Help talk:Wikitext

Strikethrough section

@Danbloch: Did that escape your attention? marks up a span of text with the <s>...</s> tag The template is merely a convenience. Paradoctor (talk) 02:45, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, yes, but that doesn't really change anything. The Strikethrough section was about the {{strikethrough}} template, with the mention of <s> being just an easy to overlook implementation detail. And the problem with having a section about {{strikethrough}} is that templates aren't part of wikitext so {{strikethrough}} doesn't deserve a section in this article.

Having said that, I no longer care that much. If no one else chimes in, feel free to put it back. Though I reserve the right to do a more comprehensive rewrite some other time. Dan Bloch (talk) 03:29, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Noted. Paradoctor (talk) 04:56, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

@Danbloch: If no one else chimes in, feel free to put it back. No one chimed. Paradoctor (talk) 04:57, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Special characters

This section shows HTML character entities but it does not show templates, e.g., {{=}} (=), {{!}} (|), {{all}} ($\forall$), {{and}}($\wedge$), {{euro}} (€), {{exist}} ($\exists$), {{not}} ($\neg$), {{pi}} (π), {{times}} ( × ). -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:33, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

&nbsp; two pass vs. one pass

The article should mention why using &amp;nbsp; is more reliable than just &nbsp; Jidanni (talk) 08:18, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Preview broken

I added this H:WT and when I hover over it, it says "There is an issue displaying this preview." I'd fix it, but I forget where the preview is. Is it in the "short description"? --David Tornheim (talk) 01:10, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Help:Wikitext, it is not a help forum.

Anyway, the short description is nothing to do with page previews. The preview is pulled from the text of the lead section of a page by JavaScript. I may be wrong, but I think that it only works for articles. Your shortcut is in article space, so it's attempting to start the page previews script; but the redirect target is in Help: space, not an article. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:14, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't think this was a help forum. LOL. That it gives an error with the preview seems to me to be a bug, not a mistake on my part for using the shortcut. Since the preview error is associated with this page, I reported it here. Can you suggest a better place to report the error? WP:Village_pump_(technical), perhaps? Incidentally,WP:Village_pump_(technical) does not give an error when I hover over it. --David Tornheim (talk) 09:15, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

WP:Village_pump_(technical) isn't an article, so Page Previews is not triggered, so there won't be any error. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:26, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Help:Wikitext is not an article either. And this isn't article space, right? Yet the preview is broken for it, but not for WP:Village_pump_(technical).

Weird, Help:Wikitext doesn't break. Only the shortcut H:WT.

And the short cut WP:RS doesn't give an error either. So it appears to be a problem with the shortcut.

H:YFA and H:FIRST also break. So it appears to be a problem with all shortcuts starting with "[[H:" --David Tornheim (talk) 09:41, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

The thing is that H:WT, although not an article, is in article space: you can tell because its Page information shows "Namespace ID 0" - the list of namespace numbers is here. The same goes for any other shortcut beginning "H:". It's not a problem for WP:RS because it's in Wikipedia space: you can tell because its Page information shows "Namespace ID 4", and also "Namespace Wikipedia". The same goes for any other shortcut beginning "WP:". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:52, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Redrose64 said "The preview is pulled from the text of the lead section of a page by JavaScript". That only applies to "Navigation popups" which can be enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. "There was an issue displaying this preview" comes from the default preview feature mw:Page Previews which works differently. It's configured to only work with mainspace links. "H" is not a namespace alias so H:WT is a mainspace page. "There was an issue displaying this preview" is displayed on all redirects from mainspace to other namespaces, e.g. MOS:DATE. The message is made by MediaWiki:Popups-preview-no-preview. We could change it to be more informative but I suspect it's a general message used in other situations than cross-namespace redirects. Page Previews knows in advance that the wikilink Help:Wikitext is not in mainspace so it doesn't try to display anything for a direct link like that. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:40, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

I have tested (test deleted) at testwiki:MediaWiki:Popups-preview-no-preview whether wikitext is parsed in the message. It's not so we cannot do anything to give different text depending on circumstances. That would have to be requested at phab:. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)