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Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Bots Newsletter, January 2022
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
BRFA activity by month
Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.
After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.
Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.
Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired).
January 2020
Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.
A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022.
On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved.
In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code).
A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18.
Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.
May 2020
We heard you like bots, so we made a bot that reports the status of your bots, so now you can use bots while you use bots
MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status.
In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored.
On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors).
David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so".
(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Is it normal for the bot newsletter to be posted to WP:VPT? And why is the 2022 newsletter filled with items from 2020? I don't get why this is here. RudolfRed (talk) 03:14, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
I appreciate the newsletter being here. I would have missed it if it wasn't here.
I am guessing they are going through the backlog of uncovered events. If I was in charge I would just skip right to 2022, but it is intresting to see 2020's events though. So i don't mind either way. Rlink2 (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Reading is hard. Here's the TLDR from above: After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. ... I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. ... this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:13, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
Hello, Village Pump frequenters,
I'm just putting this wish out there but is there any way that log pages could be sortable by namespace like an editor's contribution page can be? I assume this is difficult or impossible or it would already be possible. So, I guess I'm looking for an explanation on why this can't happen rather than asking that it happen. It would be so useful to me, and I assume other admins, if I could sort a deletion log to see just deleted categories or deleted draft pages. Is this an impossible dream? And if Contributions are sortable, why can't other log pages be sortable by namespace? Thanks for indulging me with further information (I'm hoping). Thank you. LizRead!Talk!02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
Also, if anyone could explain the "Tag filter" field, I'd appreciate it. I've found it to be basically useless but maybe it has a purpose that has eluded me. LizRead!Talk!02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
The tag filter allows you to filter by tags (like "AWB" and "mobile edit"). See WP:Tags (which does a terrible job explaining how to interact with them).
My apologies for "unarchiving" this discussion but I thought it would be on this board for at least a week before being shoved into the archives. I can see it was done by a bot, so it must be the settings if there are no activity for 3 days or something like that, a discussion is archived. But I'm just getting around to coming back to see the replies.
It seems like I'm not alone in wishing for more utility in the log settings, I had not even thought about something like ones contributions or searches being exportable. To be honest, it's very interesting when some thoughtful editor searches and shares a phab report but whenever I check them out, they are from years ago which makes me think the answer is "Problem is noted but you won't see a solution in your lifetime". Thanks for the replies though. LizRead!Talk!06:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
That is probably only possible server side. There is an roundabout way of doing this, copying the query behind the special page, paste it to quarry and sort to your hearts content. Same goes with exportable results.--Snævar (talk) 11:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, please see WP:User access levels § Autoconfirmed and confirmed users. Here the template {{If autoconfirmed}} is nested within {{If IP}}. On desktop version, it works; on mobile version logged in, it works too; but on mobile version NOT logged in {{If IP}} fails and whatever is within both the true & false parameters appears on the screen. As such, the message appears is "You are not logged in, so you are not autoconfirmedYour account is not autoconfirmed". I since tried to change the code of this page but it didn't work out. Can someone please check it out? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)07:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
It seems to me that none of the user/group classes are available on mobile right now... Not sure if that was always the case, mobile is known to always have run their own order of modules etc, but this should be fixed indeed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:57, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Does templatedata work on user namespace templates?
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I've tried to create templates with templatedata in the user namespace, and then use the insert template button, but when I type the name of the template it says that templatedata is missing. I can still access all of the all of the default parameters, so I know that the template exists, but templatedata is ignored. Any idea what could be the problem? ― Levi_OPTalk17:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
After reading over mw:Help:TemplateData, the first section says To add or edit TemplateData, first navigate to a template's page, located at "/Template:Templatename". Every other instance on the page also only refers to using the template namespace. Could anyone confirm that this feature only works in the Template namespace? ― Levi_OPTalk20:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Mediawiki help pages are generally reliable. They are created by the very same team that created the extension. Snævar (talk) 19:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Huge increase in IP blocks
Latest comment: 2 years ago20 comments11 people in discussion
Hi folks: We've noticed a huge increase in IP blocks on en.wp since June — going from around 60,000 blocks a month to 500,000 blocks a month, and staying there. It was only happening on English WP until October, when there was a similar sudden increase on Spanish WP.
I can see on Special:AutoblockList that there's a block with the reason "Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "<blocked user's name>"." It's happening every few minutes, always with a different blocked user. It's not possible that dozens of individual blocked users are each trying to make an edit, taking turns every few minutes, so there's clearly something else going on.
Do you know if there was a bot or some kind of change deployed in June that would autoblock a lot more IPs? I don't know if the current situation is a bug, or if it's working as intended. Can anybody help me? — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
The most recent ones seem to be primarily registering when a user gets hard blocked, but unless there's been a technical change in how this is handled, I'm not sure why hardblocking would cause such a big jump. Hog FarmTalk21:58, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Timing looks right to me, we started blocking in July and only announced it once we'd gotten the blocks in place and seen the effects. This appears to be working as intended, though there's no denying that we're blocking a lot of IPs. DannyH (WMF), there's some non-public background on this; if you'd like I can email you the details. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:38, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
"It's not possible..." - famously edible words. The blocklist has always been somewhat busy, anecdotally similar to how it looks now. I've had a quick look through some of them. The majority are accounts which have been blocked today or yesterday. Some others are accounts which were blocked some time ago, but have tried editing today. One example causing an autoblock, User:DaniloForrest6 has been logging in several times a day on different IPs, almost every day since they were blocked 3 months ago. I'd suggest grab a DB admin to pull out some quirky ones. I only saw one quirky autoblock in the current list, which doesn't match the reported 900% increase. -- zzuuzz(talk)22:12, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
I don't know if it's relevant to this issue but I have noticed a dramatic increase in bot-like or otherwise totally useless edits by IPs with no other edits. Examples: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. There are also more like this which superficially looks like a good-faith edit but which consideration shows is totally misguided. I used to use polite edit summaries and even leave messages but it's impossible to keep up with now, and that's without me looking for it. I guess that wouldn't account for a huge increase in blocks, but who knows. Johnuniq (talk) 22:33, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Well, this is the chart that I'm looking at. The green line that goes from the lower part of the chart all the way up is English WP, with the spike starting in June. The pink line that spikes in October is Spanish WP. Every other wiki appears to be acting normally. If that 10x spike was caused by actual user behavior, it would mean blocked users suddenly started to log in ten times more often than they did the month before. And the same thing would suddenly happen in Spanish a few months later. It can't be spontaneous individual behavior; there's something behind it. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Hello; I confirm that I have personally been importing the blocks to P2P proxies, since on es.wikipedia they have been abused by WMF banned user #00026885. LuchoCR (talk) 05:30, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
I have a further question — if the increase that I'm seeing is from proxy blocks, why are they showing up in Special:AutoblockList the way that they are?
I'll show you what I'm seeing in that autoblock log -- I won't use links for the names because I don't want to ping all these people. :)
23:31 - 31 January - blocking admin Dr Kay - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Alexandru Mihai Zausila". The reason given for Alexandru Mihai Zausila's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: suspected sock puppet".
23:29 - 31 January - blocking admin Widr - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Hamster KILL KILL". The reason given for Hamster KILL KILL's block is: "Vandalism".
23:28 - 31 January - blocking admin LuK3 - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "BLMisApeacfulorganization". The reason given for BLMisApeacfulorganization's block is: "Clearly not here to build an encyclopedia".
23:26 - 31 January - blocking admin PhilKnight - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Borhan18". The reason given for Borhan18's block is: "Disruptive editing".
23:25 - 31 January - blocking admin Favonian - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Otávio Astor Vaz Costa". The reason given for Otávio Astor Vaz Costa's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: User:MarquinhosWikipediano".
And so on, every one to three minutes. The way that I read this log, it says that blocked user Otávio Astor Vaz Costa tried to edit at 23:25 - then Borhan18 tried to edit at 23:26 - then BLMisApeacfulorganization at 23:28 - then Hamster KILL KILL at 23:29 - then Alexandru Mihai Zausila at 23:31.
That seems like a suspiciously regular pattern, a long list of banned users each trying to log in at a regular cadence. I don't mean "suspicious" as in I suspect that someone is doing something wrong, just "suspicious" meaning that I'm not sure I understand the explanation yet.
Is what I'm seeing in the log related to ST47ProxyBot blocking proxies based on the Spur info? If it's not, then where would I see the ST47ProxyBot activity? Sorry if I'm being annoying; I'm just trying to figure this out. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Over a longer period, it looks like random times. We just have a lot of unwanted editors. The only duplicate I noticed was LaraBrockman visiting twice, several hours apart, possibly from work/school and home. Certes (talk) 00:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
It also look random to me. I see 12 minutes, 1 minute, 2 in a minute, and others. Yes, we really do get that many blocked users trying to edit. I can't see any relation between the autoblocks and ST47ProxyBot (btw, Special:Log/ST47ProxyBot). I suppose one thing to add is that when a blocked user tries to edit, the new autoblock will typically replace the older autoblock, so you don't tend to see too many repetitions in the autoblock list. It might look different if every hit was noted. -- zzuuzz(talk)00:46, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I still haven't gotten my login credentials for Newspaper Archive via the Wikipedia Library, and it's been over a month. Who would I poke about fixing this? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?)18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Hello! In the article List of most-played video games by player count, ref 13 has the error of |last1= has generic name. I attempted to fix it by just moving the last name to be part of the first name, however that just made the error worse. The ref does not give an actual author name and instead just lists the author as "Guest Author (sponsored)". What do I do here? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654521:31, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Is it really important that your ref displays "Guest Author"? Why not just omit it? {{cite news}}'s documentation says to give it an explicitly-blank author parameter, but it works fine even without that. —Cryptic21:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
The error is accidentally highlighting the poor quality of the source. The cited source is a sponsored post that looks like a press release. The real solution is to find a reliable source to support the claim in the article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
False positives are possible. When the name is valid, wrap the parameter value in the accept-this-as-written markup:
|author=((Super User))
The actual credit in the source is "Guest Author (Sponsored)". When the website explicitly says this, I think it's misleading if the citation only specifies the website as source. You could write |author=((Guest Author (Sponsored))) to display what the website says without getting the error message. Or look for a better source. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Live preview not working with Vector 2022
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm been using the Vector (2022) for around a year, but strangely, something happened today, when I go into edit source, and then with or without making any changes, clicking the Show Preview button, after which the content area will shrink and the various button at the top of the page will become messy as seen in the attached video. I have tried switching between Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Brave but all yields the same result. Was there a code update when wrong somewhere? —Paper9oll(🔔 • 📝)07:43, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Email notifications - Phabricator
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Currently, the emails you receive from Phabricator lack an "Unsubscribe" kind of button that would mute the task they were coming from without you having to go there and mute it manually. Or do they? Is there a way I can do what I want to do? Should I consider asking at Phab for that as a new feature? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, thank you! I was checking in Phabricator to see if there was a place like this but I didn't find one. I guess that will do.
You know we already talked together a very similar thing but I keep getting 5-10 emails per day from Phabricator lately and things are quickly going out of hands. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
When I go to a different language Wikipedia I am automatically logged in with my global account. But when I go to Wikidata or Commons, I usually have to log in again. Is this normal? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:50, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Do you have your browser set to disallow third party cookies or any kind of browser extension that would block them? Does the issue occur on other non-wikipedia sites like meta or wiktionary? All the wikipedias are hosted at variations of the xx.wiki.x.io domain whereas commons and wikidata have different addresses. 192.76.8.77 (talk) 10:56, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
I can confirm that the same login behavior occurs for me. On a related note, will it be possible to establish a common thread between the supposedly unified logins across Wikimedia, etc. The reason I'm asking is in the Metaverse, someone could pose as me in an alternate universe, and usurp my logins across all universes, eventually. Could WMF assert those same rights to identity for us, right now in the real universe, before a usurped identity metastasizes before our eyes. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs)23:20, 3 February 2022 (UTC)"
Ummmm. You already have a unified username/identity/login across all public Wikimedia wikis if that's what you're asking. Legoktm (talk) 08:17, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
It looks like the answer to my 'usurped identity metastasizes' question is "Wikimedia's implementation of Unified login is the way we are handling Identity.". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ancheta Wis (talk • contribs) 09:16, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, this may be a naive question but is it possible to put utility functions I often use in a separate user script and call them in another? Thanks for your help.—182.251.108.127 (talk) 00:22, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Yes, you can use something like jQuery's $.getScript to load another JavaScript file from on-wiki and then on its callback, use those functions. Legoktm (talk) 08:13, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
I'm wondering if it's possible to get the matched pattern text and use it in the replace string. For example:
Wiki Source
Rendered Result
{{#invoke:String
|replace
|text text... [[other text]] more text
|[[.*]]
|<b>.*</b> additional text
|plain=false
}}
Original text to be replaced: text text... other text more text
What I'd like the result to be: other text additional text
As you can see, what I desire is that any time [[.*]] is matched, I would like to use the text that matched (the ".*" in this example) in the replacement string. Is this in any way possible? ― Levi_OPTalk16:29, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Put the text you want to capture in parentheses in your search pattern, and %1 in your replacement pattern: {{#invoke:String|replace|foo bar Baz boz|[A-Z]([a-z]+)|Q%1Q|plain=false}} produces foo bar QazQ boz. %2 will be replaced with the second capture group, and so on.The search pattern in your invocation above doesn't work. Lua uses a horrifically neutered variant of regular expressions, and I haven't been able to come up with a pattern that non-greedily matches up to a pair of close brackets, or even a single close bracket. Escaping the open (and close!) brackets with %[ and %] prevents your pattern from erroring out, at least. —Cryptic16:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
%[%[(.-)%]%] matches the contents of a link non-greedily, leaving the innards in %1, but won't handle nesting such as [[File:appletree.jpg|An [[apple]] tree]]. Certes (talk) 17:25, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
It should, but it doesn't. {{#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!}} should produce "text text it worked! more text", but instead gives "text text it didn't work more text". —Cryptic18:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
Umm, |plain=false:
{{#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!|plain=false}} – capture not used here
Like I said above I wasn't actually handling brackets or wikilinks when I was using it; It was just an easy example. Cool to know and helpful to learn, though. ― Levi_OPTalk13:41, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Default to soft redirects in specific scenarios
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Would it be possible to make the "Article" tab a soft redirect (not sure if there is a more appropriate technical term)? For example, in the default "Vector" skin, if I am reading the revision history (or talk page, or "What links here") of a redirect and I want to edit the redirect (say, to retarget it or convert it to a disambiguation page), I will click the "Article" tab. This will take me to the target of the redirect rather than the redirect itself, when the latter is what I intended. (e.g. user is reading page history of UK → user clicks "Article" tab to make a change → user is redirected to United Kingdom → user must click "(redirected from UK)" to backtrack to their intended destination.)
Interesting. Although it's overkill for me because, with the exception of my example, I do want to follow redirects in most other cases. Schierbecker (talk) 00:50, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Just wrap the user script loader in "if on history page then load this script". It will then only work there. wgAction = "history" should do.--Snævar (talk) 08:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Any way to show page preview on a new tab in user scripts?
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I'm currently writing a user script (on a different wiki) and wondering if there's any way to generate page preview from a textbox on a dialog (using jQuery UI). It's a script that asks the user to fill out a bunch of fields and then edits a certain page when the form is submitted, and it'd be best if the user could see page preview on a new tab before posting, when clicking a dialog button. I'm guessing the "preview" parameter of mw:API:Parsing_wikitext could be used or User:SD0001/private-sandbox.js could be forked somehow, but it's just a guess and I'm really not sure exactly how. Do you guys have any idea about this, or know any user script that actually has page preview functionality? Any help would be appreciated. --Dragoniez (talk)04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't know why you would want to open a whole new tab instead of a popup like Twinkle does, especially if you already have a dialog. The parse API only gives you the content of the parser output, so you'd have to reconstruct the CSS in the new tab to make it resemble the actual result. I suggest looking at the live preview code (search for "postData") and tinkering with Special:ApiSandbox#action=parse to get what you want. Nardog (talk) 14:36, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
The Random Submission button found on AfC project page is leading to a category searchbar instead of finding a random submission.Slywriter (talk) 18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
If only that were true, but the general category has over 3k submissions. Hint hint for any experienced editors reading along that AfC can ALWAYS use help.Slywriter (talk) 21:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
@Slywriter It should be working now. Long story short, WP:ITSTHURSDAY. Toolforge is still running an old version of PHP that defaults to using HTTP/1.0. A few hours ago a new version of mediawiki was deployed whose API requires HTTP/1.1 (see WP:ITSTHURSDAY), so I had to tweak the code to make it work. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 22:08, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
If you don't already know what I'm talking about, then click https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtenable=1#Reply_tool_might_get_here_soon to see the new [reply] buttons after each signature on this page. If you click the [reply] button, you will get a little quick-reply widget, which has the important advantage of auto-signing the comment. The other tools (e.g., the [subscribe] button that we played with here last year) won't be deployed yet. (Maybe we should ask the team to give us all the subscribe button, though. I'm really liking it.)
For the regulars, on the assumption that somoene's going to ask about this new tool here:
You can turn it off if you don't like it. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion (after it's deployed; if you don't have the Beta Feature enabled, then that section's probably invisible to you right now).
Feedback is wanted. Since it's already been used to post 750,000 comments so far, I'm not expecting any big suprises, but if you run into a problem, feel free to ping me. You can also post at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Replying (which uses Flow, not the new [reply] tool) or file tasks in Phabricator and tag them with #DiscussionTools.
I know this has been delayed several times already, but I do think it's finally on track to happen. Thanks for your support during this very slow process. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Problems with navigating wikipedia on Chrome on chromebook OS
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
"Version 94.0.4606.124 (Official Build) (64-bit)" is the version of Chrome I'm using. This problem has been ongoing for at least two weeks. About 2/5 of the time I click on edit source, the side-scrolling widget on the right side of the editing space will not come up, I have tried disabling my add-ons, without better results. Obviously this greatly hinders my ability to scroll down and up through articles. It doesn't happen when I switch to "visual editing", but I much prefer "source editing". I believe my device updated at around the same time that this problem began.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:40, 3 February 2022 (UTC) Edit: it seems to be happening even in visual editor right now. Even refreshing the page doesn't help.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
side-scrolling widget on the right side of the editing space is not standard, so, you're going to have to tell us what you think that is. Izno (talk) 16:56, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
I'm sorry, it used to come up for me, maybe I'm referring to something different when I use the term "widget", I mean the scrolling bar on the right side of the editing box. It used to come up all of the time, but if you're right and it's just not standard to have a side-scroller, then that answers my query. Thanks.--Phil of rel (talk) 19:44, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Show draft creators that an article already exists
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion
If a user attempts to create Example when Draft:Example already exists, a message pops up "There is a draft article for this article at Draft:Example" (see Harpreet Kaur for an demonstration). It would be good to have the opposite functionality: an editor attempting to create Draft:Albert Einstein should, assuming Albert Einstein is not a redirect, get a message along the lines of "Albert Einstein already exists; please consider improving that existing article." (more draconian, but with its advantages, would be to prevent creation of any draft with the same title as a non-redirected mainspace article). Anyone willing to tackle this? Thoughts? UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:24, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
When I go to Draft:Albert Einstein, I do indeed see "Note: There is a Wikipedia article named Albert Einstein (diff)" (with a link to the diff). I agree that this could be made bigger, similar to the message that pop ups vice-versa. 🐶 EpicPupper(he/him | talk)05:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
{{Draft at}} is the message you're referring to, and I agree a similar mbox would be a good idea here. Or could mirror the logic I added to {{draft at}} recently, where it doesn't show if the draft is a redirect outside draftspace, and have it so it shows the current small message if the article in question is a redirect, but an mbox if it's not. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they)06:37, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Although I dislike the screenful of messages that pops up when I edit certain pages, this is a rare case where a big warning is appropriate. Anyone attempting to create the duplicate article would normally help us and themselves better by improving the existing page instead. Certes (talk) 11:48, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Enable live updates by default
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Is there a way to enable the live updates for one's watchlist by default, rather than having to manually turn it on each time? I asked at the Teahouse and was told that another user's always stayed active when he turned it on, but that doesn't appear to be the case for me -- mine always turns off any time I refresh the page. — Czello16:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
And, if you look at these category pages, there is a bright red message "This category does not appear to be empty!". But the categories are, in fact, empty. I thought this might be a problem with a system lag or something (a layman's guess) and I was going to add this message last night when I noticed the problem but decided to wait to see if it went away. But they still appear to be non-empty empty categories. I did a "purge cache" and still, no change. I've been working with empty categories since 2015 and I've never seen this happen before.
Of course, as far as technical problems go, this is more of a curiosity than anything else but I wondered if anyone had an idea why this would suddenly happen now, and to more than one category page. Thank you. LizRead!Talk!23:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
@Liz: that red error is from the db template making use of the PAGESINCAT magic word; it is not reliable as it is subject to database and replication lag, which can't be fixed with a purge (phab:T85696). So either ignore it, or wait. — xaosfluxTalk23:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
The code is in Template:Db-c1: {{#ifeq:{{PAGESINCAT:{{PAGENAME}}}}|0||{{error|This category does not appear to be empty!}}}}. "does not appear" is a hint that it may not be certain. If it's currently very uncertain then we could state it more clearly or link a page which mentions the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Well, I don't quite understand but I appreciate the explanations. That doesn't have to do with your explanations but my lack of understanding of templates and all things database. It's nice that others can figure out what is going on when weird, unexpected things happen. Many thanks. LizRead!Talk!05:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Today we ran a script to recount categories so that counts are well, correct. It's possible said script has a bug or there's some other race condition going on. I re-opened T299823 for now. Legoktm (talk) 08:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Okay, Legoktm, another VERY LITTLE BUG which can drive CSD patrolling admins a little nuts. Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as spam always has 1 page too many in the content listing (see right-side listing of categories on the page). If there are 2 pages in this category, it will say there are 3 pages. But mostly, it says there is 1 page when the category is actually empty.
A few weeks ago, the CSD categories were completely out-of-whack but this is a very specific mistake that is only happening in the Spam CSD category but it's been a couple of days now. Admins who patrol CSD categories like to clear them out so to still have a 1 page indicated when the category is empty can be a little irritating. Not, stop the world irritating, but if you have a solution, that would be awesome! Thank you. LizRead!Talk!05:08, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
@Liz: There is a long-standing known bug causing counts to be wrong. Basically whenever a page is added or removed to MediaWiki, it just adds +1 or -1 to the count, so if that fails for any reason, there will permanently be one more or less page in the category and it just tends to get worse over time. The first step to making that less worse is T299823, which I mentioned earlier. We now recount all categories from scratch on the first of the month.
The second part is T85696, which once deployed (still in progress) will let you purge the category page to recount it from scratch. Hopefully that'll be available in a few weeks and then in the future if you find a category with counts that are off, purging it will do the trick. Legoktm (talk) 06:29, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Related changes to talk pages
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
If $1 links to $2 and if I then go to $1 and click on "related changes", I get a list of changes to $2. But if I have $1 on my watchlist, I also can view changes to Talk:$2. Will it be difficult to implement a corresponding feature in related changes? It would be useful to monitor talk pages easily without having to link to them specifically or manually add the links to my watchlist. Utfor (talk) 08:43, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hello all, I don't really want to go messing with a highly used template that uses a module, so I was wondering if it was a simple job to create a version of this template that is in a default collapsed state. It's taking up a lot of real estate on year pages and I am guessing that 99.9% of the readers of those pages don't even look at it. TIA, Black Kite (talk)14:39, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Something like: {{cot | Year in various calendars | right=true | b-color=transparent | border2=transparent | bg2=transparent | bg=transparent}}
{{Year in various calendars}}
{{cob}} ― Qwerfjkltalk16:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
The template's documentation says (in bold italic, no less): "Please do not rename or remove these classes nor collapse nested elements which use them."
I do not know why that should be so but before you go off and collapse all of those infoboxen (which I don't find to be all that obtrusive) you should discover why the template documentation is so averse to collapse.
The text in the template's documentation is added by {{Microformat message}}. Alas, that template's author, Sardanaphalus, is, apparently, no longer with us. Perhaps someone else knows the reason.
Can a wikilink work if the word is in a lang template?
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Over on the page Mary Robinson#Resignation as president, I have tried to put wikilinks on the words "Cathaoirleach" and "Ceann Comhairle". These words are in Irish, so I have also put them in a {{lang}} template. It's formatted like this: [[Ceann Comhairle|{{Lang|ga|Ceann Comhairle}}]]. Weirdly enough, in the visual editor it appears an a blue-link in italics. But in the reader view, it just shows the square brackets etc.. Any advice about where I've gone wrong? Thanks. Xx78900 (talk) 22:26, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Would it be possible to give Special:allpages the ability to filter out redirects? We have a redirect discussion where someone wants to delete redirects because of the inability to filter them out, and we shouldn't be deleting redirects merely because of a shortcoming with our tools. Thanks. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 21:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
The thing about special pages is that they are for every wiki, including the sister projects and all of the wikis listed on wikiapiary (it lists wikis that use Mediawiki). Creating an Wikipedia:Database reports for this purpose on the other hand is entirely possible.--Snævar (talk) 21:15, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
It used to. However it seems it was disabled in March 2017 to resolve an issue where someone mass screen-scraping special:allpages caused outages (phab:T160916). A request to re-enable it in August 2017 was declined (phab:T173479). The task to actually fix the issue (phab:T160983) has been open since March 2017, but no actual action appears to have taken place since then (it wasn't even prioritised until September 2021, when it was rated low priority). So it seems like a database report or similar is going to be the only useful way forward for the next several years (deleting redirects is not a useful way forward). Thryduulf (talk) 01:35, 7 February 2022 (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.
Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month. [2]
Problems
A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022. A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).
Latest comment: 2 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion
I am considering writing a script to analyze data from WP:AIV. The script will need to query about 10,000 diffs using the compare action of Wikipedia's API. The script is purely read-only: I am not making any edits, just downloading the JSON outputs for offline use. I have read MediaWikiWiki:API:Etiquette and don't want to run anything that exceeds a reasonable rate of API requests. My questions are:
Is running my script allowed by policy?
Do I need to get BRFA approval to proceed?
I am willing to spread the API requests out over time and limit myself to batches of 500 requests at a time. I appreciate any technical advice from more seasoned editors as this is my first foray into using the API. Best, Altamel (talk) 03:55, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Yes
No (you are not doing any actions that modify en.wp)
Yup, that. Not something that the English Wikipedia will care about - however if you do flood the server developers may shut you down. Your request is really not "that big" in the grand scheme (20x 500 result requests) - just don't do something silly like make 10000 individual requests - each with a new session - and all in parallel :D — xaosfluxTalk10:48, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
Hope we didn't confuse you with terms - yes you can make 1 "request" that has 500 results; then repeat that process in series, 20 times. If you really have to you could make 10,000 requests, but also do them in series - and if it is public-read only data: skip authentication steps too. Don't make hundreds of parallel requests. — xaosfluxTalk15:24, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
The compare API only supports one result at a time. Though I'm not sure @Altamel why you want to query diffs. Sounds like you'd be better off querying the revisions, which can be done in bulk (50 revisions per request, although if you have a bot account you could upto do 500 {but there's a 12 MB size limit on the API response which 500 revisions could break}) and then compute the diffs locally. – SD0001 (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@TheDJ, Xaosflux, and Legoktm: thanks everyone for the replies. Good to know this is a permissible use of the API, though I must admit I am still a little confused about the difference between parallel and series. I have not run any requests en masse yet (still testing small bits of code in the API sandbox). So to clarify – even though I can't pipe requests for the compare API, if I write the code so that it waits until a JSON is returned, and then loops back to making the next request, and repeat that 10,000 times – that's what you mean by making requests in parallel? SD00001, I did not know that the compare API can only handle one revision at a time – thanks for the clarification. That explains why my tests in the API sandbox, where I tried to use the pipe character to request multiple revisions at once, kept returning errors. I had planned to use diffs because it was easier to match up the content that was added with the account that added it – as you pointed out, otherwise I would have to back out the diffs manually. Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Some programming languages/libraries allow for making multiple HTTP requests at the same time (see Asynchronous I/O), which would be requests in parallel. To make requests in series, just wait for the first request to finish and then make the next one. I would recommend using one of the pre-existing API client libraries, they all should take care of that for you. Legoktm (talk) 06:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), I am hoping to analyze statistics regarding the frequency of reports and average response times. If I ever find the time to finish the analysis, I might write my results up as a report and offer suggestions for improving AIV. Best, Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Please can someone copy over Template:Graph:Map from English Wikipedia to Meta?
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hi
I'm working on some documentation on Meta and have built a map using Template:Graph:Map not realising it wasn't available on meta. Please could someone who knows how to copy templates copy it over for me? I would ask there but I doubt my message would get seen.
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! Can someone experienced in the translation feature in Commons help me with adding translation and language tags to some project pages? The pages and the details can be found here. I asked in the Translators' noticeboard there but I didn't get an answer and thought that maybe I can have some more luck here. Any kind of help would be appreciated as I've never had a chance to work with that feature before. - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:35, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Modify header for vect0r-2022.js and css
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
If your non-question is about the preferred form in articles then it's generally templates. It's easier to answer a question if you actually ask one. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:54, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
How do we turn off banner ads?
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
This is getting really really annoying. I have all banner ads turned off in my prefs, but still have ads on nearly every page, often multiple ads on a page so I have to scroll down to get to the article. It's nearly all garbage, and 'dismissing' them doesn't seem to do any good -- they just pop back up over and over. Hundreds of ads a day; some of the ads I've seen thousands of times. (Like the 'Vote in the Community Wishlist Survey' popup, which is even in extra-large type so that it takes up lots of room.) Once is enough. How do we turn them off or opt out? And is there a universal opt out? Thanks. — kwami (talk) 10:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Also you shouldn't be getting them thousands of times, but if you have disabled cookies or local storage - you will likely see them much more than you should. — xaosfluxTalk11:37, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Thank you! I'd already unticked everything at the first link, but didn't know about Central Notices at the 2nd. That should help. — kwami (talk) 11:41, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Search button is broken
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
Latest comment: 2 years ago12 comments3 people in discussion
On my notifications screen, if I press the person icon, a popup appears. I am unable to press the buttons on it. If I do, the popup hides without changing the site. A temporary fix would be, on mobile devices at least, to add the sandbox buttons ect to the sidebar. I assume this popup works with other users, but I use an Amazon Kindle, and isn't possible currently to use my computer for web stuff. Any help or fix would be greatly appreciated. L10nM4st3r(talk)11:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
On further inspection, the button shows only in advanced mode, right? When I turned it off, the button disipears and I can access my userpage on any page... I used the Vector Legacy 2010 and im on "en.wikipedia .org". No ".m." included. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 15:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
By "advanced mode" you mean on the toggle on this page? That suggests you're indeed using the mobile site and Minerva, even though your report of the domain and preferences suggests otherwise. So, to recap: when you tap or , a menu shows up but tapping inside the menu does nothing, while you can use the menu that shows up when tapping just fine. Is that correct? Nardog (talk) 16:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Not as inportant at the moment, but too similar to class as a different bug type: "new discussion" and article "edit whole" buttons don't work either, but I have managed to work around it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 23:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Eliminating internal borders in this table
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Dear experts,
In this draft of a table in my Sandbox, borders appear around each cell. How can I eliminate them, please? I've checked out Help:Table with nosuccess. If there are other faults in my coding, I'd greatly appreciate being corrected. Cheers, SCHolar44 (talk) 07:59, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
I made a change to your sandbox which removed the borders but unfortunately there are other problems with your table which I don't have time to evaluate or fix at the moment. I'll check back on things when I get home from work. Best regards.--John Cline (talk) 09:18, 9 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hello! On Talk:George Orwell, the answered edit requests appear to be leaking into other sections not related to the edit request that is answered. I'm thinking it's the images that are causing this but I don't know how to fix it. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654518:50, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
This is normal behavior for things floating right that clear right. You can fix it by removing images or removing bad edit requests or both. Do not remove good edit requests much less their corresponding boxes. Izno (talk) 19:01, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Just had the following message when trying to go to my watchlist "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow". DuncanHill (talk) 19:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Hello again! Just recently (within the hour), when I've tried accessing pages i get the message upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow. Is Wikipedia having issues right now or is it just me? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
It looks OK. The three latest edits (earliest first) are: unlink Ramin Mashare in #Cast; unlink Ramin Mashare in infobox; redlink Ramin Mashare in infobox (revert previous edit). Certes (talk) 21:48, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Certes Maybe I'm having a cache issue but the article does not have the live redlink on my screen and the double revert seems off as there shouldn't have been anything to unlink the second time.Slywriter (talk) 21:54, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
I had opened a section as can be seen. But now, the reuse tab of citation has appeared again. What had happened last time, and what has happened now. ItcouldbepossibleTalk08:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
It looks like you need to select text that contains a reference in order to use the "Re-use" tab. I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work though, as it adds <references><ref name="..." /></references> in the middle of the prose, which results in "Cite error: A list-defined reference with the name '...' has been invoked, but is not defined in the <references> tag (see the help page)." Nardog (talk) 10:30, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
@Nardog@Snævar I am really sorry for creating such a confusion. Last time and this time too, I made the same mistake. I can see the reuse tab only when I am visual editor mode, and not in source mode. I have got things right. Thanks for your overall help. ItcouldbepossibleTalk10:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
To be fair, we did only have one editor until VisualEditor was deployed. (External editors and CodeEditor do not count.) Snævar (talk) 16:47, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
After saving, there is the "Your edit was saved" box near the top of the page that persists for what seems like 2-3 seconds. I often want to edit the short description next, and this box is blocking access to the short description helper. I know I can move the cursor over there and click on dismiss, but is there a way for me to change the timer to something like a half second so it will disappear faster. MB04:58, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't know about shortening the time but you can get rid of it altogether by adding .postedit { display: none;} to your common.css Nthep (talk) 10:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
It's not up for enough time for me to use my browser's "inspect" feature (in order to examine the javascript and stylesheets), yet is up for enough time to annoy MB. Ironic? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:02, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
@Redrose64: something you can try, in Chrome at least: Open the dev tools, and go to the "sources" tab. Then load your page, press F8 at any point to pause script execution. — xaosfluxTalk14:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Article displaying incorrectly in mobile view or visual editor
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I tried asking at the Teahouse and they recommended asking here. The article for pimecrolimus displays fine normally, but if you open it in mobile view or edit it with the visual editor, you see all of the markup for the infobox at the beginning of the article (like this). This is the case in different browsers and in the Android Wikipedia app. I'm thinking there's something in the infobox content that's breaking it, but I compared with some other drug articles and couldn't figure out quite what the problem is. Any ideas? Thanks. flod logic (talk) 13:42, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
This fixed it as far as I can tell (I couldn't reproduce the problem on mobile, only in VE). It must be the single braces in the split lines that tripped them up. Nardog (talk) 13:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago30 comments9 people in discussion
The {{coord}} template is supposed to put the geographical coordinates at the top right of the article when the parameter "display=title" (or its variants "display=inline,title" and "display=it") is used. Instead, when I'm logged in it displays the coordinates at the point the template is used, right-aligned. With the variants, it displays the coordinates in place twice, once directly and again right-aligned. I believe this changed yesterday, although it may be it happened earlier and I didn't notice until then. The template and the module it invokes haven't changed, so I'm not sure where to look. For an example of use, see Oban, New Zealand, just below the map in the infobox.
I'm using Firefox on a desktop with vector non-legacy; I'm aware that display=title doesn't work on mobile. If this is something unique to my preferences, it's not important but I'd be grateful if anyone could suggest a conflict with some gadget I may have enabled (I don't recall changing anything in my preferences or .css and .js files recently, apart from removing a few gadgets today to see if they affect this problem). If this does apply to all logged in users, it's a significant regression as coord is used in over a million articles and I suspect display=title is a common parameter.-gadfium04:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
This week WMF has made Vector 2022 its own skin and this is probably one of the results. Coord has been a troublesome template generally. It won't impact anyone who isn't logged in at this time and of course only those who use Vector 2022.
Thanks. I can confirm that changing my skin to Vector legacy (2010) fixes the problem, but I'll stick with Vector (2022) and know this glitch doesn't affect most viewers.-gadfium05:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for reporting this. I'll now revert an edit I just made as a workround to the problem in an infobox coordinate display. Thincat (talk) 12:00, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@Izno earlier in that Phab ticket you wrote "Because there is no way to differentiate between new and old Vector that I know of, there's no way to fix this that makes both new and old variants of the skin happy. Either a) it's time to split new Vector out, b) time to give up on legacy vector for all involved, or c) give me a vector2 somewhere in one of elements toward the top of the DOM."
You now have a way to differentiate between the two.. so can this be solved now, or do we understand the problem differently now?
@Jdlrobson (WMF), "intended behavior"? Yikes. This is causing infoboxes to exceed their intended width, and the duplication is absolutely not something that can remain. I've never seen any explanation of why language switching is such an essential feature that it needs to commandeer that top right corner, but if you're also going to then just shove everything that used to be there into the article and tell the community to clean it up, that's a problem. {{u|Sdkb}}talk23:23, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
I can't judge whether it's worse to have:
overlapping text which make both text unreadable/unclickable
the coordinates inline - a larger infobox
the coordinates hidden.
However the first option was clearly bad, judging by the many bug reports I've had to handle over the last 6 months since the problem was originally identified (in May 2021). In my better judgement I thought the second was a better. As I said before, feel free to revert the change in MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css or provide a different solution. It was a good faith suggested improvement on something that has been a problem for over a half a year that I'm constantly seeing bug reports on from users complaining.
I'm trying to be helpful here. I've spent the entire week addressing problems with gadgets in my own free time so I am hurt by the accusation here that I'm unnecessarily dumping work on the community, particularly for a skin which is opt-in exactly because of these kinds of bugs, that together we need to fix. Jdlrobson (talk) 23:53, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@Jon (WMF), it's telling that putting the language switcher somewhere else isn't even listed in your options. It appears that decision was made long ago, with as far as I know zero community input. {{u|Sdkb}}talk00:35, 5 February 2022 (UTC)Edited 05:11, 8 February 2022 (UTC) per below.
{{Coord}} appears below, not beside, the top heading so I don't see how moving the language dropdown could help. That said, canceling position: absolute; is a weird choice. top: -3em; works perfectly for me. Also, Vector 2022 can show topicons like {{Administrator topicon}} just fine, so wrapping {{Coord}} with <indicator>...</indicator> is another option. Nardog (talk) 00:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
@Sdkb, I understand that more than half people who speak English do so as a second language, and almost half the traffic to the English Wikipedia is from countries where English isn't the primary language. It's possible that while the language switcher is not especially relevant to monoglots like us that it's still useful to many millions of people. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
As a tri-glot from a country where English isn't the primary language, I don't find the language switcher useful because articles on English Wikipedia are almost always better than in most other languages. – SD0001 (talk) 05:27, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
@SD0001, we have a pretty good idea of when someone might want to switch to read an article in a different language: if it is featured/good status there but not here, is substantially longer there, has substantially more citations there, or is for a topic whose coordinate location (P625) is in a country where that is the primary language. The WMF folks might want to consider making the switcher more prominent only in those circumstances. Someone reading about Chicago's Harris Theater in Arabic should absolutely be given a prominent link to the English article, but readers of the English article definitely don't need to know about the Arabic page. {{u|Sdkb}}talk05:44, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
A smarter approach to language switching would also allow readers some degree of personalization. If I indicate in my settings that I know English and Hindi, then it's worthwhile to suggest the Hindi page prominently if the algorithm thinks it might be even slightly better than the English page, and Hindi should always be listed first when the menu is opened. Features like this would encourage more readers to create an account, which then helps us if they decide to start editing. {{u|Sdkb}}talk05:50, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
I have Compact Language Links on at most wikis and off at a few. I think it's a good default for people who read fewer than ~five languages and who aren't systematically going from wiki to wiki (e.g., not for an editor who wants to update the picture on every article about their favorite boy band, or, in my case, someone who occasionally needs to find all the village pumps in every language for a project). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
[I]f you add your favorite languages to your web browser, then CLL will keep those at the top. Therein lies the problem. I might want to keep larger wikis at the top but I'm not going to tell every website I visit I'm a super polyglot. Nardog (talk) 22:19, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
Couldn't disagree more. Simply which (and how many) language editions have corresponding articles can tell you a lot about the subject itself even if you have no interest in reading any of them. I'd be really bummed if they forced the new Vector on us for this reason. Nardog (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
That sort of meta information might be intriguing as a curiosity, but for the purposes of informing readers, I don't think we should be holding it up, as it's a poor proxy for a subject's importance and it fails WP:DUE as it's not anything external sources ever talk about. {{u|Sdkb}}talk18:46, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
I'm saying that if you go to a random topic, say Moon, no external source telling you about the Moon ever mentions that the Moon has an article in 254 language editions of Wikipedia. We'd never consider writing that in the lead, any more than we'd consider noting in the article that it got 262,285 pageviews over the past month. Because it's not covered in external sources, it's not due, so it's not something we should emphasize for encyclopedic reasons to teach people about a subject as Nardog seems to suggest above. {{u|Sdkb}}talk21:16, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
I wouldn't know if sources talking about the Moon mention it, but this journal article about Zika fever specifies that the related Wikipedia articles were available in 96 languages.
Hey @Sdkb, just wanted to chime in with some details on the research and feedback we did on language switching during the development of the new button. We were able to get feedback from multilingual readers in India (results available here), as well as about 200 logged-in editors and community members across 10 languages (feedback summary available here). This feedback round showed that most people preferred the new location of the language switching functionality. Upon deployment, we did see some data and received feedback showing it was more difficult for some people previously familiar with the feature to find the new version. We are currently working on iteration to make sure languages are sufficiently visible for the folks who need them. More information can be found in this blog post and the feature page within the documentation. Hope this is helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing those links; they were good reads. It looks like there was some feedback sought, so I'm crossing out my comment on that above. It doesn't entirely alleviate my concerns, though, since in both cases the question was framed as "does this make it easier to switch languages?", and as Izno noted below, yeah, if you make something super prominent, of course it'll make it easier to find, but it also has costs, as some editors like MusikAnimalpointed out. Was there ever any sort of intermediate prototype tested, like keeping it in the left sidebar but just moving it higher up? (Moving the "tools" section links somewhere else, like under the "more" menu similar to Twinkle, would also help with the issues the India focus group had from needing to scroll, even though some editors might have concerns.)
One other thing I noticed in the India focus group is some concerning trends related to how readers decide whether to trust Wikipedia. Per pp. 147–148, only 6 out of the 24 mentioned references. Further, it appears that zero out of 24 mentioned the single biggest indicator of an article's trustworthiness, which is whether it has a recent GA or FA review. This is something I've long suspected, given that our icons aren't placed prominently and aren't designed well, but it's absolutely relevant that moving the language switcher into the top right corner pushes the GA/FA icons down a row, further degrading their prominence. This is a major problem if we want to facilitate good information literacy among readers. I mentioned this to you at Wikimania, but I've seen no indication anyone on the Desktop Improvements team is working on it. Granted, some of the work needs to be done on the community side, but there are very concrete ways the WMF could help. The topicon move discussion deadlocked largely because many editors held the (imo implausible) view that readers do know about GA/FA; asking the next focus group about it would give us research to answer that question. And assuming they don't, the WMF design/graphics folks could provide icon ideas or prototype designs for the community to consider that'd help readers notice GAs/FAs better. What can be done to get those things on the agenda? {{u|Sdkb}}talk05:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Previous research has shown that readers click on a ref tag (i.e., click on any single blue clicky number) approximately three times per 1,000 page views (and then primarily on stub articles, which suggests that they are seeking more information than the article contains). In that context, having 25% of the readers mention the references is much higher than I would have expected. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for spending the time to write everything out here! Here’s some thoughts from our side:
Language Switching: I think something that is worth pointing out was that the goal of moving the language button itself was to make it easier to switch languages, thus, that is what we were testing for :) To give a bit more detail on why this is important - what we learned from the research in India was that a lot of folks that were using the wikis in multiple languages did not know they could actually switch languages directly from the page. They would instead go to a search engine and type the name of the article followed by their suggested language and then the wiki (for example: “moon hindi wikipedia”) and then hope to get the correct result. From our perspective this was due to two different factors - the first was the location of languages on the page - at the very bottom, often times requiring scrolling, the second was their positioning within the sidebar itself.
As you mentioned, the sidebar contains a lot of links that both refer to properties of the article, most of which currently under the “tools” heading: (ex: languages, related changes, interwiki links) as well as links that refer to properties or navigation to the site as a whole (ex: recent changes, community portal, etc). Even though these are in separate sections, it’s difficult to tell which will act on the article vs which will act on the whole site. As a part of the project, we are beginning to work on ways to separate these so that it is easier to understand which link does what. Moving languages to the top of the page served this function too - it is now visually clearer that selecting a language will show you that article in a different language rather than send you to the main page of the wiki in that language. In terms of further explorations around this separation, this is our most recent prototype of what it might look like to separate these menus completely. As a note - this is a very early prototype that we haven’t yet tested with readers or communities so nothing certain, yet we would love feedback on it if you have any initial thoughts. We're still doing more tweaks on this (for example, making the menus pinned by default) and will start sharing it more widely in the next few weeks.
On trust: In terms of your second question - thank you for raising this again. As I mentioned then, this is still something that we want to do, although it is outside of the initial scope of the project. The way we see it is, Desktop Improvements will focus on cleaning up the navigation and creating the space for exposing different tools and indicators for article quality. Here, I’d also like to question whether the GA/FA tags are the best way to do this (they might be, it’s just something we should test first). When we take this on, we would probably want to start with a study of different types of quality indicators to identify which ones are perceived as increasing the levels of trust in the article. Another thing we would like to explore is how we can use the language/copy of the links and items themselves to better indicate its meaning, with the hypothesis that reducing confusion here will also influence people’s overall sense of trust and welcomeness. Pinging @AHollender (WMF) here as well, as he might have some further thoughts on this.
@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing the prototype! There are a bunch of changes I'd make to the menu items, many of which come from WP:SIDEBAR20 (e.g. put the print/share/link section first above tools); that RfC is an important one to review to get a sense of how the community thinks about the sidebar items. The pinned ToC is fine with me, but removing the copy from the end of the lead is likely to get pushback because it'll cause infoboxes to extend into the body and create sandwiches. The menu pinning is a neat feature—something I'd also like to see explored (for both this and theuser menu) is to have the dropdown appear on cursor hover rather than requiring a click—I think that'd make the collapsing pill go down a lot easier.
On trust, we should be careful to distinguish between indicators that make readers trust a page more and those that reflect an actual difference in quality, and ideally push those things into alignment. An FA icon is huge for the latter but I'd guess not for the former. That's something we could try to remedy through better design. The India survey seemed to focus mostly on "How do we get users to trust us more?", and while that might be the typical goal in the corporate world, our situation is more complex: we certainly do want readers, but we don't want them to trust us so much they take legal/medical advice from unsourced content. {{u|Sdkb}}talk19:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)Edited 19:58, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Jdlrobson I'm really sympathetic to Sdkb here right now given that I know that the test that was performed that "supported" this change was fundamentally shit. Yes, of course more people are going to see it if it takes up more space at the top of the page. That was the wrong null hypothesis to begin with.
That said, here's some further recommendations on the technical side of what can be done now since it will apparently take heaven and earth to get WMF to back that change out, and I am not strong enough to move that much. Either:
ensure that MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css is always concatenated after MediaWiki:Vector.css, or
remove the Vector 2022 dependency on MediaWiki:Vector.css.
I have a strong preference for the latter just from a cleanliness and 'trainability' perspective.
Right now my console is telling me that -2022.css is getting concatenated into the file before Vector.css, likely defeating the purpose of having the dependency on Vector.css in the first place. Review Brooklyn, where the .vector-2022 #coordinates CSS has insufficient specificity to override the CSS in Vector.css (notably, the .mw-indicator #coordinates block), because it's appearing before and not after the other.
(Please also consider renaming the skin too. I hate writing the numbers after. Some pun off Vector would be cool, I've seen Matrix tossed around. Or possibly Space, from vector space, because of all the whitespace [everyone will have a wry laugh at that one].) Izno (talk) 05:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
And following this up, it looks like having the interlanguage links there/not there affects what the offset should be when we make the system an indicator and keep using position absolute. 3.5em when it displays and 0 when it doesn't. So, nothing I can do to fix that at all without just making it an indicator and tossing our absolute positioning. I can maybe undeploy the change I made to Module:Coordinates and then try to position stuff from there, but I doubt that will work the way I want seeing as no one has moved on that. Izno (talk) 06:26, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Maybe this is fixed now, IDK, I've reverted the Module:Coordinates change and adjusted MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css. It works for collapsed interwiki list which is standard? in Vector 2022. Still seeing that Vector-2022.css is concatenating into the file before Vector.css. Izno (talk) 21:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
Tabs, error
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Unable to get this working. Following the directions I added the script and reloaded the browser cache. The watchlist now has a box at the top with "Smart watchlist settings" options. Click the box for "Enable hide user buttons", but then nothing changes in the watchlist, there is no box next to the username to hide that name. The Smart watchlist settings box has a purple error at the bottom "To use Smart Watchlist, enable 'enhanced recent changes' in your user preferences", but I am unable to find 'enhanced recent changes' in the preferences menus. -- GreenC19:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
@GreenC I assume that means either checking "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" and/or unchecking "Use non-JavaScript interface" --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 22:20, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Ahecht , I tried four combos of those two buttons: (both off, 1 on 1 off, 1 off 1 on, both on) and it worked: with both on. Thanks for the tip! -- GreenC22:45, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Well, that user script hasn't been updated in more than a decade. I wouldn't expect it to work – a lot has changed with watchlists and recent changes over time. – SD0001 (talk) 05:35, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
Get protection levels via API
Latest comment: 2 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion
I mean protection levels in general. For instance, here in enwiki we have autoconfirmed, extendedconfirmed, templateeditor and sysop, but there is no extendedconfirmed level at Test Wikipedia. IIRC, Twinkle's protect module have to set this up manually. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh06:23, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
How do I contact the GUC maintainers to fix the problem where GUC doesn't log Flow comments?
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I can see them[4], but I'd like to be able to see them as part of my global contributions. I gather that the volunteer maintainers would probably fix this is asked. Thanks. Doug Wellertalk14:00, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
Attempting to read wikitext in lua of the transclusion of a contributions page
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
The module Module:User-exists, which I am working on for use at SPI, attempts to verify if a local user exists. I could not see a built in method (such as parser function or lua function) that verifies if a user exists, and I'm pretty sure Lua or templates do not support calling the API.
I thought that by transcluding the contributions page, and then expanding the template I could read the wikitext and detect when no such user existed by looking for text such as "is not registered on this wiki" at the top of the page. This nearly worked, but for some reason when expanding Special:Contributions it said the template did not exist. I got around this by creating a wrapper template to transclude the contributions called Template:Contributions transclusion. This didn't error out, but instead the returned wikitext is UNIQ--item-0--QINU which I was told on IRC is a parser strip marker tag. When displaying this by returning the parsed text renders the contributions page, but I cannot get the text in the lua code.
This is not possible, and in fact the ability to do it was deliberately removed in gerrit:171290 back in 2014. The specific feature of reading Special:Contributions caused a security issue (phab:T73167), in addition to the data-storage bug the patch claims to report. * Pppery *it has begun...16:15, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
My searches for it didn't find anything. I think I will do this via a bot and the API unless someone else has any ideas. Wanted to get automatic categorisation, but I think this is not going to work. Thanks anyway. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions16:22, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
I've deleted both the module and template as it seems the idea won't work without additions to the software, so these are both unused / not working. Perhaps these would be useful in a parser function / lua function, but that would need a phab ticket. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions16:29, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
You might try fetching the content of user and user talk pages. Not everyone (me, for instance) has a user page with content, but most of us, most of the time, have something on our talk pages. In the debug console, this:
=mw.title.new('User:Trappist the monk'):getContent()
returns nil
but this:
=mw.title.new('User talk:Trappist the monk'):getContent()
returns the unparsed content of my talk page. When a blanked page exists, these return an empty string.
Yeah, not 100%, but might be sufficient for most cases.
Good idea. The reason for wanting this is to tag SPI cases where the username for the case does not refer to a user that exists either globally or locally. This would likely be due to when an account is later renamed, and unless the redirect is deleted / suppressed when renaming the user this would say that the user exists (as a redirect would still show page content). This could be combined such that if the user talk page does not exist or if the user talk page is a redirect to another user talk page it tags it as possibly broken. However I can see this as maybe having some false positives (such as accounts locked globally, but which never were blocked locally and have no user talk page) being tagged as being possibly broken. Plus any globally renamed account without a local talk page won't show up. This, however, is probably going to be a small number as if there is a SPI someone will have likely created their user talk page. I might try this out, but will compare with pywikibot and the API to see if this method works well enough. Dreamy Jazztalk to me | my contributions17:01, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
You may be able to exploit some mw.* function that leaks information on whether the user exists. For example, I hoped that
might give useful results, but it returns "neutral" for both non-existent users and those who exist but haven't recorded a gender preference. Certes (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
User script problem
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
I have this user script:
var header = $("h1").text();
$("h1").text(header + " <span style=\"color:red\">[Wikipedia]</span>");
It is supposed to add a red [Wikipedia] to the right of the page title, but instead it displays
Try e.g. $("<span style=\"color:red\"> [Wikipedia]</span>").appendTo('#firstHeading');. $().text() is a method for setting element text, so it escapes special characters. It can also be basically achieved in CSS btw:
Since you're modifying the underlying document object model directly, you're updating the text contents of the h1 element, so whatever you put in there is the text within the element. You can use the html() method to alter the corresponding HTML within the h1 element; just beware of what you insert (for example, if the original header, in this case, was some malicious Javascript, it would execute). isaacl (talk) 02:10, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
While reading the pages linked on Template:Brexit topics, I noticed that some of them didn't have the template. After digging around, I found {{Check completeness of transclusions}}, which adds a link to a tool that shows which articles are linked by the template but not transcluded, and vice versa (example). This template appears to currently be predominantly used on sports team templates to help ensure that all the players have their respective teams' templates transcluded, but it is actually useful for every single navbox and sidebar, particularly as so many have dozens or hundreds of links. I therefore think it should either be added to the Wikipedia sidebar in the tools section under "What links here" when you're on a template page, or added to the "External tools" section on the "What links here" pages for templates. Does anyone else agree? 60.242.222.90 (talk) 08:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Toolforge
Latest comment: 2 years ago19 comments4 people in discussion
These sound like features of your specific ssh clients; various clients have options to reuse the current OS credential, or to save your credentials for future sessions. — xaosfluxTalk05:58, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: sure, Wikipedia ;) Comparison of SSH clients. In a pinch for Windows I've used PuTTY (it philosophically does NOT allow "saved passwords"). In general, you should never reuse the same password for multiple systems (which I have a feeling is how your linux one may be working). If you are going to store a password - you might has wells store a private ssh key, in effect it is just a long password. — xaosfluxTalk14:01, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
You use the default built-in ssh client, right? If you don't enter a password, it simply means there's no password. ssh-keygen -p can be used to add one. – SD0001 (talk) 14:27, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
@SD0001, if I'm not wrong, yes. What happens if I already have one and add that command? Does it notify me? Or does it simply prompt me to add a new one anyway? Does it notify me if the new one is the same as the old one? - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:39, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I think I answered this question for you before, but if you're using PuTTY on Windows, you need to add your SSH key to Pageant (it should've been installed along with PuTTY). See this tutorial. Once you do that, PuTTY will not ask for your key's password when you log in to toolforge. You'll still have to enter your password into Pageant every time you reboot your computer, but you won't have to do it every time you connect. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 15:11, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
@Ahecht, so you're suggesting that I do have a passphrase even for my Linux PC but it's only Windows that asks me to authenticate continuously just because I don't use PuTTy while Linux has no need for that? Put in even more simple terms: "My Linux" is fine and secure while "my Windows" is "lacking" PuTTy? - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:41, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
Update:
Turns out my Linux also asked for the passphrase every time I shut it down and restarted. It was just that I had spent quite a long time without shutting it down that I had forgotten about that part. So the situation is basically what Ahecht mentions above. Both computers ask for the passphrase but the Windows one asks for it every time I connect while the Linux one asks only after it gets restarted. This would rephrase the question to "How can I make Windows also behave the same way; That is, only ask for the passphrase after it gets restarted. I'm using the default built-in SSH client (OpenSSH). Is there any way to achieve this with that or is there a must I must get another client? - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:12, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi In Windows, press ⊞ Win+r, type services.msc and hit enter, scroll to "OpenSSH Authentication Agent", right click, click "Properties" set the "Startup type" to "Automatic", hit the "Start" button (if it's not greyed out), and hit "OK". Open your command prompt, type ssh-agent, hit enter (nothing should happen), then type ssh-add <path-to-private-key-file> and hit enter (it should prompt for your passphrase). You should now be able to SSH in without it asking for your passphrase each time. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 05:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
@Ahecht, did everything you said. It worked. cmd now only asks for passphrase on restart. The only problem remaining is that I rarely use the command prompt. I use the Git bash as I find it more flexible. (I read out our past discussion and I see that I've mentioned it in the past as well.) How can I replicate the same result in it? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:43, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Git CMD, perhaps unsurprisingly, behaves exactly as cmd: You type ssh-add <path-to-private-key-file>, it asks for the passphrase and it allows you to SSH without asking for your passphrase each time.
@Ahecht, literal examples of what I did: vi ~/.bashrc, copy-paste the mentioned lines, save. Nothing happens. :/ If I type ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa, it again says that it couldn't open a connection to my auth agent.
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
I suddenly find that my Gadgets and user scripts are not working correctly, or at all, on various projects, including this one, Wikidata and Commons.
For example, Navigation popups are visible, but clicking the links in them results in no action taking place. The upload Wizard on Commons has no scroll bars (I have to tab between fields), and if I enter a copyright template under "Another reason not mentioned above", I cannot preview it.
I'm using Firefox under Windows 10 (both fully up-to-date). I have disabled Ghostery, to no effect. [Update: If I use Edge, they seem OK.]
Do you have an ad blocker or privacy tool? I disabled mine for wikipedia.org so I can run scripts from related sites such as mediawiki.org. Certes (talk) 13:37, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
– Problem resolved: I forced Firefox to update all plugins and things seem to be working now. I've no idea which one (or more!) was causing the problem, but I hope this helps anyone else experiencing the same issue. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits15:08, 14 February 2022 (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
Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [6]
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
When piping a parameter (like {{{1|}}}), if the parameter is not provided, it will default to what is after the pipe (for {{{1|{{{2|}}}}}} if 1 was not provided, it would default to the value of 2). The thing is, if there is whitespace, it will use the whitespace and not continue (for {{{1|{{{2|}}}}}}, {{template|1= |2=value}}, 1 would be matched because it was provided, even though it's whitespace). The part that makes this annoying is that if statements don't match the whitespace, and will result in false. For example:
(Template)
{{#if:{{{1|{{{2|}}}}}}|1 or 2 had a value|neither had a value}}
(Example)
{{template
|1=
|2=I have a value!
}}
This template will result in neither had a value, because while |1= had a whitespace, and provided it to the if statement, the if statement didn't accept it.
I know that I can manually check through every parameter to make sure that they aren't whitespace, but this adds a lot of redundancy and takes up a lot of space. For example:
{{#if:{{{1|}}}|1 or 2 has a value|{{#if:{{{2|}}}|1 or 2 has a value|neither had a value}}}}
will give the correct result.
Is there any way I can loop through multiple parameters that will continue down the line on a whitespace, without manually checking every parameter for whitespace before performing the if statement? Thanks, ― Levi_OPTalk19:45, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
{{if empty|{{{1|}}}|{{{2|}}}}} behaves identically to {{{1|{{{2|}}}}}, except that empty parameters will still pass through. The template can take any number of parameters ({{if empty|{{{1|}}}|{{{2|}}}|{{{3|}}}|{{{4|}}}}}, works to produce the first of four parameters with actual content). I thought that was what you are looking for, but I may have misread (and Jonesey95's idea is clearer when doing a basic "are any parameters set" anyway). * Pppery *it has begun...21:53, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Oh! I see what you mean now, and this could be a useful template, but jonesey's answer is probably more what I'm looking for. Thanks, ― Levi_OPTalk22:01, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Have you considered this?
{{#if:{{{1|}}}{{{2|}}}|1 or 2 has a value|neither had a value}}
I’m a mobile user and prior today when checking my contributions it shows it in the manner I’m familiar with, but today I checked my contribs but it displayed it as though it were in “advanced mode” I checked to see if I accidentally toggled “on” “advanced mode” but I didn’t. Please is there any help as to remedy this? Celestina007 (talk) 21:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
I just cried for a bit, then figured tough luck. Hope you get a work-around. I loved the minimalistic mobile and just switch to desktop as needed.Slywriter (talk) 21:13, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
It would be extremely helpful if you reported how you feel on phab:T293268 as the simplistic view was removed as the most vocal users are the people who disliked it. I was also disappointed to lose the original styles. I'm working towards making it possible to restore the old view with user styles or possibly make some of the good parts appear in the more powerful advanced view. I'll report back when I have something viable. Jdlrobson (talk) 02:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
I'm also having a problem with this. I like the simple one, I dont like the current, it loads too long. Please fix this. We have already a AMC with its own style of user contribution, it's enough, but please don't make the standard mobile style complicated. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 04:10, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
We need interface administrator to fix this. I don't usually add scripts like that, i don't like it, just return the oldest one it's easy, so scripts not needed. Why they changed it without other users opinion, I am heavily mobile user, they should notify other mobile user like me if they gonna change something on the style, the heck. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 06:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
First off Jdlrobson, thank you for the script, that might suffice for now. I totally understand and appreciate the frustration of Ctrlwiki, I do not believe this implementations are well thought out(or the potential consequences) I believe it is behoove of anyone making such drastic interface implementations must, as a prerequisite, initiate a conversation with mobile editors. To be honest this change has done nothing but incapacitate me, every now and again, mobile editors are faced with new changes to the editing interface and we have to learn to “adapt” I’m sorry but there is only so much mobile editors can take until we feel “this” isn’t worth it anymore. As stated elsewhere, whilst the script may suffice for now, in the long run I believe this implementation be reverted back to status quo for editors using mobile devices. To anyone reading this, I’m sorry if this comes off as rather passive aggressive, of a truth, I’ve never been more upset than I was yesterday after the new (unexpected) implementation for mobile device editors was made, which i am totally irate about. Once again I’m sorry but I’m sincerely saddened by this. Celestina007 (talk) 22:37, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
One of the problems we're (all of us) facing is that there is no obvious way to reach mobile device editors as a group. I'm looking at some fairly big changes to mobile at some other wikis (enabling the mw:Reply tool, but when you change this, then you have to change that, and when you touch that, then there's this other thing...), and I'm just not sure how to reach them. There are central pages for technical problems, for new editors, for policy wonks, etc., but not for mobile editors. I'm seriously considering a CentralNotice banner, as one of the few things that might work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
IP range talk pages
Latest comment: 2 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion
With too many tabs open in my browser, I tripped over my myself and inadvertently left a welcome message for a Talk page range (here), instead of the intended IP recipient. This was later cleared up, but not before a different IP saw the message and spammed my UTP, which RegentsPark kindly cleaned up for me. But that left us each scratching our heads: who knew you could create a Talk page for a range and leave a message on it, and how does that even make any sense? Maybe the mw software should prevent that? Or if there's some use case for it, can we get a edit notice added to trap this case in Preview mode with a great, big, red warning, "Are you sure you really want to leave this message for an IP range? Usually this is reserved for WP:SOMETHINGELSE." Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:40, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
I wonder if preventing IP range talk pages from being created would mean preventing subpages of IP talk pages, because I bet that's what the software recognized it as (even if an IP can't end in a zero) and therefore you could create it. Nardog (talk) 00:04, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
The only way we could know for sure if IP range talk pages are considered subpages would be to create one and see if it has a link at the top taking you to the main IP talk page. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654500:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Ah ok. SO the solution might be to prevent subpages of IP addressed from being created since there's usually no need for an IP to have a subpage since there's the chance it can change. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654500:43, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
These are fundamentally just wiki pages with no other special meaning (and certainly not the meaning associated with a normal user talk page, IP or otherwise). Changes to these pages do not reach or notify anyone. Izno (talk) 01:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
That's interesting. Does that mean that all the IPs in 94.252.0.0/17 got an orange bar of doom, or was the anon just stalking your contributions? Is it possible that we have finally stumbled upon a way to communicate with a whole IPv6/64? (added) Sadly, it looks as if Izno answered these questions while I was typing them. Certes (talk) 01:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
@Izno: If they don't reach anyone else, was it just by chance that my UTP got spammed (here, @22:11) by a different IP (94.252.85.48) than the one I intended to welcome (94.252.4.105) and subsequently did end up welcoming (here), and which just happens to be within IP range of the spammer? Seems too coincidental. Mathglot (talk) 01:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Coincidental in the sense that you tried to reach the editor, probably dropped a warning somewhere, and then the same user came to have a chat with you from a different IP because we have some fairly intelligent abusive editors out there. Izno (talk) 04:14, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
In any case, I'd still like an edit notice (or do I mean, 'edit filter'?), because I'll trip myself up again someday when I'm not being careful enough, and that would help. Mathglot (talk) 01:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
You're far from the first person to do this. Here are 650 other examples. (I ignore IPv6 pages beginning with A-F, as I've never seen one.) Certes (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
I suppose in some cases they could be useful; but software changes may be needed to support them. Likely planned changes in ip masking will mostly moot this idea though. — xaosfluxTalk15:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
ADD publishersweekly.com to Wikipedia:Book sources
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
If you look at that revision, you can see that there are lots of non-rendered wikimarkup in a chunk of text at the end of the "Inexperienced editors answering questions" section. That looks like unclosed nowiki tags, but if you look at the source carefully, the tags are actually properly closed.
I thought about asking AssumeGoodWraith to fix their signature in the line of that edit, which fixed the thing. But I am not sure that the signature is actually to blame.
Looking at the symptoms, the only explanation I have is that nowiki tags are greedy matches (i.e. in a code sequence (nowiki)stuff1(/nowiki)stuff2(nowiki)stuff3(/nowiki), the first nowiki matches the last /nowiki, and the middle stuff is nowikied). I am not using the actual tags for obvious reasons. If that is so, surely that is new behaviour, and surely that is not intended.
The effect of a <nowiki> tag varies depending upon the existence of a </nowiki> tag at a later point in the page. If there is one, everything between those two tags is treated according to the description at H:NOWIKI. But if there isn't, the <nowiki> tag is not processed and is displayed as plain text. So if a discussion page has a single unbalanced <nowiki> tag in any section, that tag has no effect until somebody adds a <nowiki>...</nowiki> pair later on - and then that closing </nowiki> tag gets paired with the pre-existing <nowiki> tag, and everything in between, including the newer <nowiki> tag, is treated per H:NOWIKI. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:24, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Neglected patterns in regex?
Latest comment: 2 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion
In regex you can neglect a pattern by putting it in brackets and putting a caret before the characters ([^pattern]). I don't see anything in the documentation that shows how to do this using Scribunto patterns. Is this possible? ― Levi_OPTalk17:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
It appears as though you can. I think I was just doing something wrong in my testing and it wasn't working but it appears to be now. Thanks. ― Levi_OPTalk18:44, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
It's the final row in the table: [^set]: Represents the complement of set, where set is interpreted as above.Izno (talk) 18:59, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
I read that, but "the complement of set" is not very descriptive of the fact that it is negating everything in the set. I feel like this should be clarified. ― Levi_OPTalk19:29, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
@Izno: Ahh. I didn't realize that "complement" had such a literal meaning in the context of set theory. That's now how it's used in the normal english context. Also, how is that not negation? Do you mean that [^set] in scibunto patterns isn't the same as negation in regular regex? Because [^set] is commonly called a negated set in regex. ― Levi_OPTalk20:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I realized that complement was equivalent to negation, though that article does make it obvious that it can also be called the logical complement. Kind of wondering why those are two separate articles now, or at least why they aren't linked in some see also fashion. Izno (talk) 20:28, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
The negation of a proposition is different than the complement of a set, though, so while it might be something that could be under "see also", they're distinct. From a set theory point of view, the complement of a proposition would be all other propositions. isaacl (talk) 21:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
There is no negation. The pattern [abc] finds all characters in the set {'a', 'b', 'c'}. The pattern [^abc] finds all characters not in that set. That is, it finds all characters in the complement of the set {'a', 'b', 'c'}. Johnuniq (talk) 22:11, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Hi everyone, I came across a certain table, which renders results something like this:
Wanted
Actual
Wide screen
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Middle width
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Low width
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Lorem Ipsum of New York is a good man
Here, the wanted and actual rendering is same in wide and low width screens, but in middle width screens they're not the same. I can use to prevent line break after every word, except between "York" & "is" but that will prevent additional line break between "Ipsum" & "of" even in low width screens.
Now, are there any "Breaking priority" (using brpr henceforth) templates on Wikipedia? Say for example, we use {{brpr|1}} between "York" & "is", and {{brpr|2}} between "Ipsum" & "of"? The one with higher breaking priority breaks first if needed, and the lower one breaks later. The required markup will become Lorem Ipsum {{brpr|2}}of New York {{brpr|1}}is a good man. If it doesn't exist already, can they be made using modules? or a new project on mediawiki to create <bpx/> tags where x is the priority level has to be started? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)16:15, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Actually, I wanted to know if mediawiki allows this kind of additional feature, whereby we can explicitly mention the level of Breaking priority. So that I can use it. ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)16:36, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
Tbh, the place where I wish to use it is just 14 characters long without any special html characters. I just want to change the 'point of line break' in mid-width areas, and not when area is genuinely too small. As you can see above, the wanted & actual rendering are the same for low width, but different for mid-width. And hence, the need for multi-level brpr templates, so that it breaks at the correct places according to available width. ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)23:32, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
The point I'm making is that there is no one correct place. Even if we accept your sense of aesthetics as correct (which, I definitely do not), making a change will cause bad behavior for something else. Just accept that this is not LaTeX or even MS Word and that what you want to do is a negative in the general case. Izno (talk) 03:59, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
What Izno said. Plus, given any phrase having two or more potential wrapping points, neither the HTML specs nor the CSS specs provide any means for prioritising one wrap point over any other. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:18, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
I tried searching around for an answer, but didn't find one; apologies in advanced if it's obvious.In short: for some reason, my addition of a comment on a talk page resulted in the disappearance of a large portion of text from that section for reasons that are entirely beyond me.
See the bottom section ("Inaccurate use of far-right label") in Special:Permalink/1071912592 and compare that with the underlying wikimarkup (displayed correctly in User:WhinyTheYounger/sandbox, "bug reproduction" — I copied the exact markup from the talkpage diff). The talk page doesn't display paragraphs of text that occur between my "first" ref (the third in the markup) and the additional portions of my comment even though it's in the underlying markup. It's like it got commented out. I tried toying around with the reflist-talk template and a few other things to fix the issue, to no avail. Any idea what's going on here? WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 18:57, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
The big red Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page) is your clue. Can you see that giant error message in that permalink? Did you click on the link to the help page? The problem is that you tried to close <ref> with <ref> instead of with </ref>. One little slash can cause so much trouble. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:25, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
@Jonesey95, about that big red error message. I looked at that version of the page and the error message flashed briefly (once but not again) before disappearing because I have the Discussion tools activated. I can only see those error messages when the tools are turned off! Not good since I spend time trying to fix reference errors. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:19, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, Redrose64. I must have enabled that years ago and forgotten about it. Why those messages would not show on talk pages is beyond me. Silent failures are generally not user-friendly. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:34, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
It sounds like there's a Flash of unstyled content, before the warning message is hidden by sitewide CSS. It doesn't appear to be related to Discussion Tools.
@Whatamidoing (WMF) If you just have an unclosed <ref>, then it won't eat the rest of the page. However, if you have an unclosed <ref> followed by a valid <ref>…</ref> tag (even in a different section), then it will eat everything between the unclosed <ref> and the closing </ref> of the second tag. :/ Matma Rextalk18:56, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
It's a really weird coincidence, but I also noticed this issue with discussion tools yesterday while working on an unrelated problem, and reported it here: T301845 (I'm one of the developers working on this). It's actually a bug in our software, and should be fixed soon. But the errors might still be hidden by sitewide CSS here, and I'd suggest that it should be changed to reveal them. Matma Rextalk18:54, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
Was white-space: nowrap removed accidentally from .tocnumber? It does seem like a CSS issue to me. I'm using Vector-2022 btw. —Paper9oll(🔔 • 📝)01:52, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Please help translate to other languages.
Hello,
Over the next months we will gradually change the audio and video player of Wikis from Kultura to Video.js and with that, the old player won’t be accessible anymore. The new player has been active as a beta feature since May 2017.
The new player has many advantages, including better design, consistent look with the rest of our interface, better compatibility with browsers, ability to work on mobile which means our multimedia will be properly accessible on iPhone, better accessibility and many more.
The old player has been unmaintained for eight years now and is home-brewn (unlike the new player which is a widely used open source project) and uses deprecated and abandoned frameworks such as jQuery UI. Removing the old player’s code also improves performance of the Wikis for anyone visiting any page (by significantly reducing complexity of the dependency graph of our ResourceLoader modules. See this blog post.). The old player has many open bugs that we will be able to close as resolved after this migration.
The new player will solve a lot of old and outstanding issues but also it will have its own bugs. All important ones have been fixed but there will be some small ones to tackle in the future and after the rollout.
What we are asking now is to turn on the beta feature for the new player and let us know about any issues.
I was the one who suggested they ask here. I don't necessarily think it's a bug since the unknown parameter errors only show up when previewing the edit. However something is causing the infobox to not work properly. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654501:16, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
It's been fixed by PrimeHunter. Apparently the issue was there were invisible non-breaking spaces (as in ones that don't come from   or its template equivalent). ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654501:21, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
An additional anti-vandalism step
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I just came across this edit, which was clearly vandalism, and which stayed in the article for two years. The next edit by the same editor (to a different article) was reverted by User:ClueBot NG as vandalism, but there does not appear to be any mechanism for editors to be alerted that an editor reverted for vandalism on article X had also previously edited article Y. Something should be done to this effect. BD2412T01:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I can see some issues with this. An editor may have made a constructive edit on article Y and then on article X they make an edit that gets reverted by ClueBot NG (whether it be a false positive or not). Sending a notification to editors who have edited article Y or X may make them think that edit is also vandalism and, if they don't actually check it, will lead to a revert of a constructive edit. And there's also the issue with ClueBot NG having occasional false positives (doesn't happen often, but it does happen). ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654501:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
I'd rather deal with false positives leading to investigation than long-term undiscovered vandalism. If there's a way to balance the risk while achieving this, I'm open to it. BD2412T05:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
What are you picturing here? After ClueBot reverts someone, where would it send messages, specifically? Who would it alert and how? I could see some sort of centralized log of ClueBot vandalism reverts if that doesn't already exist (although of course we can already examine ClueBot's edit history), but the question would be whether editors would actually track it. I don't think ClueBot could reasonably ping individual editors or even drop notices on individual pages - that would get far too spammy, especially if ClueBot reverted someone with a non-trivial number of edits. Possibly ClueBot could determine possibly-related edits or possibly-related articles the user has edited and log them on that central page, but what algorithm would it use for this determination? If it just lists every single other page the user has ever edited, that's only really going to be viable if eg. the user has only edited a handful of pages. --Aquillion (talk) 06:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
There are some limiting factors that could be applied. I think we can assume that editors with any substantial number of edits are not likely to be vandals. We can look at edits that introduced non-lexicalized character strings which ClueBot might not catch (for example, the first edit I noted above includes a change of "Attorney" to "Assorney", not a word), or edits that change blue links to red links, change dates, proper names, and the like. A centralized repository might include a snippet of the text changed, so it can easily be dismissed if obviously not vandalism. If there were a way to opt in to getting a ping about a vandal being reverted who had previously edited an article I have watchlisted, or an article in a particular category tree, I would certainly opt into that. BD2412T06:38, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
Captcha to edit
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
If you run a tool that uses the python-social-auth module to do OAuth, the emergency fix described above probably breaks your authentication flow. Python-social-auth uses requests and doesn't override the default user agent. -- RoySmith(talk)15:03, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
The issue is that the OAuth flow can't complete. As long as a user is already logged in, the token they got should continue to work. At least that's my understanding. I also see that T302047 was just opened to back this out, so it should become moot at some point in the not-too-distant future. -- RoySmith(talk)15:12, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
All afternoon I've needed to supply a Captcha just to preview my edits if they included a reference—a real pain—so I came here to find out what was going on. Glad to see it's in hand. Latest one, though, I didn't have to use one at all to save a new entry – result!--217.155.32.221 (talk) 17:02, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
"Review pending revisions" and monobook
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
In the Monobook skin, the "review pending revisions" thing overlaps the page title when the window is small enough (for example on my phone). Also, it looks like it is a dropdown menu, but it only seems to do mouseover. Can this be fixed and/or is there a way to turn this off? League of Nations is an example. —Kusma (talk) 12:27, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
I assume you're using the responsive version of the skin. I do not see the issue you describe when I use the mobile emulator in Firefox. I do see that the pending changes box is not sized appropriately for responsiveness skins, but that's not that issue. Izno (talk) 05:07, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I use the responsive version and Chrome (and I never use the mobile version). The most annoying thing is that on my phone, I can't see article titles for pages that have pending revisions. On my laptop, it is only an issue if the page title is very long. —Kusma (talk) 22:29, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
help regarding pywikibot
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hello. I am not familiar with python at all, but I want to perform only one task. I am very good with C family. On mrwiki, I want to create an automated bot to do the task of "find and replace" in mainspace. On my computer, on command prompt, using replace.py I could do what I wanted to. I could change certain words from particular namespaces. The less than 10 contributions (all with english summary) of the bot can be seen at mr:special:contributions/KiranBOT_II. Currently there is a list of words to be replaced in my user subpage at mrwiki. The current number is 42, but it expected to grow soon upto 200, and then slowly. The list/replace candidates are vetted on mr village pump before being added to that actual list. From the idea of making a list of fixes in separate file (user-fixes.py), I created a separate file. Using that file, I was able to edit my userpage. But I still dont know the correct/working syntax of "find and replace" for pywikibot. I went through source code of replace.py, fixes.py and many other files, but still I could't find what I am looking for. To be precise, how can I port following code to python/pywikibot, with addition to tell the pywikibot to edit in particular namespace(s).
{
Summary = "summary for bot";
Regex header = new Regex(@"\{\{{nobots", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Skip = (header.Match(ArticleText).Success);
Match n = Regex.Match(ArticleText, @"\{\{PAGENAME", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
if (n.Success) ArticleText = Regex.Replace(ArticleText, @"(\{\{PAGENAME\}\})", "{{subst:PAGENAME}}", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
ArticleText = ArticleText.Replace("abc", "xyz");
ArticleText = ArticleText.Replace("foo", "bar");
return ArticleText;
}
@SD0001: I already did that, long before asking help on wikipedia. I tried a lot of variations, they are not working. The first search result is geeksforgeeks, I added string.replace(abcusernamekiran, xyz) to my script, and then got the error "NameError: name 'string' is not defined". I tried few different variations from few different sources, all of them are giving similar/some or other error. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk)17:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
There was no direct/definitive answer on any of the websites. I finally managed to do it by comparing few other source codes, and lots of experiments. Now, I have only one question, how to tell the script to edit in particular namespace(s)? Regards, —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk)18:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
Do you mean you want to work on all pages in a particular namespace? That is done with a generator which iterates pages according to supplied parameters. I've never tried using the supplied scripts but pywikibot/pagegenerators.py seems to list options that might work with them. If writing your own program, I believe you would use pywikibot.pagegenerators.AllpagesPageGenerator with a namespace parameter. Johnuniq (talk) 23:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
xtools oddity
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
If I go to my xtools page here [7], it has numbered links at the bottom so I can see article talkpages I've edited less. However, the page for articles [8] has no such links. Can this be fixed? Ping to @Mann Mann who asked first at the helpdesk. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:21, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for notifying me. Would someone please contact XTools developers for a solution/fix? OR any alternative way to view more entries in article namespace? Mann Mann (talk) 08:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Do you have the Replace the "new section" tab text with "+" gadget enabled? That phab# above seems sus, wonder if we have to make a reverse gadget to change it back..... bleh. — xaosfluxTalk00:03, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Historically, this has varied according to (a) skin and (b) the language selection made at Preferences. It still does:
Effect on the "New section" tab of varying skin/language setting
It is possible for the problem to be automatically solved after some time, then you won't see the problem when you arrive at this report, but possibly negative counts can be seen on newly created categories (Just guessing, not sure).
As there are some changes to the category recount process (noted in the upcoming Tech News), i guess this issue should be reported on Phabricator. Thank you. Jeeputer (talk) 05:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
@Qwerfjkl: Thank you for your response. Part of it (incorrect category count) is related. but the problem in that thread was one extra page in categories. The problem here is that categories have -1 page which is still incorrect, but in some different way. Jeeputer (talk) 19:44, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
It is supposed to fix itself. MediaWiki has been coded to recount categories that have a minus number of category members. That logic was changed recently so it should kick in sooner than that, but I do not understand the specifics. See gerrit:c/mediawiki/core/+/506032.--Snævar (talk) 19:45, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
I think WP:Ordinal used to have guidelines on when to use "first" and when to use "1st". I can't find it now. An editor is consistently using "1st" in a sentence when it should be "first". Where is the MOS guideline? Bubba73You talkin' to me?07:56, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
User not registered, but has contributions and is blocked
Latest comment: 2 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion
(Redacted)
Hi, (Redacted) was recently nominated for speedy deletion by Afeef per WP:CSD#U2 as talk page of a nonexistent user. Despite no user being registered under this name, this unregistered user has six contributions and is currently blocked. Is this a bug that is occurring due to the characters in the username, or something else? ✗plicit14:04, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
I would bet money that it's due to Unicode, or some weird character that might be in the username (e.g. a RTL override). However since the user quite evidently exists, it may be worth filing a bug report on phabricator. ―sportzpikachumy talkcontribs14:10, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
I found it - Bonkrad (talk·contribs) has 25 contribs, but is not registered. The username doesn't have any characters outside the usual 26 letters, so we can probably rule out that theory. Their user log includes creation, block and a change to the block settings. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:37, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
@Redrose64 Special:Contributions (and every other interface) will report that the account is not registered if it has been locked and hidden globally, to avoid revealing abusive usernames. I don't know why this account has been hidden (it's indeed a little pointless if you don't also suppress their edits and log entries), perhaps it was a mistake; you might want to ask stewards if you want to know. Matma Rextalk23:32, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Any administrator can see whether an account is globally locked (and hence deduce if it's also hidden) by looking at the block interface: (Redacted). -- zzuuzz(talk)23:46, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
I misread that as the block log and was a bit confused when it told me I didn't have permission to block the user because I thought you were linking to the block log of that user ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654523:48, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
That account some steward suppression applied to it; this could be for many reasons but are generally good and get some peer review. You may not get much explanation if you ask 'why' - but if you think it is a bad lock for some specific reason you can open a VTRS ticket for steward review. — xaosfluxTalk23:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Can you obtain the timestamp of a revision from its `oldid` using Lua/Scribunto?
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
As the title asks. Template:Copied requires you to manually enter the date of the diff that copied the material, which could be eliminated if the answer to this question is yes. — Scott•talk22:11, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Presumably one could, in theory, store certain known revid-timestamp pairs and compute the timestamp for an unknown revid using best-fit curves, since the date doesn't need to be accurate to more than about a day. In practice that probably isn't what you are looking for. * Pppery *it has begun...22:58, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago16 comments4 people in discussion
Everything on Wikipedia has just gone into tiny text. Seems to affect all pages, except preferences. Other websites unaffected. Using Monobook on Edge on Win10. DuncanHill (talk) 16:07, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: I usually have everything at 125%, now if I have Wikipedia at 150% it looks like I expect it to. Safe mode looks the same as dangerous (?) mode. Other sites look normal at 125%. DuncanHill (talk) 20:03, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
Monobook seems to be setting body { font-size: x-small; }. There's a big note in that context:
/* Font size:
** We take advantage of keyword scaling- browsers won't go below 9px
** See "Note 1" at https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#value-def-absolute-size
** More at http://www.w3.org/2003/07/30-font-size
** http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html
** https://web.archive.org/web/20180201141931/http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html
** This affects users whose browser font size setting is < 14.4px,
** making #globalWrapper's font-size 11.43px at minimum.
** Gadgets have their own monobook-specific css rule to set the font-size similar to #globalWrapper.
*/
There is a rule right after at #globalWrapper { font-size: 127%; } also with the note /* scale back up to a sane default */.
It may be your browser vendor's renderer (Edge is powered by "Google" Chromium) no longer does what that note says on the tin. It may be that you modified your personal settings (not your zoom) at some point to produce smaller text. (Less likely but not impossible.) Or it may be that x-small is being interpreted a certain way now by Edge that it didn't before (for example, the <small> tag had inconsistent effects depending on the browser, which is why we set it to 85% in Common.css these days). Or it's possible that you changed the resolution on your desktop to a higher resolution (I have done so inadvertently before), which would appear to make the stuff displayed on your monitor smaller.
Either way, it is clear to me that "small" text is how Monobook is designed, more or less. Monobook text does look small to me as well (Firefox), but I can't say that it looks particularly smaller than how I remember it.
I don't know if this is worth filing a bug. I would guess that most stuff that would have been designed for Monobook exclusively went away when Vector became the norm, so a task "don't set these font sizes weird" might be accepted. I have no idea what the user fallout would be from that. --Izno (talk) 05:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
@Izno: Thanks. It's only en-wiki that's affected - not other languages, not Commons, not Wikiquote, not Wikisource, and I have Monobook set as a global preference. DuncanHill (talk) 10:27, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
@DuncanHill: I tried loading all of your scripts, on Edge, with Monobook and couldn't replicate this - and you say it is still a problem when you are using safemode as well? Only other thing I can suggest you try now is to turn off Gadgets and/or Beta features in your preferences and see if that helps. — xaosfluxTalk14:26, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Should be references always supported with archive url? If yes will bot upddate url status dead no to yes when site with archive url will become dead? Eurohunter (talk) 11:43, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
No, archive urls should remain the discretion of the editor, although pre-emptive archiving should be encouraged in general, but especially for sources that only exist online. Keep in mind that all archive services are not equal, and their practices should be trusted and/or transparent to determine reliability. The idea of a bot marking urls as unavailable involves pretty complex coding. There are many different reasons for non-availability, including several transient ones that a badly coded routine may miss or flag wrongly. There is an effort to apply time-sensitive extensions to http. When/if these get approval and widespread application, the dead url issue will not be as important. 104.247.55.106 (talk) 14:05, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Rollback edit summary duplicated part of user's username, resulting in incorrect link to contribs
Latest comment: 2 years ago10 comments3 people in discussion
Hello! So when using rollback on an edit, for whatever reason the edit summary duplicated part of the user's username. The edit is here. Anyone know what caused this to happen? It didn't appear to happen any other time I rolled back an edit by the same user. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654500:25, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
I'm 99.9% sure, especially since the mediawiki rollback should not put non-constructive (RW 16.1)) in to the rollback summary - why do you think this wasn't script based? — xaosfluxTalk00:55, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: *Facepalm* Woops my bad. For whatever reason I didn't see the (RW 16.1) and the "non-constructive" part when reading my own edit summary. I just read the "rollback edits by" part and assumed I Didn't use RW for that edit. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654500:59, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
The username was Theleak$22.25 and the edit summary was:
Rollback edit(s) by [[Special:Contributions/TheleakTheleak$22.252.25|TheleakTheleak$22.252.25]] ([[User_talk:TheleakTheleak$22.252.25|talk]]): non-constructive [[w:en:WP:RW|(RW 16.1)]]. $2 in the username was replaced with the whole username each time. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:22, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
$1, $2 and so on is sometimes used to designate the nth parameter or string match. I haven't read the RedWarn code but it must assign the username to $2 and later confuse it with an occurrence of the string "$2" in the original input. As xaosflux said, it can be reported at Wikipedia talk:RedWarn. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:45, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Ah ok sounds good. I don't think it's common enough to be that big of an issue, but if I do encounter it again I'll report it there. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654523:42, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Yup, but this doesn't seem to be anything to do with "rollback", is likely just an input handling bug in that personal userscript. — xaosfluxTalk13:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
Edit Watchlist times out
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion
I've got over 23,000 pages but I wouldn't think that's a problem. In theory I could also try editing my raw watchlist, but that loads, shows pages for a second, and goes blank. Doug Wellertalk17:49, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
You could try trimming some of the cruft from your watchlist with my watchlist cleaner tool. You might want to skip the slow options the first time round, but I've been able to test it successfully on a 10,000 item watchlist. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 22:16, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks all. @Xaosflux: safe mode worked very well. I was then able to get it down to just under 12,000. But the normal way just displays it, it won't actually delete anything, just leaves a message "There are too many pages to display here." despite having shown them all. @Ahect: I installed it but I use User talk:The Transhumanist/WatchlistSorter.js which I think stops your script from working. At least I think I am, User:Doug Weller/watchlistSorter.js really puzzles me as it doesn't seem installed and I can't find it elsewhere. I've got three watchlists, one for articles/article talk page, main space and talk pages, userpage and talk pages, with colours. Doug Wellertalk14:21, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: The message "There are too many pages to display here", displayed after you've hit the "Remove titles" button, is misleading. I think it is trying to say "I have removed the titles as you requested; if there were only a few, I would have listed them here as part of the confirmation message, but you've removed so many that I'm not going to list them." -- John of Reading (talk) 14:55, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
@John of Reading: It certainly is misleading, as I've just discovered. I've been able to trim my watchlist to under 10,000 and it now shows the pages I've deleted. I think with everyone's help I've accomplished what I was trying to accomplish, and I've reset ordinary and Twinkle preferences to add fewer pages. That plus the ability to set a time limit should keep it under control. Thanks all. Doug Wellertalk15:00, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Geez anti-vandal work sure fills up your watchlist. The majority of the pages in my watchlist were userpages of either indef blocked users or IPs. Some of these I wish I could keep the talk page watchlisted but not the userpage but unfortunately that's not how it works. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654515:12, 21 February 2022 (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.
At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change. [10]
You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]]. [11]
There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).
Future changes
The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [12][13]
Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech. [14]
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
I use Opera and recently had to reinstall it. Since reinstalling, I can't see the Tools tabs at the top of the page and when I click the Notifications icon the page is blank. I know that this is some setting about privacy or scripting but I can't remember or figure out which. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance. Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)20:43, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Have a look at the images near the top of Wikipedia:Skin, see which is closest to what you have. The main details to consider are the items around the edges, rather than the main content. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:43, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF) and WhatamIdoing: Sorry for the delay in answering. The safe mode didn't change anything but everything started working correctly shortly before your last question. I didn't change any settings either on WP or my browser or restart the browser either, so I was at a loss as to why what didn't work before suddenly did. I was holding off on answering until it seemed like the changes "held" but the tools seem to be working now. I'm kind of stumped but the immediate problem seems solved. Thanks for your help. Eggishorn(talk)(contrib)20:10, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
@Eggishorn: this is a bit o/t, but I'm an Opera user of long standing, until I discovered the Vivaldi browser, which I now use almost exclusively. If you're an Opera fan, try out Vivaldi; you might become a new fan and love it as much as I do. Mathglot (talk) 07:04, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
Effect of article size on references (and of transclusions on article size)?
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, can someone please give a look at Talk:2022 United States House of Representatives elections § Wonky footnotes? As of now, reference #1003 and all after it won't show up as it ideally should. Someone explored the possibility that expansion of templates in the article caused it to exceed limits imposed by software. However, when I simply copy-pasted the page contents in User:CX Zoom/TestPage8, with some portions being pasted in User:CX Zoom/TestPage5 instead and being transcluded from there. Despite the total content being slightly lesser than original article, references #938 and all after it won't show up. Is the issue of references not showing up not dependent on article size or transclusions somehow significantly increase the post-expand size? Also, if someone can fix the main issue in question, it will be very helpful. Thanks! ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)15:12, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
If the article is way too damn big now, with the election still nine months away, you know that the article will continue to grow for the next year and a half – longer if the election is in any way controversial. Time to split or consider severely paring it back to the essentials.
As a stop-gap, you might replace all {{cite web with {{#invoke:cite web|| and all {{cite news with {{#invoke:cite news|| (note the double pipe). That might be problematic because I suspect that that construct is not recognized by the bots and user scripts that cleanup after careless editors. It will not stop the growth of the article. Best that editors exercise editorial discipline and edit the article back to a reasonable size.
Actually the problem is that it's still primary season. This same issue happened four years ago, indeed then all the references were broken! Only after the losers in the primaries are culled out the the article does it reduce down to a reasonable size. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:58, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
...but one thing I don't understand is why the page with the same content but one of its parts being transcluded from other page will load less number of references than a page that has all contents within itself. ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)07:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
Changed behaviour for the thumb image option
Latest comment: 2 years ago18 comments6 people in discussion
Moonraker (talk·contribs) has made edits like this on a number of articles. I see no point to this, since it is merely doubling up the styles that are applied by the inbuilt CSS rule
that is triggered by the use of |thumb on the image. I brought it up on their talk page, and removed some such additions (example), but several of my edits have been reverted (example), reinstating the markup that is, to me, absolutely unnecessary.
So, has there been some change to the way that |thumb behaves, either in the site's CSS or in the MediaWiki software? It seems strange that such a radical change in behaviour (floated images failing to float) would not be noticed by several other people and at least one thread started here. But if there has been a change, fixing this in one or two places would surely be easier than adding <div style="float:right;clear:right">...</div> tag pairs around millions of images one by one. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:22, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
I see on their talk page that the user claims that it only affects small-screen mobile devices, which is probably true as floats don't make much sense at low widths. But as far as I know the relevant CSS rules have existed for years. And I doubt wholesale forcing of floats on mobile devices is really going to be a good experience for such readers. Anomie⚔13:11, 19 February 2022 (UTC)
Redrose64 and Izno, it seems to me you need to link some policy, rather than putting forward personal preferences. Most people (including me) are now using mobile devices. If I create an article and want a marginal image in it, one which does not split the text across the whole page width, the “thumb” option no longer works for me on the English Wikipedia, as it did until a few months ago. It still works fine on the French, German, and Italian Wikipedias, and perhaps on all others. By all means point me towards some other standard option. {{Main page image}} does the trick for me, but I believe it was GKFX who said that should only be used on the main page. If there is a policy which claims that marginal images are a problem, I am not aware of it. There must surely be a correct way to achieve them. Also, can someone please find out exactly what change has been made to the “thumb” mobile display on this Wikipedia, I believe it was last October, and why it was made? Moonraker (talk) 00:35, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
@Moonraker Marginal images still display on the mobile site, but they depend on your device's width and text zoom level. On my device, they appear like that when I turn it to landscape and zoom out to 75%: [15] (85% for comparison: [16]) (the example I tested is The Fighting Temeraire#Symbolism). If you see different results on different language Wikipedias, maybe you zoomed in on one of them accidentally or something? Matma Rextalk01:05, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
This is actually irrespective of my personal preference. The irony is that you are installing your own personal preference without actually understanding the implications of what you are doing.
As for 'marginal' images, Matma Rex seems to have explained how and why they aren't working for you, and why in fact you should not try to enforce your preference. While it is possible something did actually change or break for you in October (there has been work on skinning for the past couple years), I have some doubts (Matma would know if it had -- he is a reasonably diligent software engineer for the movement). Izno (talk) 01:15, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
With respect, Izno, I have today checked on two other mobile devices, and on all of them the English Wikipedia is behaving differently from the other three Wikipedias I mentioned above, Fr, De, and It. I noticed it doing that about the middle of last October. I have just checked the Spanish WP (where the “thumb” option can be used as “thumb” or “miniatura”), plus Latin, Hungarian, and Polish, and on all of them “thumb” is still producing small marginal images which do not spread across the whole page width. On my “personal preference”, sure, it is simply for marginal images to go on displaying as they do everywhere else, at least on the pages I have designed. I understand the preference of Redrose64, which is to cut out unnecessary surplus text which he believes achieves nothing. That would make good sense if it did achieve nothing. He has said on my talk page he is using Windows 10 on a PC. Moonraker (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
What makes it your preference is that you are adding non-responsive HTML which inhibits the display for everyone else. Yes, everyone else.
Matma Rex, no, no accidental zooming in. It would be really helpful to get to the bottom of what the difference is between the way “thumb” is programmed to perform on this Wikipedia and the others. Do you have time to check that out? Moonraker (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Moonraker, if you log out of the English Wikipedia, do images display differently? If so, your thumb size preferences on en.WP may be causing the different rendering between en and fr/de/it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:02, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
@Moonraker Can you link to the articles you're testing, and provide screenshots of what you're seeing? There is no difference between English and Polish Wikipedia for me, and I don't see any differences in configuration options that could affect how thumbnails are shown. Matma Rextalk08:04, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Matma Rex, I can do screenshots, but how do I post them here or somewhere else? Do you suggest I upload them to this Wikipedia or Commons, or is there another way to do it? As an example of the difference between En and Pl, the England page gives me about fifty “thumb” images in windows that take up the whole page width, but the Pl Anglia page shows “thumb” images to the right, each taking up about a third of the page width, with the text running down continuously. Moonraker (talk) 09:08, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Here's a link to a pl.WP copy of the English version of "England" (hosted on pl.WP). The templates and links generally don't work, but it should allow for straightforward comparison of the same image code on two different instances of Wikipedia. When I switch to mobile view, both pages stop flowing text around images and place them alone in the center of the page when my viewport window width gets below about 710 pixels, even though my thumb size preferences are different at en.WP and pl.WP. I see no difference. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:27, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
When posting here, you should have seen this notice, which includes the line
Some external image hosting services have objectionable advertising, or run untrustworthy JavaScript. Even imgur gives me problems - when visiting it my PC slows to a crawl and I need to reboot. So please can we stick with WP:WPSHOT which is as trustworthy as the rest of Wikipedia. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:35, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
poor visibility of ins and del-tag background colors in diffs
Latest comment: 2 years ago12 comments9 people in discussion
Hi, to me (as a visually impaired person) it's very hard to find the (often small) pieces of text that are added or deleted in a diff. Texts that are added or deleted are placed within a <ins> or <del>-tag. The contrast ratio of the background color for these tags to the normal background color is 1:1.2 . WCAG 2.0 actually advises a ratio of at least 1:3 for user interface components. Since the added or deleted parts in a diff are a vital part of a wiki, I think this should be better accessible for all people by changing the background color of these elements (globally, through MediaWiki:Common.css?). I would like to propose this background color, which is #ADD6FF for the ins- and del-tags. This is a darker variant based on the same color that is used now. This considerably increases contrast to the normal background-color (#FFFFFF). Still not a 1:3 contrast-ratio, but this would make it far more easy for visually impaired people and actually anyone to find the changes within a diff. Novopas (talk) 09:46, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
That change would also make diff usable in dark mode, where ins and del are currently almost invisible even with average vision. Certes (talk) 12:17, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Thank you, PrimeHunter, I wasn't aware of this option. On the Dutch Wikipedia I also changed my personal CSS to improve visibility of the ins/del-tags. But I still think that a lot of people, both registered and unregistered, could benefit from this change. Novopas (talk) 14:26, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
I put them in m:Special:MyPage/global.css so that they would be effective on all Wikimedia Wikis, but you can put them in Special:MyPage/common.css so that they only affect English Wikipedia. Basically, the unchanged portions of lines retain the yellow (old)/green (new) backgrounds yielded by that gadget, as do lines wholly added or wholly removed, but changed content within an existing line gets the background colours exchanged - green for old removed text, yellow for new added text. This method even works for single spaces added or removed, which the basic gadget doesn't. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:26, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
No one is touching this with a ten foot pole, I think. It’s one of those typical, whatever u do, no one is satisfied and everyone is angry issues unfortunately. And then status quo tends to prevail for a long time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:47, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Something I never understood is why desktop and mobile have as differing schemes as #a3d3ff/#ffe49c and #75c877/#e07076. To me the former is far superior and the latter barely legible, but I guess Novopas would disagree? Nardog (talk) 23:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Novopas is saying he can't distinguish (or not easily, anyway) the pastel backgrounds of the former from white, so it's as if the changes don't exist.
Mobile is on the other color scheme because mobile use its own diff machinery and it wasn't updated when core was, in case you didn't read the task. Izno (talk) 23:20, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
@Certes: a per-user preference would be great, but I'd suggest that the accessible option always be the default (also, because unregistered users won't be able to choose any preference). Thanks for the phabricator link, Xaosflux, although I'm really not proposing any different color scheme per se, rather proposing to make the current scheme more accessible to visually impaired people, by changing the background to a (slightly) darker shade. Izno is right in saying that the current background is practically invisible for me and other visually impaired users. (and as Certes pointed out, people with normal sight who are using dark mode) Novopas (talk) 09:55, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
Footnotes and line wrapping issue
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Awards parameters for Video games reviews template not working
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hello! I'm working on improving the Euro Truck Simulator 2 article and was told that I could use the awards parameter for the video games review template to get rid of the awards section, however for whatever reason when I attempt to add the publisher of the award, it results in the publisher section for that being blank. Anyone know what I"m doing wrong? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654523:41, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
Blaze Wolf, questions specific to a specific template should be asked first on the relevant template talk page or to the person who thinks they know what they're talking about. Izno (talk) 00:04, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
@Izno: Ah alright. I just asked here because I knew I would find people here that would know the answer to my question. Shall I ask this question there then or should I wait for someone to answer it here? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654500:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
Why is it that thumbnail images cannot provide vertical alignment as non-thumbnail images can? Can we add vertical alignment to thumbnail images? This would greatly enhance the placement of images to accommodate a wide range browser window widths. Yours aye, Buaidh talke-mail20:21, 22 February 2022 (UTC)
I would like to vertically align the thumbnail image with the relevant point or paragraph. The vertical alignment default for thumbnails is always top. The following is a trivial example with equal line spacing and similar image sizes. If the paragraphs and images are of substantially unequal sizes, the discrepancy becomes far greater.
If you are just playing around in User space, you could do something hacky like {{float |top=-7em |[[File:John Q. Adams.jpg|upright=0.5|thumb|[[John Quincy Adams]]]]}}. I wouldn't use that construction in article space, though, unless I were prepared to test and maintain the affected pages with a variety of browsers, skins, and mobile/desktop viewers in perpetuity. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:39, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
In some cases "url-status = live" results in no link to original or archived version and "url-status = dead" not results in hiding dead link. Eurohunter (talk) 19:01, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
When I point my mouse at Demi Lovato the pop-up shews the picture and the usual "Demi Lovato ⋅ actions ⋅ popups 185.6kB, 787 wikiLinks, 10 images, 52 categories, 4 days 4 hours old" bit, but instead of any text I only see }}. I think this is something to do with hidden comments in or near the infobox. If anyone could fix this I would be grateful. The article in question will be on the front page soon in DYK. DuncanHill (talk) 00:30, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Fixed. It was because the MDY template was on the same line at the end of the hidden comment. I moved it to its own line, and now the popup displays properly. Schazjmd(talk)00:36, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Hi, I'm facing some issue and asked for support at mw:Topic:Wqm5gq0lh7n23smn. I'm not sure if that was the correct place to ask it, and because this issue is happening with inter-language links to English Wikipedia, I'm leaving a link here for those who would like to see the matter. Thanks! ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)07:29, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
See section Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month: We are back in 2022! on those pages. The message writer forgot the colon, so [[en:Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine|Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine]] in ...with the [[en:Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine|Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine]] and [[en:Ukrainian Institute|Ukrainian Institute]] acts as an interwiki link (those old links used to be at the end of every pages before Wikidata was established). NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh08:21, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Done All pages fixed except for user talk ones. Interwiki links don't work on talk pages and I really don't want to notify ~160 users about such a tiny thing. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh09:22, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Thursday?
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Just got the error from a few weeks ago (Cant' remember what it was). Is there some update to Wikimedia (mediawiki? I can never which one it is) that broke something? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654502:47, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
I just saw upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow after something like "waiting for intake analytics" or something like that. A temporary problem. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:58, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The page has only been updated twice and has been untouched in several years. This term is used for describing indefinite blocks on Special:BlockList and MediaWiki:Blockedtext and other block messages. I believe there is a wrong connotation associated with "no expiry set". While it accurately represents an indefinite block, it does not make clear that it does not mean infinite. So I am asking here.
Which phrasing looks best for the block message as well as the block list?
No expiry set (currently used)
Never (the term previously used before changed in October 2007)
Infinite (default message)
Indefinite
Until removed
Something else?
What I am exactly trying to figure out is how do we communicate to both the blocked user in the block message and other users on Special:BlockList that they are blocked, the block does not have a fixed duration, but the block can be removed on appeal? Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis02:31, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Note this is a WP:BRD follow up from MediaWiki_talk:Infiniteblock. I think this is fine the way it is, (second choice: use system default, third choice use 'indefinite') see it in use on Special:BlockList as the 'time' value when the block is indefinite. That it is possible to be changed doesn't mean it isn't still a time unit. — xaosfluxTalk10:15, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi there. At List of years in Philippine television, several of the years listed in the 1970s redirect back to the article. Also, I don't think it's necessary to list all the red-linked years up to 2029. I tried to edit the article, but it uses templates such as "years in decade|1970|Philippine television".
What led me to that article was the template "Year nav topic5|2022|Philippine television", at 2022 in Philippine television. It's really unsightly to have all those redliked articles in the template.
Just a heads-up: the HTML changes mentioned in the last tech news to the history and contributions pages, which added headers for dates for the mobile skin which are hidden on desktop devices, have caused disruption to my workflow as a screen reader user, since what used to be a list of, say, 50 items in a page history is now several smaller lists. When I was checking page history at Wikidata for this section, I was extremely confused by the history display, but now I understand what's going on. I think I might add the CSS mentioned in the Phabricator ticket to my user CSS page to make things a bit more usable for now. In the task, there is talk of maybe adding the date headers to the desktop history/contributions page, etc., which I'm not sure about at all. I've already commented in the task itself but I thought it was worth giving a heads-up here too. Graham8702:32, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
@Graham87: I've adjusted it. In general, you probably don't need the !important, and in this case you don't. If you really wanted it, the correct CSS for important would have been something like .mw-index-pager-list-header { display: block !important; }. --Izno (talk) 03:31, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
I've proposed patches for the issues you noted, that is:
Reveal the headers to screen-readers to make it more clear that there are multiple lists
Group the edits by date in the user's timezone
Add a <section> wrappers around the lists to make it easier to jump to the end (at least, I hope this helps, I'm only an amateur screen reader user – if it doesn't, then we should think about other approaches)
Please also say if anything else should be changed. I'll make sure that next week, either those changes are deployed (if you confirm that they are helpful), or that the original change is reverted and I'll ask the team to consider other options.
(I'm posting the reply both here and on Phabricator, because I'm not sure where you prefer to discuss… Let me know and let's discuss there.) Matma Rextalk13:32, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Starting yesterday, some wikilinks and text fields not selectable or take multiple attempts to register a click. Typing in the edit summary field is sometimes impossible. On LAV II, Category:General Dynamics land vehicles is not clickable (Navigation popups also not working for this specific link). As I type this using Discussion Tools, moving the curser sometimes takes multiple clicks. Purging the cache does not help. I am using Edge stable v. 98.0.1108.56 and Windows 11. Haven't yet reproduced on Chrome. Schierbecker (talk) 20:03, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Closing and reloading the browser also does not help. I still can't click that category on LAV II. I temporarily couldn't click edit source on this section. Had to leave this reply using Discussion Tools. Schierbecker (talk) 20:13, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Disabling Discussion Tools does not help. I removed my only script from User:Schierbecker/vector.js the day before yesterday. Could that be related? I also have one script on my User:Schierbecker/vector.css that turns wikilinks to redirects the color green. I am using Vector, Microsoft Edge stable v. 98.0.1108.56 and Windows 11. I don't use Visual Editor, but I do use the Discussion Tools beta. Schierbecker (talk) 20:27, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.
I'm working on improving species articles and would really like to include more distribution maps (where the species lives). Alicia at Wikimedia Sweden has kindly helped me put together an example of how this could possibly work using Template:Graph:Map and data from Plants of the World Online to find issues etc. The main issue with using this is that you can only show countries, islands, areas of countries etc cannot be listed so the data cannot be described correctly. For example this plant is native to Sicily but not the rest of Italy.
Does anyone know how this issue could be fixed? Is there some way of importing a database of areas in each country, islands etc into the database that Template:Graph:Map uses? Or is there something else that could be used that wouldn't rely on hand making SVG maps on Commons for each species?
There are also some smaller issues
The map should have the option to zoom in on the area where the species are present, not only a world view (if the species is only present in a small area it won't show up on a world map. Is there a fix for this?
Would it be possible to use the Wikidata IDs to pull up the location data? This would be extremely helpful for importing data from external sources.
Latest comment: 2 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, there. I added the following code to my common.css files, but after using it for 3 days, it stopped highlighting the errors on wiki pages...I cleared cache, purged, removed and re-added the code in my common.js files, but to no avail. Does anyone here know why would that be the case? Any help would be appreciated. Qwerty284651 (talk) 00:18, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Basically, CSS import is broken in MediaWiki because CSS import declarations are required to be first on a page. What happens is that all the various custom style declarations get squished into a single sheet before being served, which means that CSS import in personal CSS inevitably ends up somewhere other than the top. (I should consider submitting a task for that, but it's not exactly a priority, and tinkering with CSS can lead to other issues.)
@Izno How do I use a self pointer? I am new in this. I just happened to come across LintHint, because wanted to try out repairing lint errors, to decrease the overall backlog of pages with lint errors. I even had someone help me how to save it properly in my .css page. Javascripts I have never used before. So, all that is German village to me. I tried out Template data, which is kind of similar, but I have little to no experience in the programming department. So, you suggesting me copy-paste the relevant declaration...Heck, I don't know even what that means. I wish I did, but I don't. Enough whining from my side...I just,..uhm...I got nothing...Maybe go physically into page information, lint errors on page,...and then do it manually....maybe, I don't know. I will see what I can do. Thanks for the advice, nonetheless. Much appreciated from you, technically-adept people. Cheers, Qwerty284651 (talk) 21:32, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
With the JavaScript solution, do as already suggested, just copy-paste. It is a slightly slower solution. With the CSS solution, go to and copy the rules on m:User:SMcCandlish/lint.css that aren't commented out (comments are delimited with /* comment */), then go to and paste in your common.css, then consider adding a comment like /* From [[:m:User:SMcCandlish/lint.css]] */. Izno (talk) 22:03, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, I have noticed that the Wikipedia's non-free file uploader is not working in mobile phones. This is happening in the Wikipedia's file upload wizard. When we click on 'upload a non-free file' on mobile phones, so nothing happens. Just the page reloads. We have to switch to desktop website for uploading such files. GoldenHayato (talk) 03:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion
With T112147, the oversight group has been internally renamed to suppress. This does not change anything in terms of how the group is referred to in system messages or policies, but it does mean:
In all three cases, this can be fixed by changing oversight or oversighter to suppress (looks like that's replaced both names; see e.g. [17]).
I've updated all instances of the first two I could find in important places (policy pages, ArbCom documentation... for a period of time today several pages proudly claimed we had 0 oversighters), but have for the time being let be the 100 or so archives, historic pages, and userspace pages with that markup. I think it would be reasonable for someone to go through with AWB and just update the lot of them, though. Even for some random talkpage comment from 10 years ago, it's truer to the commenter's original intention to correct the links. Remaining instances: ListUsers · NUMBERINGROUP.
As to scripts, well, pretty quick fix. If you see a script that needs to be updated for this, ping the maintainer if they're around, or an IntAdmin if not. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they)06:20, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
@Tamzin: Ah alright. Also I know there's more than just them. @Chlod: Sounds good. I would attempt to fix it myself but uh... I wouldn't know what I'm doing and would probably break something. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654515:59, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
@Chlod: Mdaniels doesn't seem to be active right now, but I've put in a pull request and cross-posted it to their talk in hopes that'll get their attention. If they don't respond, someone will have to fork the bot in order for scripts to be able to see who's an oversighter. It's a BRFA-exempt task, so should be simple enough. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they)16:09, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
I've run AWB through, which caught most pages, and have filed edit requests for the five pages I couldn't edit because they were full protected. That only leaves User:Stepshep/userpage.js which I'm A) not really sure how they managed to create (I could have sworn there were sanity checks), and B) would require a interface admin. -- AsarteaTalk|Contribs14:03, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
@Amorymeltzer basically what @Pythoncoder said above; their userhighlighter is running of the AmoryBot data, so I pinged you just in case you hadn't seen this yet (sorry for the late reply: I apparently forgot to hit publish changes yesterday) -- AsarteaTalk|Contribs14:46, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
For the scripts: this search query should find all occurrences of "oversight" on a .js page in the user or mediawiki namespace. Note that most of this is false positives caused by either oversight in a display string (which is fine, since its still the actual name of the group) or config options. -- AsarteaTalk|Contribs13:17, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
Redirect + red link
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
We want blue links than green redirects and I think we want keep redirects but I think there is a need for red links too. For exaple in template Interlanguage link if there is no article but there is a redirect - redirect will be shown instead of red link and you also can't add "internal link" ([[Article#Header|Article]]) to is to it's blue instead of green. Eurohunter (talk) 09:17, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
Eurohunter, if you don't get any other reply besides mine, it's because, once again, it is impossible to discern what you are talking about. Can you get a friend to help you with the English (and adding some context)? Then maybe can somebody can help you with whatever your technical issue is. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits)10:00, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
I am also confused but I think this may be about templates such as {{ill|Tatsuyuki Maeda|fr}} (displayed as Tatsuyuki Maeda) linking only to the redirect when there is a whole article about the person on frwp. The non-English links are removed when an enwp article appears; |preserve= and |display= can be used to prevent this. Further details are in Template:Interlanguage link/doc. I don't fully understand the bit about sections but Template:Further ill may be useful. Certes (talk) 13:53, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
The template won't produce a redlink if enwiki has a page with that title, even if the page is a redirect. I don't think we'd want to: readers are used to red meaning "no page". {{ill|Tatsuyuki Maeda#Software research and development|fr}} links to a section (of Sega) on enwp: Tatsuyuki Maeda#Software research and development [fr]. {{ill|Tatsuyuki Maeda|fr|Tatsuyuki Maeda#Ludographie}} links to a section on frwp: Tatsuyuki Maeda. The two can be combined to link to sections in both languages. Certes (talk) 18:25, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
What do you want instead of the redirect? If you want a direct link to the article, {{ill|Sega#Software research and development|fr|lt=Tatsuyuki Maeda}} looks right (Tatsuyuki Maeda) but will not update if someone creates a biography. If you want a redlink, that option is not available, because we do not confuse readers by displaying redlinks for pages which exist. Certes (talk) 19:54, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
Solution found for banner ads
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
My original thread is archived, but I thought ppl might appreciate an answer. I asked at MediaWiki, and they said,
put the following in meta:Special:mypage/global.css:
#centralNotice { display:none !important}
I tried this, and so far it seems to have taken care of the majority of the problem. I'm still getting local banner ads for Covid and the like, but that code appears to have stopped the same ad from reappearing hundreds of times after it's dismissed. — kwami (talk) 07:21, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
@Kwamikagami first, these are not "banner ads", they seem like "notices". If you are actually getting advertisements, it isn't coming from us. As far as not wanting to see central notices, a much better option for most users is to opt-out of them at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners instead of mucking around with CSS in this way, which may make you miss very important banners. A "better" solution for doing this "globally" is likely in phab:T302585. — xaosfluxTalk13:49, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: They're all internal from WP. You might call them "notices", but they're still ads.
I'd tried both those options, with everything deselected. Neither worked. Both let hundreds of "important" notices through. If I had to guess, it's that nearly everyone who posts a notice thinks that their notice is "important". So many "important" notices get through that I can't even see the article without scrolling down, and that's on a full screen. If the WP notice ppl were responsible with their oversight, I wouldn't need to block everything in order to block the flood of garbage.
It didn't use to be this way. Until recently, the ads were a minor annoyance. They didn't interfere with browsing or editing WP. — kwami (talk) 19:49, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
You can see all the current notices at meta:Special:CentralNotice, all of the enabled banners are set to types that you can disable. If you properly disable all the banners, you should not be seeing any. You are free to use the CSS, but you may miss actual important notices, e.g. site maintenance, or you may want certain types e.g. governance so you don't miss elections for example. Dylsss(talkcontribs)02:55, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
If it's so difficult to properly disable the banners that I still haven't figured out how to do it, then I wonder how accessible that option is for most people. — kwami (talk) 21:21, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Reply tool next Monday
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
As you are probably tired of hearing me say, anyone who doesn't like it need only go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion and turn it back off. No complicated gadgets or user scripts are needed to make it disappear.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved. [19][20]
The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.
Problems
The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed. [21]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).
Future changes
Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Hello! Is there any way without utilizing bots to keep pages from different projects synchronized?
The CS1 module suite is made up of 10 module pages. Those 10 pages are identic for SqWiki and SqQuote. Every time I update SqWiki's modules I need to copy-paste (x10) everything to SqQuote. Anyway to have that procedure happen automatically? - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:38, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
When I'm at the top of a page, I can look at the TOC, click a certain section and I will be sent to it while the URL reflects that.
When I'm scrolling down to a certain section, the URL will not change. Any way I can get the section link without having to scroll back to the TOC or adding it manually? I'd hope for a functionality that allows for double-clicking the section's title or right-clicking it or anything similar and it automatically gave you the URL for it. Maybe you can also choose between getting the URL or a permanent link (or a [inter-]wikilink). I have to link to different discussions in and out of EnWiki often and having an easy way to link to certain sections, while looking at the said sections, often in the permanent way (discussions get archived rather quickly and the permanent link is deemed more desirable in some cases) would be greatly appreciated. I'm guessing something similar would be appreciated even with articles' sections (but there [inter-]wikilinks can be more desirable).
@MusikAnimal, thank you very much for the insight provided! The script's description looks exactly what I'm looking for. I'd only wish that if it would become a native MediaWiki functionality, it would also allow for wikilinks and interwikilinks beside URLs and permanent links. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:50, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
I don't know of any websites where the content of the URL bar changes as you scroll up or down, it only changes when links are followed (or moved back from). But regarding a means for obtaining the URL for a section, some websites do indeed do this - the W3C's own website does it on many pages, see for example CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3, where most section headings (from 1. Introduction on) are preceded by a § section sign - clicking this alters the URL in the browser's address bar - or you can right-click it and select "Copy link". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:20, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
@Redrose64, to be honest, I wasn't expecting the URL to change as I scroll down (although that doesn't look like a bad idea). I was just hoping for a kind of interaction with the section heading that would bring me the links for it (having a share button would be the easiest way). The example you brought was a good one and it was elegant too. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:56, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Make working with templates easier: Several improvements coming to your wiki soon.
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
A new attribute “suggested values” was introduced to help you clarify what values a parameter may expect. (1)
When using syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension), line numbers are shown in the template namespace. (2) A few wikis have these line numbers activated in all namespaces. If you want this for your wiki as well, please reach out to us.
More improvements from the Templates project are coming to English Wikipedia soon:
Finding and inserting templates will become easier with an improved search and added warnings (in the TemplateWizard & in the template dialog of VisualEditor and New Wikitext mode). (3)
In VisualEditor, you’ll be able to remove a template from a page via the context menu, just like removing a table or an image. (4)
Also in VisualEditor, the template dialog will become bigger and descriptions will be more visible. (5)
Matching brackets will be highlighted (when you use syntax highlighting). (6)
The color scheme in syntax highlighting will be updated for better readability. (7)
These improvements have been tested on a few wikis for some months now, and will be deployed to all wikis except English Wikipedia on March 9. Assuming no severe issues emerge during this deployment, we’ll deploy this set of changes to English Wikipedia on March 16, 2022. We’d love to hear what you think of these changes on the talk pages of the project pages linked above ([1] - [7]).
A few weeks later, we’re also going to deploy the last round of improvements from our Templates focus area:
A colorblind-friendly color scheme will be added in syntax highlighting (CodeMirror extension). You’ll be able to activate it via a user setting.
A range of fundamental changes to the VisualEditor template dialog will be deployed. They will make it easier to understand what is expected from a template, to navigate the template dialog, and to add parameters to a template.
"Matching brackets will be highlighted (when you use syntax highlighting)" This sounds like it'll be really helpful when using a bunch of nested templates. Not so much when just using a single template but still helpful. How do I know if I have syntax highlighting enabled? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654515:04, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I needed a small-cap delta for a non-Unicode character. But the small-cap template had no effect. I am told there that how the letters display depends on my browser. Could something be done to ensure that small caps display correctly?
On my browser (Firefox), the following basic Greek letters display as small caps:
εζηικνξοςτυψϝ
and these do not:
αβγδθλμπρσφχω
That's true whether or not I log in.
However, in the Falkon browser, all are correctly small-cap.
If you want to continue the discussion, I think you should move it here. It's technical question but seems unconnected to Common.css. Certes (talk) 12:13, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Response of visual elements on using Dark mode (gadget)
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, I want to raise some issues caused with visual elements when WP:Dark mode (gadget) is used.
First of all, .svg rendering. There are at least 4 different manners in which .svgs behave on using dark mode.
For the first two manners, I wish to invite you to visit my userpage. If you look at all those userboxes, you'll find that all of those .svgs have a transparent background. Yet only two of them respond when the userbox background colors change as a result of using dark mode: the "This user has been on Wikipedia for..." and "WikiProject Redirect" ones. All rest .svgs for some reason switch to a simple white background, for example the "Bengali is the mother tongue..." userbox.
Now, let's go to Chennai Super Kings, there's an image for the team's T20 kit in infobox, instead of the .svg background responding to dark mode, the actual jersey colors do, which makes it "factually incorrect".
For the 4th behaviour, let's go to 2020 New Zealand general election#Background. On using dark mode on desktop, the background of parliamentary makeup .svg is white, on mobile however it would switch to black instead. All other .svgs on the same page would not respond to dark mode & remain white irrespective of desktop/mode site.
What I don't understand here is why they all behave differently and not in the same one way or another?
Secondly, the issue with visual elements used to portray information. See the infobox at 2019 United Kingdom general election, dark mode causes SNP's party colors to switch from yellow to black. Similarly, Harvard University's university color in infobox looks less crimson and more like light pink. And then there is this Shades of pink article, whose whole world is turned on its head by dark mode. There must be a way for such usage of colors to escape from being modified when dark mode is used.
The white background is because many SVGs have hardcoded black text, they are forced to have a white background for that reason
The non-white background on some SVGs, is because these svgs are not linked to their description page. The rule for #1 did not take this scenario into account.
"factually incorrect colors". Yes, the gadget uses two filters and this causes information loss, making it impossible to invert back to the original colours. Especially in the yellow spectrum this is very visible.
"the background of parliamentary makeup .svg" its a png, not an svg. It shows the default background of any thumb image (white).
"visual elements used to portray information" yes. See #3.
The dark gadget does a double application of filters, causing loss of color information. This double hue offset can be removed, but then the darkgadget will basically use a yellow/orange style, which many ppl might also not prefer. The only way to deal with ALL problems is to make a complete CSS dark theme AND maintain that. The dark gadget is only a 'quick-fix' that basically works most of the time, by making a few shortcuts. Shortcuts tend to have problems that people will complain about. This is exactly why the Wikimedia foundation didn't bring this mode to production when they experimented with it, but turned it over to the community who made this gadget out of it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:14, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Can you recommend anybody who likes to do user boxes?
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I realize there are how-to-pages and templates for the DYI of user boxes, but I'm not particularly good with visual design — many others have more innate ability with that.
Can you recommend anyone who likes to create user boxes?
If I revert and then realize I reverted incorrectly, does the person still get notified?
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Something weird was happening and I couldn't advance to "next edit" on Talk:Hello (Adele song) so I thought the vandalism (or unconstructive edit) was still there. I couldn't undo so I went back to the last good version before the person's bad edits. Somehow I discovered what I was reverting had already been reverted, and I had actually reverted something constructive.
I checked the history again. The reason it wasn't working to move forward was the same unconstructive edit was done three different times, which made me think I wasn't moving forward.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:49, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
And the edit was neither vandalism nor unconstructive; the article was in fact stating that the video achieved a milestone "As of October 2022" which I have corrected.--John Cline (talk) 00:14, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I know. Because of the peculiar way the unconstructive edits were added, I thought I was seeing the current version with the unconstructive edits still there. That's why my only option seemed to be to go back to the last good version.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:50, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Send Mass Message
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hello, is there a problem with the Send Mass Message function? The page Special:MassMessage has gained some none English text and attempting to send a message results in no pages being sent. Keith D (talk) 19:09, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@Keith D: as far as the non-english text, I'm going to 99% guess you have a deprecated interface language set, such as en-gb, and that there is something broken on that upstream, or at translatewiki. Try changing your interface language to "English". I'll check the sending part. — xaosfluxTalk19:29, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes switching to English does remove the non-English text, I also tried sending again and it worked OK. Must be some sort of glitch. Many thanks for the help. Keith D (talk) 23:05, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Kartographer maps broken
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Yesterday maps on all Wikimedia projects which use Kartographer stopped working, there's a Phabricator ticket about it at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T302853 . If anyone would be able to help fix it that would be great. I'm unsure how many pages on English Wikipedia this will effect but probably quite a lot.
It's nice but annoying. I have the ability to see disambiguation links in orange after I finish. At the very least I want that box to go away when I click.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:52, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes let's do that. I've filed phab:T302848. There's a little more to it since mw.notification only accepts IDs, not CSS classes (and there should not be multiple elements with the same ID), so I might want to make a change to Core first. But this shouldn't be anything difficult. (I've typed out these technical details here just in case someone reading knows about a workaround that I'm unaware of.)
@VchimpanzeeI want that box to go away when I click This should be the case for all notifications. You just click anywhere in the notification that's not a link. Also if it's really bothering you right now, an interim solution could be to add .mw-notification-type-warn { display: none; } to your personal CSS, since this is currently (I believe?) the only notification of type warn. This is not a good long-term solution, though, since more notifications of this type could later be introduced. — MusikAnimaltalk02:46, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
mw.notification only accepts IDs, not CSS classes The tag option (as in mw.notify('...', {tag: 'foo'}) will add the class mw-notification-tag-foo to the notification element. That would of course prohibit multiple warnings about disambiguation links from appearing at the same time, but I doubt anyone wants them anyway. Nardog (talk) 03:11, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
I did not know that! This is why I like writing out technical details to solicit input here :) Anyways, I think this system is a little baffling. Going by the docs, a "tag" is for notifications that should appear only once at a time. What we have here can and should be able to appear any number of times. Thus it would seem better design to make the id option act like the tag, since it enforces only having one notification of the same ID. I guess it's down to adding a new class option, which again shouldn't be hard :) I'm looking into it now. — MusikAnimaltalk03:31, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
That would of course prohibit multiple warnings about disambiguation links from appearing at the same time, but I doubt anyone wants them anyway. Writing the sentence "The student will take a test in New York" can be typed very quickly, and without paying attention you'd miss the notification for "test". This of course is aimed at the people who do appreciate these notifications. — MusikAnimaltalk03:35, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps, but I bet even they would find the whole box with the same message appearing for each link annoying. Perhaps there should be a single <ul> to which <li> for each dab link is added (and removed after mw.notification.autoHideSeconds.long = 30s). Nardog (talk) 04:18, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
A fine idea, but that would mean we'd need to continually modify an existing notification instance, which is a bit of work and could be quite tricky. Feel free to create a task! I am assuming in practice most people don't type too many disambig links in quick succession, and those who do in their line of work are better off hiding it altogether. — MusikAnimaltalk04:24, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
You don't need to modify the existing notification instance, you just create a new message with the same ID, and it will replace the old one (unless you're referring to something else on the backend). --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 15:31, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
this is currently (I believe?) the only notification of type warn There are userscripts that use mw.notify that could generate warning bubbles. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 15:27, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Adding WikiEd banner shell moves TOC within banner shell somehow
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
Hello! So in this edit I had attempted to add the WikiEd banner shell to improve the look of the talk page, however somehow doing so also made it so the table of contents was in the banner shell. I checked to make sure I didn't somehow include a table of contents template in it but I didn't. Anyone know what's going on here? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:16, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Ah alright. Seems weird since it makes the template look like a talk page entry rather than a template but since it's normal behavior then I'll leave it. But since the ToC appears above the first heading, then what's the point of the shell if it'll just screw up the ToC when used properly? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:54, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
There are a couple of ways to avoid this. One is to specify where you want the table of contents to display by typing __ToC__. Alternatively we could change it from a level 2 heading to something else which would not trigger the contents table. But that would probably stop it working properly when used outside the shell! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:59, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
For some reason, I'm unable to review the pending change at Susan Smith from Special:PendingChanges, though I'm able to review any other page there. Specifically, on clicking the (review) option I'm taken to [22], and the expected pending changes review box at the top does not appear. I tried refreshing & purging but nothing happened. Clicking manually on the "Pending Changes" tab near "View history" doesn't show me the PC box either. ---CX Zoom(he/him)(let's talk|contribs)15:52, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Okay, so I think the last time I was here, the CSD spam category always indicated there was 1 page in the category, even when it was empty. Now, it is regularly off by 4 or 5 pages. I realize that this might seem small but when you are constantly checking CSD categories, it's irritating for a category count to be constantly off. And it's only the CSD spam category, none of the others.
Is this just our standard category "glitch", like how some categories are always empty even when pages are tagged as being in that category? Which means there is a phab ticket on the issue from years ago that was filed and forgotten. Well, since the constant category number went up from 1 to 5, I thought I'd ask. LizRead!Talk!03:17, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
What am I doing wrong with this code to pull and image from Wikidata?
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Hi all
I'm trying to pull images from Wikidata into Wikipedia articles using this code which PrimeHunter suggested, however I'm doing something wrong and its not working, can anyone see what I'm doing wrong?
Hi. In the past hour or so, I get a little notification in the right-hand side of the page saying "Your edit was saved", complete with a green tick. I'm using the Monobook skin in Firefox. How do I switch this off? Thanks. LugnutsFire Walk with Me20:22, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Nevermind, I see it applies to other edits as well. I thought there was a new update to discussion tools that added that, but no. Please shut this off. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654520:27, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
This has actually been a feature for some time in case you haven't seen it before, it may just be more noticeable because green. The relevant task is phab:T58313. Izno (talk) 20:39, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
I have to ask, who cares that they aren't in the exact same style as other notices? It's not really something that a lot of people would notice, and changing the text color has made it worse. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654520:43, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
It's not broken. You can certainly change it with your own personal CSS, but chances are it only stands out simply because you're not used to it. There's no reason to change anything site-wide. Staying consistent with the styleguide is a good thing. — MusikAnimaltalk20:56, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
You have to remember that not everyone knows how to change it with their personal CSS (including me, and i'd rather not try because I'll probably end up breaking something on my end). ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654520:57, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
But again I think this is just adding cruft to your personal CSS for a minor detail that is only a temporary distraction. New UI changes always look weird when they're first deployed. — MusikAnimaltalk21:25, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
When they introduced this years ago, the user testing indicated that newcomers found it informative and reassuring. For someone like you, who's made more than a million edits, it is presumably superfluous. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
<sarc>Well, at least we know if this was T58313 that the backlog of super-important-features that are certainly needed is only 9 years old.... </sarc>— xaosfluxTalk22:28, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
But that task is still marked "Open, Low". Why is it still open, if it's been done? How did this "low" priority task get done without having its priority raised? wbm1058 (talk) 23:14, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
Well, notice that the change was first uploaded to gerrit in October 2020. A change unreviewed for nearly a year and a half might reasonably be said to be low priority. (Besides that, the magic of priority changing depending on who's looking at it on any given day.)
As for open, probably because no one closed it. Looks like Esanders finished the change off, so it should probably be reassigned to him. Izno (talk) 23:37, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
@Vchimpanzee and Lugnuts: You're only finding this a big deal because you've already hidden the notification by .postedit { display: none; } in your CSS. To everybody else it's just a change from a centered beige notification to a right-aligned white one. There doesn't appear to be a CSS way to hide it, but you can put mw.config.set('wgPostEditConfirmationDisabled', true); in your .js to force-disable it in the meantime. Nardog (talk) 10:42, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Is it still possible to move the notification from right-aligned back to center-aligned? I think that the right-aligned notification is not immediately noticeable. LSGH (talk) (contributions) 16:43, 25 February 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, that worked for me too. I didn't mind the box in the middle of the screen but the top-right positioning covers up useful links as well as the dismiss buttons for "Upload your pictures of Vanuatu!" etc. Certes (talk) 11:29, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
I seem to remember being able to disable this in preferences; it is distracting, and I feel like I have to wait for the damn thing to go away before moving on. Miniapolis20:45, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
Hi, how do I disable this wonderful and extremely useful new "feature" that demands my attention at the top right hand of my screen to let me know that I've made an edit when I've made an edit? Thank you. Dr. Vogel (talk) 17:28, 26 February 2022 (UTC)
I wonder how many people here are old enough to remember the debut of the infamous "clippy", and the wave of interface "enhancements" that ensued. Dr. Vogel (talk) 03:51, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
I've followed the instructions kindly provided by the people above, and I seem to have got rid of it. Luckily it worked first time, and I didn't have to spend the next hour trying to get the solution to work. It feel like it's a lot of hassle just to get rid of this pointless thing. Dr. Vogel (talk) 04:10, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't see why people are acting all surprised. This allegedly-new feature has been there for at least seven years - all that has happened is that it's been repositioned from top centre to top right; less noticeable is the change of text colour (black to dark green) and (I think) the slight rewording from "Your edit has been saved" to "Your edit was saved". For me, all this makes it less obtrusive than it previously was. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:23, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
The difference is that the older design was easily hidden with css. The update requires a js solution and to those people who had hidden the population using css (and possibly forgotten that they had hidden it) it looks like a new festure. Nthep (talk) 14:04, 27 February 2022 (UTC)
Is there a way to autoscale a Kartographer map to just the area with shapes/points?
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi all
I asked this question on Mediawiki but I thought I'd ask here as well since it seems like someone might know. Basically I'm making a load of maps to show species distribution and want to be able to just tell the map to focus on the area showing the shapes and not have to manually correct every single one with zoom scale and position. If you know please reply at the link below.
That is possible, yes. I made an smaller version of what you are asking for at Module:Sandbox/autoscale. It only supports one area, sets the position and zoom level but is still pretty bare-bones. The same principle would work on a larger scale. Example: {{#invoke:sandbox/autoscale|main|item=Q222}} Snævar (talk) 15:00, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Page name - alternative display on right hand side of page
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, this relates more to wikispecies than here, but from a technical standpoint (and in terms of internationalization/accessibility), if you look at for instance wikispecies:Miracinonyx there is a vernacular name (entered in the form |en=). At the top of the page is the language selector. How could one go about having this Miracinonyx page displaying, on the right hand side, on the same line as the page heading Miracinonyx to the left, "(?xxx?)", where xxx is tentatively flagged as the vernacular name, populated from this |en=. Presumably, the same method could then be used to display the corresponding vernacular name (assuming it has been input) in the language to which your language selector is set. Thank you, Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 15:49, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion
Looking at the linter errors for misnested tags, about 10% of the errors are instances where sub-tracks of tracks in a {{track listing}} template are used. Because the way that the track listing template works, editors were forced to use <small/> tags and bulleted lists to achieve the desired effect (e.g. Organasm, One (Tesseract album), PhantasmaChronica, Twilight in Olympups, many more at the linter). Is there anything that can be done about this, or should the template be editing to accompany these cases?
It also appears as though there is no manual of style entry talking about what to do about these "sub-tracks", nor do I know if they have an official name. You can see on websites like discogs that these are real things, and not just something that editors are making up (e.g. Organasm, etc.). As shown by discogs, though, not all instances where editors are using this technique do outside websites support that this is how the track listing should appear (e.g. One at discogs doesn't match One (Tesseract album)) Thanks, ― Levi_OPTalk19:39, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
If it is valuable to have these subtracks (I doubt it, but I'm not going to judge today), either a) the template should account for them directly with reasonable parameters, or b) you can use {{smalldiv}} instead. Izno (talk) 20:25, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
@Redrose64: The issue, as Nardog mentioned, is that the very nature of the template only allows text to be in quotations. This causes a problem because no matter what you do, the last closing quote will not be <small>, which is just really annoying. Using something like ordered list is probably a better short term solution, because it fixes all the linter errors, but I'm thinking the template should probably be changed to allow for text outside the quotations. ― Levi_OPTalk14:53, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
The issue, as originally raised, is a linter problem. Specifically, that you cannot enclose a list in <small>...</small> tags, because lists are block content whereas small may only enclose inline content. My edit fixes that. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:52, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Your fix to the linter error causes a visual error which is arguably worse. I'm saying that the template should probably be edited to allow for text after the title that isn't in the quotation of the song's name. I guess I'll go over to the template's talk page and suggest a change. ― Levi_OPTalk23:11, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
I was thinking of examples like Organasm where it isn't on a new line, so doesn't look as bad, or Twilight in Olympus where they don't include the track length to hide the issue. Regardless, I see what you mean now. ― Levi_OPTalk20:10, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Is there a variable that can evaluate the full and true URL for the page as it renders it's output? I'm trying to use a conditional parser to evaluate whether the page is rendering a mobile view or not. For example:
{{#ifeq:{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}} | //en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical) | output if equal | output if unequal }}
correctly evaluates the strings, in desktop view, but incorrectly returns the same information in mobile view. The parser and string 1 are in use below (in case anyone wants to change their browser's view, to see the effect:
When I was using my phone earlier today I followed the banner inviting me to close the gender gap and clicked on the URL for one of our WiR projects (I think Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Meetup/223), just out of curiosity to see how it worked ... but the page displayed omitted the whole "Welcome" section, and just listed the other ongoing WiR projects (sport etc) and then moved on to the redlinks lists. Not very welcoming for our potential newbie editors, many of whom are likely to use mobile. I'm using Chrome on a Samsung Galaxy A12 phone, though I think I'm sometimes using the Wikipedia app - I seem to swap unpredictably between several formats, and editing talk pages is a nightmare.
Is there some way we can fix the layout of the pages so that all new potential WiR editors get a better experience, ie can see the "Welcome" information? (I followed the same link when I started editing this session, on a laptop, and the page displayed OK. I can't reproduce either now, as the banner seems only to offer once per user/device per ... day?) (Pinging @Ipigott: for info.)PamD16:58, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
I do not see it as omitted? On the mobile site I see the content you reference, but below the right sidebars and detached from the "Welcome". This is compounded by the fact you are using {{infobox}} to create the sidebars, which MobileFrontend treats somewhat specially and will move below the first paragraph in a page in a normal page. In this case, I would recommend you use something like {{flex columns}} to make a two columns view. Izno (talk) 18:42, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Automated way to get data on number of different languages for WP articles
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hi folks, hopefully someone can help - or point me towards someone who can. I'm looking to find out how many non-English languages a given English Wikipedia article is associated with. Looking to do this for a whole WikiProject (specifically WP:COMPBIO) of articles, so manually isn't an option. So for example, Christoph Bock has no entries in the 'languages' section of the left hand sidebar, but Bioinformatics has many. Is there way, potentially via a bot, of determining this data for the ~1,500 articles in WP:COMPBIO? Many thanks! Amkilpatrick (talk) 17:30, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
@The wub Thanks so much, this data is fascinating. I'm new to querying via SQL in this way but will probably play around with that query a bit as a template. One obvious follow-up question would be a count for each represented language, to say eg "x% of these articles have a Spanish equivalent" - would that be a simple change to the query you posted? Thanks, Amkilpatrick (talk) 09:04, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@Amkilpatrick Glad the data is useful, it was certainly an interesting question and has encouraged me to play around with it a bit more. Regarding a count by language, I think this should be correct: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/62834 The empty language row is the articles which only exist in English (or maybe exist in other languages, but aren't linked). the wub"?!"00:24, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago51 comments5 people in discussion
If someone creates a link to a file that doesn't exist, it shows up at Special:WantedFiles, no? Is there any fast way to cleanup articles that have links to files in them that don't exist? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:20, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
@Snævar, thank you. I was wondering what those striked through entries actually were. Is there any automatic tool I can use for quickly removing those links from the articles though? Any AWB command or a bot related to that job? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:03, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
We already have ImageRemovalBot which automatically removes deleted/non-existent file links from pages in the article namespace. Not sure we should be doing this for pages in other namespaces. -FASTILY03:30, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
@Fastily, I come from SqWiki. Any chance IRB can be borrowed to work outside EnWiki? Any chance we may also be able to choose what namespaces it works on and how? - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:07, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
@Fastily, thank you! Would it be better if I asked the bot's operator beforehand? Maybe they are interested in extending their reach to our wiki? Assuming they aren't, can you or anyone else tell me shortly what would need to be changed for the adaption to happen? I operate a bot myself in ToolForge but it is a Pywikibot and so far I've only worked with that framework + a Python script once. So I believe I know the basics but I've never had a chance to use Perl before and some guidance would be needed. Unfortunately I'm the only one dealing with bots in my community so I have no one else to ask there. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:50, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Looks like the bot's operator isn't very active. Personally I have no experience with perl, so I'm afraid I'm not much help in that respect. -FASTILY03:34, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
@Fastily, okay then. I tried importing it but it had too much dependencies and I was reluctant to go on further given that technical support for them had years that had stopped even on here. The further technical adaption and maintenance cost would be too high for my homewiki. If someone else might offer an easier way or maybe help with with this I'd appreciate it. Meanwhile thank you for your help! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:54, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, I'm sorry but I'm confused. I've never dealt with any of these categories before. A user reported me some time ago that an article was missing its file even though it had a link for it. I went in to remove it manually and then in the following days I started to notice that there are different articles with the same problem and that made me think of finding a way to automatically clean them up. Can you explain a bit more in details what am I supposed to do?
Also, I must warn you to check your last comment or your sign because it has linter problems somewhere. It won't let me use the reply tool to answer to it. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:40, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, you're right because on this comment it works now. I understand. If that category is only for broken file links though, ALL the names you mentioned are badly translated. I should retranslate it and then delete the old categories.
I wanted to delete the old categories but then I noticed that they had different numbers of articles in them. How is that possible? Shouldn't 2 be empty and 1 have all the articles? - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:56, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, following your instructions, I cleaned up all the old categories, deleted them and then changed the remaining one in TranslateWiki and after the change takes place, I'll delete that as well. Then, assuming I have finally all the needed articles grouped in only 1 category, do you know what would I need to do with AWB to actually remove the broken file links? - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:08, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: Mostly no. However, I do know a trick that may helps, though it don't necessarily work all the time:
This regexp can catch [[File:Foobar.png|thumb|[[Lorem ipsum]] dolor [[sit]] amet.]] with $2 = file name and $1 = all of those. By subst'ing #if, you can return nothing if the file you caught doesn't exist. Otherwise, you will not replace anything.
Since there are also other cases, this trick is insufficient.
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, thank you for providing the substitution regex but I've been running it for quite a while now and it doesn't catch anything. It skipped more than 1k articles and I believe this will be the case for the remaining ones until they finish. Something must not be right. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:39, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, now it's working. Can you tell me more about the cases that can't be caught by this method? The reason I ask is because I can create a bot task if that regex is all we need to look after for and no false positives can't come from it. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:16, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: So far I've thought of files in infoboxes (/(^\s*\|\s*\w+\s*=\s*([^|#<>{}[\]]+)\s*$)/gm) and in gallery tags (/(^([^|#<>{}[\]]+)\s*\|.+$)/gm). Those cases are more prone to false positives and therefore using regexes is not recommended. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh12:21, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, the task is over and the category went from +7k to +3k entries. Take a look at the remaining entries. As you mentioned, those are mostly from geo-infoboxes. Check 1-2 articles. Do you think I can use the regex you specified above for infoboxes for them? I can run it supervised if it is needed. But I'd still need some automatic help because cleaning up 3k articles by hand is a lot. - Klein Muçi (talk) 18:18, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: No. They are purely for illustration. Also, I did not noticed that there is another localized alias for File namespace (Figura). That being said, links in articles like 1 Lek were not caught. Try running again with (\[\[[ \t_]*(?:File|Image|Skeda|Figura)[ \t_]*:[ \t_]*([^|#<>{}[\]]+)((?:(?=([^[\]]+|\[\[[^\]]*\]\]))\4)*)\]\]). NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh18:28, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, did so but unfortunately it didn't help much. 90% of the remaining entries are from {{Infobox settlement}}, respectively from |image skyline=, |image seal= and |image map=. Would it be possible to create a regex to account specifically for these cases, preserving the format we already used? - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:12, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: The regex will definitely cause problems with pipes being not escaped. But here's it anyway:
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, tried the first regex about pipes. Not a single catch. Trying the other regex about images now. The list is again going on without a single catch and I doubt it will get any (already past 500 articles). - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:08, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
I also tried the regex you brought above saying it will cause problems and still not a single catch. :P There's something wrong. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:10, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Tried it again. Even on JWB. For me it skips everything. I must be doing something wrong. Most likely the regex for pipes. Can you write that down again in a more clear manner? Maybe I've misunderstood it. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:40, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Update: I was able to fix it. You say to replace /\|/g but in AWB that actually needs to be just \|. Regex101 finally helped me sort that one out. Now it's working normally and I'll see later the end results. - Klein Muçi (talk) 23:29, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Regexes are always written inside a couple of /, the rest are flags. I omitted them when writing long ones just because syntaxhighlight wouldn't work if there are slashes. Also, I forgot to say that subst: doesn't work in ref tags. Anyway, that is why regexes are insufficient for this task, though they may help when running semi-automatically with supervision. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh05:06, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh, after your advice on JWB, I believe I was able to clean up all the possible entries that can be cleaned with those regexes. From +3k, now the list stands at 1k entries. Can you take a look at it and see if you find any other pattern that can be solved with a different set of regexes? - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi,
by default, sections in the table of contents are numbered; subsections distinguished with decimals. Likely the numbering can be shut off but a reasonable search effort failed to find an explanation. In some wiki systems, bullets, squares and etc. can take the place of the numbering. Surely this is documented somewhere; but where? The Help:Section page offered no clue. Incidentally, considering that the editor doesn't type section numbers the logical default is no section numbers. Numbering should be turned on deliberately. Thx, ... PeterEasthope (talk) 14:28, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
There is an obvious benefit in numbering TOC sections. What is the benefit of not numbering them, or of using positionally ambiguous indent marks like bullets or squares? 65.88.88.126 (talk) 14:39, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
There is {{compact toc}} etc. which allows for different formatting, and mobile toc omits numbering by default, but is also hidden by default. The phabricator discussions don't seem to be moving. 65.88.88.126 (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. In Wikibooks the result is "Template:Compact toc" in red in the rendered page. If a way to shut off section numbering turns up--good. Otherwise it's tolerable. ... PeterEasthope (talk) 17:06, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Visibility of Formulae
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I have some eye issues so I prefer using desktop in high contrast theme. But in high contrast theme, the formulae on our site become invisible against background, I am inserting
An example of the bug
some screenshot from Green's theorem page. The browser I use is MS Edge Version 99.0.1150.30 (Official build) (64-bit) and high contrast theme I use is Night sky in Windows 11, Please can you fix this, as I have to turn on and off theme again and again causing inconvenience.
Wikipedia does not support any version of 'night' or 'dark' mode out of the box, and it is not coming any time soon. There is a gadget you may use while logged in and browsing if you would like similar, see your preferences. Izno (talk) 18:38, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Associated with a task which is not exactly the same but the same underlying problem. For your theme you may want to consider the suggested CSS filter approach mentioned there. Jdlrobson (talk)
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
An article (Seervi Jat) was moved whilst I was editing it. When I saved the page, I overwrote the resulting redirect, effectively doing a copy-paste move back to the original title. (The page move seems perfectly reasonable and I was not attempting to reverse it.) I've just reproduced that behaviour in a sandbox. I would have expected an edit conflict or other error. Is that supposed to happen? Certes (talk) 18:55, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Inconsistent tab names in monobook
Latest comment: 2 years ago14 comments8 people in discussion
WP:ITSTHURSDAY. Depending on whether the page is already protected or not, we see either a "protect" or an "unprotect" tab. Someone has been screwing around with trying to "fix" tab titles (T301203), and apparently they changed the text of the "protect" tab from "protect" to the overly verbose "change protection for this page". Which is also part of the error message if you try to access the protection interface without having the necessary permission, sigh.The message for the "unprotect" tab, "Change protection", has not been changed yet. No idea if they plan to or not. Anomie⚔20:32, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I don't know if this is even remotely connected, but in Vector (legacy) the 'Read' tab has just (in the last hour or so) changed to 'View'. Who do we need to ask to reverse that unwanted change? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:35, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
In the past (using MonoBook) the tabs were "protect page" for a page that had no current protection, and "change protection" for all others. This was a quick way of spotting whether a page was protected or not. The overly-verbose "change protection settings for this page" makes me assume that there is a current prot, and it pushes the "watch" tab further over. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:14, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Can this be changed back? I admittedly have too many things running on my monobook, but "article talk edit this page history delete this page move this page change protection watch dyk csd prod xfd pp tag unlink rater" is getting a bit long with the three superfluous "this page" things. (And no, I don't want to use Vector because I want "delete" to be directly accessible without opening a menu; also, monobook is really nice on my phone). What other page should I want to delete or move if not "this page"? —Kusma (talk) 22:05, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
I think "be patient" is probably the right response. I don't think this will fix itself but I don't know how valuable it is running all over the place to fix things while the change is in flux. I've left a couple comments on the task to ensure my understanding of the final state is correct and then maybe once that's answered we can work on fixing things. Izno (talk) 22:15, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
The unprotect tab is controlled by a local message [[MediaWiki:Monobook-action-unprotect]] in case you want to change it from the default. Jon (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
OK latest comment shows we can override to reset these back. Anyone actually want the very verbose labels in monobook? — xaosfluxTalk22:24, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Follow up, looks like WMF staffer is putting overrides in here on enwiki (anyone here from other projects - you may want to see that task still). — xaosfluxTalk22:52, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Feel free to tweak any messages with better preferences. The local overrides I've added match what's on the next train. I'll delete them next week so they don't become technical debt.
BTW on that subject, do we have a bot that removes local wiki overrides where the text matches the default? That would be pretty useful right now, as what's making this harder than it should be is that lots of wikis are overriding the default message with the exact same text. Jon (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
Probably would have helped if you hadn't tried to use messages named like "action-foo" when those have been in use for error messages since October 2008. Now for some reason you're pretending it's the opposite in T303012. Anomie⚔23:57, 3 March 2022 (UTC)
@Jon (WMF), I'm pretty sure that no such bot exists, but it would be handy to have it everywhere, not just here. (Also, it should be patient. You want to delete pointless local overrides for messages that haven't changed for months or years, not messages that were updated at TranslateWiki.net this week and might be changed back next week.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 7 March 2022 (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
There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers. [23]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
Latest comment: 2 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, Tonight I posted a section to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tennis and it's not showing at the Index. When I click on entry #6 Are "Men's Singles" and "Women's Doubles", etc., proper names? (the last one visible) and then Edit that section, it shows many other sections also missing from Index. Since I have no idea how to correct I'm asking for help here. Thanks. JoeNMLC (talk) 01:47, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago11 comments4 people in discussion
I just personally came across the "Make headers of tables display as long as the table is in view, i.e. "sticky"" gadget in preferences, and was surprised to see it since this was something I've thought about in the back of my mind for a while. I've had it implemented for a few days and there was something I've noticed it should isn't "working" per se and should allow, if possible. The issue can be currently seen at an article like 2021–22 NFL playoffs with the section 2021–22_NFL_playoffs#Schedule. Right now, the table column headers, plus the first rowspanned subheader "Wild Card playoffs", is being "stuck" throughout the scrolling of the whole article. In an instance like this, where there are multiple subheadings, when your scroll reaches "Divisional playoffs", that should "unstick" "Wild Card playoffs", and then 'Divisional playoffs" should take its "sticky" spot until the next one or the end of the table. I have no knowledge of how this coding works, but I believe in theory if the initial "stick" is looking for what is coded by "!" or "!!" until the first "|-", and somehow is taking the "!" after the first "|-", it would need to look for any subsequent "!" coding to unstick the previous subheader, and then stick the new one. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:41, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
Don't make tables that have headers rows in the middle, these are what are called layout tables and are bad for accessibility. See MOS:DTAB and several linked items therein. Izno (talk) 18:45, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
COLHEAD was something I couldn't find, thanks. Though they should be avoided, the "sticky" headers should still function with subheaders as I described above, even if the practice should be avoided for ACCESS reasons. It's no guarantee that will be the case across the site. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:37, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
Sticky headers assume that the table is a simple table and there's no fundamental way around it. Sorry, but that's the way it's going to be. Izno (talk) 18:29, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
@Favre1fan93: In HTML, tables do not have a concept like "subheaders". The table may have a caption, but apart from that, everything visible is either in a header cell or in a data cell. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:13, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
@Izno: If you look at the section of the article I linked 2021–22_NFL_playoffs#Schedule, are you not seeing the table "sticky" both the column headers and the first rowspanned header "Wild Card playoffs"? That's still an issue either way you look at it. Either the "sticky" function needs to be adjusted per my request, or it needs to be adjusted to not "stick" any headers beyond the top most. @Redrose64: I was using "subheading" as a way to refer to rowspanned data cells that act as subsequent group headings. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:29, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
The point I am making is that the gadget will not be changed. You can either fix the table to match the expectations of the gadget (and WP:ACCESS) or you can stop using the gadget. Izno (talk) 19:40, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
But if a known issue has come about, shouldn't that be addressed? Irregardless of a table being coded to conform with WP:ACCESS or not (and I'm not saying that should not be followed or addressed), it's quite clearly currently an error in that the "sticky" is grabbing more headers and HTML code than it should. As there are no furthering links on the preference page to go to a help or discussion page regarding the gadget, I don't think that the gadget was made to "sticky" beyond a single header row. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 23:41, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
It's not going to be addressed because it's a fundamental limitation to how CSS works in combination with how MediaWiki handles tables. We can go the way of adding JavaScript but that defeats the purpose of using the CSS of interest.
As I said, either fix the table or stop using the gadget. Or just live with it, I guess. I have, for several years, sometimes fixing it where I see it and sometimes not. Izno (talk) 02:44, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
SVG not well rendered
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Fixed. The circles were cloning a previously cloned use, instead of cloning the original circle shape... I guess that is a limitation of our renderer, but its a new one to me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:51, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Is there a better way to stop this?
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Is there any way to prevent an anonymous user from replacing the phrase "prime minister" with "crime minister"? Someone on my range is doing this, and there should be a better way to stop this person without blocking a major ISP. 2.55.12.0 (talk) 05:19, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Please post an example edit. Always post an example when possible. An edit filter can do it but there may be better ways. Does it affect one or many pages? One or many IP addresses? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:26, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
It's a difficult case for an edit filter. The first change in the diff adds "Crime" but doesn't remove "Prime", concealing it instead in a piped link. Crime Minister is a political movement which we correctly report in Protests against Benjamin Netanyahu. The term is also used as a (perhaps unfortunate) synonym or translation of "minister of justice", etc. Certes (talk) 13:36, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Mobile View / Mobile Editors
Latest comment: 2 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Back at this, some time ago I made a complaint about the sudden change to how mobile editors view contributions and a script was given which mirrored the normal simplistic view which mobile device editors are acquainted with but the script isn't quite like the original normal simplistic view. For example in the past if I wanted to check a users contribs all I had to do was click on their page, go to their contributions, and an array of all their edits were presented and I simply selected the very diff I was interested in, now, the script is “very selective” in the sense in some cases it opens the diff and sometimes it just wouldn’t open, this is frustrating, this update or upgrade is quite tiresome. I however use my desktop for AWB, ACC & VTRS asides that I predominantly edit via a mobile for my new page reviewing, anti-spam and my Teahouse duties, it would certainly be bizarre and laughable that; after all I have gone through a change in interface would be what makes me exit this collaborative project permanently, I have discussed with Izno in the past & whilst I understand that the changes done in the interface are done in good faith, it is extremely vexing for mobile editors who are simply not interested. We aren’t interested really, please can the update be entirely completely removed from my account? I don’t want or appreciate it, Seriously, it is extremely vexing for average mobile editors, some of us simply do not just like the desktop view neither do we like editing via a desktop except need be. Please & Please I do not enjoy this change, I do not want this, I’m irate this changes are “forced down our throat” for a serial anti UPE editor like myself, this has done nothing but impede my progress in tackling spam/UPE. I’m sorry if this is out of character for me and sounds rather passive aggressive, but I am simply at my wits end, depressed by this and completely exhausted mentally, I don’t know how to communicate to them that is change be removed from my account and the simplistic view be restored for me. I am deeply depressed about this. Celestina007 (talk) 18:23, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
The developers have already stated they do not plan to revert the changes made (though there is some push on a different front). What I am curious about is the script is “very selective” in the sense in some cases it opens the diff and sometimes it just wouldn’t open. What script? Izno (talk) 19:43, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Izno, I cant begin to diff search now but when I made the complaint some weeks back or a (month ago?) I was presented with a script that enables me view things in the simplistic view, that script is the only reason I still edit, weren’t for it I had made up my mind to quit editing altogether, whilst I’m appreciative of this it isn’t quite like the real thing. “The developers have already stated they do not plan to revert the changes made” The developers need to be mindful of the (drastic) changes they make, what may be considered “minor” might just be a deal breaker for mobile editors. Celestina007 (talk) 21:07, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Ok, the discussion you're referencing is this one and you're having issues with User:Jdlrobson/mobilecontribs.js causing diff links displayed on the contributions page not to open when clicked/selected. Is that correct? I don't see anything at a glance in that script that Jdlrobson made that would cause that behavior. Izno (talk) 05:39, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
If the diff link is not working it sounds like a bug that I'd happily help fix. Which diff on who's contribution page are you seeing this problem on? I can't replicate this myself.
I am sorry this is frustrating. For what it's worth this code was removed as it was causing site security issues which was causing anxiety to those who were tasked with maintaining it. I hope we can find a middle ground where everyone's anxiety is reduced. :-) Jdlrobson (talk) 18:16, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Tabs floating
Latest comment: 2 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion
On my mobile device (using New Vector), the collapsible sidebar doesn't appear as a sidebar, but above the rest of the page. I don't mind this (I actually prefer it), but recently, the tab names have moved to above the collapsible sidebar, so there's are really long gap between the tabs and the rest of the page. This is probably an ITSTHURSDAY issue. ― Qwerfjkltalk14:46, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Not quite. When collapsed, pages look like normal. I expect the uncollapsed sidebar to display above the rest of the page (It means the page isn't squashed), with the tabs just above the page. However, the tabs have moved to above the uncollapsed sidebar, instead of below. ― Qwerfjkltalk17:06, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping. Work on Vector 2022 is currently scoped to tablet and desktop devices. While we're testing on mobile occasionally, I can't actually recommend using Vector 2022 (or the legacy one) on a mobile device right now.
I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot and knowing more about your browser though to at least get a bug created if we need one. Jon (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
@Jon (WMF): I discovered than I can reproduce the issue on desktop, by halving the window width. Here are some screenshots of the problem: Top of the sidebar and the page - note the tabs at the topBottom of the sidebar ― Qwerfjkltalk12:43, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
@Jdlrobson: When the tabs are at the top of the page, I have to scroll a lot to get to them from the content. I use the sidebar frequently, and collapsing and uncollapsing it all the time is just as much of a nuisance. If this change has to be done, then is there any CSS I can use to restore the former behaviour (tabs at the bottom of the sidebar)? ― Qwerfjkltalk20:50, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
I'll look into this during the week (Mon/Tue) and get back to you. This looks like an intentional change related to phab:T300875. It should be possible to at least provide some user CSS in the short term. In the mean time please do review the prototype on phab:T302073 and feel free to comment there with any feedback you have as hopefully that will on the long term address your concerns. Jdlrobson (talk) 22:38, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
For now, you should be able to fix this by applying this CSS:
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I remember back in the old days, image deletion was handled differently than it is now. If you deleted an image, there was no way to undelete it, or something like that. So, with that in mind, what's the difference between File:P1140078.JPG and File:P1140081.JPG? When you try to undelete the first one, you get a "Page history" and a "File history", and can see the deleted image in the "File history" section. But the second one only has Page history. -- RoySmith(talk)19:01, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
The difference is the deletion date. This capability was added around June 2006. Nothing deleted before then will be stored, but I'm not sure the precise date it was fully implemented here. -- zzuuzz(talk)19:46, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Hello! The biggest protection level you can put a page is admin level. The Mediawiki namespace already has that level of protection by default yet we still get the option to protect those pages. Isn't that redundant? Does it serve any function whatsoever? Wouldn't it be better if it was removed as an option? I remember years ago when I first became an admin in my homewiki and I started working with Mediawiki pages, fearing the high abuse potential those pages had, I spent hours protecting every Mediawiki page I had ever edited, until some days later, I learned that those pages were protected by default and I spend again quite some hours un-protecting them for standardization reasons. - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:34, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
AIUI MediaWiki allows different protection levels/groups. You could, e.g., have a "human resources" user right with a matching protection level. That wouldn't be relevant here, but it's easy to imagine a corporate wiki wanting to have certain pages editable only by certain people. So, as a matter of general software design, the ability to choose a different protection level probably makes sense, even though it's not exactly relevant to those pages at this wiki. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF), oh, you're right. I'm still learning how to broaden my viewpoint on these cases. Unless we want a more elegant approach that says something like "if default protection = maximum site protection, remove the option locally", I guess we're fine like this then. But I doubt anyone would want to go through that rewrite currently. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 17:31, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Not much is gained by adding a restriction here, and it might be the first time I've seen a question from this direction in watching VPT. Izno (talk) 19:31, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Something similar has been asked before, three to five years ago, but not necessarily on this page. It was in the context of a non-admin requesting that a particular page in MedaiWiki: namespace should have its protection level reduced. My reply was along the lines of "as far as the 'protect' tab is concerned, it's not protected: there is a software setting that is independent of protection that prevents editing by non-admins". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:42, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi: Namespace and Page protections can be combined. For example, on WMF projects, the mediawiki namespace has a namespace protection, normally requiring someone to have (editinterface) permissions. This is normally held by admins and int-admins. Regular page protection can be layered on that, requiring that the person wanting to edit it have both (editinterface) and the proection permission (e.g. "protect"). A project could have a use for this; for example some projects grant 'editinterface' to bespoke access groups, but could also apply "protect" to pages they only want their administrators to be able to change. In summary, for most WMF projects: nothing special is needed, and page protection isn't needed to be added to anythign in mediawiki namespace - but there are usecases. Also there is nothing in there about "maximum site protection" - these are not hierarchical on a technical level they are just different. Like User:Whatamidoing (WMF) mentioned - the use cases can be even wider when considering non-encylopedia uses of mediawiki. — xaosfluxTalk19:48, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, the non-hierarchical part was also something else I hadn't considered. With that information added, I do agree that from a wider perspective my request doesn't make much sense. Although I do think that from a practical point of view it does feel strange/redundant and maybe something can be done for that (although I lack the knowledge to suggest what exactly), I believe this discussion can also very well end here. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:47, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
pipe character
Latest comment: 2 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hi! Since this is the English Wikipedia, please use English here so that everyone can understand you. I ran your comment through Google Translate, and apparently you're asking about inserting the "|" character. I think most people don't have an issue with that, because most people here are using a keyboard that includes that key by default. For example, take a look at File:KB United States.svg, where you can see the pipe character available above the Enter key. I don't know if there's an easy way to insert it if you're using a russian keyboard, but you can always copy it from somewhere else, especially once you're already editing an article that uses the pipe character. --rchard2scout (talk) 13:53, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
In wikieditor the pipe symbol is under Special characters and then Symbols. Some wikis use MediaWiki:Edittools and place it there, you can then pick it from an area around the edit summary.--Snævar (talk) 15:35, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, as in the sandboxes here and here, why is that (standard) template transclusion excludes content between <section> and </section>? (Where in the help is this?) It seems to be the case, but before rolling out a feature over at wikispecies (this may be used on many pages, and if transclusion began to include content between <section> and </section>, that would cause many errors), I would like to check that <section> ... </section> is a standard/approved/stable way of excluding content (which can (then) be marked up with section labels for separate transclusion eg via Module:Transcluder) from transclusion. Thank you, Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 06:10, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Unless they've changed it since I last looked, you can't edit conflict with yourself. IIRC the intention was to support something like "you edit, then you realize you made a mistake and cancel/hit back and resubmit" to overwrite your first edit instead of conflicting with it. Anomie⚔12:41, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
I don't think so. I don't recall selecting or using that feature. How do I find out? There's no tickbox for that option on Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion on Wikipedia, but the corresponding page on mw: has the "Enable the Paragraph-based Edit Conflict Interface to resolve edit conflicts" option unticked. Also, I just got an ec for this edit (with the normal warning rather than anything paragraph-based), so something is working. Certes (talk) 12:44, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
The option simply isn't offered to me on enwp, at least not on the screen where I'd expect it, but I have it unticked on sister projects. Certes (talk) 13:03, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Is this a button menu you created, or an existing core item which you want to access from a user script or something ? If you are generating them yourself, I suspect from the widget class you actually have to call getMenu() and click/focus/activate that element within the widget. You can find the code for the toolbar demos here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:51, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
TheDJ, my own new OO.ui.ButtonMenuSelectWidget(). You were half right, the solution was Bawl.cITSbuttonMenu.getMenu().toggle(true);. For the other thing, the demo source seems a bit discouraging. Long lists of stuff. I was hoping for a new OO.ui.toolbarWithEverythingForWordProcessingAndBobsYourUncle(), but I guess not. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 17:37, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Double braces bug reproduction.
Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
Hello, I found a bug that crashes my wikipedia tab, and I was wondering if someone could help me reproduce it before I post it to the bug tracker.
The bug seems to happen when two braces {{ are used in the source editor, in front of a huge chunk of text. The editor seems to consider that giant piece of text as part of a template, and must be searching it or something because sometimes it crashes, or at least slows the tab down noticeably.
One good page to test it on is on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style on the section about ships. Just put 2 braces at the start of the bold face voting and see whether the tab crashes.
Thanks for the attempt, I have posted the bug at [25] The double braces seem to highlight the full next paragraph, the block with all the votes is the longest paragraph, so the line immediately before that is where I get the crash. This doesn't crash in Chrome, just Firefox.
I suggested limiting the length of a template or stopping highlighting after a newline is encountered.--TZubiri (talk) 23:30, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
I'm having about 20 tabs on Chrome, along with some personal things, and can't reproduce this at my sandbox (2017 wikitext editor) with a paragraph of about 10000+ consecutive chars. Syntaxhighlight works in less than a second. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh23:38, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
@TZubiri: I'm also unable to reproduce. I have Firefox 97.0.2, the current version. phab:T303232 says you have Firefox 88.0. Try to restart the computer and update Firefox. Does it happen if you log out? You mention syntax highlighting at phab:T303232. There are several features at Wikipedia:Syntax highlighting. Do you refer to the highlighter marker button to the left of "Advanced" in some toolbars? Please quote the precise text you place the braces before on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:54, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
The editor seems to consider that giant piece of text as part of a template, and must be searching it or something because sometimes it crashes, or at least slows the tab down noticeably. Yes, I have observed this. It's not a bug at all. This happens because the JavaScript that highlights has to re-render the wikitext with all the new text that is now inside the template of interest. I would recommend not having syntax highlighting on if you are editing a significant size of text and go to add a template (or start with the end braces first).
You can file a performance bug or see if the re-render can be delayed when those two characters have just been written.
As for newlines, that would stop rendering for example in infobox templates, which are usually block-formatted in the wikitext. Izno (talk) 01:01, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
If it produces a crash, it's a bug. If it doesn't, it's a serious performance issue. Chrome doesn't crash, but CPU usage spikes to 40%! TZubiri (talk) 01:48, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
One workaround is a plug-in or add-on for your browser or OS that automatically inserts closing markup when you insert opening markup. I use AutoPairs for Mac OS and love it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:47, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
I've created an article for every plant species in Malta, could someone help me with some tasks using an automated tool?
Latest comment: 2 years ago25 comments4 people in discussion
Hi all
I've spent the past few weeks writing an article for every plant species in Malta, I assume this is one of the first countries to have every plant with a Wikipedia article. They are now all listed at Flora of Malta, I think I wrote about a 300 in total. I would really appreciate some help with some tasks which I hope can be done using for of the automated tools, they would take 100s of hours to do manually:
A few 100 of articles have images but these images are not included in Flora of Malta, is there a way to add them automatically? This would make the article much more usable as a species identification guide. Many of the images were taken from the Wikidata item. I don't think that images should be added for the subspecies, but I'm not entirely sure, there's only a few of these so they could be done manually at a later date. Done
As you can see there are a lot of red links for missing synonyms, could these redirects be created please?
Could all the pages be added to Category:Flora of Malta? Some of the links are redirects rather than direct links to the articles. Done
@John Cummings: I'll do all of these tomorrow (UTC). The idea for 1. would be to use some regex to add {{subst:wikidata|property|page=Page|P123}} to each missing cell, with page being the page (duh), and P123 being the property for the image (I haven't actually checked what it is). ― Qwerfjkltalk21:03, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Side note: The property is image (P18), and you will also need the "replace" function from Module:String to set widths for images: {{subst:#invoke:String|replace|{{subst:wikidata|property|page=Achillea collina|P18}}|]]|{{subst:!}}100px]]}}.
Not done hi NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh something has gone wrong and the same image has been added to all the empty fields. I've reverted the edit so the page isn't wrong. I hope that the issue can be resolved, thanks very much for trying. John Cummings (talk) 08:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
@John Cummings: Oops, re- Done (diff). Silly me copying directly the line above from JWB editor... (FTR, I replaced /\|-\s*\|\s*\n\|\s*(\[\[([^|#<>{}[\]]+)(?:\|[^\]]+?)?\]\])/gm with |-\n|{{subst:#invoke:String|replace|{{subst:wikidata|property|page=$2|P18}}|]]|{{subst:!}}100px]]}}\n|$1). NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh11:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
About the second one, I think I can go and write a simple script, but given the policies about (semi-)automated edits and categorizing redirects here I wouldn't risk trying. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh11:37, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
@Qwerfjkl: I tried counting the number of red links by using $('td > a.new') and turns out there are 1400+ of them; too many to create manually. I'm thinking of a script that automatically create pages when you click on it, just like this one I wrote for some edge cases on viwiki. 1400 sounds unreasonable, but is somewhat suitable given the rate limit of normal users (90 edits per 60 seconds). If John's hands are fast enough he will finish clicking/creating all of them in about 15 minutes and a half. Otherwise, he can ask for AWB access to benefit from JWB and its page variables feature. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh18:12, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
If it can't be done easily semi-automatically, then I could do something like: append target to link (maybe as a pipe?, maybe also rcats?), then isolate the links and wrap in ifexists. Then, that JWB idea sounds viable (or maybe just a script). ― Qwerfjkltalk20:29, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
John Cummings, I don't want to poor too much cold water here, but you haven't made a page for every plant species in Malta or anything like it – Malta has more than 1000 wild flowering plants (see the blurb of Edwin Lanfranco, Guido Bonett (2018), Wild Flowers Of The Maltese Islands), and various mosses, ferns and so on (see this paper). What you seem to have done is make a page for every species on some random person's (commercial) website, which does not at first sight appear to be a reliable source; what makes you think that it might be, if I may ask? Oh, and species names should be in italics; and once we've linked Anacamptis pyramidalis, we don't link Orchis pyramidalis or Pyramidal Orchid because they point to the same page. Perhaps some bot can fix all those, too? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 10:45, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Justlettersandnumbers this was the only source I was aware of. I'm not technical enough to check if any of the species in the sources you've linked to are not on my list, if you're able to add any extra ones I'd really appreciate it and very happy to write the missing articles. Thanks, John Cummings (talk) 18:14, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
John Cummings, I do have that Lanfranco book, but I and it are not in the same country at the moment; it anyway lists only about 300 of the flowering plants you're most likely to see. But yes, when I'm reunited with it I'll do some checking. Meanwhile, I still don't see that Mifsud's website is a WP:RS.
There's another problem with the list article: in several cases you have used the same image for more than one subspecies, which obviously can't be right – either it's of one of them and thus not of the other, or else it's of neither of them. To avoid deception, please remove any image that is not verifiably of the exact species and subspecies named. Thank you, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 18:48, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
@Qwerfjkl: Your regexes seem to be insufficient. For example, ''[[Allium sphaerocephalon]] subsp. sphaerocephalon'' should be ''[[Allium sphaerocephalon]]'' subsp. ''sphaerocephalon'' I believe. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh20:24, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago32 comments11 people in discussion
Hello! Just recently, some of the text and text in menus has become very large. I would assume it's WP:THURSDAY related and if so how do I fix it? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:48, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Oh ya, in case it's important I'm using the Legacy Vector skin (because the new Vector skin still has some issues that I would like to see fixed before I switch) ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:49, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
We have a lot text and menus, will need some very specific examples to look in to this. Include what skin and interface you are using as well please. — xaosfluxTalk19:49, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
I can confirm this is happening (I use the default skin, right now I'm on an iPhone in desktop view). At random times, I see either one of two things; the first is the Twinkle menu is in way huge format while everything else is good, and the second is that all 5 tabs are misaligned, the "Personal tools" and "namespaces" are plain text right over the namespace tab, "Views" is plain text directly under my username, and "More" is plain text underneath my preferences tab. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
I've noticed that "Personal tools" and "namespaces" can appear as plain text as well, mainly in my watchlist. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:57, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Yes I have the same issue loading it in safemode. One of the options in the "page" menu is "page logs" ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654519:59, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
It's literally everywhere, every page, one thing or another is screwed up at the top tabs, Namespace Views on some TW and Page on others, etc. DB1729 (talk) 20:00, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Beginning just moments ago, I'm either seeing a large bold "TW" or seeing "Namespaces", "Personal tools" and "Views" above the top menu items. Default Vector skin on Chrome. --Paul_012 (talk) 19:55, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Update (5 minutes later): it just seems to be the big TW now; not seeing the labels anymore. Also the same thing on Firefox and Edge. --Paul_012 (talk) 20:03, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Scratch that last part, the Twinkle dropdown looks ok. It's just the big TW displaying is the only wrong right now that I can tell. DB1729 (talk) 20:11, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
I just noticed this, the Page menu and the TW menu at the top of my screen as well as the menu headers on the side, and then the word namespaces is at the top of some pages. Happy Editing--IAmChaos19:56, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
I'm having the exact same results as Paul_012. Either "TW" is huge for Twinkle, or weird stuff like "Namespaces" appears at the top. Do they actually test these changes before the roll them out ... Hog FarmTalk19:57, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Changes are not tested with local custom scripts, such as Twinkle. I'm still having a hard time finding these errors in order to open the right tickets, when using an account without any scripts or gadgets loaded. — xaosfluxTalk20:02, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Using my alt (This account) I'm not seeing any of the issues, however I don't think it's a Twinkle specific issue since it's affecting more than just the Twinkle menu. Blaze Fire Wolf (talk) 20:09, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
FixedMoreMenu and Twinkle should be fixed now. There unfortunately wasn't a way to deploy a fix preemptively without breaking the gadgets for those still on MW 1.38-wmf.24 — MusikAnimaltalk20:07, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for deploying the fix. This was caused by phab:T290280, which wasn't announced. h3.vector-menu-heading is backwards compatible. Using <label> like core does would not have been, which is why I didn't do that. I fixed Twinkle on simple yesterday and it was fine. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:11, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 2 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I'm using two computers.But this looks this way across Commons, Wikisource, English Wikipedia, everything.
On my old computer with Windows 10, the edit window font looks pretty close to what I see when I'm not in the edit window. On Windows11, what I'm on right now, the edit window looks very faint, and the font is small and yucky and resembles one of those old manual typewriter outputs. How can I correct what I see on my Windows11 computer, without messing up the other computer. And FYI, the font in Chrome always looks this yucky in the edit window,and I've never figured out how to fix that one. I don't think it looked like this yesterday. — Maile (talk) 16:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
I'm back at my old computer and Windows 10. So, can anyone advise me on setting the new computer edit window font for Windows 11? Thanks. — Maile (talk) 17:36, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
@MarMi wiki and Xaosflux: This issue has now resolved, by following your advice. On both Chrome and Firefox. Fifteen years on Wikipedia and the other wikis, and I never realized there were separate settings to be adjusted on each one. Windows 11 probably triggered it, but it was resolvable. Thanks to both of you. — Maile (talk) 21:05, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Remove category from its pages
Latest comment: 2 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion
Any user script to remove a category from its entries? That is, to go to a certain category and empty it (semi-)automatically from there. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:30, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
@Pppery, assuming I'm not wrong, cat-a-lot serves to change categories from individual pages. I want to go to be able to go to the page Category X which has 100 entries and from there press a button which removes [[Category:X]] from those 100 entries. - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:40, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
You seem to have misunderstood what cat-a-lot does then, as I'm pretty sure it is what you are asking for (whereas HotCat is the tool you are describing above). * Pppery *it has begun...03:04, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
Speaking of which, I find it rather strange that there isn't more restrictions or at least warnings on its use here on Enwiki, especially for the main namespace, where it has the potential to cause mass disruption or be used to bypass the usual checks of the standard CFD/CFDS process. --Paul_012 (talk) 07:43, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
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wikimedia.org or post over at meta:Talk:The_Wikipedia_Library. — xaosflux Talk 22:32, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).
or 
, a menu shows up but tapping inside the menu does nothing, while you can use the menu that shows up when tapping 
just fine. Is that correct? Nardog (talk) 16:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:43, 12 February 2022 (UTC) 
The html() method worked Anpang01 (talk) 02:21, 14 February 2022 (UTC)
Resolved
In the AbuseFilter extension, the 
Works for me what view (Desktop, App, Mobile Web), skin, and browser are you using? — xaosflux Talk 20:22, 23 February 2022 (UTC)
.jpg)
, to the left of "Advanced" in some toolbars. It has been deployed at de:, for example de:Wikipedia:Sandbox. When the cursor is at a bracket, the matching bracket is highlighted. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:21, 28 February 2022 (UTC)
Comment: For better experience when reproducing, try viewing WP:REGEX. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 17:07, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
Not done hi NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh something has gone wrong and the same image has been added to all the empty fields. I've reverted the edit so the page isn't wrong. I hope that the issue can be resolved, thanks very much for trying. John Cummings (talk) 08:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
Fixed MoreMenu and Twinkle should be fixed now. There unfortunately wasn't a way to deploy a fix preemptively without breaking the gadgets for those still on MW 1.38-wmf.24 — MusikAnimal talk 20:07, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
Fixed