to be universal. However, I was wrong, because apparently some of the non-English communities prefer this. Perhaps in addition to your language/script, it also depends upon how you use diffs? I imagine that the monospace font is handy for checking edits to templates, less convenient for reading the diffs of long comments on talk pages, but unimportant if you keep up with discussions by actually reading the page (instead of the diff column). I read a lot of busy pages in diff mode, so I'm finding that I'm somewhat more likely to ⌘F down to read long comments than before. But someone who doesn't read like I do might not even notice.
Also, if you don't have your edit-window font set to monospace (Do you remember the editors complaining when that default changed here? But no complaints after the first couple of weeks...), then you probably didn't see any change. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
I use diffs primarily to spot vandalism, something not apparently of any importance to the Foundation accounts posting here, who only seem interested in talk pages and templates. The new font makes it harder. DuncanHill (talk) 19:07, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
It's a harder font to read quickly. That was a particularly blatant piece of vandalism so not a great example. And no, before you ask, I'm not going to waste my time producing loads of diffs of vandalism and screenshotting them for you, not least because I can't do a "before and after". And also I don't believe the Foundation would take any notice. "We hear what you say but all the people who haven't said anything love the change, and so will you in time as we know your minds better than you do" is the line they are taking, as they always do. DuncanHill (talk) 19:30, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@DuncanHill: OK thanks - I went looking for an example of vandalism that was now hard to see in diff view, but after about 50 diffs I couldn't really find one - if you come across one perhaps you could drop the diff here? While we certainly can't fix things for every WMF project, or wikimedia core locally - we could possibly implement local tweaks to improve the experience, but would need to have some good use cases to build upon. — xaosfluxTalk19:53, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): People giving up complaining after one or two weeks does not translate to it being fine with them, they just don't see it as a choice. Even after multiple editors posted on Phabricator against it (and that is not common at all), the change was not reverted and nor was an option given to choose different styles. I understand that all changes cannot be notified but to railroad things after they are disliked is just plain mean. I had it set to monospace yeah, the 2010 editor forces monospace afaik, so in both spaces I'm stuck on that accord, not that I mind (the font is too big for me imo), but a lot of others do. I'm just trying to make opinions heard because everytime a change like this is forced upon us, we feel that you're taking away our right to choose, remember the survey which apparently had 4% opposition or something? Or the time that superprotect was decided? And finally little instances like these. The community really does not ask for a lot - we don't need flashy features, we just don't want things that are okay to be broken, is that so hard to ask? I hope you understand my viewpoint. I just hope you (or whoever is responsible for passing on feedback) really does their due diligence and takes the opinions here to heart and does what is required. --qedk (t愛c)19:37, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
User:QEDK, I believe that you will find that I have not claimed to be a mind reader. I started writing a longer explanation, but it's probably off topic for VPT, so if you're interested, then please drop by my user talk page in a few minutes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
It astounds me that a major UI change was implemented with no apparent UI survey or testing in place. In my decades of involvement with software design and implementation, no company I've worked with would have done such a ham-handed job of making a glaring UI change. But then, the WMF has made it clear several times in the recent past that editors are taken for granted. Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)19:38, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm not convinced that this is a "major" UI change. People who think changing one font in one place is a "major" change probably wants to get mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements on their watchlists, because some moderate-to-major changes are planned for the coming year. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
And with that comment this just descended into complete unprofessionalism. It isneverup to the developers in any competent software development organization to decide what is or is not a major change in UI. It neither should be up to en:wiki editors to be required to monitor meta for anything that affects their editing environment. To assert such is further evidence of WMF disconnect. I literally find monospaced fonts painfully difficult to read but my personal distress is not what I object to. It is the blasé assumption that that the WMF knows what is best without consultation. Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)22:14, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Improvements for readers is different than improvements for editors; since there's no way to solicit most of the affected people, it's essential to rely on research, including A-B testing. I am also sympathetic to the argument that even for editors, there are a lot of features that are better designed through focus groups than community surveys. However choice of typeface is something text-based content creators have wanted over and over again, with everyone desiring a font that suits their own personal quirks. I can't imagine there is any research that editors using a monospaced font for editing would automatically attain a net benefit from a monospaced font over a sans-serif proportional font when viewing diffs. It's just too much of a personal choice. And unlike the interface for readers, where branding is an important factor, it plays no role for the diff viewer font. isaacl (talk) 23:17, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
(crossposting from User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF) I will give you a simple explanation - the more you believe that editors will simply be amenable to any change without doing your due diligence, the more editors you will lose. Everytime there is an misstep on the part of the Foundation, it is an erosion of confidence - and I do not understand why every change has to be justified! How easy is it to just fix the problem? Literally everytime, WP:FRAM, superprotect, you name it - it is absolutely insulting that user feedback is not respected. I'll tell you what - and this is what your eBay example did not cover, in a few weeks, people will finally learn to live with the new font, they will realize complaining is fruitless, but what they will remember is that they complained and no one cared. And the next time there is a misstep, this will be in their list of examples of why they don't think the WMF will do anything to resolve their issue. Take my word for it. --qedk (t愛c)16:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
FWIW, I think the change was quite reasonable, but the WMF did not handle the transition well. There should have been clear instructions on how to reverse the change posted right at the time of deployment. The unfortunate deploy-revert-redeploy also probably caused additional frustration. Style changes like this are always disruptive, even when they're positive changes, and efforts should be made to avoid messing up anyone's flow. --Yair rand (talk) 20:26, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@Yair rand: I did post instructions, not immediately it is true, but within half an hour of the change going live (25 minutes after, as far as I can determine). But if you read this thread from start to finish, it's surprising just how many participants clearly had not WP:READ what had already been posted and still asked for a fix even though I'd already done so. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:38, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm pretty sympathetic to the notion that there are some changes that should be done for the greater good even if there is a vocal dissenting minority. The typography refresh, for example, is something that benefited the large mass of anonymous Wikipedia readers. But if you look at any popular creation tool (such as integrated development environments) based around text, the user can customize the fonts used. If the initial release doesn't support this, I guarantee it'll be a top request. Back in the day, customizing an X11 configuration file was considered sufficient, but now people want to be able to do it more easily. It would have been desirable to invest the effort to allow the font used by the diff viewer to be configured, as it is for the edit area (I did forget how that was introduced). Yes, it would have meant some editors might have never learned how to configure the font to something more helpful for them, but they would have been no worse off than before. isaacl (talk) 22:53, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
@Isaacl: IIUC, previously there was no way (other than direct editing of CSS) to specify a font for diffs, but this change made it so that the font for diffs is the same as the one chosen for the edit area, which can be customized at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, and defaults to monospace. --Yair rand (talk) 00:12, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I know. Rather than assume all editors would be happy with tying them together, I feel it would be better to allow the font used for viewing diffs to be configured separately. isaacl (talk) 00:33, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Can we revert back to pre-2014 fonts/sizes and anything new should be done via RFC ? ... Not saying WMF etc are useless but time and time again thing's are changed and like 80-90% of the project doesn't like those changes ..... It's OUR eyes that are being tortured to death with these fonts so we should atleast get a say on what looks/is fine and what isn't. –Davey2010Talk23:04, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
A wild Courier appears!
In all seriousness, is there a reason why when I view diffs they are suddenly in Courier (or some similar serif monospaced) font? I find this type of font very difficult to read. This started this weekend for me with no changes to my .js or .css pages. I'm using monobook, if that makes any difference. Did I miss a technical change? Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)21:14, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Should we drop a link to this in CD or something so that other editors know? There should be wider notice of this change and its fix, I think. Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)05:35, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Hello.
As per the advice received from a fellow editor, I've just implemented a bit of code that will help me highlight any errors in referencing. It seems to have been successfully uploaded, but - as is recommended on the page where I put it - I thought that I'd check here and make certain that it's all kosher. Wouldn't want to compromise my account.
Please note, that when using "import" any changes that are made by the other person will apply to you as well. This can be good for bug-fixes, but bad if something breaking or disruptive were entered in there. You can just copy-and-paste the code from that page to avoid future changes. — xaosfluxTalk01:06, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Phantom line breaks
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
It was a combination with other things which apparently made it count as part of two blank lines which causes extra space in MediaWiki. The infobox is in a div.
1. One div, newline, blank line after this.
2. One div, thin space, newline, blank line after this.
3. Two blank lines after this.
The second spacing above is far larger than the first and even a bit larger than the third for me. I don't know all the rules. Just be happy if something works.
@Farvardyn: Post the code and calls as text so it can be tested. Your image is an unreadable mess of left-to-right and right-to-left text, and you don't even show any of the calls. Also say at which wiki the code runs. I guess it's not here when there is right-to-left text. And don't post the same question in multiple places. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:36, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
I highly appreciate your help.
{| class="wikitable"
{{#if:{{{boardgameclub1|}}}|
{{!}}-
! boardgameclub
{{!}} {{{boardgameclub1}}}
{{!}} {{{boardgameclub2}}}
}}
{{#if:{{{boardgamecenter1|}}}|
{{!}}-
! boardgame center
{{!}} {{{boardgamecenter1}}}
{{!}} {{{boardgamecenter2}}}
}}
|}
And here is the usage:
{{Shop|
boardgameclub1=value1|
boardgameclub2=value2
}}
PS. It seems code is not visible unless otherwise you click for `Edit` to see it! Also You can find it on StackOverflow link I gave above. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Farvardyn (talk • contribs) 15:52, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
@Farvardyn: Whitespace is stripped from the beginning and end of parser function parameters. MediaWiki requires some table code to be at the start of a line so I have added non-displayed code (I chose nowiki) before newlines we don't want stripped.[8]PrimeHunter (talk) 11:14, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
Sorry not directly here as I cannot upload screenshot and the code looks bad here. I highly appreciate your help. Farvardyn (talk) 13:22, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
@Farvardyn: I already linked Special:Version which shows three different sandbox features here: LuaSandbox, TemplateSandbox, SandboxLink. In most browsers you can search a page for a string with Ctrl+f. If you refer to User:PrimeHunter/sandbox9 then it's just an arbitrarily chosen page name and not a special sandbox feature. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:21, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Bug when creating new sections
Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments2 people in discussion
This has been bothering me for a some time now, hence I thought it is maybe time to post here. Do this:
Open any talkpage in a new tab or window (I've experienced this at Module talk:Mapframe last, but this page works too)
Click start a new section
Type something in the "Subject/headline"
Type something in the edit window.
Now, from the dropdown at the bottom, select "Wiki markup" and click on the <code></code> or anything else.
Why does the text end up in the "subject/headline box? It is extremely frustrating if you often work with templates/codes. Please tell me this isn't only me. Rehman10:08, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
It doesn't happen to me in Firefox. What is your browser? Is the typing cursor still in the edit area when it happens? For me, it inserts where the typing cursor is, or where it last was if it isn't in any of the fields. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:28, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm using Chrome 81.0.4044.138 (64-bit). The cursor is active in the edit Window - I can even type there, but clicking those codes always adds the text to the subject line. This happens only when #3 is followed though. If you head straight to the edit box, this doesn't happen. I have a bunch of extra elements enabled in Gadgets, but I don't know if one of them is causing this... Rehman12:10, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
It doesn't happen to me in the same Chrome version. Does it happen in safemode or if you log out? safemode doesn't run gadgets or other local scripts. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:18, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Yep safemode disables that part. Running in incognito (i.e. logged out), the issue isn't there. So probably one of those gadgets is causing this. Only if I know how to figure that out... Rehman12:34, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't have that enabled, but after spotting the phrase Syntax highlighting on that page, I spot the culprit. This is caused by the default syntax highlighter (the pen icon, next to "Advanced", on the top toolbar). Can you retry and confirm if this happens to you with that on? I'd like to file a bug report if so... Rehman12:57, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for helping pinpoint the cause of this issue, PrimeHunter. I have checked Commons, and it doesn't happen there as well. I will go ahead and file a bug report. Cheers, Rehman14:35, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Debug please
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi all. I would like to pull some stats for Good Article nominations and was hoping someone watching here would know an easier way to do it. Currently I am just importing into excel and using formulas to drag the info I need across. From 19 September 2010 a bot has been updating the WP:GAN page. So we have some pretty consistent edit summaries to follow since then. I was hoping there was a way to pull the information presented in the edit summaries out and put it in an excel spreadsheet. For example if we look at this revision history (screenshot to the right) we have GA Bot leaving edit summaries like:
New: Hannah Banana (Theatre, film, and drama)
On hold: Bianca Jackson by CountdownCrispy
On review: Ho Chi Minh City by ??? ??? must be an unknown editor
Failed: Party in the U.S.A. On review: Platinum by Jezhotwells
Passed: Great Fire of New York (1776) On hold: Platinum by Jezhotwells
Passed: Günther Specht On review: Émile Bouchard by Leech44 2nd opinion: French ironclad Armide by Dank
Often the edit summary is for one article, but sometimes it is for multiple ones. At the start there is a bit of interference from non-bot editors, but that becomes less as editors got used to the new system. The bot itself changed and is now called legobot. The edit summaries are pretty consistent though (see this for latest history revision). I believe all the possible options are presented above (New, On hold, On review, Failed, Passed, 2nd opinion).
New corresponds to when the article was nominated.
On review and On hold should be treated as review date (some editors use on review and then go to hold, some don't hold at all and others hold without putting it on review).
Failed and Passed are pretty self explanatory. It is possible for an editor to pass or fail an article without putting it on review, but this is rare.
2nd Opinion doesn't happen very often and while it may be interesting is not really as important as the others.
What I am hoping to do is to sort the info into a table. For example I would like to end up with something like this.
Article
Cagtegory
Reviewer
Review Date
Nominator
Nomination Date
Passed
Failed
1757 Hajj caravan raid
Warfare
Gog the Mild
14/11/2018
13/11/2018
14/01/2019
2001 Motorola 220
Sports and recreation
Kpgjhpjm
20/12/2018
19/12/2018
01/01/2019
Unfortunately the bot doesn't record the nominator in the edit summaries, I am going to have to figure out another way to do that. I am happy to do the heavy lifting, but was hoping someone more technically minded can suggest better tools, methods or might even have a bot capable of extracting the info. There are a lot of revisions ~30 a day, so a 500 revision page covers roughly 2 weeks. AIRcorn(talk)22:29, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Color contrast
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
About a week ago, I was playing around with color contrast options on some "preference" page. I made a change, but it's too bright. I want to revert back to the default, but I can't locate the page where I had the options to change color contrast. Thanks for your help. --Rosiestep (talk) 05:56, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
Stacked toggle buttons in the medical cases chart template
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I am posting my concern at the talk page for the medical cases chart template here because traffic there seems to be lesser than other highly visible noticeboards. Someone seems to have messed up with the code. As a result, the toggle buttons appear to be stacked, whereas they are supposed to appear in a single row. This is quite concerning because the template is being transcluded in so many templates that display the chart of COVID-19 cases in several countries and other localities. LSGH (talk) (contributions) 17:17, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
This article, Willys M38, has an infobox that is generating one of those "mini-summary" lines, referred to as "title description" in my iOS client. This similar article, M151 ¼-ton 4×4 utility truck, uses the automobile infobox rather than weapon, and does not generate such a title, although I see one on-screen in the iOS client.
I'd like to edit both of these descriptions. How do I do that through my desktop browser in both cases - they appear to use different mechanisms, neither of which is either obvious or immediately visible. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:51, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
The article Willys M38 has the short description "Type of 1⁄4 short ton (230 kg)?'"`UNIQ--ref-00000001-QINU`"'? 4x4 Utility truck". I think strip marker is because |type= in the infobox template includes a note. — Jts1882 | talk12:54, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Dispute Resolution Notice Board
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
We do not have a "References" section at the bottom of the page, so when editors file a DRN it shows up as part of the last DRN filed. Can this be corrected so it does not look like it is part of the DRN? If you look at the bottom of Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard you will see what I mean. Thanks for looking into this. Galendalia CVU Member \ Chat Me Up09:00, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
I thought something was up Francis Schonken when I noticed it completely disappeared from the bottom of the page lol. Thanks. It looks much better!!!! Courtesy ping @Robert McClenon: - Robert if you look at the discussion psych the references are now listed at the bottom of that thread. I like it much better and I believe they will archive with the thread if I am not mistaken? Galendalia CVU Member \ Chat Me Up09:22, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, it will archive with the thread – that's why this is a better approach than creating a references section at the bottom of the page. --Francis Schonken (talk) 09:27, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
User:Francis Schonken - Thank you. As I was explaining to User:Galendalia, having the footnotes show up at the bottom of the last discussion on the noticeboard was a misfeature, not a bug. It was working as designed, and I didn't feel like adding the reflist manually. Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:15, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
User rights issue
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I have recently enabled the gadget Twinkle in my User Preferences page. I don't have the rollback right in English wiki (my rights). I would like to know why I have options to rollback when viewing the Revision History of articles. File:Revision History.JPG shows that I have 3 buttons enabled related to rollback. This was one such edit done by me. Adithyak1997 (talk) 11:01, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi@Adithyak1997: every user gets those links. When you have rollback rights you get additional links as well and it allows you to use programs like Huggle. I hope this helps. When you have questions like this you can go to the Teahouse and someone is always in there to answer questions. Galendalia CVU Member \ Chat Me Up11:16, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Twinkle's "rollback" feature is not the same as true WP:ROLLBACK. For a start, Twinkle doesn't need you to have the rollback right (as you noticed). Second, your edit shows "(Tag: Undo)" - a true rollback would show "(Tag: Rollback)" instead. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:03, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Bot issues
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Who handles bot issues if the editor has seemed to vanish? Galendalia CVU Member \ Chat Me Up 11:21, 11 May 2020 (UTC) DRN bot is not properly updating the templates it stopped around the middle of March and attempts to reach the creator have failed and their talk page is filled with questions not answered. Thanks again Galendalia CVU Member \ Chat Me Up11:21, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
BON is fine if the bot is actually doing something wrong - if it is simply not making contributions the only place to go is to its operator's talk page - if they are also inactive in most cases no one else is going to make their bot do anything. — xaosfluxTalk18:12, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Everyone can now import photos from Flickr to Commons with the UploadWizard. Before this only autopatrollers on Commons could import photos from Flickr. [10]
Problems
Commons will be on read-only for a few minutes on 12 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [11]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [12][13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 May. It will be on all wikis from 14 May (calendar).
Future changes
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via mw.config.exists() or mw.user.tokens.exists(). You can use exists() or get() to check one at a time instead. [14]
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
I have a problem bothered me just know. When I start to edit a Lua module, it doesn't load the editor, just redirect to view mode instead, and the problem also affect a TemplateStyles. I used Firefox 68.8 for Android, and I used User-Agent Switcher and Manager to switch desktop and mobile modes, however both two modes got the same problem. Anyone know have an idea as to why this is happening? --Great Brightstar (talk) 16:33, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Oh I just installed Kiwi Browser Quadea, than I found all editors works for me even if I edit these pages, however while I switched back to Firefox, the problem happen to me again, no any warning or notice for me. --Great Brightstar (talk) 10:47, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
Add option filter data in tables
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
@Sivakumar1605: it would be useful, but this is not currently technically possible. There is an open phabricator task (phab:T238309) to add it, but it hasn't seen much discussion there and the only technical respondent so far was unconvinced of the need. It has remained prioritised since November 2019. If you or anyone else knows of any previous discussion about this idea on-wiki it would be useful to link to it. Thryduulf (talk) 10:03, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
Writing a gadget that would do this sounds like a good challenge for anyone who wants to practice their Javascript. Maybe you could find someone to write it by posting at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), which I would guess is where people who are into that sort of thing hang out. Phil Bridger (talk) 11:43, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
Works for me. Try to log out here and delete your wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org cookies, or try another browser or computer. Post your browser if you want cookie deletion help. You can also delete all your cookies if you are willing to delete cookies for other sites. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:08, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
I use Safari 13.1.1. I tried again and I got a message that the automatic account creation does not work because my name is blacklisted. I have now asked on arWP in the village pump if anyone can change this. --Killarnee (T•1•2) 15:51, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Addendum: It still doesn't work. I can log in, but as soon as I want to edit a page I get the message: منع أسماء المستخدمين غير المقبولة من التحرير --Killarnee (T•1•2) 18:50, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks @Xaosflux: for mention. @Killarnee: The problem is that, the first four letters of your name "kill" is in the black list. I will try to modify the abusefilter for you.--Dr-Taher (talk) 02:21, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
Template-populated categories are often very slow to update after template edits. The categories displayed on the pages are often updated far faster than the category pages. I examined 10 pages in Category:Redirects from fictional characters and they all showed the new name Category:All fictional character redirects. A purge of a page only updates which categories are displayed on the page itself. A null edit also updates link tables so the category page will be updated immediately. It appears the job queue only does purges at first in many cases. Google's cache shows 38,199 pages 8 May. There were around 33,000 when you posted and 31,995 now (dropped 100 while I wrote this) so it has started emptying. The new name currently says 6,207 pages. We could speed it up with 32,000 null edits but I see no need to burden the servers with that. Help:Job queue#Updating links tables when a template changes and mw:Manual:Job queue#Updating links tables when a template changes give the impression link tables are updated at the same time as the pages themselves but that seems wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:28, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
I have added a link to a feature request that is at least five years old. But hey, we got a new diff font that everybody loves! – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:27, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
I want to finish fixing the references, but visual editor chokes and won't run. I thought it might be a temporary glitch but it failed yesterday and still fails. It's 48k, but I've used VE on larger articles.
@Sphilbrick: It seems to be working for me, but saving does take a while. I also ran my reference expander script on the page at User:BrandonXLF/C for testing of the script and I thought the page might be useful for you.– BrandonXLF (talk)01:25, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, I tried again and failed. I've had some computer issues (though I think they are wifi related, and I'm directly connected) so I tried a speed check and have 450 mps, so it isn't that. Thanks for running the reference expander script, that's exactly what I wanted to do. Can I install that myself? S Philbrick(Talk)12:05, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, If I follow, adding "?action=submit" brings up the old editor, which I use extensively. I like VE for converting bare url's, and for working with tables. although maybe I won't need the convert functionality after installing your script. Thanks for pointing me to it. S Philbrick(Talk)20:44, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, Thanks for creating the ticket. On the one hand, it's not a small table, but I'm fairly certain I've seen many much larger. For example, I've recently worked on Honda Sports Award, which is larger in the aggregate. It is made up of smaller individual tables, which may be relevant, although VE doesn't open sections, it open the whole thing.S Philbrick(Talk)00:30, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes, a null edit remakes the whole page (including the table entries relating to outward links) whereas a purge merely freshens the display on that particular page. So if you amend a transcluded page (such as a template's doc) it's desirable to null edit the pages transcluding that page (such as the parent template). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:50, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Wrong Fabric? WikiMedia Foundation Errors, May 2020
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Are Wikimedia Foundation Errors supposed to go to the Phabricators? Are there systems programmers who've looked at previously reported
errors?
As of this moment, for the first time in my over six months of seeing these problems, I'm getting this on TWO edits.
Below, interleaved, are a list for passing to the appropriate parties, who can presumably change/rollback whatever system parameter(s) may
be causing this.
Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.
See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information.
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.
Request from (Redacted) via cp1087 frontend, Varnish XID 6238131
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 12 May 2020 00:38:57 GMT
Request from (Redacted) via cp1087 frontend, Varnish XID 22255412
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 12 May 2020 00:39:14 GMT
Request from (Redacted) via cp1087 frontend, Varnish XID 18834531
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 12 May 2020 01:04:12 GMT
Request from (Redacted) via cp1087 frontend, Varnish XID 23617505
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 12 May 2020 01:03:44 GMT
Request from (Redacted) via cp1087 frontend, Varnish XID 23710071
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 12 May 2020 01:05:28 GMT
Thanks in advance for forwarding to a systems programmer, to at least look into an error log regarding the above. Pi314m (talk) 02:03, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
@Pi314m: Are you still seeing the errors? It's possible that they showed up because of some maintenance work that might be happening. They usually go away in a little bit. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 05:34, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
There was a note on Commons stating that a server is being restarted (or something like that) from UTC 05:00 to 05:30 today, and it did say things will become read-only during this time. Could be related. Rehman05:46, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
The errors haven't totally gone away, but in the past 48 hours none of them have been as persistant. One or perhaps two clicks on RETRY
Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
Hello. My pings are working perfectly - except for pings to Girth Summit. For example, I tested this by trying to ping them on my sandbox and it didn't go through. Both of us don't get the notification that the ping was sent/received. We communicate a lot as Girth is training me at WP:CVU so it would be great if someone can help with this. I am using Google Chrome on Windows 10. Thanks sm, Hillelfrei talk 17:04, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
@Rehman: I forgot to sign in my test but in general it's not working even when I sign. Just re-did it on my sandbox and signed and it didn't work. To make things more confusing, the first message I sent on this forum did send the ping. Any ideas? Hillelfrei talk 17:08, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the information. Is it possible that previewing an edit on quick edit will cause the ping to not go through? Hillelfrei talk 17:44, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
// A regexp matching a templates used to mark uncategorized pages, if your wiki does have that.// If not, set it to null.uncat_regexp:/\{\{\s*[Uu]ncategorized\s*[^}]*\}\}\s*(<!--.*?-->\s*)?/g,
These lines are responsible for detecting the templates, which need to be removed when categories are being added. However, the script does not mention "nocat". —andrybak (talk) 15:47, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
In mobile view (iPhone 8, iOS 13.3.1, Safari), the article Seht, er lebt displays an audio control with no content. This control is not shown in desktop view. Update: I can eliminate the control by deleting the parameter "vorbis=1" and will do so since this is a Main Page DYK entry. Jmar67 (talk) 23:39, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
I have restored the parameter that generates the audio file. I had deleted it because the article was on DYK. In mobile view I see the player control but there is no file to play. In desktop view on mobile, the player is not even visible. Jmar67 (talk) 00:15, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
@Xaosflux and Jmar67: The reason it doesn't work is that iOS doesn't support Ogg Vorbis files by default. Normal Ogg Vorbis files have been transcoded to MP3 server-side since January 2018, but it looks like this wasn't implemented for the Score extension. Jc86035 (talk) 16:18, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Is there any way to get alerted when certain text appears on a page? I want to be alerted whenever a particular user's name is mentioned on WP:AN (or a subpage). -- RoySmith(talk)15:01, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
@RoySmith: "Stalked" mentions are somewhat discussed in phab:T50892, though I doubt it will get implemented in to echo without an opt-in from the stalked user, and if it did it would still only apply to linked mentions, not "text". I don't expect anyone will make this 'easy' because of the resistance to things that will "stalk" people. — xaosfluxTalk15:13, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
It could probably be done with some sort of outside software. I once wondered whether something like an RSS feed would ping me any time the word "visual" appeared on this page. I never got around to trying it, though. (Consequently, please ping me whenever you want my attention.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): depending on the capabilities of your RSS software you can do something like that - you would need to watchlist all the pages you care about, and not watchlist pages you don't care about as well. — xaosfluxTalk15:44, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
See, it's that assumption about "your RSS software" that we'd have to deal with first. ;-p
It certainly is possible, as every edit is public. You can monitor the entire recent changes feed and parse all the text, like the way some of the anti-vandalism bots do - then have your processing service send you some sort of notification. We could also make an edit filter to look for a word and you could monitor the filter log, but there would really need to be a good reason not just because one user wants to watch for a word anywhere. — xaosfluxTalk15:42, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Visual editor not loading
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
I'm not sure what happened, but recently Visual Editor isn't loading up for me. It appears to be loading on other wikis, so this appears to be site-specific. I have tried toggling the Visual Editor and the editing toolbar in my Preferences to no avail. I have also cleared my cache without changing anything. I suspect it could be a Javascript issue, but I only recently edited my common.js with minor addition. The browser (Chrome) recognises that I tried to access the Visual Editor by appending &veaction=edit at the end of the URL. Anyone know have an idea as to why this is happening? (please mention me on reply) —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 05:28, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Tenryuu, try adding &safemode=true to the URL and see if that works, if it does than it's a JavaScript issue. Also try loading with and without &debug=true and look for any errors in the console (press F12). – BrandonXLF (talk)07:20, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
@BrandonXLF: I've added both of those strings to the end of the URL and nothing new happens. What errors am I looking for in the console? —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 15:40, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
The other four skins load up VisualEditor with no apparent trouble; it appears to only be Modern that is the issue. I'm assuming what happened is that VE had an update which Modern neglected to be updated with. I have switched to back to the default Vector skin and it is working as intended. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 19:26, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
You are correct. The Modern skin needs an update to work with VE. This is Phabricator feature request T177243. The WMF apparently does not maintain the Modern skin, so someone from the community will have to make these updates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:35, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
I restored the local hack that was providing usability, so it should be okay now until that goes live. ~ Amory(u • t • c)18:27, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Use of the IABot to archive live links en masse
Latest comment: 4 years ago33 comments14 people in discussion
I would like to clarify best practices regarding the use of IABot to archive live links en masse, meaning can one start using IABot on any article and archive live links that actually work on their own? Thank you. Dr.K.02:46, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
This came from an inquiry by another editor on my talk page. My understanding has been that WP:LR supports the use of the IABot in this manner to ensure that sources stay available for our readers. If there is documentation/consensus somewhere that says that this is not to be the case I think we should make that clearer at that how-to-guide. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:51, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I participated in that discussion on Barkeep49's talk. I have used IABot on articles where there were no dead links, and am not aware of any reason not to. (I have only done so, however, while fixing other citation-related issues, like converting bare links with reFill). Mdaniels5757 (talk) 04:03, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Ok, to make myself clear, if the archiving of live links is acceptable, why not make a bot to automatically archive all extant links on Wikipedia, instead of doing it manually. Personally, I think the added bloat to the articles would be something excessive and would make navigation in editing mode more difficult. Dr.K.04:26, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
My understanding is that as soon as you add a reference with a URL, a backend process assures that the link, if possible is archived. using IABot to populate archiveurls into articles is not disallowed, but it is "busy" work. --Masem (t) 04:29, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I agree on both points. At WP:LR it is specified that all en.wiki links are automatically archived after 24 hrs. But archiving all links in all articles would create excess bloat, which you described well as "busy" work. Dr.K.04:35, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
The bot has an optional feature (check box) to archive all links, even live. The feature has always been controversial. Some want it, others do not. The bot operator/coder wants to keep it. I don't think you'll have much luck removing the feature, but you might be able to regulate it. One solution is to specifically mention the feature in the guidelines, and when it should be used, and how to resolve disputes over usage. -- GreenC05:06, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't know the background leading to this discussion but of course external links in references should be archived ASAP. Webpages disappear quickly and archiving later may not be possible, and usually cannot be done once it is needed because the original has gone. Johnuniq (talk) 05:25, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Per WP:LR, this is already done automatically at the IA server: All new links added to English Wikipedia mainspace are automatically saved to Wayback Machine within about 24 hours.. The issue here is if in addition to the automatic archiving at the source (at web archive), these links have to be archived live at the article as well. Dr.K.05:31, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I would assume the reason for including the archive meta tags in citations would be so editors could repair broken links without needing to wait for or know how to use IABot. All the guidance appears to encourage editors to add at least an “|archive-url”, including Help:Archiving a source, Help:Using the Wayback Machine and Wikipedia:Link rot. I don’t see how that would add “bloat”, as the tags are self-contained in citations and adding them to even large articles only adds a few kilobytes. XPEric (talk) 07:23, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I agree that reference-urls should be archived at the earliest possibility after a reference is added (just in case it changes/disappears later in time, you can check whether the information was correct at the time of the edit). also agree it is good practice to have the backup-url in the article, but it is and remains a convenience link, it makes our life easier, but if the archive exists then we can always find it. I therefore would not encourage a bot to add the parameter soon after the page was edited (on some pages that would result in bot edits a handful times a day, every time a new reference is added and archived). The archiving itself should be ASAP, adding of the url to the page can either be done manually, or by bot once every so much time (weekly?). --Dirk BeetstraTC07:54, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
@Dr.K.: since you have this here on VPT: What is the technical issue you are trying to resolve here? Can you point to a diff of the issue occuring? — xaosfluxTalk11:48, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
This is a very good and practical question Xaosflux. This is a good example of an edit adding 31,495 KB into a 107,722 KB article by rescuing 181 sources that were live. It automatically bumped the article to 139,217 KB and bloated it by approx. 30%. Now imagine this being done to every article on Wikipedia en masse. Also, let's no forget that these links did not need to be rescued because they were live, thus working. In addition, per WP:LR: All new links added to English Wikipedia mainspace are automatically saved to Wayback Machine within about 24 hours., thus archived copies of these links already exist at the Internet Archive, making retrieval of these links in the future easy. Therefore, the added bloat of ca. 30% additional KB added to the article was unnecessary. Dr.K.12:19, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
@Dr.K.: thank you, but like most things people raise about this "bot" it doesn't seem to be a bot problem at all - that edit was made by an editor, XPEric - and if this is mostly about if that is an appropriate edit for someone to make it isn't really a technical problem but a user behavior/editing guidelines concern isn't it? — xaosfluxTalk14:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Strictly speaking you are correct Xaosflux. After posting here, I also thought that VP Technical was not the right venue and even said so to Barkeep who then posted at VP Miscellaneous as well. The problem is not so much on the technical side, but rather lies in the lack of guidelines on how to use the bot properly and uncontroversially. Having said that, since this is a bot forum, guidelines for bot use may also be within the spirit of this place. 15:52, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I think that doing this en-masse is against the spirit of WP:CITEVAR. It should certainly not be done by a bot, since this is clearly a controversial issue, and bots should be limited to actions that have consensus per the bot policy at WP:BOTREQUIRE bullet #4. I also agree with Dr. K's point about readability. The citation templates have become so bloated that a lot of articles are now virtually unreadable in edit mode. The argument that this saves editors the bother of trawling through the archives is a bit thin. IABot automatically rescues deadlinks so a human rescue is only really needed if it is an emergency. SpinningSpark15:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @Spinningspark: I'm a bit lost here - if there is an actual bot account that is making bad edits, and the operator isn't responding to feedback - lets follow it up at WP:BOTN. The only edit I'm seeing referenced in this discussion was made by a live human editor who should be responsible for whatever they publish. — xaosfluxTalk15:30, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
The opening of this thread claims that edits are being (or could be) made "en masse". That phrase implies either a bot or bot-like editing. My apologies if the bot is not actually capable of doing that. My other comments still stand. SpinningSpark15:42, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
A rapid succession of edits was made to 13 articles in 13 minutes using the optional functionality of IABot to archive live links inside the articles. I reverted the edits and warned the operator of the IABot to stop. Given that there are no clear guidelines on this type of editing I came here, after discussion with Barkeep, to clarify this. The IABot operator spoke to Barkeep about my reverts of his semi-automated mass edits and wanted clarification. By the way, I also use IABot, but only to rescue dead links. I never choose the option to archive live links inside the article, for the reasons enumerated above by myself and others, including Spinningspark who actually made some excellent arguments against such use. Dr.K.16:20, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
This is just like saying someone made a lot of edit with AWB, or with "Chrome", or with any other editing environment. Not really a technical issue, its an editor issue isn't it? — xaosfluxTalk16:43, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
It is a technical issue insofar as the option to archive live links is given to the operator of IABot. Perhaps, it should not be given, since archiving live links creates bloat in articles. It is also an editor issue and lack of guidelines issue. It has elicited opinions that are helpful in clarifying the issues involved so it was valuable. However, it has not solved all the associated problems. If you can suggest a better venue, we can move this discussion there. Dr.K.17:34, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
What I'm saying is that the option to just blank an entire page is there every time you click edit, but that doesn't make it your browsers fault if you do so. If editors are making inappropriate edits, point them to some documented editing guidelines on how they can improve. — xaosfluxTalk17:44, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
I would fully agree with you, Xaosflux, except one of the issues here is that there is no guideline saying that mass-archiving live links is frowned upon. To the contrary, what little guidance exists seems to allow this practice. Dr.K.17:51, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @Xaosflux: Yes, definitely, documentation is not a tech issue. :) Perhaps, we can add some information to the links you so helpfully provided, as well as WP:LR or even the interface of IABot near the archive live links button or on the bot's wiki page. Such reference would provide guidance so that we don't have to discuss this issue every time it pops up. Dr.K.18:56, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Dr.K., I would say this looks to be settled here. In any event, what the user chooses to do with IABot, is the responsibility of the user. If the user is in violation of specific guidelines, any admin can block said user from using the tool. —CYBERPOWER(Chat)19:17, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, Cyberpower678. Yes, I agree with you, and I think we are done here. By the way, IABot is currently down giving an "Interface disabled" message. Hopefully you can fix it. Best regards, and stay safe. Dr.K.20:01, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Don't get me wrong, it's not a big deal, but I'm curious. Why does the local "Stewards" group exist? Stewards are global and they don't need this local group to exist AFAIK. Is this a remnant of a past when local stewards were either a thing or considered as an option? Or is there an actual reason why a group without members needs to exist? - Alexis Jazz18:59, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
@Alexis Jazz: "stewards" local group is part of the default groups in the WMF wiki's config (every single project has it, and it is normally empty). So no need to deal with removing it only here on enwiki - you can raise a request at phabricator if you want the default updated. — xaosfluxTalk19:23, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
Steward's note: This user group is used for edge-cases, when we need to manipulate with user groups that aren't available at Meta. Hence, this group needs to exist as a technical one, to be used in cases of need. Best, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 20:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
In inline citation, is there a way to have a reference number like in a footnote but not in superscript and not in brackets?
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Suppose that an article uses footnote-style referencing, so that references appear as bracketed numbers in superscript, like this.[1] This is achieved e.g. using the following markup: <ref name="Doe 2020">{{cite journal |last1=Doe |first1=J. |date=2020 |title=An important article. |journal=J. Big Results |volume=21 |pages=234–235 }}</ref>. (It can also be achieved using the refn template.)
It would be nice to be able to refer to this reference directly, e.g. like this:
As explained in Ref. 1, …
But, apart from not being superscripted and not being enclosed in brackets, this ‘1’ in ‘Ref. 1’ should have the same properties as the superscripted reference. In particular, it should have the following three properties:
It should be generated automatically, from the supplied reference name in the wiki markup (i.e. the engine should know how to convert the name "Doe 2020" to the appropriate number);
It should link to the correct entry in the list of citations.
It should show the reference when the mouse pointer hovers over it (the same tooltip behavior as the superscripted reference).
It would additionally be nice if there were an option to retain the brackets, so that the citation looks like this: As explained in Ref. [1], …
In short, whatever generates the ‘1’ in ‘Ref. 1’ should work just like refn, except that the output should not be superscripted and (optionally) the number should not be in brackets.
I realize that, in a great majority of cases, one just summarizes what the source says and provides a superscripted reference without needing to directly refer to that reference; and I realize that on the rare occasions when sources do have to be discussed, the "workaround" mentioned above is the preferred method. Indeed, scholarly literature has these same two guidelines. And yet, scholarly literature does allow for usage such as 'Ref. 1', because it is recognized that there do exist some rare occasions when the usual, preferred way of talking about sources results in awkward constructions.
Please no, not that. Manual anchors are the worse things ever to maintain and will horribly break over time. If you need an inline ref, go with According to Doe (2020), ... or similar. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}01:04, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for your answer, Jonesey95. The #CITEREF trick gets us two-thirds of the way there: it generates the correct link to the list of citations and the correct tooltip. However, the automatic generation of the reference number is absolutely essential; as Headbomb points out, the solution is not practical without it. In addition, it seems that that, in order for the #CITEREF to work, either the article has to use list-defined references, or else in the article there needs to be, in addition to the [[#CITEREF... reference, at least one standard footnote reference to the same source. But this one might be able to live with, assuming other editors of the article can be persuaded to switch to list-defined references. --Reuqr (talk) 05:01, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
References
^ abDoe, J. (2020). "An important article". J. Big Results. 21: 234–235.
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
How might I check the current replication lag at the servers (I don't know what they're called now, it was Toolserver until mid 2014) that are used for database reports? I've suspected the existence of a significant replag for a week or so now, so yesterday I was careful to make exactly 100 edits, expecting my count at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits/1–1000 to increase by the same amount (100). Instead, it's increased by just 41, so there are at least 59 edits of mine that have not made it over to those other servers. My adminstats edit count for the same period shows an increase of 44 (excluding deleted edits). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:10, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I'd like to be able to set up the pages from the Help:Intro to series (e.g. Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines/2) so that, when transcluded, only the central text gets copied, not the tabs/border/etc. All of the extraneous stuff is coded at Template:Intro to, but when I think about adding an includeonly tag there, it applies to the Help:Intro pages themselves, not the transclusion of the those pages as desired. How do I get around this, so that the onlyinclude tags will end up resting at the level of the Help:Intro pages? {{u|Sdkb}}talk19:42, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
{{intro to}} can't do anything about this by itself other than possibly branching off of the name of the current page. There's of course lots of ways to do this that involve manually editing each individual page in the tutorial (I'd recommend adding adding <section begin="content" />...<section end="content"> inside the {{intro to}} transclusion, and then transcluding with {{#section:Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines/2|content}}, but simple <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags would work. If you insist on not editing individual pages of the tutorial, you might be able to hack something together with Module:String, Module:Page, and Module:Expand wikitext, but it would inevitably be fairly brittle. * Pppery *it has begun...20:21, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
An example of that last suggestion: {{strip categories|{{expand wikitext|{{#invoke:String|replace|{{#invoke:Page|getContent|Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines/2|as=raw}}|[iI]ntro to|1x|plain=false}}}}}} produces
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, and the community constantly strives for accuracy. Articles should be neutral and should contain only verifiable information and opinions that already exist in reliable sources.
Neutral point of view (or NPOV) means that content is written objectively and without bias, merely presenting the facts and notable viewpoints of others. A general-purpose encyclopedia ought not to contain articles that favor particular viewpoints. Striving for a neutral point of view helps prevent articles from becoming advertisements or propaganda.
Verifiability means that articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources, such as reputable newspapers and scholarly journals. All content should ideally be supported by a citation, but content that is controversial or likely to be challenged will definitely require one! Unsourced material may be removed at any time, and it is the obligation of the editor adding material to provide a reliable source.
No original research means that articles may not contain previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, opinions, or theories. This prohibition means that Wikipedia editors' own analysis or synthesis should not be included in articles. Basically, Wikipedia is a record of human knowledge, viewpoints, and summaries that already exist and are expressed elsewhere.
Thanks, Pppery! That code at the end is quite a glorious monstrosity haha. I think I'll just go with adding the section tags to each page — that seems a lot simpler, even if it does involve copying to each page to get it off the ground. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}}talk21:00, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Cluebot III has blown up my talk archive index. I am not certain what has gone wrong or how to fix it. Nor do I know the appropriate forum to seek an answer. I imagine the real error is my own. I came here for a clue by following a link from the bot’s user page. —¿philoserf? (talk) 16:19, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
(Philoserf I've moved your issue from ANI to here as technically you were at the wrong venue and 4 hours had passed with no help (I did try but couldn't find the issue although I suspect it's related to the heading page, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk19:22, 17 May 2020 (UTC))
I recall a spate of these a few years ago. I don't think there ever was an explanation and the solution was to blank the index and hope it got regenerated correctly. Johnuniq (talk) 23:58, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hi there! I've been on Wikipedia for a touch under four and a half years, and I had to get a new computer relatively recently. My new computer's screen is larger than my old one's and it affected the way certain Wikipedia pages are displayed. The problem occurs only when I am logged in and viewing a page in the mainspace. The issue is that the rightmost quarter of the screen seems to be some sort of a cut-off point, and no text will go beyond it. Any images present in a section, such as images displayed as thumbnails, will appear larger and always in that section of the screen. Is there a way to remedy this? I've linked images below that show my view of the Main Page when logged in and out.
@PrimeHunter: The content reaches the edge of the page in safemode (which I did not know existed until now), and the content starts out with the messed-up formatting when reloaded, rather than moving. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 23:20, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: The latter was the answer! Turns out I'd skipped over the "Improved appearance for mobile, narrow and wide screens" option in my preferences and didn't realize I had it checked. Thank you so much! PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 01:27, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Mystery whitespace on an image
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
This is only a preview; your changes have not yet been saved! → Go to editing area
Warning: Template:Infobox power station/sandbox is calling Module:WikidataIB with more than one value for the "1" parameter. Only the last value provided will be used. (Help)
If not you must have some CSS that suppresses it, such as
I saw the warning before the fix. Maybe you have enabled "Show previews without reloading the page" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. I don't. I previewed different parts to pin it down. It was tricky because there are 170 complicated calls of WikidataIB and four of them had errors. Fixed by [15]. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:06, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Curious that you don't get the box, I get it even when logged out so it must be part of the default setup. Anyway, the duplicates were fixed in the edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:08, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes it is "Show previews without reloading the page". I get the box when I disable that option. Rehman12:41, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Superfluous brackets
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Could somebody take a look at Ontario Highway 400#Exit list? There's a superfluous }} appearing between the section's introductory text and the actual table, but I've scoured the table several times in an attempt to fix the coding error and just can't find it. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:26, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
I think I've fixed it. The top template closes further down in the middle of the table. Cheers, Rehman14:45, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi folks, hoping this is the right place to ask for a little userscript help. I'm working on a modification to Headbomb's unreliable source highlighter script which will make it load custom rules from a userpage, my work-in-progress script is at User:Creffett/unreliable.js and the part I modified is the chunk starting with the comment "Dynamically load a user's custom rules". From my console log statements, I can see that my test rule is picked up and appended to the rules var correctly, but then the JQuery each() loop doesn't reach my custom rule - the logs show that the last rule it checks is the final hardcoded rule, "Reliability depends...". Any ideas why it's not iterating over the full array? creffett (talk) 12:30, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Well, the first thing I notice is that your log statement is outside your callback. Callbacks are run asynchronously, so the console.log statement will probably execute *before* the getScript statement has finished downloading the script, and therefore before the callback has had a chance to run and add the rules. Try adding a console.log within the callback and see if it gets executed there. Just a guess. Writ Keeper⚇♔13:00, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
...or I could do it now while my work code is running tests. That indeed did the trick, I reworked things so that the iterating call was a function called in the callback. Thanks! creffett (talk) 16:58, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You can choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This is a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for. This is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. [16][17]
Problems
There is a bug that creates problems for iPhone users with iOS 13 and Safari. If you use an iPhone to read or edit Wikipedia and see bugs on the mobile site you can report them. [18]
Several wikis including Wikidata will be on read-only for a few minutes on 19 May. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. English Wikipedia will be on read-only for a few minutes on 21 May 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. [19][20]
Graphs will be rendered in the reader's browser. This will use Javascript. Graphs will hopefully work better for everyone who uses Javascript. It will not work for users who don't use Javascript. This will not affect diagrams in image files. [22]
Some CSS for the skins has been simplified. This affects div#p-personal, div#p-navigation, div#p-interaction, div#p-tb, div#p-lang, div#p-namespaces, div#p-variants and div#footer. They will have to remove div. You will have to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. This is so we can use HTML5. [23]
Some CSS for the Vector skin has been changed. This affects #p-variants, #p-namespaces, #p-personal, #p-views and #p-cactions. They can no longer use > ul. You might need to update your gadgets, scripts or user styles. See how.
Latest comment: 4 years ago15 comments3 people in discussion
Heavy - annoying - black lines around the preview screen. Breaking up with line breaks (or whatever) This just started happening a few minutes ago. In the edit box, and this only appears in a preview mode (it was only on preview, but now I see it as I type this when I opened this to add this note) . On both Firefox 76.01.1 (32-bit) and Chrome. I am not in Beta, and I am not editing other than just regular style. I am looking at this issue right now as I type this.
See TFA Frank Matcham as one example. I open the edit screen on that, and I see those heavy black lines everywhere the system (seemingly) detects an extra space or something.
There's a heavy line at the top and at the left hand side, which seems consistent on this talk page. In article space, the heavy black line appears, it seems to me, where the system is detecting a space or line that breaks the page. It's unbelievably annoying to work in the edit screen this way. Visually, this is VERY distracting. Can we turn off this feature, whatever it is? — Maile (talk) 17:51, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
On a second look, it does appear in safe mode. But how it appears ... if I click on the safe mode link you gave, it's not immediately there. If I then click on the "Show preview" button, the problem shows up. Did you try it that way? — Maile (talk) 19:17, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
@Suffusion of Yellow: thanks for your advice. The problem would appear to be in the Gadgets syntax highlighter. Now it's a choice for me whether I want to go blind trying to edit in black and white, or see the colors but be annoyed by the malfunctioning visuals. At least I know what it is. — Maile (talk) 00:29, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
@Suffusion of Yellow: Just another odd thing, and probably because I don't know how to do this. I can take a screen shot of the issue, no problem. I can insert/paste the screen shot in just about anywhere outside of Wikipedia. But if I take the screen shot and try to insert it on Wikipedia or its affiliated sites, nothing happens. That is ... Print Screen ... Control-V to insert ... or the Insert key on my computer. Am I doing something wrong? — Maile (talk) 12:49, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Here's my screen shot. My first ever attempt at a screen shot. Note that the right-hand side has none of the black/bolded vertical lines. The top of the edit screen has a long black/bolded line, but not above the section header. The left side has the black/bolded vertical border between paragraphs, but not next to any text. The rest of the page that you can't see in this screen shot, is that the bottom of the edit window has no black/bolded line, nor does the right-hand side have a vertical black/bolded line. — Maile (talk) 14:37, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
From close examination, I think that the border is the same all the way around, but portions of it are being obscured by (i) the variously-coloured backgrounds of the highlighted elements; (ii) the scrollbar on the right. Where it's partially obscured, it appears thinner. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:57, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Well, until yesterday, that heavy black border wasn't there at all. When I first open an edit window, it isn't there. It's when I do a "Show changes" or "Show preview", and it essentially does a refresh, then the dark black border is there at all. Since this change happened right in the middle of something I was working on, I thought it might be a bug. But it also flips the opposite way, depending on the article. I just pulled up an article with no table formatting, no list involved, and the black link was solid. When I did a "Show preview", the black line disappeared from the screen. — Maile (talk) 18:55, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Proposed fix to Mediawiki:Common.js about section-jumping behavior
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I have proposed a fix to Common.js that might help with how autocollapsing boxes make the page jump around after navigating to a section header. That is, when navigating directly to a section near the bottom of AN, often times when the collapse box code and other javascript is done, the section is offscreen. This fix performs an additional jump to the section after the collapse box code. Comments are requested over there. Enterprisey (talk!) 19:24, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Issues with the API when logging in with a bot
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I am trying to make a bot for a non-WMF wiki. When I send a POST request to log in, I always get a 'NeedToken' error even though I get a token by querying for the login token, via https://.../api.php?action=query&meta=tokens&type=login&format=json.
I then respond with the body:
Where token is the token from response.query.tokens.logintoken.
I am aware that I need to manage and maintain cookies which I do by storing the Set-Cookie header from the response and then putting that back into the Cookie header of the request. That might have something to do with the issues I'm having.
The wiki is running on MW 1.34.0. I am using Deno and the Fetch API.
I did not know that you're talking about a non-WMF site, the documentation is only for the latest version of MediaWiki so it's possibly changed, my recommendation at this point is to use mw.Api()'s login method. --qedk (t愛c)15:42, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Ah, TBH I probably should have realized too. I'll try that. If it doesn't work I'll post on the support desk. - VeryGoodDog11:56, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
Possible issues with search function
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hello everyone! I hope it's the right place to ask this. I've created a number of pages recently, and I check pretty frequently if the articles that I create are correctly indicized by the WP internal search engine. I've noticed that many articles do not come up in the suggested articles when I write the name of the article in the search bar (the small list that appears whenever you write something in the search bar, for example if I type Abraham, it will show Abraham, Abraham Lincoln, Abrahamic religions and so on). This has happened with the more recent articles (some example: all the LNBP seasons but the 2000 and 2001 seasons, so if I type 2006 LNBP season, it will just suggest 2000 and 2001 but not the 2006 article; Amaury Filion is another example, does not appear at all; Nike Elite Youth Basketball League, same thing. So, I am wondering: is it just for me, or does this happen to other users, too? I've tried to access these articles on mobile, and the same thing happens. While I am able to access it by typing the name and clicking "Go", they do not appear as I type the name, so people possibly searching for these articles just have to guess they exist and click "Go", the search engine wouldn't show them in advance. Could you please check? Sorry if I got some terminology wrong and if my message is a bit wordy, but I did not know if I would be able to explain the issue correctly. --Triple 8~enwiki (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Hmm, WP's search function has never worked super great, but I'm not sure what's leading to that. Have the pages been approved by NPP yet? If not, perhaps they're being downranked because of that. {{u|Sdkb}}talk20:22, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
If it matters, the same phenomenon emerged at the Hungarian wiki only for a few users, irrespective of browser, system, ad filter, everything: the search engine does not return any article (or any page in any namespace) created after April 30. We are planning to log an issue on Phabricator. @Triple 8~enwiki: My question to you would be if you experience the anomaly starting with the same date, ie. pages you created before are okay, pages created afterwards do not show up in the search bar? Thanks! Please ping me when answering. Pasztilla (talk) 04:43, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
@Pasztilla: thanks for your reply. It does start on April 30, actually. 2002 LNBP season was created on April 30, and it's the first page not to appear in the engine – even though, the date only seems not to be the only issue. 2001 LNBP season was created on April 30 at 00:02 (should be UTC+01:00 as I am in that time zone). This page has no issue and appears in the search engine just fine. 2002 LNBP season, on the other hand, does not appear in the search engine, and it was created at 12:53 of April 30. So, my inference would be that something has happened between 00:02 and 12:53 on April 30 that messed up the search engine. --Triple 8~enwiki (talk) 14:27, 19 May 2020 (UTC) P.S. I see you pinged me but I didn't get any notification or anything. I just checked this page randomly if anyone had replied. I hope it works for you, I tried to ping you (this ping thing didn't exist in 2014 when I stopped editing on wiki for the first time)
@Johnuniq: as the Legobot "expert" around here during the continued silence of Legoktm, I shall explain.
In the diff you linked, Legobot added |rfcid=6F12A99 in two places: the second was correct, the first was due to WP:RFC#Duration (sentence beginning "Do not enclose") not being observed. That's kind-of an obscure place for what is really universal advice; it should at least be mentioned at Template:Rfc#Usage in the paragraph warning against nowiki. Technical expln: Legobot runs one an hour, and doesn't know that you're still working on your RfC. When it sees a page in Category:Wikipedia requests for comment, it searches the wikitext for two opening braces followed by the three letters "rfc" (case-insensitive). If it finds those five characters in that sequence, in any context, it assumes that it is the start of an open RfC. It continues the search to the end of the page, in case there is more than one open RfC. For all open RfCs without a |rfcid= parameter, it adds one. It is buggy, not just that it looks inside comments, but also that it doesn't conjure a different rfcid value each time (recent dramatic example).
Now to this edit. That was due to the lack of a timestamp following the first instance - the commented-out one mentioned above. Where two open RfCs have the same rfcid, only one of them gets posted on the listing page. When the comment line was removed in this edit (no cosmic rays were involved), Legobot noticed that and amended the listing entry. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:42, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank you. I guessed some of the first bit and I fully intended removing the commented-out rfc template but I got an edit conflict with Legobot when I saved. I must have been super lucky with my timing. That's interesting how it revisited an hour later and sorted out the issue. Johnuniq (talk) 09:27, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
Short description metadata issues
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I'm not sure how the short description stuff is getting into articles these days without {{Short description}} or {{SHORTDESC:}} being used; it seems to sometimes be imported directly from WikiData. E.g., William A. Spinks has no {{Short description}} in it, nor the magicword (though I'm about to fix that), yet it has a short description, possibly via infobox behavior.
The short description is followed by a block of links that look like "(Wikidata · Import · Edit and import)"; this span of text is broken in two ways:
Some of it is generated by CSS and is not actually part of the HTML content per se. It copies and mis-pastes as "WikidataImportEdit and import", and this is how some screen readers are going to misinterpret it. (However, this kind of behavior can vary by user agent.)
It is not being properly CSS-classed as unprintworthy self-reference, and it consequently is showing up in circumstances it should not, such as the output of Print/export > Print page in the left menu. It may need more CSS classes than just unprintworthy, such as nomobile noexcerpt noprint, as used in {{Short description}} for some other metadata.
WP:SHORTDESC says "The short description is normally invisible when visiting Wikipedia using a desktop browser. It is visible and used by the mobile interface." So, at this point a majority of our users are seeing the short descriptions. And even desktop users will if running something like MediaWiki:Gadget-Page descriptions.js (in the Gadgets section of Special:Preferences), or the original User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper. All of us should be using the gadget by now. WP:SHORTDESC says of short descriptions: "All articles should have a short description. ... The short description is part of the article content, and is subject to the standard processes for content decisions .... Short descriptions are subject to many Wikipedia standards of content, including those found at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view ...." Thus, a) we need to be including, reviewing, and improving them; and b) they are real, printworthy, reader-facing content, to be included in printed and other WP:REUSEd article content. However, metadata links for management of them are not, but are WP-internal editor interface features.
It appears that the implicated interface pages are among these:
As of right now Wikidata short descriptions still show up on articles if there is no short description on enwiki, so shortdesc helper shows it. Re screen readers, the links should show up as buttons as I've set them as so (see aria button; let me know if it doesn't). On printing, I don't think short descriptions need to be included in printed material, since its main use is in search results where the rest of the article is not visible. I suppose I could wrap the buttons of the script in noprint, but if you are printing a page you probably want to view it logged out as there are other gadgets whose output could appear (like Xtools and assessment).
FYI, MediaWiki:Gadget-Page_descriptions.js is the original script, which just shows the page description without any editing functionalities; I forked it as User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper which eventually became a gadget of its own. As for I'm not really sure exactly how this code is being managed as of 2020-05.: the code is maintained by me, and I generally push my changes to the github and then copy them to the onwiki gadget file. Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:15, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Earlier wikipedia while opening from smartphone redirected to m.wikipedia, now it does not. The normal wikipedia is so annoying and unoptimised for smarphones. And syntax editing is highly inefficient. It leads to unknown locations and sometimes type what you havent typed. Sometimes you cant even click on a desired location to type because it will keep on leading your cursor to somewhere above. Can we please get the mobile switching automatic mechanism back? Capankajsmilyo (talk) 02:20, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
Click "Mobile view" at the bottom of any page and see if it rembembers your choice. "Desktop" switches back to the desktop version. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:20, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
Planned maintenance operation (read-only time) on May 21 @ 5:00 A.M. UTC
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi,
This is a reminder about the planned maintenance operation that will happen on Thursday 21st May at 05:00 AM UTC, for 30 minutes.
This wiki will go read-only during this operation.
How to make sortable columns that are also colour coded?
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
Hi all
I'm working on some documentation which needs colour coding of section heading to organise the information into different types, unfortunately this seems to break the ability of the column to be sortable, which I also need. How can I make the 'Completed Tour' a sortable column?
Yes, if you move your mouse cursor into the header cells concerned, you'll see that in some portions of the cell, the arrow pointer changes to a finger pointer revealing the presence of a hotspot, which may be clicked to sort. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:45, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: and @Redrose64: one last question, is there a way to put code into a table so when the page loads in sorts a specific column, e.g so the 'Completed Tour' column puts all the blank rows at the top. John Cummings (talk) 18:38, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
No, when a sortable table is first displayed the rows appear in the same order that they occur in the page source. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:50, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
When I log in (with user ID) alternately from two WiFi networks, I receive the email message:
"Someone (probably you) recently logged in to your account from a new device. If this was you, then you can disregard this message. If it wasn't you, then it's recommended that you change your password, and check your account activity."
I am using the same device (iPhone) but with different IP addresses. The message should read "from a new device or using a new IP address". The help files for this message do make this distinction. Jmar67 (talk) 03:19, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This is for a script User:Awesome Aasim/quicknote.js, a script that allows leaving "quick notes" (short personal messages for thanking or coaching editors). I want to stylize the JQuery UI buttons to use the mw-ui styling instead of the default ui styling. How can we do this? I tried removing all the styling associated with JQuery UI and adding the .mw-ui-progressive and .mw-ui-button but that does not stop the JQuery UI styling when someone puts their mouse over the button. Aasim 06:57, 17 May 2020 (UTC) Did some searching on my own. The answer: jquery.ui is deprecated and I should use ooui instead. Will consider this for the future. Aasim09:57, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Petscan is down
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Petscan is returning a 502 bad gateway error. It's been doing this a few hours a day for awhile now. Seems to happen most often in the evening California time (so around 02:00-05:00 UTC). CJK09 (talk) 02:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
By the way, when I saw the subject line in my inbox, my first thought was to decipher the header and report it as spam. My second thought is that the Wikimedia software is making a mistake. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:31, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, User:Suffusion of Yellow, but how do I disable email notifications from other wikis while leaving them on for English Wikipedia? Does the global setting override the local, or does the local override the global? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:12, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
When you first make a global setting it overrides local settings. Afterwards you get a local option "Set a local exception for this global preference". PrimeHunter (talk) 01:41, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't want to turn off messages that are in English. I am willing to get messages in Hindi if that is needed to get them in English, because I can ignore messages that I can't read. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:14, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Thank you. That answers that. I "visited" those Wikipedias because I was checking on the editing history of a blocked user, and then concluded that I wasn't learning anything, partly because I can't read the scripts. Well, well. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:52, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
This issue often comes up on help pages. I have created meta:Welcoming policy with a proposed policy in development: "A wiki is only allowed to post welcome messages to users if their account was originally created at the wiki, or the user has at least one non-imported edit there." PrimeHunter (talk) 20:38, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi Aram. I'm currently working on a similar task (which I believe will take a bit of time). I'd be happy to look into this if no one starts on it by the time I'm done with the task in hand. In the mean time, I'd help speed up things if you can gain consensus on the template talkpage. You may also wish to ask if you really need a separate template subpage for Wikidata, or code it on the main template as {{Infobox power station}} does. Cheers, Rehman04:01, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Wtmitchell, you click the wikidata item link in the sidebar of the article you want to correct, find the data field in the item page and correct it. Or override the local en.wp value by providing it as the infobox param ‘postal_code’ —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:39, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
The situation: I've been working on Category:United States articles with invalid parameters starting with those headings that list the most pages. Under heading "N", several hundred pages were showing because they use |New Hampshire=yes due to an error in the template documentation (since fixed). To avoid amending all those page individually, I amended the template to allow it as an alias for |New-Hampshire=yes.
The problem: Go to the category and in the TOC, click on "Na". Expected result: it should go straight to the "O" heading because there are no longer any pages with invalid parameters that begin "N" or "n". Actual result: it lists something like 450 pages under the "N" heading.
The slow fix: Go to any one of those pages, preferably one which has the words "New Hampshire" in the title; perform a WP:NULLEDIT; return to the category page; reload and observe that the page visited is no longer listed. I don't want to do this 450 times.
{"error":{"code":"mustbeposted","info":"The \"purge\" module requires a POST request.","*":"See https://en.wiki.x.io/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes."},"servedby":"mw1388"}
Now, I know how to put together a HTML form to send a POST request - it would be
<formaction="https://en.wiki.x.io/w/api.php"method=post><inputname=actionvalue=purge/><inputname=forcerecursivelinkupdatevalue=1type=hidden/><inputname=titlesvalue="Template:WikiProject United States"/><inputtype=submitvalue=Go/></form>
but when I try this, it returns
{"batchcomplete":"","purge":[{"ns":10,"title":"Template:WikiProject United States","purged":"","linkupdate":""}]}
@Redrose64: The purge and linkupdate are both successful because both the parameters are returned. The issue lies in how categories are cached, phab:T26575 might be related. --qedk (t愛c)22:09, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
is sending the same information to the API as my form above. The problem as I see it is that a category page shows entries that are presently in the link table, whether those are correct or not, but a purge doesn't update the link tables. An edit (if only a WP:NULLEDIT) is necessary for that, --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:51, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I have some confused notes on purging accumulated over the years with much of it probably out of date. One point (which the note says is from the API docs) states that forcerecursivelinkupdate uses the job queue and so will not immediately purge anything. I have a Python script which I occasionally use to purge pages while fixing an error category. I just tried it on the first 16 entries under your Na link above. After purging (a few seconds) the 16 entries were no longer on the category page. The script uses a POST with forcelinkupdate=1 on each title copied to the clipboard, pausing for 65 seconds after every 30 titles to avoid tripping the server's rate limiter. Johnuniq (talk) 23:40, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Hi, Today I "discovered" in Notepad++ (my fav.text editor) that I can change cursor color. So I made it Red & it's highly visible now. Wondering if that is also possible within Wikipedia edit box? If yes, please let me know how to do, or maybe a gadget. Thanks. JoeNMLC (talk) 21:29, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
Wow, it had never even occurred to me to wonder if something like that property would even exist. (Can't search for what you don't know that you don't know, ya know?) Learned something today, thanks, all! — Pelagic ( messages ) Z – (21:29 Fri 22, AEST) 11:29, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
@Pelagic: I don't know of a general index of CSS properties, so I rummage around. Once a year (or whenever I remember to) I look through the current W3C Recommendations to see what's new - helpfully, they're shown in reverse date order, newest first. Most documents have a "Property Index" near the bottom; caret-color: is listed here, along with nine others. Five of the ten are new, five were brought forward from the CSS 2.1 spec (and thus have universal support); but the doc doesn't say which five. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:32, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
VE and NWE feedback page
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
In Visual Editor and New (2017) Wikitext Editor, there is a ? button with an item "Leave feedback about this software". If the user selects that, they get a form that posts their feedback to mw:VisualEditor/Feedback, except on English Wikipedia where it posts to en:wp:VisualEditor/Feedback.
At at the top of that page, there is a highlighted line: This page is not actively monitored by Wikimedia Foundation staff. You may consider leaving your feedback on mediawiki.org or filing a task on the bug tracker. (I haven't investigated when that was added or by whom. AFAIR, it's been there for quite a while.)
The issue is: anybody filling out the form won't see that warning message. As of Special:Permalink/957931891, there were 35 sections on the page, and 6 of them had replies.
Questions:
How do you feel about changing that form to target the MediaWiki page instead of the en-wp page?
Is this the right forum? And is an informal discussion here sufficient, or do we need a full-blown RFC?
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Has there been some recent change to the return/newline characters in edit mode, like for example some sort of hard carriage return? Recently, I'm constantly seeing a new problem where the down arrow does not work to take the cursor below a blank line, and where after clicking to move the cursor down, the delete key deletes two lines instead of one – exactly as if some kind of hard two-line return had been there. It only happens in the Wikipedia edit window, so I don't believe it's a MacOS/Safari glitch. Anyone else seeing this? It's a pain ... Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:57, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
If the proper text editor, then there hasn't been any recent change, and since it's just a text area, any behavior change would be on your browser. If the visual editor, who knows what wacky things are happening with that, although I haven't heard this particular complaint. ST47 (talk) 04:38, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Why is the uploaded file still a red link?
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Only on English Wikipedia. I don't have this issue on Wikisource, Commons, or anywhere else. Hit and miss. For the last 2 or 3 hours, editing has been odd in not showing the preview. I can open the edit screen, and type in it. If I try for a preview, it's hit and miss, which sometimes completely wipes out my edit before I save it. Thought it might be related to Phabricator at phab:T253405, which was filed by someone on Commons 1 in relation to images not showing up on English Wikipedia. Re-posting this message, as the system completely wiped it out when I previewed. — Maile (talk) 20:04, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
OK. The stupid quirk IS browser specific to Firefox, but not Chrome. It does not happen on Edge. Problem is ... I'm spoiled with Firefox and find Chrome edit screen difficult for me to see. I absolutely hate the visuals on Edge and cannot bear to use that browser to edit in Wikipedia. — Maile (talk) 00:11, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Here's another oddball thing about this in Firefox. I open an edit window, and I can get Preview mode exactly one time. If I click on "Show Preview" again, not only does it wipe out my edit, but it takes the edit window to the very top of this talk page. Right up to the "short description"" template at the top. This is very strange. — Maile (talk) 01:29, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Firefox 76.0.1 (32-bit), Show preview before edit box. As I type this - without clicking on Show Preview - the preview is automatically showing at the bottom of the screen (as opposed to yesterday when it didn't show at all). But if I now click on Show Preview, it previews the entire page - not just this section - at the bottom of the page, without my edit here. Clicked on Preview again, and it previews only the section. Click on Preview again, and it gives me a preview of the entire page without my edits. — Maile (talk) 10:53, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Media viewer image description text is often inaccurate, irrelevant, and/or in a foreign language
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I've noticed that the description text for images when opened in Media Viewer is often completely irrelevant to the context and/or in a foreign language that the enwiki reader cannot and should not be expected to understand. My guess is that these descriptions are being imported from Commons or somewhere else outside en.wiki. I don't see a good reason why these should be shown instead of the local captions on the article, when they exist. CJK09 (talk) 09:33, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Please always include an example when you report an issue. I see the local caption on tested examples, e.g. "Wales at the Creative Commons Board Meeting in June 2008" at Jimmy Wales#Personal philosophy. If you are thinking of an infobox then the local page probably doesn't have a MediaWiki image caption but the infobox is just coded to show a caption parameter after the image. The infobox on Jimmy Wales generates this: [[File:Jimmy Wales - August 2019 (cropped).jpg|frameless|upright=1]]<div>Wales in August 2019</div>. It might be difficult for Media Viewer to determine when it's reasonable to display such texts as captions. I guess it only examines the image code. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:40, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Removing the residence parameter
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
I sent TMIP here so I hope this is the correct place. There might be templates other than the "artist" one that also still have the field. If anyone knows of such and can remove it there as well that would be most helpful. MarnetteD|Talk22:23, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Gap at the bottom of Talk:Detective Pikachu (film)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I noticed that Talk:Detective Pikachu (film) seems to always show a gap between the bottom-most comment and the categories despite not having a template at the bottom that says to do so, regardless of how many new sections or comments are added. Perhaps, there might be some wikitext on the page (not at the bottom) that causes this to happen, and if possible, this part should be removed to get rid of the gap. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:41, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
@GeoffreyT2000: Fixed it. I did a "View Page Source" in Firefox and found there was an invisible "cite error" message at the foot of the page. Fixing the cite error made the white space disappear. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:41, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Template:Navbox with collapsible groups allows creating a navbox, where all but one of the groups are collapsed by default. The group that is not collapsed is determined by the parameter |selected=. On the other hand, {{Navbox}} does not have a parameter |selected=.
A template is sometimes changed between using using {{Navbox}} and {{Navbox with collapsible groups}}. The parameters are so similar that you can usually just swap. Maybe some of the templates used {{Navbox with collapsible groups}} in the past or will in the future, and then it makes sense to pass on selected from articles. I suppose there could also come a time where {{Navbox}} uses it to emphasize the group in some way. I would just leave it. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:17, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Template:Flatlist does not display correctly on mobile
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The issue is that flatlists' bullets do not show up on the mobile site (see Template:Flatlist/doc for an example; those using {{Hlist}} appear to work fine). Using inspect element, it appears that the li elements from {{Flatlist}} do not have the ::after used to display bullets, hence the issue.
There appears to be a handful of items raised in Phabricator related to hlist on mobile site (phab:T169315, phab:T235416, ...) but not sure whether this one falls under any of them. Would be great if anyone could provide some pointers. ネイ (talk) 15:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Raised here because I thought there wouldn't be a simple fix :) (Read several of those items before asking and the discussions there just gave me this impression.)
Comparison from the testcases page looks fine, and given that hlist-separated is only available in the mobile site this change looks safe to be reflected in Template:Flatlist. Wonder if you could help or if you need a template-protected edit request raised? (P.S. the hlist-separated class seems to do this.) ネイ (talk) 16:43, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Sending pings Comment
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, I need to start a discussion with a project and I know not many people read the talk pages regularly. I have seen it before, but how can I ping all volunteers of the project at once without copy/paste individually?
You cannot, unless your secret project already has the names in a list you can copy, maybe with some regex help to get the right format. Why do so many people conceal which page they are posting about? Maybe you are thinking of Wikipedia:Mass message senders but that also requires a list of recipients. If you try pings then note you can ping at most 50 users in the same edit, and the edit must have its own line/paragraph and signature. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:56, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
I am not "secretly hiding" anything. It is for my general knowledge as well as to use when I start a discussion such as on Wikipedia_talk:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard where I need to get a consensus on something from the volunteers. Same with the volunteers at Spoken Media (it is also in my signature). I have seen something similar to {{ping|some page participates (listed as a group)}} or something to that effect. Thanks, Galendalia (talk) 19:06, 23 May 2020 (UTC)Spoken Wikipedia Project Coordinator
PrimeHunter and Cryptic Yes! That is what I am talking about. So for the project, the project participants are on a separate page Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Participants. I expect the participant list to go down as some people have not expressed an interest yet, even though they have until the 30th before they are moved to inactive. Right now I may create a separate list of just the ones I know who are active and currently working on something, but my idea is to save time and not ping individually. I am no longer part of DRN, so that is mute. Galendalia Talk to meCVU Graduate17:07, 24 May 2020 (UTC)Spoken Wikipedia Project Coordinator
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The "Adding new links" section of Template:User-multi's documentation references how instructions are in the module source for adding new links. However, I do not see any such instructions? Could someone please assist me in adding the ability to preload a new talk page section (soo....the param value would be what to preload)? Thanks! (posting here per Enterprisey's suggestion). --TheSandDoctorTalk02:45, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The visual editor will now work in the Modern skin. The changes that needed to happen for this to work could cause problems for some scripts or gadgets. [27]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from May 26. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from May 27. It will be on all wikis from May 28 (calendar).
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
Is there a way I can change how internal links are shown to me so the colors are more distinct between visited and unvisited internal links? Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 14:10, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
They seem very wrong - for .mw-body-content a:link, } for .mw-body-content a:visited - does anybody see those? Inspecting the style sheets for Vector when logged out reveals these:
Piggybacking on the question above, I've looked at Help:Link color and can't figure out how to do what I want. I'd like to make the difference between visited and unvisited wikilinks more clear on my screen without changing other colors. Most likely would be to make unvisited wikilinks that are not redirects or redlinks a lighter blue. I've fooled with User:SchreiberBike/vector.css, but I don't really understand what I'm doing. Thanks for any help. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 22:37, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
Please drill - WikimediaFoundationError
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Can someone drill ALL the way down on
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.
Request from x.x.x.x via cp1081 frontend, Varnish XID 986350071
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 24 May 2020 08:46:48 GMT
Request from x.x.x.x via cp1081 frontend, Varnish XID 992843364
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Sun, 24 May 2020 09:00:31 GMT
This is about the WikimediaFoundationError problem(s) I've reported more than once (going back many months; no, the REBOOT didn't fix it). Pi314m (talk) 11:44, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Pi314m, there is a small spike in 500 errors on that server around that time, but as you are the only one reporting this, it doesn’t seem too common and that also means. That it is harder to find a cause. Like stepping in a needle in a haystack. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:04, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Without further information, it will be very difficult to help you. Please follow the instructions at mw:How to report a bug to report the issue on Phabricator. Only a small number of people have access to the logs that would help investigate the issue, and they watch Phabricator, not here. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:06, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Update babel description
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I can't figure it out how to update babel description. For example is in User:Wirjadisastra's infobox, there's a word "Panganggo" and I want to update it to "Naraguna" but I can't find where to change it. The jv.wiki community has been decided to change the word Panganggo (User) to Naraguna[28]. Diki Ananta●Talk08:09, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Ah, but it's not similarly formatted; the second one doesn't have equals signs in all of the parameters (it's got an equals in one paramarer, but you may not have noticed in that forest of links that the "Neolithic Mounds of Tassili and Amguid in the Satellite Google Maps" one isn't showing). See Template:Refideas#URLs containing equals signs; this fixes your first one;. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:38, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I know about that problem. I am hoping to prune that list in a month, when I can get back to large wikiprojects. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:42, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Edit filters to enforce topic bans
Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments6 people in discussion
Topic bans in their current form have several problems. The boundaries of a topic area aren't always clearly defined and this generates a lot of overhead for users under the ban (could this possibly be seen as a violation?) and on the admins with limited knowledge of topics who have to look at borderline diffs and judge whether or not a block is deserved. There is ambiguity in the "broadly construed" language we routinely use in bans and it's normal for different admins to come to different conclusions. We also waste a lot of time dealing with editors who mess up by accident or who test the boundaries the day after a topic ban is imposed. (We generally give editors a pass on their first violation, but that doesn't prevent 16 people from arguing about it every time it happens.)
It would be nice if there were some way to create a topic ban with bright line boundaries that automatically prevented users from editing certain pages. I had high hopes for WP:Partial blocks when they came out, but those limit you to blocking up to 10 pages at a time if I remember correctly, and they really clutter up the block log.
But I think an edit filter could do the trick. I imagine an edit filter that would stop a specific users from editing articles belonging to specific categories. Or block them from editing pages belonging to a specific WikiProject. For example, I could ban a user from BLPs by using Category:Living people or from Arab-Israeli conflict using WP:WikiProject Israel Palestine Collaboration. These bans would be more narrow than our typical "broadly construed" bans, but that might be desirable in some cases, especially with the no fuss bright line benefit. Sometimes I only want to ban someone from editing biographies and not from editing any material remotely related to a living person.
Another option would be to warn users when they try to edit pages in a category. Something along the lines of "You are attempting to edit a page in the category "Living people". Are you certain you wish to proceed?" That would take a bit of overhead off of users and admins by taking away the excuse "I didn't know that was a violation." ("Oh really? You triggered the edit filter.") Warnings could also be used for more narrow topic bans... if a user were banned from baseball articles, you could warn them if text they're adding/removing includes the word "baseball". This would also be in harmony with our ethos of us wanting competent editors to self-police. It just helps them avoid screwing up.
I know that we are always hesitant to add new filters because they add a minuscule but cumulative delay to all the other edits on the project. Would there be a way of implementing this so the filter only computes for editors under sanctions and short circuits otherwise? (If the editor is on this list, proceed and search the page for the categories, otherwise skip this filter.) And would there be a way to implement it so that admins placing sanctions didn't have to edit filters directly? (Example: admins just add the username and category to a protected page somewhere on the project that is referenced by the filter)
"implementing this so the filter only computes for editors under sanctions and short circuits otherwise?" is definitely possible. "would there be a way to implement it so that admins placing sanctions didn't have to edit filters directly?" is possible if a bot updated the filter, which mostly would require phab:T213037. So technically this is largely doable.
Personally I don't this is a good idea. People who boundary test who are only prevented by an edit filter will still find ways to be disruptive, and I don't think micromanaging editors is worthwhile; our efforts are better spent retaining non-disruptive editors. Any technical solution that isn't 100% equivalent to the sanction imposed would cause more drama with editors complaining they weren't warned by the filter. There's also issues regarding any editor being able to add pages to a category to stop someone from editing them. Galobtter (pingó mió) 23:31, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
@Galobtter: Why can't the sanction imposed be 100% equivalent to technical solution? Example: "You are topic banned from editing all pages in Category:Living persons." And if a malicious editor were discovered adding categories to pages where they don't belong for the purpose of blocking their colleagues that would be a clear case of WP:Hounding and easily sanctionable. You say "our efforts are better spent retaining non-disruptive editors". The whole point of a topic ban is to retain editors who are generally productive but tend to be disruptive in one topic area. I would imagine that if you talk to non-disruptive editors who are under a topic ban they would tell you that they'd prefer having a bright line that they can't accidentally cross rather than having to constantly worry about treading in some grey area. Take a minute and imagine yourself topic banned from living persons broadly construed. How many articles can you think of that don't have content related to living persons? ~Awilley (talk)00:05, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Why can't the sanction imposed be 100% equivalent to technical solution? Certainly can, but I could definitely see issues where the "spirit" of the sanction is different. If an editor found pages that weren't properly categorized or tagged and specifically edited those, that could lead to drama.
Someone has to be quite disruptive to get a ban from all living persons, and tbh I have actually wondered about the work-ability of a ban from all living persons, having the same question re the amount of articles that don't talk about living people. But that would IMO call for narrower topic bans (say a ban from editing articles primarily about a living person or people) or a site ban as appropriate than a technical restriction. Anways, I think further discussion might be more suited to WP:VPI than WP:VPT :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 00:17, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Maybe so. I figured I'd see if it was technically possible first. But since you're here, here's another example. You recently commented on a proposal that would potentially have a large number of newer POV-pushing editors and SPAs finding themselves with 6-month topic bans from "Donald Trump and Joe Biden broadly construed". Depending on how that's interpreted that could be a pretty broad ban because of User:GreenMeansGo/The Trump Horizon (everything can be related to Trump). If these hypothetical temporary bans were enacted, imagine the administrative burden of explaining "broadly construed" to dozens of users and following up and judging violations in AE reports. A cleaner approach would be to simply block them from editing pages in Category:Donald Trump and Category:Joe Biden. It would still achieve the desired result of preventing disruption in election-related articles, but with less work for everybody involved (admins, banned editors, and editors monitoring/reporting violations). And if some of those editors moved on to disrupt loosely related articles (say, Coronavirus) then that could be dealt with separately. ~Awilley (talk)01:04, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
That's why topic bans are usually for the entire American Politics DS area. I can't imagine someone being disruptive on Donald Trump related articles but not on other American politics related articles, and to my recollection whenever a narrow topic ban within AP2 was imposed it generally had to be extended to the whole area. Galobtter (pingó mió) 01:53, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
The problem here is the same problem that led to the WMF “postponing” category blocks: it would effectively give non-admins the ability to sanction editors under DS/community authorization and would lead to wikilawyering of TBANs because of technical constraints. As an example of a former. I TBAN the long-suffering User:ThisIsaTest from ARBPIA and that rapscallion User:Example who is on the other side of said dispute knows that ThisIsATest is passionate about the subject of grape leaves (who wouldn’t be. They’re delicious.) User:Example then adds Category:Banned Category to Grape leaves. He has now TBAN’d his nemesis from a page without ever passing RfA. Also, while I did have some fun with this example, I also just blocked someone for edit warring over whether falafel was Israeli or Palestinian, so it’s not that far-fetched. TonyBallioni (talk) 01:11, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
Ha! That is a fantastic example :-) I'll have to think about that some more, but my gut reaction is if Category:Banned Category is indeed an appropriate category for Grape leaves then User:ThisIsaTest should not be editing that article. If it is not an appropriate category then that's a very underhanded thing for User:Example to do, and User:ThisIsaTest could easily take the diff of the category's addition to AN/I which would almost certainly result in a WP:HOUND block or one-way Iban. I'll need to look up the discussion on category blocks...I'd never heard of them until now. ~Awilley (talk)01:40, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
There is also the issue of subcategories. If I am banned from Category:Grapes then surely Category:Grape_leaves is within scope, but typically you wouldn't see the parent category on the page, nor will the edit filter. — MusikAnimaltalk23:53, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
As to could this technically be done (since this is VPT) - then sure. As to should this technically be done - then nope; would be a nightmare to maintain and use up expensive filter conditions (keep in mind that every single edit made has to be checked against every single filter. As to the other options - use administrative controls, if someone can't follow a topic ban - give them an editing banblock or a site banblock. — xaosfluxTalk00:54, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
Fetch the Infobox data of "Software latest version" and "Software release date" from an item in Wikimedia Commons
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi there,
I have an idea for the Software and Operating system Infoboxes, but I should discuss it for its possible bugs and side effects here.
What do you think about fetching the "Software(or OS) latest(preview) version" and "Software(or OS) release(preview) date" data from Wiki Commons items(WikiData)? In the following Infoboxes
As such this is the case for "Repository" URI item.
I should note that "version" and "date" is a frequently changing item, and this idea has the advantage that with one change in this (WikiData) item, all Wiki Infoboxes (in all languages English, Dutch,German, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) change at once, only by a single change.
Are there any problems (or bug producing) with this idea?
I noticed here that, when references go over 1000, they take up quite a lot of space in a way that makes text harder to read. Part of the reason for this is that they include the optional thousands comma. I'd like to propose that we get rid of that comma, but I have no clue where I'd do that, so coming here. {{u|Sdkb}}talk06:33, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
I wasn’t sure what “references” meant until I looked at the article. It refers to citations. And wow, I never thought I would see over 1000 citations in a single article. This just shows how much attention this topic is getting.
Back to the point, I notice that the citation list at the end of the article does not include commas in its numbers, when I view it in my web browser. That’s because it is rendered as an HTML ordered list, which means it’s up to my browser to render the numbers however it likes, and my browser doesn’t include commas. I assume this is true for the other mainstream browsers. So removing the commas won’t just save space; it will increase consistency. Brianjd (talk) 07:15, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
For the past 10 minutes I have been unable to delete a page. I am getting various errors like "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try waiting a few minutes and reloading." and also "Database locked. A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software." — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:31, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
I just created a new article and I was planning to check if it had any interwiki links. However, the "add links" link on the left toolbar isn't appearing on my end. Checking using a random new page from Special:Newpages gives the same result. What's going on here? Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew12:13, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
@Narutolovehinata5: I see “edit links” if interwiki links already exist, or nothing if they don’t exist. I don’t know what I am supposed to see, as I have never used this feature. Brianjd (talk) 12:30, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
That's the problem. If no interwiki links exist, nothing appears when in fact an "Add links" link should be there. Apparently it's already being tracked by Phabricator at least, but the error appears to have existed for at least two weeks now. Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew12:38, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
mw.loader.using(['mediawiki.util'],function(){mw.util.addPortletLink('p-tb','//www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Search?search='+encodeURIComponent(mw.config.get('wgPageName')),'Wikidata search','t-wikidatasearch','Search the page name in Wikidata',null,'#t-wikibase');});
That did the job, although I had to purge the page for the interwiki link to appear in English after adding it. There's still the problem though of the issue not being fixed. Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew13:18, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
I meant Thursday. However, the Deployment Train is blocked again for an unrelated issue, deployments will resume when issue is fixed, meaning the fix will be deployed Friday at the earliest. phab:T253022. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:33, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
The invisible links are interwikilinks to fr.wiki. Look in the far left column of this page (desktop view) and find 'Français' You will see that it links to fr:chat. If you want the link to appear in article text, use a colon before the language code.
For the benefit of other readers: The reason those “invisible” links are visible here is because someone added a colon to them. That someone was actually a bot, which recognised that those interwiki links were invalid. Brianjd (talk) 12:26, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
For the benefit of other readers: [[fr:Chat]] is an interlanguage link to French Wikipedia, which goes to the 'Languages' section, whilst [[:fr:Chat]] is a visible interlanguage link in the wikitext. --CiaPan (talk) 12:45, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Can't upload ogg fair-use file from my mac using File Upload Wizard
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
(I'm running macOS Catalina 10.15.5 on a MacBook Pro.) When I click the <choose file> button on the File Upload Wizard page, ogg files on my hard drive appear greyed-out (non-uploadable); cf. my jpg/jpeg and pdf files are accessible as normal. I tried recreating my desired ogg file using Audacity s/w but still had no luck uploading it. Birdman euston (talk) 18:24, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The zero-width joiner can be useful sometimes, but WP ignores it. E.g., for Marshallese, el-cedilla should have the same shape of cedilla as cee-cedilla does. WP, like word processors, substitutes el plus combining cedilla with the Unicode el-cedilla, which by default has a comma shape for use in Latvian. Separating them with a ZWJ should prevent that from happening, and in a word processor it does, producing the proper letter shape for Marshallese. But on WP it makes no difference. Compare ⟨ļ⟩ (ļ) with ⟨ļ⟩ (ļ). Can that be fixed? — kwami (talk) 22:04, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Hey you techies, I'm seeing problems at the Editor interaction analyser, and I'm not quite sure where else to report it. I don't think Σ (Sigma) is very active anymore. This search, should have indicated that Dhashwanth Kumaran edited Aranmanai 2 and Velayudham, but did not. Any ideas? I'm not savvy in the world of Phabricator or whatevs, but this is a tool many of us use. Help? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:02, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Cyphoidbomb, it's because when the form is submitted the username is sent as Dhashwanth+Kumaran, but it's stored in the database as Dhashwanth_Kumaran, so this works but your search doesn't. – BrandonXLF (talk)04:56, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
@BrandonXLF: Actually, yours didn't work either--or at least not from my perspective, as Dhashwanth did edit at least two of the articles that come out in the results. The user has been indeffed--could that affect the tool's performance? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 13:29, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
Also, when I started a new search between "Dhashwanth_Kumaran" and "Fishdash" per your suggestion, there were zero hits. When I did it the normal way "Dhashwanth Kumaran" and "Fishdash", I got the two intersections at the articles indicated above. So it looks like there could be something wrong with searches in excess of 2 users. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 13:51, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
I'm having problems with it too. I ran it with multiple editors, and it reported out one editor with 4 edits to a certain article, when the article history lists them as having 341 edits. Since I was trying to compare Master 1 + socks with Master 2 + socks, unreliable data meant I couldn't report out accurate results. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:01, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Doug Weller, is this page the Special:Thanks page? If it is, then from my testing I think this is the reason:
The thanks button in the history page defaults to opening Special:Thanks. The behaviour of the sliding animation with "Publicly send thanks?" after you press "thank" is implemented through JavaScript, so only works after the page has loaded and run the script. I don't know of any way to make the thanks button only work when the script has run, but I guess the best solution for now is to wait until the page has fully loaded. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions10:03, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Could the template {{Culture of region}}, which is supposed to be on the right side of an article, be fixed so that it allowed to have pictures on the left side? E. g. at Religion in Botswana the picture from the History section is pushed down below the template Culture of Botswana, although one is on the right and the other on the left. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 11:51, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Jan.Kamenicek, this is due to the positioning of image 'BAPS Swaminarayan Hindu Mission'. Either move that below the images on the left, or use {{stack}} to make one right floating item out of the 3 separate items on the right. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:34, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Often when I am moving (renaming) a page, I get to the move dialogue Special:MovePage/<whatever> and realise I have to reconsider or check something first. However there is no "cancel" button on that page and I am left with only the alternative of using the browser "back" button and hoping that nothing is left half-done. It would be nice if a "cancel" button was present beside the "move page" button. Zerotalk07:44, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
There's a link to the article being moved at the top of Special:MovePage, a cancel button would just do the same thing as that link. – BrandonXLF (talk)08:28, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Nothing can be "left half-done", since Special:MovePage is no more than a form - nothing is actually done until you click Move page. So if you navigate away before clicking that button, whether by using the "back" button, a cancel feature or by following a link, the worst that can happen is that you may have to re-enter the information when you return to the form. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:37, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Yes I know all that, but you are missing the point. This isn't to reassure me, since I figured it out long ago. The purpose is to make it more friendly to editors in general. Think about the "cancel" button you see when editing a page; that is also not strictly necessary but having it is a good thing. Zerotalk09:23, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
@Zero0000: this would be a mediawiki side button, not an English Wikipedia specific one. The development team rejected this in phab:T5835 but that was over 10 years ago, so they may have a different UX/UI mindset now. You can comment at that task, and try to have it reopened/reevaluated. — xaosfluxTalk14:31, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Is there a log of DS alerts?
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
I'm suddenly finding a lot of new or returned editors editing Falun Gong articles and have been giving alerts out like candy (including to the experienced ones who have reacted of course). I haven't kept track and have no idea how many other editors have given out alerts. Is there anyway of finding out? If there isn't, there should be IMHO. Doug Wellertalk14:08, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
I believe that was the old system? It just caused things to go out of control and hundreds of alerts were being logged, resulting in huge pages. --qedk (t愛c)14:23, 27 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion
I removed a spam link from Advertising revenuehere, but now the page won't load correctly – it appears to be loading a 1x1 gif. Yet if I load load the page via the index here, it works! I've tried bypassing my browser cache, and purging the server's page cache. What is happening? Thanks. —Bruce1eetalk06:53, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
I used Ctrl+Shift+R in my browser (FF 76.0.1). I even cleared the browser cache, but the page still won't load. All other pages I've tried load normally. —Bruce1eetalk07:25, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
I tried when I'm logged out, and in safe mode – no change. I am using an ad blocker, but it's turned off for Wikipedia. Advertising, for example, display correctly. —Bruce1eetalk08:26, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Interesting that the safe mode version has the same problem, since it has a different URL. You could try using the development tools to get more information, using a private window or restarting Firefox in safe mode. Brianjd (talk) 08:44, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Oddly enough, it loads correctly in Private Browsing (not logged in and pages aren't cached). Yet when I tried it when logged out in Normal Browsing, it wouldn't load. Could it be a caching issue in my Firefox? I did clear the cache completely earlier. I have also shut down and restarted Firefox. —Bruce1eetalk09:00, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
I think it’s not a caching issue, since you were able to reproduce the problem with a different URL. I would suggest investigating your add-ons further. Brianjd (talk) 09:06, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
I've just tried it in Firefox safe mode (addons disabled), and it worked. So there's clearly an issue in my local Firefox environment that I'll have to sort out myself. It's just so weird that it is only happening on this one page, as far as I can tell. Anyway, thanks Brianjd and PrimeHunter for helping me out. —Bruce1eetalk09:26, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, but just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea. A bot would have to maintain the category, or it would quickly fall out of date. A default gadget or &withJS link would be a better long-term solution than a bot. The best solution of course is to add the desired functionality to MediaWiki: for that, phab is thataway. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:39, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
@AntiCompositeNumber: I'm not sure it's a good idea to suggest filing a Phab ticket as the primary solution, because this is not going to be used relatively often (so WMF staff won't be assigned to work on it) and there are already longstanding unfulfilled requests to improve access to MediaWiki-generated data which have been stalled for years mainly because of the architecture of MediaWiki being prohibitive (for example, phab:T49137, for Lua access to Special:PrefixIndex, has been open for five years). Furthermore, if it were proposed for the next Community Wishlist Survey, I don't think it would reach the top ten because this affects a relatively small number of editors in a relatively minor way. At the moment, I think an external site, a bot or a user script is probably the way to go. Jc86035 (talk) 18:01, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
In this case, best = most complete. A bot-based solution would be most likely to break without anyone noticing and creates a duplicate category that would go out of date. Using a tool or on-wiki JavaScript would mean reimplementing the behavior of Special:RandomInCategory (phab:T63840) or sitting in front of it. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 19:30, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
@AntiCompositeNumber and Jc86035: returning to this, I think I found what might be an easier solution. I was curious how the "All Level 4" list was created/maintained in the first place, and it looks like it's done through {{Vital article}}. There's some fancy code there creating/defining the categories, and that could probably be tweaked so that it created one category for the VA's talk page and one for the VA itself. I'm not skilled enough with categories to mess with that, though. If someone else wants to take a go, feel free. A set of buttons that allow you to go to a random article at a given importance (VA level) or quality (GA or FA) would be a really useful tool for readers, potentially even for the main page. {{u|Sdkb}}talk20:18, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Hello, I think it would be a good idea that special pages like Randomincategory had an option so it returns the main page, the talk page, or either. --NaBUru38 (talk) 20:19, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
@NaBUru38: That would be good. And it might be easier to implement than getting Randomincategory to be able to return subpages, which would be the other way to solve this. {{u|Sdkb}}talk19:53, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
Bawolff I'm looking to create a button that could potentially go on the Main Page, though, so I'm not sure how useful an off-wiki tool could be for that. {{u|Sdkb}}talk08:06, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
For some unknown reason all the members of this category appear under A, and apparently are similarly affected in other categories they appear it (but not before I created this cat). Can't see any obvious reason for the problem. Can somebody help? --Richhoncho (talk) 16:26, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
On mobile, the talk pages show all top-level headings to be dropped down, and have no table of contents or anything. It's the same as with articles, just differently styled. Talk pages shouldnt have important content in subheadings otherwise I have to scroll like hell to get anywhere. A table of contents button on mobile is very well overdue, anyway. NixinovaTC19:43, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Nixinova, you can show the TOC on mobile by adding this CSS to your common.css .skin-minerva .toc, .skin-minerva .toc .toctitle { display: table; visibility: visible; }. There's also phab:T147026. – BrandonXLF (talk)20:29, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I'm confused about something at Glendon Campus of York University. A COI editor changed the name of the article today. On the article page there is a notice "A request that this article title be changed to Glendon Campus of York University is under discussion. Please do not move this article until the discussion is closed." However, the article was moved, and the notice on the talk page says "The request to rename this article to Glendon Campus of York University has been carried out". These messages contradict. Shouldn't the article be moved after a consensus to move? Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 17:43, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Hmmm. It looks like the page move concerned was the very first action taken by Glendonws after becoming autoconfirmed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:17, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: Seeing that I was able to drop a message just fine, the issue is not with Twinkle, have you checked the "Add block template to user talk page"? Furthermore, you can always add a new section and paste in the template yourself (such as {{subst:Uw-pblock}}), that's much more viable than unblocking. --qedk (t愛c)14:50, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
QEDK, I've never had this problem before. I see "Add block template to user talk page" and it is checked. I tried again, and of course it worked fine now. so not sure what happened the first three times. S Philbrick(Talk)19:09, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Is there any way to search for uses of specific unicode punctuation? I'm looking for edits that contain U+201E ('DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK') as part of a sockpuppet investigation. -- RoySmith(talk)16:41, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
I just stated noticing that many pages are rendering with the left-hand nav bar all scrunched up. See attached screenshot. Not every page, but most pages. Emptying my browser cache had no effect. Thursday? -- RoySmith(talk)19:22, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
I suspect that this is related to the mw:Desktop improvements project. They've put some of it up at the private office.wiki. The rearranged the logo in the corner a bit. At first, I didn't notice it, but when I did, it was really obvious ...for about four or five days. Now I don't notice it again. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:51, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
@NinjaRobotPirate and Davey2010: My apologies for posting to the wrong forum. Just a quick question and I don't want to seem like a beginner on Wikipedia. How do I know which forum is the best place to get help with Wikipedia? Interstellarity (talk) 19:58, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi Interstellarity, Please read the above introductory bit on each board which explains what each board is to be used for, If you're stuck you're more than welcome to ask at WP:Help Desk who may be able to point you in the right place, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk20:05, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
@Davey2010: Thank you for your explanation. I think the help desk seems to be the best place to start if I'm not sure where to go. They can probably direct me where to go from there. Interstellarity (talk) 20:13, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
@Cassiopeia, Naypta, and Interstellarity: This seems to have been sent around various talk pages (unrelated user talk pages, ANI, VPT, and apparently HD) - but since I can't find it at HD, I'll try to explain here. But first, please note: when you have a query about the actions of a bot, your first port of call should be the talk page for the bot concerned, even if it redirects to another page, perhaps the talk page of the bot operator. In this case the bot is ClueBot III (talk·contribs) and its operator is Cobi (talk·contribs).
When CASSIOPEIA (talk·contribs) was renamed Cassiopeia (talk·contribs) back in March, and the user, user talk and archive pages moved accordingly, the |archiveprefix=User talk:CASSIOPEIA/Archive parameter of the {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis}} should have been amended as well. But apparently this didn't happen for some weeks, so in the meantime, ClueBot III was at something of a loss to work out which archive was the current one. I'm guessing that it's trying all archives until it finds one that hasn't yet hit the limit set by |maxarchsize=75000. I'm a bit puzzled as to why |numberstart= seems to be stuck at 1, when I think that it should now be at 45. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:54, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
Hello Caro7200, Can you explain what the problem is or what happened when you used the script?,
If you saw the message "success" (see right picture) then this means nothing needed doing for that article, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk20:02, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
This thread might be relevant Template talk:AllMusic#Set field question. Numerous of our articles have Allmusic templates as a ref ({{Allmusic|class=album|id=r43760/review|pure_url=yes}}).[1] As you can see this renders as a bare url in the ref section
Editors see this and slap a "link rot" tag on the article. But, since the ref is actually in a cite template both refill and reflinks ignore it. The fix is to change the "pure_url=yes" to "pure_url=no" in the template. You will see at the thread I linked to that I asked if the default could be changed to no to avoid this problem but the conversation petered out with no change being made. Now Caro7200's post might be about something different and, if it is, in the immortal words of Emily Litella "never mind" :-) MarnetteD|Talk20:16, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks to both. Well, I noticed it on 5/30. I use reFill pretty much every day, often with AllMusic refs. The little red error box appears. Reflinks will still fill the url. If I see it again, I'll note more specifically what the problem is. Caro7200 (talk) 20:56, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
That can happen Caro7200 with various refs not just Allmusic. AFAIK what you describe happens with refill not reflinks so we might be confusing the tools. I am not sure what is causing it so hopefully another editor can fill us in. If you've used both tools and they haven't worked you can also try Citer. There is the occasional ref that no tool will fix and you just have to deal with them manually. MarnetteD|Talk16:35, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
Oh yeah, thanks, I meant that it has only started happening with AllMusic the past few days. It happened again today. Just seemed to be a new problem in regard to reFill specifically, thanks. Caro7200 (talk) 16:55, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
Template issue rendering
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new beta version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It has a new zoom function when you look at images. It can also suggest places when you upload geotagged photos. [30]
Problems
There was a problem with the Commons database on 27 May. Commons could not be edited for eight minutes. Because of this problem the database was moved. This caused another short read-only time on 29 May. [31][32][33]
The Vector skin had a problem where you couldn't add links to the article in other languages. You couldn't see the section if there were no links to other languages already. It also removed content translation links and links to language settings. This has now been fixed. [34]
Changes later this week
You can get a notification when someone links to a page you created. You can turn these notifications off for individual pages. You can soon turn them off also in the notifications you get. [35]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 June. It will be on all wikis from 4 June (calendar).
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Recently I have set up a github project that contains a script to edit Wikidata. I would like to use the CI website Travis CI to perform the edits as a CRON job. However, I ran into the problem that the IP address of Travis seems to be blocked as external proxy. Of course I wanted to perform the edits using my account, but it seems there is still somehow the access with the IP involved. Now my questions are:
Is it possible to use Travis CI for edits in Wikimedia projects and somehow circumvent the global block?
If not, does the Wikimedia infrastructure allow to set up and run CRON jobs, e.g. using the Wikimedia Cloud / Labs tools infrastructure?
Any way to change or suppress a keyboard shortcut for this script?
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
I recently installed the script User:P999/Toggle VF.js, which creates a narration-friendly version of a page suitable for download. The problem I have right now is that the keyboard shortcut to create the page, Alt+⇧ Shift+V, also happens to be the shortcut for editing in VisualEditor. Is there a way to alter or suppress the shortcut for this script? I looked at the code but can't figure out where it defines the shortcut combination. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 23:55, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
Tenryuu, it's the line var prntVF = mw.util.addPortletLink ( 'p-coll-print_export', 'https://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=' + currpgName + '&printable=yes', "Printable VF", "p-VF", "Voice-friendly version for printing [v]","v");, specifically the "v" (see Help:Customizing toolbars), you can alter it by changing the letter to the desired key and you can remove it by removing the argument completely. – BrandonXLF (talk)05:41, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, thanks! I tried to give it the shortcut Alt+⇧ Shift+B by substituting both instances of "v" (one in quotation marks, one in square brackets) with "b", but it didn't seem to work. I'm fine with that, as my original shortcut for the VisualEditor has been restored. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 06:11, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
Resolved. BrandonXLF, thank you so much for your help; this solves my problem and makes it convenient for me. As a little nugget that I would like to store away in my head for future reference, what causes the default shortcut to take Alt+⇧ Shift+V instead of Alt+V? —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 08:23, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
When logged in on main page, top bar moves constantly
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
When I am logged in to Wikipedia on the main page, the navigation bar at the top keeps changing. The "View History" keeps moving in and out of the favorite button and the entire right side of the bar moves up and down. This happens ~once per second. My page size is 665x814 (half of my screen). Not sure if this should be on Phabricator.
@Serial Number 54129: A lot of ad blockers don't like strings like "pageviews" in URLs as they think they're being used for tracking or serving ads. The easiest solution is to turn your ad blocker off on that page. --Deskana (talk) 10:17, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks @Deskana and SD0001: Thanks both. Yes, of course; I was really wondering why its suddenly decided to do this when for the last few week its been no trouble at all, with no hint of a problem with adblocking... ——Serial#10:21, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
@Seril Number 54129: When I click where? I don't see a link that would cause you to end up in one place as opposed to another, just the link in the header. Do you have a gadget or script adding a link? --Izno (talk) 18:01, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
Sorry Izno,yes I do: Wikipedia:Nominations viewer. Does that make a difference? See in that image, in this case, wwhen i cick the "nomination" link, it takes to a non-existant page without the "?" rather thn the actual nom page which has a "?"...if you know what I mean...! ——Serial#18:23, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
I want to copy the vastly simplified version of Template:Collapse at User:Launchballer/sandbox to http://wiki.apterous.org, but it isn't collapsing when I copy it over. The documentation suggests the template depends upon having rules for the three classes (collapsible, uncollapsed, and collapsed) in the appropriate CSS files, and some related JavaScript installed - where would I check?--Launchballer16:37, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Launchballer, the wiki is running version 1.16 and version 1.18 is required for collapsible elements to be included in core MediaWiki. I modified mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-collapsibleTables.js so it should work with your wiki.
common.js (modified):
window.addEventListener('load',function(){varautoCollapse=2;// Index of first table to autoCollapsevarcollapseCaption='hide';// Caption to collapse the tablevarexpandCaption='show';// Caption to expand the elementvartableIndex=0;varcontent=document.getElementById('content');functioncollapseTable(rows,button,buttonLink){varcollapsed=button.classList.contains('mw-collapsible-toggle-collapsed');button.classList.remove('mw-collapsible-toggle-'+(collapsed?'collapsed':'expanded'));button.classList.add('mw-collapsible-toggle-'+(collapsed?'expanded':'collapsed'));buttonLink.innerText=collapsed?collapseCaption:expandCaption;for(vari=1;i<rows.length;i++)rows[i].style.display=collapsed?rows[0].style.display:'none';}functioncreateCollapsibleTable(table){if(!table.classList.contains('mw-collapsible'))return;varheaderRow=table.getElementsByTagName('tr')[0];varheader=table.getElementsByTagName('th')[0];if(!header||!headerRow)return;table.setAttribute('id','collapsibleTable'+tableIndex);varbutton=document.createElement('span');button.className='mw-collapsible-toggle mw-collapsible-toggle-default mw-collapsible-toggle-expanded';varbuttonLink=document.createElement('a');buttonLink.style.color=header.style.color;buttonLink.setAttribute('id','collapseButton'+tableIndex);buttonLink.className='mw-collapsible-text';buttonLink.setAttribute('href','#');buttonLink.addEventListener('click',function(e){e.preventDefault();collapseTable(table.rows,button,buttonLink);});buttonLink.innerText=collapseCaption;button.appendChild(buttonLink);header.insertBefore(button,header.firstChild);tableIndex++;if(table.classList.contains('mw-collapsed')||tableIndex>=autoCollapse&&table.classList.contains('autocollapse'))collapseTable(table.rows,button,buttonLink);}for(vartables=content.getElementsByTagName('table'),i=0;i<tables.length;i++)createCollapsibleTable(tables[i]);});
Yeah, I've noticed User:BernsteinBot has been having issues for a couple days getting its daily edit counts. It doesn't look like replication lag is terrible right now (<5min), but I wonder if those two issues aren't interrelated somehow. VanIsaacWScont07:12, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
Isn't it normal that yesterday's page views haven't been added this early? The article has around 3 daily views so the 0 on May 28 and 29 is plausible. All other tested articles show views those days. PrimeHunter (talk) 07:23, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
@The C of E: I am not seeing any "missing" pageviews. The days prior are especially low by comparison so perhaps you're not noticing them? To better surface those you'll want to use the "Logarithmic scale" option (checkbox on the top-right just above the chart). The tool is capable of detecting when a logarithmic scale is appropriate and can show it automatically. To enable this, go to Settings > "Automatically use logarithmic scale if applicable". Indeed the article apparently received no views on May 28 and 29 (note also logarithmic scales do not have a zero value on the x-axis). Also, very recent data may not be available due to the normal 24+ hour lag in the pageviews pipeline. Hope this helps! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Mangled archives
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I probably should know more about how the archiving process works but someone set up my talk page archives for me a long long time ago and they worked so I never found the need to look into it. That's my excuse for not being able to handle this myself.
I'm dealing with a OTRS inquiry regarding Flavio Briatore. In the course of the response I made mention of the talk page, so I thought I'd check it out to see how active it has been.
I was initially surprised to see only four entries, none of which were dated. I am aware that automatic dating of talk pages is more recent than some of these entries. I knew that there had been some issues in 2013 so I was surprised not to see anything on the talk page.
I looked further and found Talk:Flavio_Briatore/Archive_1, which does contain some of the issues I expected to see. However, I thought it was standard practice to have a link on the talk page itself pointing to archives and I do not see one. I thought it was convention that archiving would leave the most recent entries on the talk page. Although the most recent entries date back to 2017 they are more recent than some of the threads left on the page. My guess is that the bot didn't know how to handle the undated entries and chose to leave those four.
What's the best way of fixing this? I presume that the undated entries should be in the archives, the talk page should have a link to the archives, and the last few entries on the talk page should be on the talk page.--S Philbrick(Talk)16:31, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
I added {{unsigned}} to the undated discussions and manually archived them. I also pulled the 4 most recent discussions from the archive as the bot is instructed to leave at least 4 discussions. I also added {{archive banner}} to automatically create links to the archives. – BrandonXLF (talk)23:18, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, Thank you very much. I think I could have done some of that but I didn't know about the archive banner template so thanks again for helping clean this up. S Philbrick(Talk)12:13, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Resetting password problem
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
A long-time editor user:Hsan22 is having difficulty logging in. They requested a password reset, but do not see the email with the reset information. I have already suggested checking spam folders, and that did not help. my experience with such requests is that it is often the case that the user has failed to associate an email address with a username. I usually open up Special:EmailUser and attempt to send a test email. that typically achieves two purposes, first confirming that they do have email established, and second, helps identify the address. In this particular case, entering the username generates the message:
This user has chosen not to receive email from other users.
I believe that message confirms that they have established email, but because they've chosen not to receive email from others, I cannot use that to help them confirm which email address is associated with the account.
They have successfully changed their password in the past. Any suggestions on how we can help this user recover access to their account?--S Philbrick(Talk)12:16, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Sphilbrick your assumption is correct. I'd suggest opening a new private task in phabricator. I'm not sure how much information can be disclosed within the privacy policies, the user might have to offer up some list of email addresses he was expecting. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:30, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
The account is old but only has 434 Wikimedia edits and no special rights. Will the developers really consider a request? Wikipedia:Help desk gets many posts from users who forgot their password and don't have email enabled or lost access to the email account. We usually just tell them to create a new account. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:19, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
836 entries/lines (as of today). Is there a MediaWiki API entry point? Web scraping the above lists on Meta is less than ideal and probably not authoritative. -- GreenC15:27, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Received a notification although editor doesn't mention me
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
When I clicked on "view changes" I got this.[36] I've talked to Serols on MOTORUP's talk page some time ago, but other than that I don't think I've even been involved with this editor, so it's unlikely they'd ping me anyway. Doug Wellertalk17:34, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
I am not receiving mail sent through our internal system.I am aware that such emails are sent because I get an alert, but for the last couple months or so none have shown up in my inbox. I've checked the usual suspects — my social folder, promotions folder and my spam folder.
In my preferences the box with the label:
Allow other users to email me
Is checked.
Any thoughts?
Typical emails come from new users who are attempting to contact me about copyright issues. Because they are new and more interested in the copyright issue I haven't imposed on any of them to look at what happens at their end when they try to send me an email. Could I ask someone here (assuming you don't have an immediate solution) to try sending me an email to see what you see at your end?--S Philbrick(Talk)15:46, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
BrandonXLF, I tried to reset my email address but it wouldn't let me insisting that I use a different address which I take as confirmation that I have the correct address entered. I did try turning off the option to receive emails, saved, then turned it back on. I tried sending myself an email, and I think it worked, but I'm not sure that is a perfect test. Could I ask you to try one?
When I was looking at my preferences, I see a new option "allow emails from brand-new users" I should have paid closer attention, but when I was making the other change I have a vague recollection that the box was checked but in a different shade. I wonder if that's a new added option and created a problem? When I undid the first option, and then reset, I checked the second option. It's possible this cleared things up. S Philbrick(Talk)12:28, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Hi. I've been thinking about creating a tool that would notify a requester (possibly on-wiki, possibly off-wiki) if a given account starts editing. I think it would be useful for me when I create an account through WP:ACC for someone, but think they might have promotional edits, so I can keep an eye on them. I could see a number of other possible uses for it as well (e.g. keeping an eye on suspected socks, knowing when to report someone to WP:UAA, etc.).
Of course, to prevent abuse (e.g. wikistalking/harassment), I'd limit it to trusted users. I'm thinking functionaries, ACC members, and OTRS members, plus perhaps a whitelist of other trusted editors, but am open to ideas.
Replace template doesn't recognise apostrophe in PAGENAME
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
There is an external link template ({{AFL player}} that uses a wikidata ID and the {{replace}} function on PAGENAMEBASE string to create an external url. It works perfectly unless the article name has a ' in it, ie Ebony O'Dea. The replace function successfully converts the spaces to hyphens which the external links use, but for some reason it is unable to convert the ' to a hyphen. I created a test page at User:The-Pope/sand box'6 (dab) (anyone skilled in templates can play around with it if they want) and you can see that it just wouldn't work. In example 9 it did successfully convert the extra 's that I added outside of what was returned by PAGENAME, but didn't touch the one from the PAGENAME. Any ideas? The-Pope (talk) 09:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Thank you both, the titleparts addition worked. I did think about the url encoding, but hadn't worked out how to ampersand-encode char 39 in the search field. Still learning something every day about templates! The-Pope (talk) 14:46, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Google Search adding highlights for incoming users
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Am I the only one who hates hacking this into URLs in this way? No issue whatsoever with Chrome doing the highlighting where it's told to, but I do have an issue with it adding extraneous bits into the URL which aren't standards-compliant, and aren't relevant to the actual content of the page. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:37, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Lost WikiData link in the Tools section
Latest comment: 4 years ago16 comments12 people in discussion
Anyone else lost the wikidata link in the tools section? Has it been moved? I use Monobook, and on articles I only see the following list under Tools. Was working normally for me yesterday, and still appears when I switch to Vector.
* What links here
* Related changes
* RTRC
* Special pages
* Permanent link
* Page information
* Cite this page
* Add to the New Pages Feed
* Expand citations
* DYK check
It should still be in the same place. You may have a conflicting user script or something. Does it appear when you use safe mode (append ?safemode=1 to any page of interest)? --Izno (talk) 01:40, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Safe mode didn't make it show. It is still there in all the other skins, I didn't load or change anything, someone must have done something to the monobook skin to break the wikidata link from showing. The-Pope (talk) 03:06, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
mw.loader.using(['mediawiki.util'],function(){if(mw.config.get('wgWikibaseItemId')){mw.util.addPortletLink('p-tb','https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/'+mw.config.get('wgWikibaseItemId'),'Wikidata item','t-wikidata','Structured data on this page hosted by Wikidata',null,'#t-cite');};});
I don't believe this is connected to the sidebar changes RfC. The tooltip to Wikidata was changed but the link was not moved. Apparently there were some changes to the software also made yesterday. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:46, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
As I was pinged as a closer of the RfC, in the discussion there was some talk of how proposed changes would impact Timeless but not Monobook. The scope of the close was what there was consensus for with implementation details, as with many RfCs, left to interested editors. I certainly hope that Martin is correct that this was the result of a software change and not implementation of the RfC. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:28, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
I can confirm this is a software issue and nothing related to your RFC. User:PrimeHunter this should be fixed next week's train so the Monobook.js solution sounds like a good idea until that happens. Apologies again. I'm trying to make technical changes to the menu as carefully as possible but made a human error on this one. Sincerest apologies for this regression. Jdlrobson (talk) 16:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Jdlrobson, I came here to see if this was discussed and if I'm understanding you correctly, Alt+Shift+G will take me to Wikidata again sometime next week. Is that correct? ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯18:58, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Correct. The shortcut requires the link to be present so until that link returns the shortcut will be broken. Sorry! Jdlrobson (talk) 20:37, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
"Rosetta Stone" has a problematic entry at field "Described at URL". The link works technically but the contributor used a link shortener, which is (now) blocked by scripts on Wikidata and Wikimedia.
When I try to use it for file description on Wikimedia Commons (Template:Artwork), Wikimedia says "The following text is what triggered our spam filter: skfb.ly."
The normal user interface of Wikidata blocks editing or removing of the problematic link entry for the same reason. Wikidata says (roughly): "Cannot remove this link because it's spam." ΟΥΤΙΣ (talk) 01:28, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Not sure why it didn't let you replace it. There are only seven other uses of that site on Wikidata, so I'm going to just fix them manually. --Yair rand (talk) 01:52, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Please always give the actual error message so helpers can search for it. Maybe there is a problem somewhere but it's hard to investigate an unreproducible error with an unknown error message. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:21, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
@Hddty: you'd have to point to a specific label, however I don't think this is an English Wikipedia setting in most places, see also phab:T145926 that seems to have swapped things the other direction at least in some messages. As this appears a bit contentious you will need to point to a strong international reference to get this done on the software side (i.e. more then just a Wikipedia article). — xaosfluxTalk12:49, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
If you get it changed in CLDR then it should be changed in all Wikimedia places which use CLDR next time Wikimedia updates from CLDR. If you want it changed in Wikimedia without a CLDR change then it could be requested at Phab: but I doubt it will be considered seriously. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:02, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The change summaries don't appear in the page history when viewing the history on a mobile device in desktop mode. How can I make them appear? How can I view the change summaries on a mobile device? In addition the font used for the difference view changed to a hard to read font. How can I specify the font to use for the differences? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1000:B050:C64:717A:C49B:6FFB:1A6A (talk) 22:56, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
It's hard for me to tell exactly what happened, but when this page was created, it looks like it was created at a typoed title, and I attempted to move it to the correct one. One way or another, I ended up being the "page creator", which actually should have been, apparently, I am One of Many. As a result, whenever a link is added that points to this page, I get the notification instead of I am One of Many. Is there a way to correct the "creator" of the page, or are we stuck like this? Home Lander (talk) 01:32, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I'm working on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Slowking4. There were a little over 100 pages created by Essiepolman79. I've spot-checked a few and so far they all appear to be G5 eligible. I've never used Special:Nuke before, but it looks like the right tool. The question is, is there any way to verify that they are indeed G5-able by flagging the ones that anybody else had edited? Or should I just go ahead and nuke them all, on the assumption that 1) that's probably correct and 2) if I accidentally get any that aren't, it's easy enough to restore them? -- RoySmith(talk)20:16, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
I would advise to always check the histories of each page, as I think 'probably correct' and 'fix it later' are not good policies to strive for. I'm not aware of any shortcut to spot pages which have been substantially edited by others, although if you can see the N and the (current) on the same line, it should be good to go. -- zzuuzz(talk)20:30, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Zzuuzz, Unfortunately, most of the ones I looked at had several edits by the creator so the N/current thing doesn't work out. Pinging Jo-Jo Eumerus who I see has made this moot by already mass-deleting them all :-) -- RoySmith(talk)21:20, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
I manually checked each page before firing off the mass deletion. The tool produces a list of pages with links to their page histories, so it's not that hard to uncheck all the pages which are not (necessarily; I was being quite conservative with this mass deletion) G5 eligible. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:28, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Problem with inserting content into Wikitext editor
Latest comment: 4 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Recently I noticed that whenever I try to insert a link, image, table, or citation via the toolbar in the regular WikiText editor, the element is inserted at the beginning of the textarea instead of where the cursor was before I clicked the toolbar. This only happens if I'm using Chrome and I'm logged in. Is anyone else experiencing this problem or is it just me? Kaldari (talk) 20:32, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Ok, I saw a bug report that looks similar to this with a hint about "syntax highlighting". I can verify that the bug manifests when CodeMirror is in use. @Kaldari:, I believe you have enabled syntax highlighting, otherwise it might be a different issue. – Ammarpad (talk) 08:51, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Second-degree related changes?
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Let's say I have a list of a thousand disambiguation pages for human names, and I want to keep them all up to date. For example, if a person listed on one of those pages dies and their article is reflected to edit this, or a missing birth/death date is added, or their article is deleted, I would like to know this in order to update (or remove) their entry on the disambiguation page accordingly. Is there a way to do this from that list of a thousand pages, without searching for related changes to each of those thousand pages individually? Of course, in an ideal world, a bot would make all these updates, and I (or another disambiguation editor) could merely check the bot's work. BD2412T21:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Last edited
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion
So I have a proposal. What if we did this:
Last edited at 23:00 by you (only shown to that person) and:
Last edited at 23:00 by user (shown to everyone else). New3400 (talk) 15:07, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Where are you imagining that this would be shown - is this a new feature you're looking for, or something that exists being changed? Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:37, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
The footer of each Wikipedia page includes a notice such as This page was last edited on 6 June 2020, at 10:35.
This editor proposes to show the username of the last editor, or "you" if that is appropriate. I am not sure about this latter twist, but I guess it's OK to name the editor. It seems like a low-priority change. It also seems nearly irrelevant to non-editors who are the most likely ones to be looking for this notice. Elizium23 (talk) 17:38, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Elizium23, I'm not 100% sure that is what they meant - I notice that the comment that was left was a mobile edit, so I think they might be referring to the bar at the bottom of the mobile page that currently shows "Last edited at 12:34 by User". New3400, it'd be good to get some clarity on what specifically it is you're proposing here, and why you think it'd be an improvement on what's existing there. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 17:41, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
@New3400, Naypta, PrimeHunter, and Elizium23: I've always like what Wikivoyage does, where the footer includes e.g. Based on work by Wikivoyage users Bob, Sally, Harry, and others. It's a nice way to give some credit to a page's top contributors in a way that doesn't disrupt readers. Would I get SNOWed upon if I proposed adding something like that here? {{u|Sdkb}}talk01:03, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Encouraging trivial changes by those who like seeing their name at the bottom of a Wikipedia article should not be encouraged. We also do not want to encourage trolls trying to see how far towards trolldom a user name can be before admins waste time removing it. Johnuniq (talk) 01:10, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Johnuniq, good points. I'm not sure how Wikivoyage does their ranking, but authorship percentage would probably be better than edit count since it's harder to game. Even with that there's enough concerns to be cautious, though. {{u|Sdkb}}talk03:39, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
It appears Wikivoyage just shows the 10 latest contributors listed by how recently they edited, but with IP's listed after users. Wikivoyage has installed mw:Extension:CreditsSource. mw:Manual:$wgMaxCredits controls whether credits are shown and how many authors are credited. It says: "Note that this will require 2-3 extra database hits for every single page view, which can have significant impact on performance for large wikis." https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php says:
Latest comment: 4 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
There is technical error with subsection file thumbnails (File:Imagejpg|thumb|thumbnail description) in syntax. The problem began on yesterday without display all images in subsection. This occured at "all" Wikipedia pages, not at specific article or file. As I open all pages, they cannot show the thumbnails. It might be my web browser error. Could you explain the issue please? For example, I recently viewed the article "Joseph Stalin". The Supermind (talk) 18:30, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
FYI, there was also yesterday a similar report about broken thumbnails from an IP user at the Help Desk, but no details were given. RudolfRed (talk) 18:56, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
@The Supermind:I can confirm the same issue with the Android Webview browser based on Chromium 38. It shows gray rectangle with caption Tap to view image instead of thumbnail in all Wikipedia pages' subsection. It regards just the mobile view, desktop version shows images properly. Newest release of Google Chrome or Chromium-based Vivaldi browser displays images properly. --Downlife (talk) 18:59, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
Allowing pages to be categorised by tags on their talk page
Latest comment: 4 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
Hi folks,
There's an issue on Phab at phab:T117122 talking about WikiProjects wanting the ability to easily see which pages are in their categories, view recent changes on those pages (i.e. not the tagged talk pages, but the actual pages), and to patrol those pages using tools like Huggle. I picked up this issue, and have been working out an extension for MediaWiki which would allow this to happen.
All you'd need to do is put {{#pageCat:The category you want}} on the talk page, and it would categorise the corresponding page with Category:The category you want. This works through templates, so WikiProject headers could categorise the actual page, and not the talk page that they're on, without adding any wikitext to the page itself. As it's using the standard MediaWiki categorisation features, it also respects __HIDDENCAT__ and all the rest, so you can keep the categories out of the way with no issue.
The extension is still going through code review on Gerrit, and it's my first time building a MediaWiki extension, so it's a little way away yet. However, the idea's there, so I suppose the questions here are:
Broadly, does the community want this on enwiki? Does it seem like a good idea?
Is it a good idea to have some sort of visible indicator on the page that gets categorised that it is categorised from a tag on the talk page, or is this unnecessary?
Are there specific details of the implementation that need to be built a specific way, or any other uses for this extension that would be useful to consider?
Are there any other questions or concerns about it?
Incidentally, I wasn't sure whether this was best to put at VPT or VPR - feel free to move it to VPR if you think it's better there! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 16:26, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
@Izno: Thanks for the links! I was aware of PageAssessments, but didn't know it was already deployed to enwiki. That being said, this extension is different in some quite important ways.Whilst PageAssessments creates an entirely new system, not only for WikiProjects to follow but also for categorisation of articles which come under those projects - so that means no compatibility with anything that currently uses categories, like Huggle, and a different set of tools to adapt processes to. It also is only applicable to WikiProjects, for obvious reasons.Rather than creating a new system, my extension leverages MediaWiki's existing categorisation functionality, meaning it's natively compatible with everything else that supports categories. It's not inherently connected to WikiProjects, either; whilst it was inspired by that Phab ticket, and would do what's being looked for there, it could also be used in a multitude of other ways. For instance, just off the top of my head, it could be used by sysops to monitor recent changes to pages that had a DS notice on the talk page, without having to muck about with additional categories in the wikitext of the page itself. It could equally be used to easily categorise and browse pages which had recent PRODs or the like. The possibilities are endless! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
@Pppery: Unfortunately, no, this wouldn't be possible to do via a Lua script, as it needs to alter not just the page that it is embedded on, but also alter other pages (specifically, the corresponding page for the talk page the template is used on) - and alter them in such a way that future edits to the wikitext of the page will not override the change it makes. This is well beyond the capability of Scribunto's implementation of Lua, as far as I am aware. I'm following the steps on the mw:Writing an extension for deployment page you linked to, and have been since I started developing the extension; I'm happy to jump through the hoops required, although I of course recognise that this takes effort from other people as well as myself, which is why I wanted to obtain consensus at this early stage. Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 21:29, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Naypta, yes, this seems very useful. For example, I'd like to patrol WP:VITAL articles using Huggle, but those are categorized by a talk page template and not on the mainspace page. Thank you for taking this on! Levivich[dubious – discuss]20:55, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
"Search Wikipedia" missing page titles
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Can anyone else reproduce this thing I see today (on desktop, with both Firefox and Chrome), where searching from the top right-hand bar on any enwiki page (including the Main Page, but not including wikipedia.org) shows no bolded autocomplete results for "2018 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina" even when you type/paste the whole title? The page exists, but you would never know it from autocomplete until you hit Enter/clicked the magnifying glass icon. Airbornemihir (talk) 20:49, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: I'm now seeing what you're seeing. It might be because of a change that was reported on the phabricator discussion you linked. I'm glad they looked into this, but in my opinion it's still a little messy for autocomplete to wait until the last letter - it defeats most of the purpose of autocomplete. Airbornemihir (talk) 13:47, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some articles have tables that can be sorted in different ways. For example a list of countries can be sorted alphabetically but you can click on the size column to sort them by size. If you clicked on the column a second time it would sort the countries from the bottom to the top instead. A third click will now take you back to the original sorting. [39]
Self-closed tags now work as in the HTML5 specifications. This means you should stop using some of them. <b/> is an example of a self-closed tag that won't work. area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr can be self-closed. Pages with tags that should not be self-closed have been listed in a tracking category since 2016. They will be listed in Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag. This doesn't affect <references /> or <ref />. [40]
There is a banner called WikidataPageBanner. It is for example used by the Wikivoyages, Wikimedia Russia and the Catalan, Basque, Galician and Turkish Wikipedias. It will now been seen by mobile visitors too. Before this it was only seen on desktop. The wikis should update instructions on MediaWiki:Sitenotice so that editors know to test and style for mobile too. [41][42]
Changes later this week
You can now edit MassMessage descriptions through the API. This is useful for tools and gadgets. [43]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 June. It will be on all wikis from 11 June (calendar).
Future changes
A temporary fix helped wikis make their main pages more mobile friendly. This was in 2012. It has not been recommended since 2017. It will not work after 13 July. Wikis should use TemplateStyles instead. 118 wikis need to fix this. You can read more and see if your wiki is affected. [44]
@QEDK: One of those cases where "Your edit was saved" actually means "Your edit was ignored because someone else has just made exactly the same edit" -- John of Reading (talk) 15:25, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Nothing to see here. Move along please. You can all get back to you work. (Unless, that is, someone want to fix the stupid {{UserboxCOI}} template so it can be indented without affecting the rest of a talkpage. But it's not a big issue.) Nick Moyes (talk) 23:14, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
However, I knew it was quite likely people would not realize what I'd done, and add new terms without adding the required {{anchor}}s. I also knew it was possible that the WP:VE could change at any time and stop displaying the little puzzle piece and word Anchor, therefore increasing the likelihood of problems. After all, our work here lasts decades, and I certainly don't have the ability to screen all edits on all the articles I've contributed to.
I did not think adding the notice to Talk:List of Latin legal terms was sufficient to keep the {{anchor}}s up to date in the long term, though I did that too.
Noting the discussion about RefToolbar above, I'd like to report the following issue:
Using RefToolbar in WP:Source Editor to add citations, I find they are all being inserted at the very top of the page I am editing, and not at the end of the relevant sentence where my cursor was placed.
In this edit I copied a bare url already present at the end of the sentence, then used RefToolbar to autofill it, Preview it and Insert it at the end of the sentence where my cursor had been placed. The reference previewed correctly, but the 'Insert' point was wrong. Citations added to the same page via WP:VE are inserting correctly.
@Nick Moyes: Thanks for the report! This has been fixed in master and the fix should be deployed to English Wikipedia on Thursday. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime! Kaldari (talk) 17:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Also note that you can avoid the problem by turning off syntax highlighting or using a browser other than Chrome. Kaldari (talk) 17:07, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
System requirements for hosting a fork of Wikipedia via a Wikimedia server
Latest comment: 4 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, I am following these directions for hosting a personal copy of Wikipedia (via a Wikimedia) server; my goal is to have it fully editable (I'm using WAMP server)
If you mean, you want the WMF to host it on their servers, that's not going to happen. If you want to host your own Wikipedia fork, it will in large part depend on what you're hosting; are you planning on hosting just the current version of the article text without user or talk pages (approx 60GB), the current version of the article text plus the current versions of Commons images (about 30 terabytes), or all-revisions-all-pages-all-languages (almost certainly more than either your computer or your internet connection can handle, unless you have large commercial servers). The instructions for downloading database dumps are at Wikipedia:Database download. ‑ Iridescent10:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, I want my own Wikipedia fork, not one hosted on WM servers. (I followed the Instructions on the ExtremeTech article to set up a database and install MediaWiki. I have an XML dump downloaded here which I plan on importing. I want just the article text, and the pages to be editable by uses. No plan on importing the Commons images due to hosting and copyright reasons.
For the record, I only want to host about 30,000 articles at most (mainly the good and featured articles on Wikipedia), with edible pages and talk pages? Any estimate on that? Thanks.
Some back of the envelope guesses: Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia says 6 million articles with 3.6 billion words, so roughly 600 words/article on average. Figure a typical GA or FA is several times longer than average, so 3000 words, or 15k characters. Another factor of 2 for database overhead, so 30 kb per article. Times 30,000 articles, gives you on the order of 1 GB. You owe the oracle a quick lesson in how to pass a software engineering interview. -- RoySmith(talk)17:33, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, this is where I was lost; I used WampServer to install Wikimedia software so that I can access and edit it via localhost. [https://docs.sweeting.me/s/self-host-a-wikipedia-mirror#Method-3-Run-a-full-MediaWiki-server This article says I would need up to 2TB for importing it and high CPU use; also said that importing the XML as chucks of SLQ could take days. I'm assuming this link isn't talking about just the articles and an editable wiki, but includes something else, such as images and full revision histories?--IBBishops (talk) 19:35, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Layout problem in bracket codes
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
There are lots of errors in how 32 team bracket are displayed. I checked few cases from 24, 48 and 64 brackets and they were correct, so it seems to be only 32 team problem:
Template:32TeamBracket-2legs, Template:32TeamBracket-2legs-except final, Template:32TeamBracket-Compact-Squash5, Template:32TeamBracket-Tennis3 and Template:32TeamBracket-Tennis5 are missing spacer rows at "Round of 32", which Template:32TeamBracket has. Broken ones have all pairs mushed together, so it's visually horrible mess.
Template:5RoundBracket-Byes, Template:32TeamBracket-Byes and Template:32TeamBracket-Compact-Tennis5 are missing "Round of 32" boxes completely
Template:5RoundBracket is missing round header texts and padding
Template:32TeamBracket-Compact-info shows content tags or something
Template:32TeamBracket-Compact-NoSeeds-Byes shows only final
Please link to pages in article space where these problems are visible. Did you try raising these issues at the talk pages for the templates in question? – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:22, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Module:TeamBracket and Module:TeamBracket-Tennis do have a parameter to control whether there are spaces: |compact = yes omits spaces. The default is spaces. Some templates call the modules with the parameter, some without, some give it as an option, and some don't use the modules. {{32TeamBracket-Compact-Squash5}} reveals in the name that it's compact, but it does have an undocumented |compact = no option. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:54, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
Retrieving least updated templates
Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 4 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
Is anyone having difficulty with the Ctrl-F search function while editing. It used to be very reliable, going to the searched term automatically. Now the screen kind of squiggles, and if I scroll down I'll find the searched term, but it doesn't go there. Anyone else? Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:54, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
@Beyond My Ken: Works for me just tried on this page for your term "anyone else?" - worked first time on both Firefox and Chrome for me. This is a browser-side function, can you try a different browser? — xaosfluxTalk13:47, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
I think I have had the same problem. Can't remember which browser but probably Firefox. I have had all sorts of problems with connecting to WMF recently, but many of them probably just bandwidth problems. · · · Peter Southwood(talk): 17:43, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
I had that once. I think the search hit was obscured by something the browser was displaying. For example, if the mouse is above a link, the browser shows the URL at the bottom. I can't remember if that was it, but the search hit was hidden. Or, maybe it's a case of the JavaScript scrolling the screen problem where the browser thinks it has stopped at the position to show the search, but then js inserts something. Johnuniq (talk) 23:59, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
I only saw my problem a couple of times, some weeks ago. I didn't do anything other than grind my teeth but I haven't noticed the problem lately. For example, searching for "10 June 2020" on this page shows no problems for me. Johnuniq (talk) 03:40, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Edit summary link
Latest comment: 4 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Is there any way to turn off the link to Help:Edit summary just above the edit summary window? It's very frustrating to accidentally click that and (depending on browser) lose your work in the edit window - Dumelow (talk) 07:29, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Dumelow, you could use the Visual Editor, that would put a whole new spin on where the controls are located.
Or, you could use keyboard shortcuts: TAB will skip from the edit window to the edit summary line, and while your cursor is there, pressing ENTER will publish the page.
There is a browser add-on which saves your form data for later recall. It doesn't work in IE. Maybe it doesn't work at all.
Thanks guys, PrimeHunter's fix worked for me. It's not a problem when I edit from home with Firefox which retains the form information but sometimes I have to use Edge elsewhere which doesn't - Dumelow (talk) 09:34, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Related Article changes
Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
@Hindu Viki:, the related articles are generated from his categories, I believe. Amit is not just an Indian youtuber - he's also an Indian male comedian, but also a youtube comedian - so I'd expect to see articles from both of those categories as well. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:47, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
@Nosebagbear: So I have recommended Bhuvan Bam, Ashish Chanchalani, and Ajay Nagar.
He is also a YouTuber and a male comedian. I hope you will change it.
It is a feature that should be rarely used, I'd say – Princes in the Tower has an obvious and unchanging set of most closely related articles, but for many articles with a large potential number of related articles this is a great way for marketing people to steer mobile users to a particular target. Such as in the case of an article about a contemporary performer with an active cadre of marketing staff. --bonadeacontributionstalk13:45, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This may or may not be the same problem as #Problem with thumbnails images of subsection. The Main Page is missing the Pierre Nkurunziza picture. Instead, it has only the words "Pierre Nkurunziza in 2014". Similarly for Drużbart card, but the other pictures are working. Firefox 77.0.1 (64-bit), Windows 10. The problem doesn't occur on Chrome or Edge, and it doesn't occur when I use the right arrow at the top left corner of the browser to re-access a page I just visited, but this morning it happens every time I click the Main Page link below the "Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia" ball, or the Main Page link I just made in this section. Although when I first logged on (after a Windows update) it was the Samuel J. Randall picture (but not Pierre Nkurunziza) that was missing. The Food desert article had, and still has the problem. I had a similar problem a couple days ago, but it disappeared while I was researching it so I could describe it. And before you say it's completely random, I have reproduced the problem consistently about 10 times this morning by clicking "Main page". Art LaPella (talk) 14:35, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Why are signatures not added automatically in talk pages.
Latest comment: 4 years ago18 comments12 people in discussion
One of my first memories from using wikipedia is somebody adding my signature through some kind of {{unsigned}} template and asking me to add it in the future. So I ask the question, why are comments in a talk page not automatically signed?
I think it's a good case study for wikipedia's lack of rules set in stone. My explanation is that most software contains rules that are imposed by the developers, the company, the code. On wikipedia communities implement rules either by social means or by third party automation that have the same interface and privileges as regular users (bots). This would serve to avoid biasing wikipedia in favour of those with technical acumen.
Yes. It's an unnecessary little complication in a system that has complications galore. And yes, I am omitting rather than forgetting the four tildes for this reply. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jim.henderson (talk • contribs) 07:34, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Users can edit the whole page, some parts are not "comments" on many pages, and some edits should not be signed. Wikipedia:Flow is an alternative discussion software with clearly defined posts and no manual signing but it's unpopular and not enabled at the English Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:48, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Off topic: I for one like Flow (random example), but only dislike how it takes up so much space. Would be great if it could use up less [vertical] space, probably by reducing the header size, and maybe move the username to the beginning of the posts... Hopefully someone would start an RFC on why they don't like Flow, and perhaps it would be first steps of enabling it here. Rehman12:16, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
Maybe having a notice when saving the page, that could be disabled using preferences, like the one that comes up when you don't enter an edit summary (if it's enabled), could be useful for new users. – BrandonXLF (talk)04:12, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi, Tomás, the Talk Pages Project is developing a reply system that automatically signs and indents, and is designed to fit with existing wikitext structure and prevailing social conventions. It's available as a beta feature in French, Arabic, Dutch and Hungarian wikipedias. (Checking that link, I see they’ve just released version 2.0!) You can still do section edits so it’s not an on/off choice like Structured Discussions (Flow).
[Shh, don’t tell anyone, but it seems you can use v1.0 on en-wp by appending ?dtenable=1 to the URL. The "dt" stands for Discussion Tools which is the MediaWiki extension that implements this. It should create a "Reply" link after each post, similar to the ReplyLinks script. I’m doing it right now. ;)]
Anyone who's interested should please put WP:Talk pages project on your watchlist (and maybe even occasionally nudge me to update it – let's see, it basically works, version 2 is on the Beta Cluster if you know the secret ?dtvisual=1 URL code, and we still don't have a date for when it might be available as a regular Beta Feature here). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:35, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
@Redrose64 and Whatamidoing (WMF): Even though it uses external link syntax, it should not appear with the external link icon, as that icon is only applied to links in page text and not in interface elements. I assume you fixed the problem with this edit: [45] (but if you still see the icon there, I'd be curious to investigate why). It used external link syntax because we wanted to link to mediawiki.org by default, and I vaguely remembered that the mw: interwiki prefix used to not be available on third-party wikis – but apparently it works now, that might have been fixed some years ago in fact, so maybe we could have used an internal interwiki link instead. I don't think it really matters though. Matma Rextalk22:23, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
@Ahecht: You might be able to replace the redirect in your script with a call to mw.loader.load( 'ext.discussionTools.init' ); (that is basically what the parameter does), so that the page doesn't have to reload entirely. Matma Rextalk22:26, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
If your script turns out to be moderately popular, then I can ask the Editing team to hurry up on the Beta Feature. (Personally, I'm loving having easy access to the Reply tool on pages like this one.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Bogus edit conflicts from Chromium
Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi folks,
This has been driving me crazy for a while now. I'm using Chromium (currently version 81.0.4044.129, but it was happening long before I went to this version) on Linux. Usually (but not always) when I submit an edit, it gives me the "edit conflict" page. My changes actually were saved. I've tried running Chromium with no extensions and even with a new user profile, but the problem persists. It doesn't happen with other browsers, just Chromium. Anybody seen this behavior before?—Chowbok☠07:57, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
, they mean the exact same thing. {{open access}} was never updated to the green lock, but probably should be. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:33, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Resolved
Works for me Recheck. --qedk (t 愛 c) 14:06, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
OK
Edges of the rounded rectangle
Top and bottom edges
Bottom left corner
Bottom left corner
Bottom edge
All horizontal edges
Edge between two speech bubbles
Edge between two speech bubbles
Upper lip
Fixed Category:Articles with links needing disambiguation from april 2020, which is caused by putting {{dn}} in {{term}}, which automatically lowercases its output to include an HTML ID (I resolved the disambiguation link). * Pppery * it has begun... 13:09, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
Done. All came from the same old source. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 10:57, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 May. It will be on all wikis from 7 May (calendar).
--qedk (t 愛 c) 15:54, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
--qedk (t 愛 c) 16:49, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
JavaScript scripts and gadgets can no longer check multiple keys at once via 
mention me on reply) —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 05:28, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Resolved. I think I figured it out; I am using the Modern skin and the debug console gave a yellow warning which stated:
--qedk (t 愛 c) 11:44, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
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You're invited to join the discussion at Module talk:Template invocation § Lua error: attempt to compare string with number. —andrybak (talk) 14:36, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
Done
Bumping thread. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 09:59, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Moved from Talk:Main Page
You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:Naypta#Cassiopeia's archives. Interstellarity (talk) 17:31, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:33, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
--qedk (t 愛 c) 14:32, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
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