Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 204

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216

Separate Tab for Automated Messages on Personal Talk Page

Would it be possible to set up a separate tab for automated messages on a personal talk page? If so, how would you go about doing that?

To explain, I periodically receive notifications from various projects, such as newsletters and election announcements. Over time they start to build up and crowd out the actual discussions from other editors. (For newsletters, I even go back and delete them when a new one is delivered, but this is inconvenient.) However, I would like to continue receiving them, as they are still useful updates about what is going on. Therefore, directing them to a separate tab seemed like a good solution. To be clear, when I refer to a separate tab, I am envisioning something like the WikiProject infobox as seen on museums Wikiproject. –Noha307 (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Wherever you subscribed to the automated messages, you can change to point to an arbitrary page in most cases. I would of course recommend pointing it to a user or user talk subpage of your own. For example, the Signpost's signup mechanism is at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Subscribe, where you could remove your personal talk page and then add User talk:Noha307/Subscriptions instead, c.f. User talk:AfroThundr3007730/Newsletters already present in that list. Then you would just catch notices to that page with the usual Special:Watchlist. Izno (talk) 05:13, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
You might also find User:Evad37/OneClickArchiver useful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:28, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-07

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

  • On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [1]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
  • The Reply tool and other parts of DiscussionTools will be deployed for all editors using the mobile site. You can read more about this decision. [2]

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [3][4][5]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:46, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

signatures.toolforge.org down

Resolved

https://signatures.toolforge.org/check/en.wikipedia.org/Jonesey95 currently returns an error, "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable". It usually returns an editor's custom signature in wikitext form. Should this be reported on phabricator, or in some other way? Or has the tool moved, leaving no forwarding address? – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:46, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 You can try github or User talk:AntiCompositeNumber (in this case it's prob not software, but operations - so the talk page first). — xaosflux Talk 01:19, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
AntiCompositeNumber fixed it super-fast after I dropped a note on their talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:08, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

FAs by prose size

Hi, WP:Featured articles/By length (and the query linked from it) lists FAs by wikitext size. I'd like a list ordered by word count, or at least readable prose size. Does anyone know how to generate one? Thanks, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 17:26, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

It's probably impossible without getting a bot to retrieve every relevant article and count their words. Certes (talk) 17:33, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Page size should correlate with word count pretty well. For every few sentences, you will have a few refs (Which add a lot of the size), so the order should be mostly correct, as long as you account for any article being too high/low on the list by 10 places or so (Just my guess I have no evidence of this). Terasail[✉️] 17:47, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Wikitext is a very different measurement to prose size. Articles that use lots of templates or have lots of references will have much more wikitext than articles that use fewer templates or cite a small number of references (eg books) more times. Hence Maya stelae (36 kB, 5965 words) is #3 on that list but Douglas MacArthur, nearly four times the length (113 kB, 18667 words), is way down at #32. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:25, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
It's quite possible, as DrPda used to produce a report from his bot/script. See the talk page at WP:FAS for ten-year-old data he regularly updated whenever I asked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:28, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
This is reasonably in the realm of bot-possible, or by hand using the wordcount script. Izno (talk) 20:58, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm trying to write a script that does it. Have never done this before, so there is a risk I'll give up before I finish. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:07, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Not sure if you're trying to do it from the rendered prose or the source wikitext? The first note at the bottom of User talk:Dr pda/generatestats.js describes a parameter for the script that will generate a list based on prose size. It loads each article so that the rendered prose can be parsed. isaacl (talk) 17:24, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm using xtools' prosesize, which I understand is slightly less accurate that the prosesize script. I don't speak javascript though. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:29, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
I see—so by "script" you are referring to something run from the command line, versus within a browser? In terms of being able to break down the task into chunks more easily if desired, I think that's a good approach. isaacl (talk) 17:39, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm running a jupyter notebook on wikitech:PAWS that talks to the xtools API and uses pywikibot. Problem is that I seem to have trouble connecting to PAWS on and off.. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:35, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
@Femke: just a heads up that I also started working on this following a request at WT:DBR. I assume the issues you're having with PAWS were caused by the WMCS outage earlier today (T329581). Legoktm (talk) 04:54, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Database reports/Featured articles by size now exists. I gave a more detailed explanation on the DBR talk page. Legoktm (talk) 06:44, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Feature request + 2 keyboard shortcuts

I am requesting additional options for the "Find and replace" icon in the wiki edit source toolbar.

Proposal picture

.

  • Keyboard shortcuts:
  1. When you click Alt + Shift+ ↑ it would open the "Find and replace" option menu and position the cursor in the "Search for:" query.
  2. When you click Alt + Shift+ ↓ it would close the "Find and replace" menu.
  3. Add a find results toolbar under the "Search and replace" menu which would add a search result, highlight said result and indicate X/Y result it is.
  • Increased functionality of finding results:

I hope this isn't too much to ask. If the 3rd option is too demanding, then at least the first 2 options should be able to get implemented fairly easily for quicker and easier editing, especially using regex, which would benefit the entire Wikipedia editing community. Qwerty284651 (talk) 23:18, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Note that the WE2017 and VE editor already have keyboard shortcuts for find and its associated functions. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:29, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Can WE2017 be used for regex replacement as well? Qwerty284651 (talk) 11:37, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
To some extent. See phab:T306930 for what's not. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Also T151671. Nardog (talk) 14:50, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Until this gets resolved I am sticking with WE2010. Oldie but functional. Qwerty284651 (talk) 14:58, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:Annotated image

When {{Annotated image}} is used to crop an image, the image caption does not display correctly on mobile: it is cropped instead of wrapping. I can't work out if the issue is in the template code, some wikipedia CSS, or something in wikimedia, so I don't know where to report it. See Template talk:Annotated image#Unreadable caption on mobile for discussion so far. jnestorius(talk) 16:32, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Copy-paste into reply box sometimes moves cursor to the beginning???

  • MacOS Monterey 12.6.1 (21G217)
  • Chrome Version 110.0.5481.77 (Official Build) (x86_64)
  • Firefox 109.0.1 (64-bit)
  • Safari Version 16.3 (17614.4.6.11.4, 17614)

Within the past few days, I've started seeing an odd problem with pasting text into a discussion tools reply box. Sometimes, when I paste some text, it leaves the cursor at the *beginning* of the piece of text I just pasted. I'm seeing this in both Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox. It happens both when I'm logged in, and while logged out in an incognito window.

It also depends on what I'm pasting. If I grab the "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" banner at the top of this page, it happens. It also happens when I grab "The default interactive shell is now zsh" from the login banner on a newly opened terminal window. It does NOT happen if I grab the URL out of the browsers's URL bar (i.e. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)")

I tried grabbing some text from the middle of a line; that doesn't make any difference, so it's not that I'm grabbing a trailing newline.

Anybody else seeing this? -- RoySmith (talk) 14:28, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

I assume this is related to T329439 and will be fixed in next deployment. Nardog (talk) 17:16, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Yup, that describes what I'm seeing (including "Uncaught TypeError: this.getTarget is not a function" in the console. Thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:44, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Should be fixed now. Sorry about that. Matma Rex talk 15:02, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Yup, looks good now, thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:23, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Usage of templates for Project-independent quality assessments

Now that the proposal at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Project-independent_quality_assessments has been approved, I would like to formally note the new resources and templates below. I suggest that we use this section as an active discussion, simply to consider ways to promote usage of these new templates. thanks.

Please note, my reason for adding this as a new section is simply because the relevant proposal has been closed, due to its formal approval. So perhaps it might be helpful to open new discussion, on ways to proceed with promoting these new templates for active use. Thanks.

QUOTE FROM APPROVED PROPOSAL:

See Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Project-independent quality assessments for discussion on this concept.

Quality assessments define how close we are to a distribution-quality article in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, wikilinks etc. Most projects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some large projects have specialized assessment guidelines. This is to propose adding a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment, and letting project banner templates "inherit" this assessment. {{WPBannerMeta}} will look after the details, so the project banner templates will not have to change.

Projects with specialized quality assessment approaches, which will be recognized by {{WPBannerMeta}} using a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter, can continue to record these assessments on their project banners and link to their specialized quality assessment scales.

Importance assessments are project-specific, showing how important the article is in providing complete coverage of the project subject area. An article may be high importance for one project, low importance for another, and irrelevant to most projects. This proposal does not affect importance assessments.

Banners using article-level general quality assessment are illustrated below:

  • {{WikiProject banner shell}} may now accept, validate and display an optional |class= parameter as shown above.
  • {{WikiProject banner shell}} may be added to an article talk page with no wikiproject banners, in which case it will populate a general category like Category:C-Class articles
  • If a new {{WPBannerMeta}} parameter |QUALITY_CRITERIA= has the value "custom", the project class will be displayed and used to create categories as at present. The project class will be displayed even if it is the same as the article class. Projects will be canvassed to set this parameter if they want to use custom quality assessment criteria.
  • Otherwise, the project is assumed to follow the general assessment approach, which is true of most projects today
    • {{WPBannerMeta}} will retrieve the article-level |class= value (if present) using:
      {{Template parameter value|{{FULLPAGENAME}}|WikiProject banner shell||class}}}}
    • If no article-level class value is found, the wikiproject banner will be processed as at present
    • If the wikiproject banner does not supply a |class= value to {{WPBannerMeta}}, or if it supplies a value the same as the (non-blank) article-level class, the class will not be shown in the project template, since that would be redundant. The article class will be used to form categories like Category:C-Class Linguistics articles
    • If the wikiproject banner supplies a class value that differs from the (non-blank) article class value, the talk page will be placed in a tracking category and the project class will be used to form categories like Category:C-Class Linguistics articles
  • A future project may consider bulk change to remove |class= values from wikiproject banners where the value is the same as the article level class, and where the wikiproject uses the general Wikipedia:Content assessment approach. That is outside the scope of this proposal.

thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:38, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Section break for comments

Greetings @Sm8900:. Above change appears to be helpful. Below is my list of three areas of concern.

  1. Rater software (JS), to add/change/delete WP assessments, User:Evad37/rater
  2. Daily Wikiproject assessment WP 1.0 bot
  3. Monthly Popular-pages, Community tech bot

Wondering if this approved change has been tested for above and is error-free? Or will there be problems after installed? No offense, just trying to be helpful. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 19:47, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@JoeNMLC, those are very good and valid questions. I am tagging @Aymatth2, since they were the editor who was the originator of this proposal. thanks. Sm8900 (talk) 19:52, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
The change has not been tested, but seems technically feasible. A discussion on how best to implement it has been started at Template talk:WikiProject banner shell#Move article quality rating into banner shell. Concerns like those raised by JoeNMLC should be raised there. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:12, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Text on top of image broken

Resolved
 – Reverted file rotation on commons. Terasail[✉️] 20:24, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello! On Wood, the lead image (images?) seem like they're supposed to have text on top of each image detailing which tree the wood comes from, however for me the text isn't correctly aligned with the image it corresponds to. How does one remedy this? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:18, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

The values used in {{Annotation}} are wrong, leading to the text being incorrectly positioned. I looked at the templates, neither have been touched in over a year and that part of the article hasn't been edited recently either so I am not sure how long it has been an issue. I will go through and fix the values after double checking there isn't any other reason for this that I can find. Terasail[✉️] 19:48, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Ah, The file was rotated c:Special:Diff/731356855 last week. Terasail[✉️] 19:54, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
It broke annotated versions in around 10 wikis. I was going to revert the rotation but you beat me to it. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:06, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, I am not sure why the rotation was requested, and with no effort to clean up the errors it made, or update the description in the languages provided, just seems like a rogue request. I also went through and purged pages on enwiki which use the file, so it should load correctly again. Terasail[✉️] 20:10, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Mass removal of residence parameter from Infobox scientist

Hi there. I'm trying to get some input from the community on whether we should have a mass-removal of the residence parameter from articles using Template:Infobox scientist. I believe that mass-removing this parameter from the 4,000+ articles will assist by a.) clearing Category:Pages using infobox scientist with unknown parameters so that it can more effectively be used as a maintenance category, and b.) reduce the likelihood that editors will add (often unsourced) information into the infobox about the subject's residence, which doesn't even show up in the infobox. If you could please voice your opinion on the matter, it would be greatly appreciated. Phuzion (talk) 03:28, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I've been helping out with this for the last year or so. For AWB users, there's some existing scripts that can target unused template parameters by infobox type. In other words, you tell it which infobox and which parameter. Trying to find where I found that but no luck so far. Dawnseeker2000 03:56, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your input. I'm trying to gather consensus on the matter, in order to submit a request for PrimeBOT to handle the entire job at once. This would be much quicker and easier than having editors manually review 4,000+ edits with AWB. The original discussion is here on the Template Talk page. I've also posted this at WPT:SCIENCE for additional input. Phuzion (talk) 04:30, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
I have responded at the original discussion. No need to fork the discussion here. – Jonesey95 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 15:55, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Link color overriding text color

Hello! User:Epifanove has attempted to make the color of their signature a dark green, and while they seem to have correctly put the CSS code in for it, the color for links seems to be completely overriding whatever color the text has been set to. Any idea what's going on here and how to fix it? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:53, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the help! Epifanove💬 17:56, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
@Epifanove, you need to put foreground (color) moderations inside the display text of a link, like so: 
[[A|<span style="color: B">A</span>]]
In this case, I would do this:
<b style="font-family:Garamond; font-size: 16px; text-shadow:grey 0.118em 0.118em 0.118em;">[[User:Epifanove|<span style="color:#023020;">Epifanove</span>]]<sup>[[User talk:Epifanove|💬]]</sup></b>
Izno (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Aha! I knew it was something incredibly obvious that I was missing. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:11, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
@Izno @Blaze Wolf
Awesome, didn't know that. Epifanove💬 18:19, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Reading Google books content: what's the secret code?

In evaluating content for the Doug Coldwell copyright contributor investigation, I am often stymied by my inability to read google content. Is it my eyesight, my browser settings, is there a secret code? Even when I try to magnify the pages, I can't always read them. Sample:

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:41, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Google Books has a couple of zoom-in, zoom-out buttons at top right that look like they work better than browser zoom to my eyes. Besides that, I think the only thing that can be said is that scans of books are scans (even if high quality), which are usually bitmaps, which pixelate and/or don't zoom nicely. Izno (talk) 18:08, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Thx, Izno; I will have to find someone in my household with younger eyes than mine to look at some of these. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:43, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

userpage formatting

Resolved
 – Looks like Epifanove doesn't want help with this anymore. — xaosflux Talk 19:39, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi,

I'm trying to get the text on my userpage to be alongside (to the left of) my userboxes.

When I try to do so, it appends the text as Wikitext to the bottom of the userbox. Epifanove🗯️ 18:30, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@Epifanove see if the change I made works for you. Also please see WP:USERPAGE for the userpage guidelines, I suggest you remove or reduce prominence of what appears to be a commercial external link on the top of that page. — xaosflux Talk 19:37, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Would you say thats commercial/promotional? Its just the link to my personal site with no promotional/commercial intent or content. Epifanove🗯️ 19:54, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
@Epifanove Suggest you put it down at the bottom maybe. The primary purpose of a userpage is to provide information about how someone contributes to Wikipedia - this isn't a technical problem or a blatant rule violation - just letting you know it will come across better to other Wikipedia users if you don't start by trying sending readers to an external site. — xaosflux Talk 20:24, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Go to the test case page for the default desktop theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Rma/testcases&useskin=vector-2022
  2. Click the superscript link [L2] to see the expected behavior for {{ran}}, which is bringing up a citation.
  3. Switch to the Minerva theme via the on-page link or this URL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Rma/testcases&useskin=minerva
  4. Click the same superscript link with Minerva and nothing will happen. Expected behavior would either be following the anchor link or deploying Minerva's popup used by "ref" tags. (You can follow the anchor link by opening the superscript link in a new tab.)

This problem occurs on the mobile or desktop site with Minerva. According to a previous thread the reference should be removed from the template as it's not really producing a reference. This would also make the template work as expected on mobile. Perhaps this was never done? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_189#Template:Ran_not_working_on_mobile )

Problem has been present since early versions of the template: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Phineas_Gage/Archive_2#Mobile_accessibility_problem

This is a clearer version of my previous post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_203#Bug_Report:_Minerva_theme_disables_links_from_{_{_ran_}_}_references Rjjiii (talk) 05:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Once again, have you tried asking at Template talk:Rma, the talk page for {{ran}}? The template's talk page is the normal place to start a conversation about a specific template's function. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:59, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I posted at Phineas Gage first and the user who created the template suggested that I post here. I can copy and paste this to the template, but who would I be reaching out to there? Rjjiii (talk) 07:09, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Template-transcluded redlinked categories, Vol. 993,789

Once again, there are four template-generated redlinks at Special:WantedCategories that I don't know how to fix.

  1. Category:User sat-2 – Populated by a user's javascript settings pages; howver, those two pages are also being filed in 21 other user categories that do exist, even though javascript settings pages aren't supposed to be in user categories at all (those are for our userpages themselves, not for our .js subpages). So these two pages need to have all categories removed from them, but I don't know how to do that.
  2. Category:Pages using WikiProject banners with internal class parameters, Category:Pages using WikiProject banners with mismatching class parameters and Category:Pages using WikiProject banner shell with class parameter distinct from internal banners - These are all populated solely by use of WikiProject templates on two sandboxed usertalk pages (same two pages in all three cases), but aren't justified for creation on that basis alone — and I can't find any other evidence that we even have any scheme of "Pages using WikiProject banners yadda yadda" categories at all — we do have a couple of "Pages using WikiProject banner shell" categories, but not "banners" categories. So these all have to go away, but again I don't know how to fix them.

Could somebody look into these and resolve them? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 16:05, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I came here to write the below section, and happen to bump into this by pure coincidence. The categories in point 2 are populated by Module:Sandbox/CX Zoom/WPBS 2. These were created for representation purposes in order to enact the consensus as found at WP:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments. While I could edit the module right away to remove this categorisation, that would render the presentation incomplete. And these categories may (will?), infact, become a part of the formal WikiProject system very soon. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 16:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
It's absolutely essential that they not exist as red links — which means that the options here are either they go away or they get created, and just sticking around as red links is absolutely not on the list of options at all. But there's no scheme of "WikiProject banners" categories for the first two to be part of at all, and we normally create project categories only when they start becoming populated by real project content rather than just sandboxed user stuff alone, so it's questionable whether any of them can even be justifiably created yet. But either way, they absolutely have to either get created immediately or go away immediately, and just staying red links is absolutely not an option at all. Bearcat (talk) 17:00, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@Bearcat: I've commented out the categorisation part, so these will no longer be populated. However, if the need be, I will create those categories before populating them the next time. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 17:08, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@CX Zoom: Whatever it is you did, none of the categories have actually gotten depopulated by it, because the pages still have the redlinked categories on them even now. Bearcat (talk) 17:11, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@Bearcat: The two usertalk pages needed a WP:Null edit, did it. Should be gone now, can you confirm? —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 17:16, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. Looks like they're clean now. Bearcat (talk) 17:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
The first part: It would appear that the user is using .js pages as a way to prevent editing of their pages rather than storing actual js. It would be best to discuss this with the user first (Since they are active) on adding <nowiki> tags to their js pages to stop categorization. Terasail[✉️] 17:04, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I can't address that, as I don't have enough background information about their actions, or the code in the js itself, to say anything coherent about it — if somebody needs to talk to the user, it would have to be somebody who knows what to say. Bearcat (talk) 18:54, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I'd support a discussion at WT:User pages about this practice that I've seen at least one other instance of hiding user page content in CSS/JS given its general disruption to editing workflows. Izno (talk) 18:56, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Anyway, I have created this category. It is part of a routine series of categories. Izno (talk) 18:58, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:TOC limit does not appear to work with Vector 2022

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T317818

I applied {{TOC limit|2}} to my sandbox, and in Vector 2022, the full TOC, down to level 5, is shown in the sidebar and in the TOC menu. This happens whether I am logged in or logged out. In Vector 2010, it works properly, showing only the level 2 (top-level) headings in the TOC. There is a post about this problem at Template talk:TOC limit from October 2022, but I was unable to find a Phab bug report. Does anyone know if this can be fixed at the template level, or if this needs to be filed as a bug? (Or if I am doing something wrong.) – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:10, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the template, it filters the toc level by placing it in a div so this approach will not work for v22 and will need a phab task if there isnt one already. Terasail[✉️] 19:20, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I found the phab task that is realted to this (Linked above). This looks like it could be a while before it is complete though. Terasail[✉️] 19:29, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Super. Thanks for the link. I have updated the template's documentation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:35, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
As the Phab task says, TOC subsections are collapsed by default in Vector 2022 if there are many sections. See e.g. American Civil War in vector and vector 2022. This makes {{TOC limit}} less relevant for Vector 2022. For most current uses it's probably best to ignore it in Vector 2022. If the skin allows it in the future then I suppose we could make two parameters to {{TOC limit}} with the second applied in Vector 2022 but would it really be worth it? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:44, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Im not sure that it would useful in articles in the same way it was for V10 however for some project pages (WP:ARC) the ability to uncollapse the toc could be immensely useful. Terasail[✉️] 21:15, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Re collapsing by default, T300973 says that the threshold for auto-collapsing or auto-expanding is 20 sections, but that logic is simplistic for pages like TFD with a few main sections and lots of subsections, as noted in the tracked ticket above. The default collapsed, unnumbered TOC looks bad to me, interferes with finding section heading text easily, and more. I turned on numbering and auto-expansion as soon as I switched over to Vector 2022. We'll see if the defaults ever catch up, or if some in-page template code will allow us to control the TOC as we used to. Beta software deployments, hooray! – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

"Reply" on talk page grayed out

Resolved

Other symptoms: "Loading ..." appears below one post and, when I go to the talk page, it lands where the "Loading ..." appears. Please let me know how to fix this. - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:17, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

P.S. - I've shut down my computer and the problem is still present. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 17:18, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
A new piece of information: the problem is only on one talk page.
I've tried turning off Enable quick replying and the grayed out "Reply" option disappears but the "Loading ..." is still there and when I go that talk page it still lands where the "Loading ..." text appears.
I've turned Enable quick replying back on and when I click on the "Reply" just above the "Loading ..." a blue box appears around the "Reply." Nothing else happens.
Help, please! - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 02:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
What browser do you use on what operating system? What page do you experience the problem on? Izno (talk) 02:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Your questions caused me to check the page on other browsers. No problem. I went back to my primary browser and emptied cashe. Now, no problem. Thank you so much for sending me on the path to a solution! - Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 02:38, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, that's good. :) Izno (talk) 02:47, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Detect category additions with python

Is there a way to query the API to check additions to a category? Special:RelatedChanges can do it, but I couldn't find an API for it, and the alternative is feedwatchlist, which requires watchlisting the category. A way built into pywikibot would be preferable. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:54, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

T17552 is the task for creating an API for related changes. You can get recent category changes from mw:API:RecentChanges with rctype=categorize. It isn't for a specific category though. The pywikibot equivalent It can't filter for a specific category, but the pywikibot method is is site.recentchanges(changetype="categorize"). — JJMC89 (T·C) 00:57, 16 February 2023 (UTC) edited 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@JJMC89, looks like wikitech:Event Platform/EventStreams also works:
stream = EventStreams(streams=['recentchange'], since='20190111')
stream.register_filter(server_name='en.wikipedia.org', type='categorize')
I intermittently get warnings like:
WARNING: Could not load json data from
{"$schema":"/mediawiki/recentchange/1.0.0","meta":​{"uri":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huts,_Shellbeach_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4397431.jpg","request_id":"57b03ef8-880c-4c5d-9383-8d78de816986","id":"5edb874d-d6af-48fe-80e2-c32790858c48","dt":"2023-02-09T10:33:58Z","domain":"commons.wikimedia.org","stream":"mediawiki.recentchange","topic":"eqiad.mediawiki.recentchange","partition":0,"offset":4522460226}​,"id":2114823567,"type":"edit","namespace":6,"title":"File:Huts, Shellbeach - geograph.org.uk - 4397431.jpg","comment":"/* wbeditentity-update-languages-and-other-short:0||en */ Adding structured data to this newly uploaded geograph.org.uk image","t
Unterminated string starting at: line 1 column 660 (char 659)
— Qwerfjkltalk 11:58, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
The since parameter only works if you provide a date within the last 7 days or so. – SD0001 (talk) 17:38, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
@SD0001, yes, I just copied that from the example. That's not what's causing the error, though. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:49, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm guessing that you are using a bad version (0.0.23+) of sseclient.[6] Installing pywikibot with the eventstreams extra, it will install sseclient<0.0.23,>=0.0.18. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
You can get recent changes in a specific category with the recentchanges API by filling in rctitle. Nardog (talk) 16:01, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
I worded that poorly (now updated). The pywikibot method does not support that for some reason. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@JJMC89, thanks, pip install sseclient==0.0.22 worked. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:55, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
The EventStream gives changes like:
{'$schema': '/mediawiki/recentchange/1.0.0', 'meta': {'uri': 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_in-text_citations_from_May_2015', 'request_id': '4cabf16c-7cd5-4128-8622-423642642eb5', 'id': '0966337a-cf78-4219-bdca-f27a8555301a', 'dt': '2023-02-17T11:00:51Z', 'domain': 'en.wikipedia.org', 'stream': 'mediawiki recentchange', 'topic': 'eqiad.mediawiki.recentchange', 'partition': 0, 'offset': 4541357697}, 'id': 1602746521, 'type': 'categorize', 'namespace': 14, 'title': 'Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from May 2015', 'comment': '[[:Mike Moore (American politician)]] removed from category, [[Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike Moore (American politician)|this page is included within other pages]]', 'timestamp': 1676631651, 'user': 'Indy beetle', 'bot': False, 'server_url': 'https://en.wikipedia.org', 'server_name': 'en.wikipedia.org', 'server_script_path': '/w', 'wiki': 'enwiki', 'parsedcomment': '<a href="/wiki/Mike_Moore_(American_politician)" title="Mike Moore (American politician)">Mike Moore (American politician)</a> removed from category, <a href="/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike_Moore_(American_politician)" title="Special:WhatLinksHere/Mike Moore (American politician)">this page is included within other pages</a>'}

How would I get the diff from this? I can't tell what the ID is (it's not revid), so the only way I can see is matching it up by checking through the page's history. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't think you can, directly. id is rc_id from the recentchanges table. The recentchanges API gives it as rcid, but also has the more useful revid.
            {
                "type": "categorize",
                "ns": 14,
                "title": "Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from May 2015",
                "pageid": 3397480,
                "revid": 1139888565,
                "old_revid": 1139888501,
                "rcid": 1602746521,
                "user": "Indy beetle",
                "bot": false,
                "new": false,
                "minor": false,
                "oldlen": 0,
                "newlen": 0
            }
— JJMC89 (T·C) 00:07, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
@JJMC89, what would be the best way of getting the diff then? Can I query for revid from rcid, or would I need to match up the page history with the timestamp? — Qwerfjkltalk 09:54, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

List of articles within redirect

Can someone create a list of pages that are technically redirects, but have have lots of extended content under it? I just noticed at Special:Diff/1139937056 that someone wrote an entire article about some non-notable film director under the redirect Film Maker and it went unnoticed for 14 whole months! So, there must be more such pages. It may also help detect some old cut & paste moves because you can create a redirect by only editing the lead (section 0), while leaving rest of the sections intact, which often happens if mobile interface edit button is used which opens edit page on a section-by-section basis. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 16:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom perhaps something like this will work for you? quarry:query/71445. — xaosflux Talk 18:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@CX Zoom may be better to limit to only pages in mainspace? — xaosflux Talk 18:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, please limit it to mainspace for the time being. When all is done, will move to other namespaces. Also, reduce the size limit to 1000. I don't think any redirect should be more than that ideally. The current limit of 10,000 will leave out many pages, for example, the above one was only about 3,300 bytes in size. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 18:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Database reports/Redirects obscuring page content used to provide this information, I think. It might be worth reviving. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:30, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@CX Zoom Try starting with this batch — xaosflux Talk 19:59, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I've created a wikitable on User:DVRTed/sandbox/large redirects based on that query's response with added wikilinks (w/ redirect=no). — DVRTed (Talk) 20:12, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Thank you to everyone involved in this. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 11:37, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

New tag?

I noticed the tag "campaign-external-machine-translation" appear on this edit. I checked Special:Tags and it's on there but it has no description so I have absolutely no clue what this tag is supposed to mean. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:39, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf it's an old tag (see phab:T216123) however, I don't expect it to be showing up here (unless someone is very manually injecting it themselves). So there may be a bug that is tagging things with this that shouldn't be. — xaosflux Talk 18:04, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
INteresting. WOuld you mind filing a phab about it then? I would do so myself however phab is broken on this device and shows up as if it were just the bare HTML without any of the CSS. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:11, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
recent changes for ref. — xaosflux Talk 12:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Getting rid of this menu when I hover over Contributions

Resolved
 – Directions provided. — xaosflux Talk 12:14, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
File:Error Message 17-02-2023.png
What I see

How do I get rid of this menu when I hover over Contributions? Interstellarity (talk) 16:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Preferences → Beta features → Empty Content Translation. Nardog (talk) 16:14, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Thank you. Interstellarity (talk) 19:30, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Copy formulas in .png

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T324451

Hi ! Please help. Now all formulas present in .svg format. I try to copy articles with formulas to LibreOffice, Word, Google Docs. It doesnt't work, only text is copied. Thank You !) Veritas-Universum (talk) 07:40, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

@Veritas-Universum: phab:T324451 has a very little on this, the current short answer from the devs seems to be "take a screenshot of it"... — xaosflux Talk 12:04, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
It's very bad solution, if you have hundreds of formulas and you need text. Please tell me, would be add this option in to settings by developers ? Maybe optionally. Veritas-Universum (talk) 14:12, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
@Veritas-Universum if you want the "text" of hundreds of formulas from an article, you can get the wikitext, then use some sort of wiki-text to LaTeX converter. — xaosflux Talk 22:24, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Formerly the link produced led to an IRS page with useful information. Now the result seems to always be a 404. See Wikimedia Foundation infobox which contains EIN 200049703 for an example. Not sure this is the right place for this. I tried the template talk page and left a question on the creators talk page and got no response. Gab4gab (talk) 15:30, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Responded at Template talk:EIN. I don't see a way to fix this one. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:27, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Template:Infobox boxing match

Following the result of an RfC (see Template talk:Infobox boxing match#RfC about fighter age), I've added Age to Template:Infobox boxing match, and updated the documentation. However, I am hoping to change the code of the template to automatically add age to the infobox. I hope to use the source code at User:Tbf69/sandbox/datetest, for this, however I need to use code that will be retrieve the fighters name, date-of-birth and the fight date. I'm not sure how to do this though. --- Tbf69 P • T 17:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I followed you from your talk page, and I kind of asked the question in a roundabout way, but... what do you mean by "automatically add age to the infobox"? Unless you are going to have a massive list/table/module of every match and every fighters age during that match, the parameters will likely need to be added to each article individually. Primefac (talk) 17:48, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I thought that may be the case. --- Tbf69 P • T 18:23, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Scroll over text on links are teeny, tiny and unreadable

New today, even in just the last couple of hours. Modern Skin on Wikipedia, MonoBook on Commons. I did not make any changes on my end that caused this. This affects Wikipedia in various languages, and affects Commons. Does not affect Wikisource, which I have set at MonoBook. When I scroll over linked words, the text is so teeny and visually faint I need a magnifying glass to read it. This also includes the sidebar sections such as Navigation, Search, Contribute, Tools, etc. etc. Not browser specific, as I can see this on Edge, Chrome and Firefox. What gives on this? — Maile (talk) 22:21, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

@Maile66 they look fine to me? First try this, open this link in a "private/incognito/etc" window and verify if everything is fine or not? (Ruling out your own personal scripts, gadgets, etc compared to the default ones). — xaosflux Talk 22:44, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
What is "a "private/incognito/etc" window"? — Maile (talk) 22:48, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
FYI, I just noticed something odd about the above "Excel to Wikipedia tables" on my browsers. It looks normal on Firefox. On Chrome and Edge, the tables look OK, but the text contained within the "</syntaxhighlight> parts: fonts looks all faded and different . — Maile (talk) 22:59, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
In Firefox, in the hamburger at top right, select "New private window", then try to reproduce the problem using ?useskin=modern at the end of the URL. Izno (talk) 23:12, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
See Private Browsing - Use Firefox without saving history at Mozilla Support. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:05, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
In firefox, right click the link and pick "Open link in new private window" - it will load a fresh browser, you won't be logged in on that window and most of your browser extensions won't be running - that is a quick way to see what a page looks like for readers too. — xaosflux Talk 00:22, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I found that to get a private window. RL has my attention at the moment, and I haven't had a chance to look into it yet. — Maile (talk) 00:37, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Well, I guess we can close this out. I didn't get around to the private window test, when I realized the above-mentioned issue is not on everything. i.e, scrolling over inline sourcing comes up normal size and as clear as could be. And I have otherwise also noticed the teeny type on non-Wikipedia links - my bookmarks, for instance. Thanks for your time, folks. — Maile (talk) 02:26, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Possibility of forcing rollback to V10

It seems probable that Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Rollback of Vector 2022 will result in a consensus to at least temporarily rollback to Vector 2010. However, to my knowledge, the WMF has not indicated that they would respect such a consensus if it were found, which would leave us in a situation similar to that with VisualEditor in 2013. In that case, it was possible to implement a hack that overrode the Foundation's changes. Do you code wizards have any idea if something like that would be possible here, and if so, what kinds of technical consequences we might be looking at? (Forcing a rollback would probably require another discussion, but it seems prudent to begin exploring our options, if we have any.) —Compassionate727 (T·C) 22:45, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

If the WMF refuses to change the skin (Assuming consensus for rollback is found) then any sort of attempt to override V22 and force Vector 2010 would be reverted and the user implementing the change is tempting an office block. Afterall they do have final say on the website they host. Terasail[✉️] 23:42, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Anyway, any sort of hack which would force vector 2010 for both logged in and logged out users would be less than ideal and probably be inefficient at best. Terasail[✉️] 23:50, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
While I think it is very inadvisable, it could be possible to run a gadget that forces a preference change - for logged in users; it has lots of technical problems, starting with: how to skip users that purposefully opted in to v22. Besides, logged in editors can just opt-out if they want to at any time. As IP users don't have preferences, that mechanism can't be used there - there is no good way to do it for them - so it would come down to getting a developer to change the configuration. — xaosflux Talk 00:08, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't think a one-time update of everyone's preferences back to V10 would be a major problem—it would be no more intrusive than how V22 was rolled out in the first place—although I agree it would not be particularly useful, either. A rollback would mainly benefit the same users it most seriously impacted in the first place, namely anons. I feel presumptuous asking, as this is so far outside my competence, but there is no way to use to use a snippet in MediaWiki:Common.js to forcibly load the V10 javascript and CSS for users without accounts? Or at least some lines of code that would make V22 look and behave more like V10? I would have thought it would be possible to simply overwrite many elements locally. —Compassionate727 (T·C) 13:41, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
@Compassionate727 to be clear, anons (mostly readers) don't have stored preferences, so we can't do anything script-wise to change their preference. We could potentially do some sort of hacky "run once" on registered users, which would be a headache as new users registered and continue to get V22 as their default. The biggest challenge about readers is that they get cached pages. (A client-side sort of hack is to rewrite every page load with a useskin=vector parameter) As far as CSS hack arounds, if we want it for everyone that is in V22 we could change the CSS in the site wide vector-2022.css file or do some sort of opt-out default gadget. This may also fail due to page caching for readers. I think these sort of expensive hacks for readers would at best provide an inconsistent page viewing experience. The right way to do to this is certainly to change the site skin default server-side. — xaosflux Talk 14:14, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, I think Alexis Jazz wrote a script for this, User:Alexis Jazz/SkinEnforcer. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:50, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
I think it is pretty safe to say there is no way we'd try a hack like that for all readers here. Some of these things that seem OK in isolation can become huge problems when multiplied by every read on one of the largest websites in the world! A "threat" of some sort of hack like that could possibly convince WMF sysadmins to allow the change or run in to WP:SUPERPROTECT territory again if it got that far. — xaosflux Talk 21:05, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
@Compassionate727 I didn't explicitly choose the 2022 skin, but I like it much better than the 2010 skin. At this point, I wouldn't want it reverted without my acquiescence. David10244 (talk) 04:47, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@Compassionate727 You seem to be assuming that the majority of anons don't like the new skin. Do you have any evidence for that? Maybe 75% of anons like the new one better. David10244 (talk) 04:58, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@David10244: Do you have any evidence that 75% of anons prefer V2022? I've not seen any, and that would be worth mentioning at the RfC. Regardless, I am not assuming anything, only exploring options. A forced rollback would require another discussion (one that would probably fail unless it could be done cleanly), and before any of that is even relevant, we first need to see how the current RfC closes and how the WMF reacts. —Compassionate727 (T·C) 13:29, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
@Compassionate727 No, I don't have evidence, and that's my point. Some commenters here seem to be convinced that most readers and editors dislike V2022, including anons. I can't figure out where that impression is coming from; just because many of those commenting here don't like it, that says nothing about the greater population of readers and editors. David10244 (talk) 08:09, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
This is all rendered moot by the fact that Wikipedia's "consensus" system is just a comfortable lie whenever the WMF is involved. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:44, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
It's worth looking into the technical matter of whether we could change the default configuration for registered and/or anonymous editors. If not, then the other questions are irrelevant. If we could, the next question is whether we should. A rogue admin doing so unilaterally might, and probably should, be blocked, but if there is a consensus to revert by technical means then things get more interesting. Blocking someone for implementing a community consensus might lose that community's support on a much broader level. Certes (talk) 10:16, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
Crazy question, have we or WMF bothered to ask the readers what they think? I assume not, we are just operating under the premise that some editors not liking equals readers not liking. Think that's a pretty big leap without any data to support it. Slywriter (talk) 14:19, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
@Slywriter Right; I replied just above that I like the 2022 skin better than the 2010 skin, even though I did not explicitly choose either one. Many of the vocal users obviously don't like 2022, and the more they dislike it, the more vocal they are likely to be about disliking it, and agitating for it to be rolled back. That's not what I want though. David10244 (talk) 04:52, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Two civilian acquaintances noticed the change and, knowing I'm a Wikian, innocently congratulated me on it. Surprised, I asked a few others, and most had not noticed it even though they read a bit from Wikipedia most every week. None said it was a bad thing. I suppose WMF did a proper rigorous survey, and got the same result. So, if we oldtimer insiders want to see a more complex, more dense screen (we have good reasons for that) then a custom skin is the way for us. Preferably with a quick click to and from the simpler reader look, so we don't lose touch with what the outside world sees. Me, I do more Commons than WP, and use Monobook there since that's an auxiliary service that most outsiders don't know about anyway, so we don't have to worry what they would see. In ENWP I use Vector 2022 with long line option and black screen, which fortunately allows a single click to white screen. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe we have the technical ability to roll it back. We do, however, have the technical ability to roll certain elements back by modifying Common.js and Common.css. It may be worth creating a list of which elements we can roll back; two that I am confident on is full width by default and link colors. BilledMammal (talk) 13:32, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
If we wanted site-wide hacks on vector-2022, we would do so in vector-2022.js / vector-2022.css , not in common.* — xaosflux Talk 14:21, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I recently noticed the change and it was annoying for my setups when logged out. For instance, I'll often use Lynx with "-dump" to save an article's current state (or sometimes with oldid for a permlink) to text for my study archives. With the new theme the infoboxes were prominent, the table of contents missing or useless and misformatted, etc. On some GUI but security-enhanced systems, the now-missing left bar menu was working but not the TOC. Getting a "#" anchor was thus annoying. I'm glad that useskin works and if that keeps working it's an acceptable compromise for my use cases. So this VPT thread was useful to me, thanks. —PaleoNeonate – 16:36, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
There isn't much harm in preparing for the worst case scenario and determining what the possibilities would be, but based on an Office Hours Zoom chat I attended with the Foundation, the Web team at least do seem interested in treating the enwiki community fairly and respectfully. They seemed like they had made the original change in good faith, based on an incorrect RFC close taken at face value and hadn't anticipated this response. They also asked a number of questions about the intricacies of working with the community instead of dictating to them, and were interested in what they could do to alleviate our concerns, improve relations and make V22 acceptable to us. I don't think this is the same group of people that had been making the decisions in cases such as the Visual Editor snafu mentioned above or WP:CANSANFRANBANFRAM. While I'm always hesitant when dealing with the Foundation, it seems like they've been trying to engage with us in good faith and we should keep in mind that extending some of that back to them would be helpful. The WordsmithTalk to me 19:18, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Update

Just to share an update on this, I have copied two parts of a new statement by SDeckelmann-WMF at WP:RBV22.

  • if consensus in this RfC calls for rolling back the software, I recommend that we do that only for existing logged-in editors on the English Wikipedia, while we work to address the key issues.
  • In considering the data we have, however, I don’t see a basis for rolling back the skin for logged-out readers, or changing the default width for them (especially now that the fixed width toggle is persistent). I believe this is aligned with the policy at WP:CONEXCEPT on behalf of readers, in the sense that the perspectives of the editor community can only be one of the important inputs to making decisions about readers. I don't think the evidence we have supports rollback for readers, and, on the contrary, the evidence suggests they are receiving the benefits we hoped they would.

Terasail[✉️] 19:40, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

VisualEditor "double click to edit cell" stopped working

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T329983

Hello! I was made aware of this page over on Wikipedia:Help_desk. I'll copy and paste what I wrote there:

"Hello! Earlier today, double clicking to edit a cell in VisualEditor was working fine. Out of the blue, it's stopped working. I've checked on multiple pages (including my own sandbox), and it's not working on any of them. ...I don't know why the double click has suddenly stopped, or what I can do to get it working again. Any help is appreciated, please! Thank you so much, have a great day!"

The browser I'm using is Firefox, version 109.0.1. HeyElliott (talk) 22:54, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@HeyElliott I'm not 100% familiar with all the VE actions, but when I quickly checked it looks like perhaps this was improved? When I went to a table with VE, single clicking "selected" the cell and highlighted it, then typing allowed it to be changed. (Double click was not necessary). — xaosflux Talk 18:22, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
If I single click and start typing then the cell is blanked and I can type new content but not edit the old. If I single click and press enter then I can edit the old content but that is hard to guess. If I hover over a cell then MediaWiki:Visualeditor-tablecell-tooltip is displayed. It says "Double click to edit cell" so something is wrong unless we later get a delayed update to the message. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:25, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
Yea, PrimeHunter is correct, it's still not working. Double click used to work, and single clicking the cell then editing it still doesn't allow you to click on the links in the cell (and sometimes, it won't even let me edit the normal text). HeyElliott (talk) 22:28, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
This should be resolved now. It was caused by an attempt to improve text selection behavior in Firefox around "focusable nodes" (e.g. references, templates) that backfired. Sorry about that. Matma Rex talk 22:03, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Awesome, it is working again, thank you so much! And no problem at all, I understand that stuff happens when trying to improve and update stuff. Thanks again, hope you have a good day! HeyElliott (talk) 22:58, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-08

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

  • Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [7]

Changes later this week

Future changes

  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [8][9][10]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:55, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T111565

Hi guys, I wanted to know why navigation boxes as {{Constructed languages}} never appear if I'm browsing using the Minerva skin, pretty much any mobile device?

Is there a code I could add to my custom CSS pages to force it appear to me on Minerva skin? --Esperfulmo (talk) 20:48, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

No collapsible elements work on the minerva skin since it isn't enabled and will only show tables/divs in their fully expanded state. The phab task to enable it has been going nowhere fast since 2015 so it probably won't change anytime soon. I am not too sure if there are any userscripts to help with this or not though. Terasail[✉️] 21:12, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
The specific relevant task is actually phab:T124168.
Esperfulmo: You can see navboxes above a certain resolution on desktop Minerva (en.wikipedia.org). You could make them display below a certain resolution with some CSS. You cannot see them on mobile (en.m.wikipedia.org) and there is nothing you can do to work around that. Izno (talk) 22:07, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks Terasail and Izno for the info. I'll see what I'll have to do. I also wondered why collapsible templates were always shown, like the {{weather box}}. --Esperfulmo (talk) 01:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
They weren't. Izno (talk) 02:16, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Automated citation "fixing" bots are inserting pharmaceutical/other spam into articles

While doing one of my periodic trawls for vandalism I noticed a surprisingly large number of edits that were unquestionably net-negative to wikipedia, but were not the result of blatant vandalism: refs in articles being turned into "buy cheap Viagra essay online" spam advertising, making public-facing articles rather embarrassing.

One scenario: A website, probably a retailer but not an overtly scammy one, stuffs their title tags with a bunch of SEO keywords. The bot grabs the title tag and SEO keywords, despite the actual title intended for humans appearing later in the article.

Another, more common scenario: A website dies and is purchased by some spammy company. The Wayback Machine's archive only goes as far back as the spam does. Wikipedia has a reference to this website in an article, perhaps a "serious" one like Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, or a very well-known one, like KRS-One. Some well-meaning users run a well-meaning bot or automated tool -- User:Citation bot, Wikipedia:Reflinks, others -- that goes to Wayback and unceremoniously replaces something bland but unembarrassing like "Archived copy" with embarrassing spam.

I can see the argument that this is putting a band-aid on a larger underlying problem, which is that we are auto-linking to the Internet Archive and semi-permanently inserting spam into references sections, and making that harder to detect by not giving it an appropriate name. But the odds someone is going to actually click such a link seem lower to me than the odds that someone is going to see the spam text. It's also not immediately obvious how to fix it, since obviously legitimate references do exist on Viagra and essay mills and online pharmacies and everything else like this I haven't found yet, meaning a fully automated blacklist is out. (This also makes it hard to find these.) But either way, it is a really bad look for the encyclopedia, and in high-profile articles. Gnomingstuff (talk) 08:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

It's the internet. it happens. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:35, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
I assume the bot retrieves the earliest good archive dated after the access-date, which usually resembles what the citing editor saw but is occasionally spam. Could the bot also retrieve the latest good archive dated before the access-date, and compare titles, listing those which differ or have no prior archive? Would that list be short enough for humans to trawl through, given the ease of distinguishing quickly by eye between
  1. Before: Smith scores goal; After: Goal scored by Smith
  2. Before: Smith scores goal; After: Buy stuff from SpamCo today!!!
This might not handle the rare first scenario, but should deal with the second common case above easily, at least when a prior archive exists. Certes (talk) 13:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Unfortunately, there often isn't a prior archive, which I assume is when this happens. The template also complains if you leave the title field blank. But that would be better, since adding "buy cialis now free online pharmacy cheap meds!" into article space is worse than adding nothing; in any other context this would be considered unambiguous vandalism. Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:58, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Preview fail on today’s featured article

The page preview is broken on today’s featured article: if you hover your mouse over the link to New Jersey's 1927 biannual elections proposal, you get the screenshot on the right. Note that the Tools/Navigation popups are unaffected (the preview as a logged-in user seems reasonable), so you might want to open a private window to test.

Does anyone know how to solve that (1) fast, and (2) without doing a gazillion tests on a main page item? TigraanClick here for my talk page ("private" contact) 09:22, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Tested on Firefox 110.0 on Windows 10 if it matters (I assume it does not). TigraanClick here for my talk page ("private" contact) 09:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Likely due to this vandalism, which has been fixed. CMD (talk) 09:28, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Indeed, it is now fixed on my side. (Today I learned that main page items are not semi-protected.) TigraanClick here for my talk page ("private" contact) 09:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Tigraan: See WP:PEREN#Protect Today's Featured Article on the Main Page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:42, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
THere was a bot that had a trial run in protecting main page items. I don't know what happened to it though. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:17, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

not-in-the-other-language.toolforge.org

I really love this tool and am grateful to whoever made it. But I was wondering if there was any way to compare one-to-multiple. Like, getting a list of articles the German and French Wikipedias have, but the English Wikipedia does not? Because I'd like to continue and expand Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/de. BorgQueen (talk) 18:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Timeless skin - Missing - Watch/Unwatch link

Greetings, I recently switched to Timeless skin. Today, at an article I wanted to add to my Watchlist, I cannot find that Link anywhere. The Alt-shift-w keypress function works okay to both add and remove from Watchlist. I did read about Timeless at Mediawiki here. No mention of Watchlist, so I'm asking for help here. Is there anything I can patch into Timeless-Custom CSS? Or should this be handled as a software fix?

First I did start with Vector legacy, then last year switched to MonoBook. Both Vector-L and Monobook have the "Watch" or "Unwatch" links. Cheers, JoeNMLC (talk) 19:27, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@JoeNMLC in timeless watch/unwatch is a star icon under the title, right of "talk". — xaosflux Talk 19:33, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: - Thanks, I missed that Star-icon. When I hover, it does not say "Watch" or "Unwatch". It displays the page-hover instead. JoeNMLC (talk) 19:40, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 Done - I see Solid-Star = Watched / Open-star = Un-Watched. JoeNMLC (talk) 19:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@JoeNMLC: By default it says "Add this page to your watchlist" on hover, or a variation of Mediawiki:Tooltip-ca-watch if you have set another language. It sounds like you have enabled "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. This overrides the default hover text on the watchlist star in Timeless but not in Vector or Vector-2022. It could be reported at one of the options at Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups#Feedback. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

User TP section-level editing

Hi, people. I was unable to solve this whole day long. On my User TP there is no section-level editing button-link "Edit" (nor "Edit source", for that matter, although I guess only source editing works in TP anyway?). I looked in Pref's, I checked for Magic words in source - to no avail. I have several nav templates included there but I tried to remove them with purging the page and that didn't help either. How to force those "Edit" (and/or "Edit source") to appear next to my TP section titles? ౪ Santa ౪99° 22:38, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

In the section "Edits to Archived Discussion at WP:RSN", the template {{talk archive navigation}} is transcluded. IIRC, that template disables the section edit links. --rchard2scout (talk) 22:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, that would do it. Izno (talk) 23:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Rchard2scout, thank you for the tip, fortunately @PrimeHunter resolved it before I could read this post, so thank you to both of you on expeditious reaction and help - thanks guys ! ౪ Santa ౪99° 23:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

VE Citation Tool Issues

I used https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.217 to autogenerate ref and the output is incorrect. Ditto for https://read.dukeupress.edu/journal-of-asian-studies/article-abstract/74/1/23/326718. TrangaBellam (talk) 19:31, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@TrangaBellam: on the first one, it looks like the source is odd there in that it is a lookup of the actual source instead of the source itself? Are you trying to reference academic.oup.com or just the journal? Try putting in just the DOI. Else, when you say it is wrong, please provide us some details. As in: The output was X, I expected it to be Y. — xaosflux Talk 12:11, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
The first one, if you put in just the DOI number, produces this:
Khan, Yasmin (2016-02). "Venkat Dhulipala. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India ". The American Historical Review. 121 (1): 217–218. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.217. ISSN 0002-8762. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
If you put in the URL, it produces this:
academic.oup.com. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.217 https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/ahr/121.1.217. Retrieved 2023-02-22. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
The first is obviously better than the second. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

How to install/activate "Related articles"?

While updating WP:DE-ORPHAN section Finding related articles, I found this suggestion: 

Highly related articles are typically linked in the uppermost lead of an article, in its "See also" section (if existent) and the automatically suggested "RELATED ARTICLES" below the article.

I have not seen any articles showing this, and am looking for instructions to install the "Related articles"? I did Search here, then looked through Preferences, Gadgets, etc. and have not found anything. JoeNMLC (talk) 23:24, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

This is a feature supported by certain skins. It is supported in Minerva skin (and hence mobile) and in Timeless skin, see the bottom of Minerva and Timeless. It would need consensus to activate in other skins, though I suspect a gadget could potentially get the relevant info and display it? Izno (talk) 23:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
@Izno, I think 
mw.loader.load(['ext.relatedArticles.readMore.bootstrap', 'ext.relatedArticles.styles']);

works. — Qwerfjkltalk 07:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
If you want to see similar results one-off, you can use the morelike: search control. — xaosflux Talk 01:25, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
 Done - Thanks for the answer. At first I used Vector-legacy, then last year switched to Monobook. Now I switched to Timeless, and after some "tweaking" I'm now good-to-go. I will clarify the Related-articles for those two skins only. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 02:46, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
It works in Vector 2010 as well; volunteer-me begged that Product team to enable it for w:ht: years ago. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Tonight, I tested above js for load related-articles with skin Monobook and it does not work. I added into my common.js, last line. No worries as I'm Ok with Timeless skin. JoeNMLC (talk) 02:45, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Excel to Wikipedia tables

Is there any quick way to turn Excel tables into Wikipedia tables? Looking through the archives I only see discussions about the opposite direction (Wikipedia tables to Excel) but maybe I missed something. I also have a vague awareness that some users have their own scripts or something to accomplish this. Thank you. Volunteer Marek 16:47, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

There are online converters that will do it for you. Nthep (talk) 17:19, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
In addition to what can be found online (apparently LibreOffice has an extension that can help), commons:Commons:Convert tables and charts to wiki code or image files lists some options, including two Toolforge-hosted tools. As far as I can tell from the documentation, though, those two tools work on tab-separated text, so if you're looking to preserve any of the original formatting, you'll need something else. isaacl (talk) 17:45, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
@Volunteer Marek: I have occasionally done this, using Excel itself. Assume that you have an Excel sheet like this:
A B
1 Player Goals
2 Brown 15
3 Jones 6
4 Smith 11
you can set up one more column containing formulas to generate the Wikimarkup for rows:
A B C
1 Player Goals ="|-| "&A1&" || "&B1
2 Brown 15 ="|-| "&A2&" || "&B2
3 Jones 6 ="|-| "&A3&" || "&B3
4 Smith 11 ="|-| "&A4&" || "&B4
Then you would go to your Wikipedia page and set up the start of the table: 
{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players

|}
Now return to your Excel sheet, select the top cell of the new column (C1 in my example) and extend your selection down to the bottom cell of the same column (C4 in my example). Copy this selection to your clipboard. In your Wikipedia page, click in that gap in the table, and paste from the clipboard. You should now have this: 
{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players
|-! Player || Goals
|-| Brown || 15
|-| Jones || 6
|-| Smith || 11
|}
It's not finished yet. Add a newline after each instance of |- to get 
{| class=wikitable
|+ List of players
|-
! Player || Goals
|-
| Brown || 15
|-
| Jones || 6
|-
| Smith || 11
|}
Preview it, and you should see this
List of players
Player Goals
Brown 15
Jones 6
Smith 11
If that looks right, save it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:34, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
You can copy-paste a table directly from Excel to VisualEditor but it may have issues in practice. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:44, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Awesome, thank you all for the answers. Volunteer Marek 21:53, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Just emphasizing that Primehunter's advice is on target. I've made many tables, and I (now) always copy-paste in VE. I think some editors were turned off by early problems in VE and never use it, but it's handling of tables makes it very worthwhile, even if you use the source editor most of the time S Philbrick(Talk) 16:14, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Volunteer Marek, the visual editor also accepts .csv files by drag and drop. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:02, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
@Volunteer Marek Try toolforge:excel2wiki. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 04:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Lint Error link from Page information missing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T301374
Resolved
 – This section now appears dynamically, only when lint errors are present. — xaosflux Talk 10:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

What happened to the Lint errors link at the bottom of every "Page information" page, which has now been replaced by Wiki checker? The latter serves no purpose there. WikiChecker provides some basic stats, but similar and more in-depth stats can be found on the Revision history statistics. Why was it replaced? Qwerty284651 (talk) 14:06, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

@Qwerty284651: it looks like phab:T301374 was completed, and if there are lint errors on a page, they will show there (e.g. currently on this page you can see one). If there are none, it doesn't appear. — xaosflux Talk 14:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it was removed for that reason.[11] A "Lint errors" section will not appear in the TOC on page information. The TOC is not automatic but added by MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header which has hard-coded the normal sections. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:37, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
It's still there for any page with Linter errors (this one shows 61 errors currently; the page has at least 82 errors, but that is a different story). – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:41, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
The post is about a link which was always under "External tools" until three days ago. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter, will the "Lint error" under "External tool" be reinstated or is this a permanent removal and replacement with "WikiChecker"? Qwerty284651 (talk) 14:53, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Qwerty284651 I think you're missing something here, it was removed because it was redundant. If a page actually has any lint errors, a dedicated section for lint errors appears now, directly above where it says "External tools". So there is no need for this to also be there. The wikichecker thing has nothing to do with delisting this item. — xaosflux Talk 15:07, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
(edit conflict) WikiChecker has actually been there since 2015.[12] The whole "External tools" section is made locally by the English Wikipedia with MediaWiki:Pageinfo-footer. You could suggest "Lint errors" is reinstated on the talk page but I don't see a good reason when pages with lint erors have a whole "Lint errors" section which includes the link. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:10, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
It makes it easy to locate and fix lint errors if any are present on a page, instead of having to go on Special:LintErrors and manually type out the link. Qwerty284651 (talk) 15:46, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Qwerty284651 I don't think you are understanding what we said above. Go to any page that actually has a lint error, click on page information, go to the bottom of the page and look. Let us know if that isn't working please. — xaosflux Talk 15:48, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Also, User:PerfektesChaos/js/lintHint may be even easier than going to a separate page. It will highlight the section containing each error when you click on the little down-arrow next to the error description. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:15, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Jonesey95, I've had that tool installed in .js subpage for a while now, but it stopped highlighting the lint errors in red, except for <center>. I thought it was in conflict with the tools/gadgets I had installed in the .js page, tried to fix it but couldn't so I gave up on it. Qwerty284651 (talk) 18:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, I added intentional link errors to my subpage. The "Page information" displays them as expected. Qwerty284651 (talk) 18:45, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Why am I seeing both "show" and "inspect diff"?

Clicking on Inspect diff (which doesn't always do anything for some reason which is a pain) and then clicking on Hide diff results in my now seeing "show" instead of "inspect". Doug Weller talk 09:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This sounds like User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/contribsHistory.js by User:Writ Keeper —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:44, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Once a diff has been loaded onto your browser tab's allocated memory, the script doesn't have to fetch it from the server and can show it synchronously, hence "show" instead of "inspect". Nardog (talk) 11:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog thanks, that makes sense! Doug Weller talk 12:05, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Vector 22 problem with co-ordinates

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T281974

With the new vector, there is a physical overlap in some articles between an FA star and the co-ordinates. This can be seen on, for example, SS Politician, where the star lies partially on top of the co-ordinates. This is also be a problem with GAs, as can be seen on Oxford Street. Switching the screen width between the default unfathomably narrow and a normal setting doesn't get rid of the problem, so some technical change will be needed. - SchroCat (talk) 18:16, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

please discuss on the coordinates template page and its associated Module. There was no agreement on the way forward, so there is a stalemate regarding this english wikipedia problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
It's a technical issue, the roots of which I do not know, so I will leave it here. Whether it's a problem from the co-ordinate side or the FA/GA icon side, I know not, but what I do know is that it's a problem that has only started with the new skin, and as there should be some WMF people monitoring this to pick up the multitude of problems with the skin, they can pick up on it and sort it out. - SchroCat (talk) 20:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
It is a hot mess, but these are placed locally not directly in the skin - so it's something for us to worry about. Part of the arguments are that the skin designers want to split up parts of the page in vector-2022 to include "meta" things (information about the page) and "content" things (information about the subject). One of the primary arguments is that the skin developers think that "coordinates" are "meta", while some editors think that they are "content". Most people agree that things like "Feature Article" icons are about "the page" (i.e. "This is a good page about this thing") not the content (i.e. "This is a good subject") - so they got a home - but coordinates are in limbo. Coordinates are mostly in the same place on all skins, even vector-2022 - but the FA icons got pushed down to make way for that sister-projects bar. Since they really want that sister projects bar up there, the community here will need to decide what we want to do with everything else, or get the skin people to make accommodations. See phab:T281974 for some of the backlog of this. — xaosflux Talk 21:22, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Coordinates are content. When there's only one set on the page, they're placed upper right for ease of finding. Pages with two or more sets of coords usually have them at appropriate places in the body, and there is no coord at top right. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:41, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, and Xaosflux is saying that the argument concerns that fa icons are meta and therefore they should NOT be sharing the same space as coordinates, whereas others are saying that it doesn’t really matter, but if it’s content, then WE need to find an appropriate spot, as the previous spot is now accepted by meta information. Regardless. A spot needs to be picked. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:52, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Yup, and we know how easy it is to get people to agree on things here! — xaosflux Talk 23:20, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Mobile DiscussionTools Deployment

Hi y'all – the Editing Team would value knowing what – if anything – concerns you about the current plan to offer the suite of mobile DiscussionTools to everyone (logged in and out) by default at en.wiki during the week beginning on 6 March 2023.

A screenshot showing what mobile Wikipedia talk pages look like when DiscussionTools are enabled.
What mobile talk pages look like when DiscussionTools are enabled.

Please join us on WT:TALKPP where @Xaosflux, @Blaze Wolf, and I have started talking about this.

For context, the plan to offer the suite of mobile DiscussionTools to everyone is a response to:

  • Learning through an A/B test, that mobile DiscussionTools cause: people to publish more edits, people to be more likely to publish the edits they start, and more unique people to publish ≥ 1 talk page edit (see the full report) and
  • The suite of mobile DiscussionTools becoming available to everyone (logged in and out) by default at all Wikimedia wikis last week, on 15 Feb.

PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Gadget-NewImageThumb appears to shrink thumbnails when typing in reply tool

Try it out. Enable the gadget and type in the reply tool (not the edit summary box, that won't work), you'd notice the image thumbnail would shrink. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:42, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

It's caused by the gadget code here: MediaWiki:Gadget-NewImageThumb.js#L-18 this will make each thumbnail 2px narrower every time the preview is refreshed. Matma Rex talk 03:22, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Why would they do that??? Aaron Liu (talk) 03:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
I… don't know? We'd have to ask the gadget author. It clearly takes the width, subtracts two, and sets the width back, and it does it from the wikipage.content hook, which runs on every preview. Matma Rex talk 04:02, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
From the top of my head… 2px is the border from thumbinner. A border which the style of the gadget doesn’t have/want, yet the dimensions in the form of width style statements in the HTML do include. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:57, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
I think this could be fixed by just making the gadget only process each thumbnail once, by making use of the parameter to the hook:
mw.hook( 'wikipage.content' ).add( function( $content ) {
    $content.find( '.thumbinner' ).not( '.mp-thumb' ).each( function() {
        $( this ).css( 'width', ( parseInt( $( this ).css( 'width' ) ) - 2 ) + 'px' );
    } );
} );
Matma Rex talk 01:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Help!

I delete quite a lot of pages each day and use Twinkle to do so. But suddenly, the notifications Twinkle is posting are malformed. See the bottom message at User talk:Kunalkelekar1 for an example. I've left a message at WT:TWINKLE but maybe it's an issue with a template that Twinkle uses. But there isn't a noticeboard to ask about problems with templates. So, I just thought I'd post here in case some one could figure out what the problem is. I'm sure that I won't be the only person affected by this. Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer. Liz Read! Talk! 07:41, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed that things are not screwed up for the G13 notice that I use the most (thank goodness). But the messages I posted that were malformed were for G11s. Liz Read! Talk! 07:45, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Appears to be a stray noinclude tag left over after some recent edits in {{Db-deleted-multiple}} (So regular G11 messages should actually still be fine right now as long as it's just G11). I've left a note over at Template talk:Db-notice. Aidan9382 (talk) 08:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 Fixed. The edit request at Template talk:Db-notice/Archive 1#Template-protected edit request on 23 February 2023 was accepted. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:54, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Problem with nationality in infobox officeholder

Hello, I added some information to the "nationality" paramter in infobox officeholder of Seiichirō Yasui, but after saving, it doesn't show. Weirdly enough, the "nationality" parameter works if I switch it to infobox person. Any idea on why this is? Taiwanesetoast888 (talk) 00:51, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Taiwanesetoast888: It's an undocumented feature of {{Infobox officeholder}}. nationality = Japanese is not displayed when birth_place contains "Japan". It's similar for other countries. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Interesting... so if I delete 'Japan' from birth_place, would nationality work then? Taiwanesetoast888 (talk) 03:51, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, but I don't see reason to do that. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Using the nationality parameter for politicians is redundant anyways, as it is usually self-evident; in this case, the Governor of Tokyo is obviously someone of Japanese nationality. Curbon7 (talk) 04:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
WP:INFONAT says "Most biography infoboxes have nationality and citizenship. Generally, use of either should be avoided when the country to which the subject belongs can be inferred from the country of birth, as specified with |birthplace=". DuncanHill (talk) 12:30, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Guidance on more complex Template functionality?

Hi there! I hope this is the right place to put this - it felt like a better fit than Wikipedia:Requested templates, since I already had some of the work written out.

I'm trying to create a template that takes start years and end years and displays them as a range for a running table - for example, 2020-22 - while truncating the second date unless it rolls into a second century (1997-2002). I'm having trouble getting the formatting right to have it check whether the truncation is necessary.

Additionally, I want to be able to list multiple ranges on the same entry (1997-2002, 2020-22) with a check if a secondary set of years is used (under different parameters, start/start2, end/end2, etc.), but I'm struggling to parse that all out.

Would somebody more versed in template syntax be willing to lend a hand with all of this? Thanks in advance! fuzzy510 (talk) 21:36, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

@Fuzzy510 This is the sort of thing that technically be done with template syntax, but the resulting code will be a mess to read, or it can be done much more neatly in Lua. I'll see if I can work something up. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
@Fuzzy510 Looks like {{Year2range}} already existed, but it can only do single year pairs. I had a little time and created Module:daterange that can do multiple ones.
{{#invoke:daterange|main|1997|2002}} → 1997–2002
{{#invoke:daterange|main|start=2020|end=2002}} → 2020–22
{{#invoke:daterange|main|start1=1997|end1=2002|start2=2020|end2=2022|start3=2023}} → 1997–2002, 2020–22, 2023
You could wrap a template around the module if you don't want to have to invoke it directly. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:11, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Holy heck! This is awesome, thanks! fuzzy510 (talk) 23:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
@Fuzzy510 Looking at how you were using the module, I modified it so that when the end date is missing it doesn't include the dash. That should simplify your template a bit. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 02:23, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
It sure does. I'll make the changes on my end. Thank you!!!!! fuzzy510 (talk) 02:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I haven't looked into exactly what you are trying to do but there is {{Str rightc}} if you just want to get the last 2 numbers of a paramter, you can use that template. Terasail[✉️] 22:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Not to be a buzzkill, but if this template is going to be used in article space, please ensure that it complies with MOS:YEARRANGE. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

About mw:Extension:ArticleCreationWorkflow and the article wizard

I noticed as a new user you cannot view any page that does not exist. Instead, you get taken to "New user landing page".

I understand that this can be helpful, but I think it might cause confusion for non-editing users who come across a page that does not exist. I, myself, have gotten confused by this because I was trying to see what Template:No article text looks like to someone who was not autoconfirmed.

Isn't this a little unnecessary? New users would benefit more from being able to see all of their options, such as searching for similar titles. Also, there are certain times where it would be more beneficial for that user to submit an edit request, such as to request the immediate creation of a new redirect, without needing to go to WP:AFCRD.

On the other hand, we can have a JavaScript article wizard. Wikipedia:New user landing page or more likely Wikipedia:Article wizard can be linked in MediaWiki:Noarticletext and then the article wizard can get JavaScript enhancement to allow for the creation of the page.

I want to rethink the workflow as well, since the article wizard does not prompt the user to check to see if the draft or mainspace page exists. Using JavaScript we can have a dialog where the user checks to see if their topic already exists, and, if so, to direct the user to add information to that topic or to create a redirect. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 15:34, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Talk page not linking to current contributions page

Not sure where to report this, but here goes.
I made this edit to Aurangabad reverting an edit by User:Sureshinde - (one capital S)
I then clicked the talk page link, added a warning and then clicked "User contributions" which took me to User contributions for SureShinde (two capital S's) which does not include the edit I had reverted. It appears the user talk page has been renamed, but the link directs to the old contributions list. I can't workout how to consolidate them under the one name - Arjayay (talk) 15:35, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I've removed the redirect.[13] This happens when an account has been renamed, then someone signs up with the old username. You'd think our anti-spoof toolkit would prevent this particular occurrence, but it was probably having a day off or something. -- zzuuzz (talk) 15:47, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks zzuuzz I'd no idea what the cause was - best wishes - Arjayay (talk) 16:24, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Chrome in-browser translation produces sub/superscript errors

The heading has been changed since the problem is more general than what was initially noticed. The first three entries below are before the heading was changed. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Chrome browser is having some odd trouble with just one page for me: acetone peroxide. This page produces a glitch that adds spaces around subscripts (actual spaces as text) and dislocates the brackets for the citation needed template (in image). It does not appear when in either the edit preview or the visual editor, and edge & IE browsers are not affected. I couldn't see anything obviously wrong in the source, but I'm not good at finding errors. I feel like Chrome is just getting better and better at breaking long-standing functionality. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 06:37, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

First guess. One of ur browser extensions is interfering. Try disabling them temporarily. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:56, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
I tried that to no avail, but I tried opening in incognito mode and that fixes it. I just noticed that Chrome is thinking that page is written in German and trying to translate it, so maybe there is some kind of language tag on the page? If it's just autodetecting the language wrong then I'm doubtful that much can be done though. EDIT: All WP pages translated in Chrome are getting messed up like that, from any language it seems. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 19:34, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
This bug is affecting all pages I have translated with a chrome browser into english. I have found this happens on at least one other computer but if anybody can reproduce this or not it would be appreciated. Curiously, I simply haven't been able to find a "citation needed" on any non-english page so it's not clear if those are always broken. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
@MasterTriangle12, try w:fr:Lampe à incandescence halogène#Fonctionnement for the French equivalent. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Cheers, the ref needed template there is normal for me. But I noticed that around superscript, text is even being transposed and hyperlinks shifted onto different text (image). Also found that turning on translation while in the visual editor, then returning to just reading the article will revert the translate to normal, further switching in and out of the editor doesn't make it happen again but reloading the page or turning translate on and off will (I think that forces a reload). I would like to get some confirmation whether or not this is happening to other people before opening a bug report, since I've only tested it on one other computer, but it does seem quite consistent. If anyone who deals with bug tracking or Phabricator could chime in that would be appreciated. MasterTriangle12 (talk) 04:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
It's not happening to me, but I'm using a Mac, and it sounds like you're on Windows, so that doesn't prove anything. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Editing news 2023 #1

Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

This newsletter includes two key updates about the Editing team's work:

  1. The Editing team will finish adding new features to the Talk pages project and deploy it.
  2. They are beginning a new project, Edit check.

Talk pages project

Screenshot showing the talk page design changes that are currently available as beta features at all Wikimedia wikis. These features include information about the number of people and comments within each discussion.
Some of the upcoming changes

The Editing team is nearly finished with this first phase of the Talk pages project. Nearly all new features are available now in the Beta Feature for Discussion tools.

It will show information about how active a discussion is, such as the date of the most recent comment. There will soon be a new "Add topic" button. You will be able to turn them off at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. Please tell them what you think.

Daily edit completion rate by test group: DiscussionTools (test group) and MobileFrontend overlay (control group)

An A/B test for Discussion tools on the mobile site has finished. Editors were more successful with Discussion tools. The Editing team is enabling these features for all editors on the mobile site.

New Project: Edit Check

The Editing team is beginning a project to help new editors of Wikipedia. It will help people identify some problems before they click "Publish changes". The first tool will encourage people to add references when they add new content. Please watch that page for more information. You can join a conference call on 3 March 2023 to learn more.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Why a space after "User talk:"?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T306440

I just noticed that talk pages in all namespaces have an extra space after the ":" in the rendered title, which is not in the main page. It's one of those things that I've probably seen a million times and never noticed, but now that I've noticed, it's driving me crazy. Cannot unsee :-) It looks like this comes from 

.ext-discussiontools-visualenhancements_pageframe-enabled .mw-page-title-separator {
   margin-right: 0.25em;
}

Although I can't figure out why it's only being applied to talk pages. Is this intentional? I'm using Vector 2010. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:12, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Looks like this came from phab:T306440. — xaosflux Talk 17:15, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
This is only happening if dtenable is active. — xaosflux Talk 17:16, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
It's mentioned in there at least, saying that it would be announced with something else. — xaosflux Talk 17:19, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
See This page about the "Talk pages project" for details and links, including a link to T313636 and its obvious follow-up, T315893. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:08, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I had a discussion about this space on MediaWiki. Well, at least they got rid of the bold namespace. Izno (talk) 18:07, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Interesting, thanks. I feel your the addition of the space is going to confuse users into thinking there's actual space in the page title (when there's not) comment. Where my (dare I say it?) user journey started was when I was working an SPI case, noticed the extra space, and thought that somehow somebody had managed to generate a username with a leading space. That may seem bizarre, but working SPI cases does that to you :-) I spent a bit of time going down that rathole before I noticed it was just a CSS thing. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:29, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it's just CSS. It's supposed to make things a little more intelligible for newbies.
The good thing about it being CSS is that when you copy/paste it, there's no space in the resulting text. (MediaWiki would automatically ignore any such space in a link, but I think it's still better for the URL to match.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Finding targets of newly created redirects in Quarry

See related previous query. I have a bot that needs to be aware of GA subpages (of the form "Talk:Example/GAn") and I can find newly created pages via a Quarry query per the above link. However, I also need the bot to be aware of pages that have moved. I am currently using page.page_touched > <last_run_date> to find these, but that's very inefficient -- in 24 hours typically a thousand or more of these subpages have the "page_touched" flag set, so I have to scan them all to find the new ones. If I knew there would always be a redirect I could simply follow any new redirects to find them, but sometimes these pages don't leave a redirect (if it's to get away from a disambiguation page, for example). Is there a way in Quarry to ask for all pages with any creation date that have been moved since a given date? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:08, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Join the page table with logging_logindex on log_page = page_id and log_type = 'move' and log_timestamp > ?.
page_touched is the timestamp of the last time the page was purged, which does not make sense here (filtering by rev_timestamp after joining with revision table would have given more relevant results). – SD0001 (talk) 23:05, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks! Still learning my way around these tables. Much appreciated. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:15, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Archiving a Facebook post

I wish to archive a (public) Facebook post by a subject-matter-expert (under WP:SPS) for a potential citation. Do you know of any services (like Wayback Machine for news blogs or Archive.is for Twitter) that allows one to archive Facebook posts? TrangaBellam (talk) 08:44, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Visiting http://web.archive.org/web/*/your.facebook.url/goes/here then should offer to archive the post (or possibly tell you that it has already been archived). This will probably happen automatically if you cite it in Wikipedia, but it doesn't hurt to speed the process up in case the page changes. Certes (talk) 10:16, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
@TrangaBellam, you can archive all the references in a page with IABot — Qwerfjkltalk 10:37, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Wayback Machine does NOT work on Facebook posts. TrangaBellam (talk) 10:39, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Say, I want to archive this public post with ALL comments. TrangaBellam (talk) 10:40, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, it looks as if Facebook detects archive.org and redirects it to a login page. Perhaps some other archiving tool isn't blocked, or you might be able to archive a Facebook page viewed via a proxy, but I'm not sure how reliable a source that would be. Certes (talk) 10:55, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
This really isn't a Wikipedia problem, you may want to bring it up with those other services. Note, you may use an actual citation, even if it isn't "archived" with a third party. — xaosflux Talk 16:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

The new temporary user accounts and old scripts

I know you've all heard about m:IP masking for years now, but I have "new news": You can see a v-e-r-y early, barely past the demo stage, version of the new temporary accounts live on the German-language Beta Cluster. Have a look at https://de.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/User_talk:*Unregistered_3304 to see the current version.

(A "temporary user" is what an IP editor will be called in the future, only hopefully with fewer communication problems. See mw:User account types for a tentative comparison chart.)

Introducing a new account type has the potential to break some scripts, but mostly things didn't seem catastrophic to me. So far, I can tell you that:

  • User:PleaseStand/userinfo.js seems to mostly work, except that it says "A registered user, 15 hours old, with 1 edit. Last edited 15 hours ago. From Wikipedia" when it ought to say something like "A temporary user, 15 hours old..."
  • m:MoreMenu seems to work, although a few of the listed tools might not work optimally.
  • There are a couple of globally locked temporary accounts there (e.g., User:*Unregistered 2865) but I didn't see any locally blocked accounts, so I can't tell whether MediaWiki:Gadget-markblocked.js is going to recognize them. (I assume so, but I can't check.)

AIUI the plan is for admins and other trusted users to be able to see the actual IP address for temporary accounts – that's necessary for anyone who's planning to do a range block – but I'm not an admin there, so I can't test that, either. If you need rights to be able to do testing, then it's usually available upon request, though I can't find the page where you're supposed to post the request.

I don't think that the usernames will continue to follow the format of "User:*Unregistered 12345". (They're likely to be shortened so that they no longer have an English word in them.) If you need to know something about the account names/type, I'm happy to go ask the team, but there's a chance that most answers will sound like "nobody knows just yet".

I'd love to hear from other folks about what they've tested. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:00, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I should add: This is months and months away from being seen here. It's good to check your favorite scripts and tools now, but this is absolutely not an emergency. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): fwiw, it currently seems like admins cannot see the "actual IP address for temporary accounts", unless I'm doing something wrong, which as always is highly likely! If you let me know your username on beta I'll +admin you. As for anyone else needing to request beta cluster user rights, that would normally be done by creating a phabricator task, though if there's going to be a number of requests it may be less spammy to list them here and ping me/another sysadmin instead? P.S. I'm guessing this shouldn't have worked? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 00:55, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps they haven't deployed that part of the code yet (or maybe they haven't even written it). I can tell you that it is currently the plan for admins and some non-admins to see the IP numbers. I understand that an official announcement to that effect is forthcoming from Legal (in March? These things always take longer than I think they will). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
About the user rights: I'm pretty sure that wasn't intended, but it looks like it could be a misbug to me. Depending on what it did on the backend, that might let people convert temporary accounts to regular accounts. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
If they're going to start with *, what are the chances someone will finally fix T14974 so templates don't break all over the place? Anomie⚔ 02:12, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Yeah.... I immediately thought of that one. @Whatamidoing (WMF) Izno (talk) 02:26, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. Is "Things like {{u|*Unregistered_12345}} will break everywhere" the simplest explanation I can pass along to the team? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
It only breaks for some templates. {{u|*Unregistered_12345}} appears to work but {{user21|*Unregistered_12345}} breaks badly. It would be awful to make huge numbers of usernames starting with an asterisk. The only worse naming scheme I can think of is something with an equals sign which would be interpreted as a parameter assignment in template arguments. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:25, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. Is there anything else to say about the asterisk being particularly bad? (I think Special:Search ignores asterisks as the first character.)
Do you have any suggestions? I suspect that they're looking for something that is uncommon (=fewer existing accounts to rename), available in almost all scripts, and ideally easy to find/type on most mobile keyboards. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
User:*Treker had problems and was eventually renamed to User:StarTrekker. At User talk:StarTrekker#Wrestling AFD they wrote "My username can be hard to ping sometimes do to the use of * in it." Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 155#Usernames containing wikimarkup and {{db-meta}} mentions a problem with {{REVISIONUSER}} on *Treker. The rename means it can no longer be seen for that user but I made a similar example. [[Carlos Government]] was last edited by [[User:{{REVISIONUSER:Carlos Government}}]] produces the broken:
Carlos Government was last edited by [[User:
  • and Obelisk]].
It should have said: "Carlos Government was last edited by User:* and Obelisk". No templates were involved. It's MediaWiki itself which fails. Special:ListUsers/* should have shown usernames starting with an asterisk to evaluate the current size of the issue here at enwiki but I just discovered that link itself also fails! This works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers?username=*. There are just too many things which break for usernames starting with an asterisk. It's a mess we shouldn't actively magnify to epic proportions. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:52, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Looks like the problem with Special:ListUsers/* is the same as for Special:ListUsers/user, the code specifically handles those two strings as values for the "Group" dropdown, similar to how Special:ListUsers/sysop lists admins rather than users starting with "sysop". Special:ListUsers/*/* works to list users starting with the character (as does Special:ListUsers/*/sysop). Anomie⚔ 14:33, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
I'll add that we just stopped the creation of new accounts with an equals sign (=) because it also messes with templates, so starting usernames with an asterisk would be similarly annoying. There is a valid question of why we allow characters with special meaning in wikitext syntax in usernames and titles at all, but it's kind of difficult to close that can of worms... Legoktm (talk) 04:54, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
In the past, I got around the *Treker problem by encoding the asterisk: *Treker (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · logs · block log · arb · rfc · lta · SPI · cuwiki) and this works for the one mentioned above: *Unregistered_12345 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · logs · block log · arb · rfc · lta · SPI · cuwiki). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:59, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I once made {{Encodefirst}} to automate that for all four special characters : ; * # (usernames cannot start with : or contain #). {{user21|{{Encodefirst|*Unregistered_12345}}}} works like your manual encoding: *Unregistered_12345 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · logs · block log · arb · rfc · lta · SPI · cuwiki). But we shouldn't rely on workarounds one template at a time on one wiki at a time. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:14, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

A way to catch API warnings in Python

In retrieving talk page revision histories I occasionally get this warning: WARNING: API warning (result): This result was truncated because it would otherwise be larger than the limit of 12,582,912 bytes. I've tried using try/catch to catch these and also tried the advice here to import warnings and then use warnings.filterwarnings("error") to make them behave as errors, but that still didn't let me catch them. Is there some other way to detect this warning? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Character restrictions?

Why are Kelvin sign, Angstrom sign, and Ohm sign unusable in page titles? Why do they get simplified to K, A with a ring, and Omega? Cmnpt (talk) 17:50, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Have a look at unicode compatibility characters. -- zzuuzz (talk) 19:18, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Graph:Chart - Party color template

Is it possible that the template can be adapted to accept the "party color" template, instead of only adding hex colours? ValenciaThunderbolt (talk) 12:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

The {{Party color}} template returns the hex string representing the colour, so you can pass it to the {{Graph:Chart}} template as one of the colours specified as a value for the |color= parameter. isaacl (talk) 22:12, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Doesn't work, hence the reason why I asked. ValenciaThunderbolt (talk) 22:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Can you provide an example? That would make it easier to understand what is going wrong. isaacl (talk) 22:22, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
I explained the problem at Template talk:Graph:Chart#Party Colours. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
@Isaacl: Here. ValenciaThunderbolt (talk) 22:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
I see the discussion there has found that the {{Party color}} template is returning a string with the leading number sign (#) encoded. Because of the way HTML works, this is suitable for passing as a style attribute (such as is done with {{Color box}}) but it doesn't seem to be suitable for the {{Graph:Chart}}. I suggest asking at Module talk:Political party about the feasibility of having an option so that the unencoded hex string can be returned by {{Party color}}. isaacl (talk) 22:57, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
@Isaacl: Will do, once I've heard back from Link20XX. ValenciaThunderbolt (talk) 22:58, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Horizontal TOC disappears after Logout

Hi, Recently I changed my userpages. On this one here,the horizontal toc {{horizontal TOC|nonum=yes}} no longer displays after Logout. Before writing here, I did several tests including with Monobook & Vectorlegacy skin, in addition to Timeless; plus Purge Cache; still same issue. And I'm clueless of how to solve. JoeNMLC (talk) 03:39, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Vector 2022 has the TOC in the left hand sidebar. You don't need an htoc then. Izno (talk) 04:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I placed the Horizontal-TOC into Helpful tools box so the Horiz.-wikilinks display there. And it looks good with Timeless skin. After Logout, and page refresh, I see those wikilinks are now at the Left sidebar. That's Ok I guess since my user chosen Skin is no longer in effect. I know of code ?useskin=timeless appended to URL on a page-by-page basis. Curious if any other option/gadget to keep the User Skin even after logout? JoeNMLC (talk) 08:37, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Options and gadgets only work for users; you could try a browser extension to add that ?useskin parameter to your requests, but keep in mind it will not work for anyone else looking at the page. — xaosflux Talk 10:36, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Some other things are possible with url's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?uselang=fr changes interface language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example?withgadget=UTCLiveClock loads a gadget but it requires the gadget has supportsUrlLoad at MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_grandmasters?withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-StickyTableHeaders.js&withCSS=MediaWiki:Gadget-StickyTableHeaders.css loads the js and css page for a gadget without supportsUrlLoad. withJS and withCSS use code in MediaWiki:Common.js so most wikis don't have it. For security reasons we only allow to load pages in the MediaWiki namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:02, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
 Done Thanks for the info. JoeNMLC (talk) 16:22, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

TOC limits in Vector 2022

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T317818

{{TOC limit}} doesn't seem to do anything in Vector 2022, and that breaks the layout of the TOC of some pages like WP:FAC, see WT:FAC. Can someone fix this for the poor folks who use Vector 2022? —Kusma (talk) 16:50, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

There is no way to fix that template in order to customise the TOC in Vector22. I don't see any issue with the TOC at WP:FAC either. There is a phab task relating to being able to customise the TOC, let me see if I can find it again. Terasail[✉️] 16:59, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
See phab:T317818 for customising the TOC levels in vector 2022. There is also phab:T300973 for information about the autocollapsing nature of the TOC. Terasail[✉️] 17:02, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. This task should really have been solved; it makes Vector2022 break many uses of the TOC outside of article space. —Kusma (talk) 17:39, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
See this discussion at the template's talk page. I wonder if it is possible to tweak the template's styles.css file to force TOC levels to appear selectively in Vector 2022. It works in my common.css file. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:05, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
It is not possible. Izno (talk) 18:24, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Previously notified at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 204#Template:TOC limit does not appear to work with Vector 2022. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:15, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Spell checking accented words

Numerous English words derived from other languages can be written with accents, e.g., résumé, and the spell checker treats that as an error. Similarly, some words are properly spelled with a diaresis, e.g., naïvely, and, again, the spell checker treats it as an error. It would be helpful if either the spell checker included both accented and unaccented forms or, after failing to find an accented word in its dictionary, tried again after removing the accents; the first is preferable. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 11:37, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Chatul: We don't have a spellchecker. It's a feature in your browser. Wikipedia:Spellchecking mentions some external spellcheckers. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:45, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-09

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

  • Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [14][15]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
  • All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [16]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:45, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity: latest edit before going read-only – Special:Diff/1142274295 and first edit after Special:Diff/1142274296. Just two minutes of the wiki being read-only, cool! —⁠andrybak (talk) 14:09, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Photo sometimes not appearing correctly

As discussed at the Teahouse, this photo has been cropped, but on its only article sometimes it appears correctly, and sometimes the old version appears cramped into the updated aspect ratio. Can anyone help? If it is useful in solving the problem, the crop was made just moments before technical updates earlier today. -- Slugger O'Toole (talk) 20:36, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Things could just be running slow? The file was only cropped 6 hours ago. I only see the most recent version, but this does remind me of this from last month. Terasail[✉️] 20:53, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
We are running on old thumbnail software. Try uploading it on https://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org. If that works, then it will fix itself in Q3 of this year, if not, well, it is not going to be fixed. Snævar (talk) 23:33, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I am not technical enough to start playing in the beta software, so I just uploaded a new version of the photo. Seems to be working fine now. Thanks. -- Slugger O'Toole (talk) 01:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Line breaks in cite bundles

Hey, trying to do the line break style of WP:CITEBUNDLE without <br> which is apparently problematic. The templates don't seem to work, e.g. {{unbulleted list citebundle}} and {{unbulleted list}} look the same. {{multiref2}} seems to have an inconsistent line gap. Is that possible please? Thanks, Indagate (talk) 17:41, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Indagate: Where did you encounter the problem? Please add links when possible. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:27, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Applies to all articles and refs when trying to merge two refs. The two examples in {{unbulleted list citebundle}} that should be different, are the same. Thanks, Indagate (talk) 22:02, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
They're different for me, whether logged out or logged in. The {{unbulleted list citebundle}} one has no line break betweeen the caret and the words "For the sun's size", whereas the {{unbulleted list}} one does have a line break. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:28, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Ah, looks the same my side, please see screenshot https://ibb.co/0c57TTp. Thanks, 11:38, 2 March 2023 (UTC) Indagate (talk) 11:38, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

New version of file not appearing in article

This may be related to Section "Photo sometimes not appearing correctly" immediately above but I'm unsure, so I'm separating them. Yesterday I uploaded to Commons two version of the file c:File:Glucosinolate_biosynthesis.svg, the second to add the word "Glucose" which I had missed in error under arrow (6). I incorporated the image in the article Glucosinolate. Now, despite bypassing my cache, I still see the first version in the article and it is the also the version appearing in Commons at the top of the file's page, until I click on the image there, which displays the new version! In addition I have used a different PC on another network to look at the image in Glucosinolate, an article that PC has never previously viewed: and the image is still missing the update. Both PC are running MS Windows 10 with Edge browser. Any suggestions? Mike Turnbull (talk) 12:44, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

I think this is most likley the same thing. It is also a WP:Thursday though. I see the new version when I open the article or the image page though. I went and purged the file and article just incase that helps but there isn't much else we can do to help with this unfortunately. Terasail[✉️] 14:16, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
@Terasail Thanks, the thread you pointed out (above) from last month gave me an idea which worked. I edited the glucosinolate article to tweak the image size from 700px to 720px and the correct later version of the image is now there for me. Interestingly, when I edit that section of the article and put the size back to 700px, a preview gives the first (wrong) version of the image. I'm not going to take this further but some expert might like to get to the bottom of this behaviour.... Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:11, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
re: the preview thing, Wikipedia:Teahouse#Strangely formatted text in page preview may possibly be related. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 17:51, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
The Teahouse thread is about an unrelated cache issue in Page Previews, fixed by purging. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:32, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

External editor support

Provide support for the use of external editors. At a minimum

  1. Provide navigation to special:export and special:import
  2. Provide for export and import of the page or section being edited.

Cut and paste is not a viable workaround in environments with a size limit on the clipboard. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 11:45, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Chatul: You didn't name your environment but Help:Text editor support has some possibilities. A preference to use an external editor was removed in 2013. The feature was documented at mw:Manual:External editors. PrimeHunter (talk)
To whit, nobody used it. Izno (talk) 21:08, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
The cited article relies heavily on use of the clipboard, which has size limits. Import and export of files is already there; they just need some documentation and links for new editors. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 21:25, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
The overwhelming majority of "new editors" are not going to muck about with XML files; and xmlimport is highly restricted. As far as "size limits", our pages have size limits which should be well below the clipboard size of modern computers. — xaosflux Talk 11:37, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
The XML generated by special:export is optional; I've used it to download just the wikitext without a hitch. I see no reason that new editors, if they knew about it, would have a problem using it. As for wiki size limit, that doesn't apply to the user name space, which is where I needed it. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:31, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
@Chatul All pages in all namespaces can be a maximum of 2Mb, this is set by mw:Manual:$wgMaxArticleSize. AFAIK every modern computer system should be able to handle 2Mb in the clipboard. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 15:12, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
I am using a legacy system and have gotten truncation on paste of overly long lines.. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:46, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
@Chatul can you point to a page with this issue? Can you provide an example command/sring you are using for a non-xml "special:export" for an example? — xaosflux Talk 16:01, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
I misspoke; I had to manually delete the front and back after exporting User:Chatul/References# Hardware timeline with special:export. Still, that's not the same as having to parse the XML. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:46, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Language populated category redirects

Somebody seems to have changed something in the language settings for reference templates that is causing articles using Maori-language sources to appear in the redirect Category:CS1 Māori-language sources (mi) instead of Category:CS1 Maori-language sources (mi). Can anyone locate the problem and fix it? Timrollpickering (talk) 11:17, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Timrollpickering This was caused by this update to mw:Extension:CLDR which handles language codes in lua via mw.language.fetchLanguageName. In that update the definition of "mi" was changed from "Maori" to "Māori". 192.76.8.84 (talk) 11:36, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Misformated reference generated by {{wikidata}}

When a reference on Wikidata includes the "author name string" qualifier, the resulting citation (on Wikipedia) is formatted improperly. See the reference 1 in GNU GRUB for example. My opinion is that it should be formatted the same way as when the "author" (P50) qualifier is used. The problem is probably related to Module:Wd/i18n, and it could be probably solved by adding [aliasesP.authorNameString] = "author" between the lines 60 and 71. However, I'm not experienced in programming of modules, so I would be glad if an experienced user implemented the fix. Thanks. Janhrach (talk) 11:54, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Note: I've started implemeting the fix, for discussion see Module talk:wd. Janhrach (talk) 15:03, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Phantom redirects

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here about a one-off oddball situation where somebody had added categories to a draft first and then moved the page into mainspace second, with the result that a phantom redirect from the draftspace title was showing up in an incategory search for draft or userspace pages in Category:Living people despite there not actually being any categories on that redirect. I was able to resolve that situation by moving the page back into draftspace, wrapping the categories in the {{draft categories}} template, waiting until it finally dropped from the incategory search, and then moving the page back into articlespace again.

I had never seen anything like this before, and I hadn't seen anything like it again since...until today, when the same issue recurred not once, not twice, but five times.

The affected titles this time were:

Again, I was able to get all the phantom redirects out of the category by the same process as the prior time — moving the pages back into draftspace, wrapping the categories and then moving the page back to mainspace again once the phantom dropped out of the search — but now the incategory search is not giving me the "There were no results matching the query." message that it's supposed to display (and still does if I search any other category that doesn't have any draftspace titles in it), but just gives me a blank list. And, of course, I'm deeply uninterested in this becoming a regular occurrence that has to be dealt with on a daily basis. Since phantom redirects shouldn't be showing up in that search at all, and indeed never did before the past couple of weeks, can somebody look into why this is happening and fix it? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 23:03, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Sixth instance of this now, at User:Streetlampguy301/Paul Badré → Paul Badré. Bearcat (talk) 23:12, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
For seven, Draft:Marcin Oleksy → Marcin Oleksy. Bearcat (talk) 23:32, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
This seems familiar, and that prior information is that category updates are not guaranteed to happen in real time in such cases. — xaosflux Talk 23:33, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't see one already, so feel free to open a bug report ; looks like your problem is something like "Sometimes, when a page that is in categories is renamed and a redirect is left, the redirect is left in categories". — xaosflux Talk 23:43, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
AFAIK adding or removing categories is handled by deferred updates/the job queue, so there may be a delay in processing updates when the servers are heavily loaded. You should be able to force the server to remove the categories by using the API with action=purge and forcelinkupdate=1 192.76.8.84 (talk) 11:06, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
As I clarified the first time, the problem was not attributable to the normal operation of the job queue at all — the job queue was not lagging to any significant degree, and would successfully clear any and all other pages in the search within 45 seconds to one minute at most, while these phantom redirects were the only pages that would just linger for hours and hours and hours of continuing to not drop. So no, it was not and is not that the job queue is just a bit delayed sometimes: this was and is an entirely different problem. Bearcat (talk) 12:46, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
@Bearcat likely, and nothing seems to suggest any on-wiki process is the issue here -- this is database/software, so WP:BUG is the place to report this please. — xaosflux Talk 15:39, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Article nominated for deletion does not appear on daily list

I have nominated Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Holloway Beach, Queensland for deletion. However, I have found that it does not appear on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2023 March 3. What did I do wrong, what do I have to do? Thanks for any help. Cheers, Oalexander (talk) 17:29, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Oalexander: Your nomination is severely malformed. Read WP:AFDHOWTO to see how to do it correctly. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:32, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Notification from foreign Wikipedia? Registered account with my name??

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T21161

I am not sure where to ask this - so forgive me if this the wrong place. This issue may or may not be important, if it's important I definitely want to know, if it's not important, I'm curious and would still like to know, for peace of mind and curiosity's sake. I got a notification on the little bell at the top of the screen on Wikipedia, I clicked on it, apparently a user from the Uzbekistan Wikipedia has left me a message on my Uzbekistan language Wikipedia talk page for my username Carlwev welcoming me to the Uzbekistan Wikipedia. I cannot read Uzbek, but my browser can translate the page. I have an English language account, which I have used a lot, a French language account I have used a little. I have never read, edited or registered on the Uzbek Wikipedia, however when I follow the link in the notification the page says the account was registered about 4 hours before I'm writing this message. When I go to the Uzbekistan Wikipedia I am signed in and can edit under the same username and view the watchlist (although it's empty) under that username, but I can do that on any language Wikipedia I have never used, like Spanish, I just checked. Does my username NAME work across all languages? Like the same no one else can make account with the same name as me in the English Wikipedia, is the same true for the Uzbek Wikipedia and Spanish, German etc, even if I have never visited them? I was not online at the time it says the account was registered, a few hours before and a few hours after, but not at the exact hour. What's going on?

  1. Was an account specifically set up around 4 hours ago by a person on that Wikipedia with my name?
  2. Have I accidently registered on a foreign account without meaning to and without realising?
  3. Has another person managed to register as me, my account on another language, without my knowledge or permission by accident, or on purpose, without knowing my password - Or does this mean someone has discovered my password?
  4. Did another person in Uzbekistan make an account with the same name, and the system allowed them to do so, but then linked my user to theirs? But then how could edit as them and view their watch list without putting in their password? Following that logic... Could they edit as me if they click to come over to English Wikipedia without inputting my password?
  5. Could the software have done this by itself, with no human involved?
  6. Although, the account has a name and a watchlist and the ability to edit. It has made no edits, has an empty watchlist, the userpage is not existent, has never been edited, and the user talk page only came into existence when the other user left a welcome message. How do people become aware of new users, if they have not yet made an edit. What would prompt another user to leave a message on a talk page of a username page name, that up to that point did not exist as a page, and never made an edit as a user? Do admins get notified of new registering users and welcome them (sounds normal in itself)

In short, I do not know if this is a software glitch of some kind. Or another person registered an account with the same name on a foreign Wiki, then the system linked them; but does that mean we can use each others account without inputting or knowing each others password. If this were true if I changed my password to protect my account, would it make no difference? Should I change my password as a precaution anyway? I will try to write a message on the user talk page with the same name as mine, and the one that left a welcome message, in English and in Uzbek, by using Google translate if possible. See if I get a response. But could this let someone know they may be able to access my account, like I can access theirs, if this is the case?

I am a little confused, this may be nothing or something, accidental or deliberate, it may lead to nowhere, or somewhere. Anyone have any idea what could cause this. Yes I know I sound a little paranoid.

The user page is here [17]

The usertalk page is here [18]

 Carlwev  17:18, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

@Carlwev, there is notng to worry about. Your account was connected to the Uzbekistan Wikipedia, which automatically created an account on that Wikipedia. I'm sure somehow who knows more about these things can explain further. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:26, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
@Carlwev: Don't panic, your account is safe this is expected behaviour of the unified login — your English Wikipedia account allows you to sign in to every Wikimedia project. Accounts are "created" when you first visit another project, so perhaps you inadvertently visited the Uzbekistan Wikipedia around that time? Special:CentralAuth/Carlwev shows some information about your unified account, such as the attached projects and when they "attached". — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 17:26, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
@Carlwev to add to the above replies, many other language Wikipedias have bot accounts which automatically add welcome templates to the talk pages of new accounts. Nthep (talk) 17:29, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
OK thanks for replies. Sounds like it's nothing to worry about. I was just surprised it happened at this time, I made an English account in 2006, French in 2007. I read the Uzbek Wikipedia began in 2003. I was just surprised it happened today, when my English account or the Uzbek Wikipedia have not started up today, nor done anything special today. I never remember getting notified about auto registering or being Welcomed on any other language on any other day - only Uzbek, and only today - It just felt really strange. Thank you for your replies, glad to hear it's probably nothing.  Carlwev  17:34, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
@Carlwev: uz:Special:Log/Carlwev shows your account was created 12:37 (UTC) today, 4 h 41 min before you saved your post here. The most common reason is that the user clicked a link to the wiki while logged in. The welcome post was at 16:00. I proposed to disallow such welcome posts at meta:Welcoming policy but it hasn't received much attention. As mentioned there, page imports can cause account creation and welcome messages to users who have never visited the wiki, but I see no signs of that in your case. I have received many of these annoying welcome posts but I'm registered at 370 Wikimedia wikis. Special:CentralAuth/Carlwev shows 88 for you. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:13, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
^--- That. I've attached to 800+ projects, and many have welcome bots, and some of automatic welcome notifications - nothing to worry about. — xaosflux Talk 18:29, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
There is an open task T21161 to stop this implicit autocreation. – Ammarpad (talk) 08:52, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Jun 11 2009, 5:00 PM. It annoys me how Wikimedia does this, but the fact that there has been a task open for fourteen years and it remains unfixed is ridiculous. BilledMammal (talk) 09:25, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Not that ridiculous. It took 7 years since that time just to get rid of all he duplicates. Turns out ppl get quite upset, when u tell them that they can no longer have their name because someone else had it before they did on a totally different wiki. Its been up to this year, just to have one database entry for names within one single wiki. At scale everything becomes hard —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:26, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
I should keep that in mind wrt Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 204#The new temporary user accounts and old scripts. Regardless of whether they choose "User:*12345" or a different pattern, we'll almost certain have to rename some accounts to prevent confusion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia server-side CSS preferences

Hi, all, I'd like to vet this idea at VPT for technical soundness before progressing it to another venue like VPP, Meta, or Phab.

I keep hearing that not-logged-in users ("anons" or "IPs", I'll use "NLI" here) can't have nice things like dark mode or width toggle, because the cache.

As I understand it in simple terms: any server-side preference that changes the rendered HTML causes alternate versions of pages, potentially millions of pages, to be stored in the caching layer. Unless the Foundation was to budget for more infrastructure, this would cause more cache misses and strain the back-end systems. (Logged-in users, like most of us reading this, already bypass the cache, and can have fun stuff like custom JS and CSS, which helps with community development of features. But there are relatively few of us compared to the NLI readership of the big Wikipedias.)

Here is the idea: if changing the rendered HTML on millions of pages causes problems, then don't. Instead have a single URL that selects different CSS resources at load time.

For illustration, say it's called theme.css. (Or skinname-theme.css, like with user and site-wide CSS.) All pages (in the relevant skins) get a line like <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/theme.css">. There is no cache split, because every page has the change.

Then the magic happens: the users' web browsers load the HTML from server cache, then they request theme.css. Their browsers send various cookies in the request, and the server can choose which version of theme.css to serve based on user preference.

Yes, there is an extra round-trip compared to pre-inlining all the CSS. But the impact on load time should be small.

What do you think? Could it work? Is there a less verbose way that I could explain it?

⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 00:01, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Well said. Verbose is good here. I half-explained a similar but much less complete idea myself, and I still think it's a good way forward. Certes (talk) 00:11, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
The point of a cache is so that work to determine the page to return for a URL is only done once, then that same output is served to everyone looking for the same page. If you get rid of the cache to save cache space, you're now spending a lot of CPU power and bandwidth on the application servers and so have caused a worse problem. Anomie⚔ 01:23, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
You can already select skins, gadgets and beta features to some extent using url parameters (?useskin=, ?withgadget=, ?dtenable=, ect..) the problem with using '/', how does the browser tell if it is supposed to load a subpage, or a skin, or is a user tring to create a subpage? It all gets a bit tricky. I think it is worth looking into alternatives, although I don't think URL selection is the best way forward for a few reasons, including the fact that anytime an outside source linked to a wikipage you could be served with a different skin. From what I have read the whole width toggle is now persistent for logged out users anyway so it appears that caching isn't entirely off the table. Terasail[✉️] 02:30, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Based on the phabricator ticket implementing the change, it's being done with Javascript, and not by adding more cached versions of pages. isaacl (talk) 02:41, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Can't say I have looked into it anymore than reading that it was made persistent a few weeks ago.Terasail[✉️] 02:43, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
HTTP requests from IP users aren't handled by an application server. A caching server simply maps the request to a file and returns it. This includes requests for a CSS file. It's fast as no logic is involved and no time is spent generating the contents of the response. isaacl (talk) 02:36, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
Just to highlight the "fast" issue:
The English Wikipedia gets about a quarter billion page views per day. This means that each second spent (on average) waiting for a page to load means that every 8 days, readers have been waiting the equivalent of one person's entire lifetime(!). An avoidable delay of a fraction of a second might not be noticeable at the time, but on our scale, it really does add up. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:48, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Agreed; as I mentioned elsewhere, milliseconds count when serving thousands of requests per second. Being able to simply copy a pre-composed response to a network connection back to the requesting browser, which can be done via various mechanisms without involving ongoing CPU processing, is as resource-efficient as it can get. Any slowdown doesn't just mean a delay in responsiveness to the user, but also a need to add more server capacity to handle the additional load. isaacl (talk) 22:47, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
I agree about the server load, Isaacl. That's why I was trying to think of a way that WMF could continue to cache the most files, and only add a single dynamic resource. (Great description in that linked post, BTW.) Even so, it would probably require extra investment in infrastructure and SRE. What they would be buying with that investment is (a structure that supports) a big feature uplift for our regular readers. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 19:14, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Generally speaking, caching servers are kept as dumb as possible, both so they can be fast and to simplify deployment of changes on the application servers. For example, there are skin-specific CSS files in the MediaWiki namespace that can be modified by interface administrators. Changing the caching servers to efficiently handle serving different CSS files for a given URL requested by different users could mean that an infrastructure ticket would have to be opened to co-ordinate resynching the cached stylesheet files with the on-wiki contents. I think for most UI customization options, relying on Javascript to apply the changes after the fact is probably the most practical approach for non-logged in users, even if it is sub-optimal for some scenarios. (For dark mode, it may mean delaying the responsiveness of the site to avoid initially displaying a bright version of the page.) isaacl (talk) 22:37, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi WAID! I get your point about collective burden, but when I'm acting as a reader, I don't care about “the sum of all human wait times”, I care about how long it takes for the page to become usable for me. The are two levels of “usable”: (1) content is rendered so I can begin to read and scroll; (2) layout is complete so that I can tap a link or button, and not have it shift under my finger to result in a tap on something else. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 23:40, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
@Pelagic I think this idea has a different kind of caching problem: lack of cache invalidation when the user changes their preferences.
When someone changes a preference like e.g. dark mode or limited content width, they expect these changes to take effect immediately; but with this scheme, the contents of theme.css would be cached for some time by the browser, and the user would still temporarily see the pages as if they didn't change their preferences, or would have to do a silly dance to clear the browser cache (you might be familiar with this from editing your own common.css/js, it's the exact same problem).
Alternatively, browser caching for theme.css could be disabled entirely, but this would result in slower page loads for everyone, even people who didn't customize their preferences (because they could customize them at any moment), and also more traffic for Wikimedia servers.
This is why we generally avoid dynamically generated CSS/JS, and use HTML markup to either control which code is loaded, or which features are enabled. Matma Rex talk 01:42, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Dang. Good point, @Matma Rex. We can't just tell people to ctrl+f5 after changing a cookie pref? If only there was a JavaScript API to invalidate the browser cache for a specific file.
You could send no-cache or must-revalidate with the theme file. On the client side, one extra round trip to get a 304 Not Modified isn't going to be much burden compared to the actual page load. On the server side, I don't dare suppose that Varnish can do cookie-conditional serving? What would it take to handle all the requests? A dedicated theme-server cluster? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 11:29, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
@Pelagic Well, we can, it just wouldn't be good user experience. Although you can't usually Ctrl+F5 on a phone, so that'd be a problem (and I guess it's tricky on some laptops too).
I believe Varnish can do anything, you just need to program it in a unique weird language. I have no experience with it, I just looked up where these files live out of curiosity.
Honestly, if I was magically tasked with implementing preferences for logged-out users, my preferred solution would be just making them bypass the HTML cache, and then implementing it in MediaWiki in the obvious way. I think bypassing the cache is well-understood, after all we do it for logged-in users all the time (and for logged-out users sometimes too – that's why the big orange banner about having a new user talk page message can work at all), and the whole thing would only affect users who use non-default preferences.
I don't know what it'd take to handle the extra traffic. It might have to be determined experimentally (by releasing on smaller wikis or to a fraction of users first). If it's on the order of 0.1% of users, like the usage of the current limited width toggle (if I'm understanding this correctly), I'd expect us to handle the traffic with no changes (we handle ~5K uncached requests per second [19] and ~160K cached requests per second [20], or ~3% uncached – if I'm understanding the charts correctly). But if the preferences were more prominent, it could be way higher.
Anyway, I am out of my depth here, please take all of the above with a grain of salt :) Matma Rex talk 13:01, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your thoughtful replies, Matma Rex. You seem to have considered caching issues quite a lot. The hit/miss numbers are good to learn: I wouldn't have known where to look. There's a lot of logic in that Varnish script, I'm still digesting it. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 19:45, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
I see that the Varnish script rewrites all requests for skin resources to Wikitech (lines 230–234) to avoid duplication. It also handles reading and changing headers and cookies. So it looks capable of both handling content selection itself and conditionally passing the request to the backend. Backend selection keeps the logic where dev's are accustomed to find it which may help maintainability. OTOH, if the aim of the cache is to reduce “back pain” (sorry, couldn't resist the pun), then offloading the processing to cache layer may better. It already runs a fair amount of code on each request. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 02:35, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Is there a way I can default to desktop on my iPad?

Because I see no benefits in the mobile version on my iPad. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 21:36, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

@Doug Weller, try User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion.js. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:46, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. Doug Weller talk 21:53, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
You could also press "Request Desktop Website" under the ᴀA icon if you're using Safari. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:39, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. Doug Weller talk 08:06, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Graph Markup Browser Inconsistencies

Resolved

Someone has created a graph, that you can see on Talk:Welsh republicanism which is displaying inconsistently. Although it displays correctly on Chrome, the line meanders in Safari on a Mac and and iPad, and in some other browsers too. The meandering line turns it into nonsense. Is this something that can be fixed from the Wikipedia side? Clearly not idea that the same markup should render so differently on different browsers. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 10:41, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

There is already discussion at Talk:Welsh republicanism#What Does This Mean?, it's probably best to keep it there and treat this thread as a notification of that discussion. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:35, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks to all who looked at this. The issue is now resolved. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 14:07, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Allocate me

Allocate me to load User:Headbomb/citations.js Twinkle1990 (talk) 14:04, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Twinkle1990: I'm not sure what you mean by "allocate me". Have you tried to enable "Citation expander" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:26, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes. I did. Twinkle1990 (talk) 02:07, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Twinkle1990: I'm not sure whether you mean you already tried that without success, or you have now done it and it's working. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:11, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
User:Headbomb/citations.js is not working for me. That is the issue. Twinkle1990 (talk) 04:24, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Twinkle1990: If you really want to use that script instead of the gadget then you have to load it in your account, e.g with this in your common JavaScript:
importScript('User:Headbomb/citations.js'); // Backlink: [[User:Headbomb/citations.js]]
PrimeHunter (talk) 05:03, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
It's already there. Twinkle1990 (talk) 05:17, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Twinkle1990: You added it after my post.[21] It wasn't there when you said it wasn't working. Please be more clear about whether something works. Does it work now when you actually load it? If not then which problem do you have with it? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:20, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter may be my browser issue. I must fix it. Twinkle1990 (talk) 13:39, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Twinkle1990: Probably not but we wouldn't know unless you decide to be a bit more detailed and specific. Do you get any errors? Does it not show up at all or fail while you're using it? You can also check your browser's console for errors; see Wikipedia:CONSOLEERROR. — DVRTed (Talk) 13:48, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't even see it. Twinkle1990 (talk) 13:59, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
@Headbomb: User:Headbomb/citations.js doesn't load in Vector 2022. MediaWiki:Gadget-citations.js made an update [22]. @Twinkle1990: Do you have a reason for wanting to use User:Headbomb/citations.js instead of enabling the gadget? Does the gadget work for you? PrimeHunter (talk) 19:37, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Not so. I should stay with gadget's one. Twinkle1990 (talk) 01:46, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Citation tool is down AGAIN!

Why is the tool server so damn delicate! It's out of order more than it actually works. It's high time WMF geeks threw some of their masdive pile of money at the tools we really need to use on a constant basis. </rant> Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:45, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Dodger67: See mw:How to report a bug. --Malyacko (talk) 16:12, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Userspace page transcluded into articlespace categories

User:Kazkaskazkasako/Work is showing up in Category:Species, in defiance of WP:USERNOCAT — but the category is not on the page, and is being artificially smuggled in via transcluded content. I can't figure out where the category is coming from, however — it's an extremely long page with hundreds of content transclusions on it. So can somebody figure out where the category is coming from so that the page can be removed from it? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 21:02, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Bearcat, Special:ExpandTemplates with the page content of that page says it is under the ===Biological classification=== section header, just before the table (or as part of the table). Izno (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
And removed. Izno (talk) 21:15, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. I couldn't tell which of the two templates at that spot might have been transcluding the category, but I tried wrapping both of them in {{suppress categories}} and it worked. So it was definitely one or the other. Muchas gracias! Bearcat (talk) 21:25, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Limited content width

Any specific reason why there's a "max-width: 60em;" for .vector-feature-page-tools-disabled .mw-content-container ? While i can understand the .mw-table-of-contents-container being limited (wouldn't want the left panel to grow too much into the page), i fail to see why the article isn't using the whole page width... :-| Or even if this would look bad on wide-screens, which i guess is why "Limited content width" exists, maybe 60 isn't all that great? Specific example, 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix, as it looks for me with and without LCW. (Admittedly, my screencaps exaggerate the difference a bit, since they were made on 90% zoom to capture a bit more of the article.) So would 100em perhaps still be okay for this feature? I mean, 80 chars was good enough for *old* command terminals, now i see i have mine by default at 120. So 60 seems quite low nowadays. :-) -- 89.121.253.228 (talk) 14:38, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

See mw:Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements/Frequently_asked_questions#Why_is_the_width_of_the_content_limited?. — xaosflux Talk 15:31, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
ems and chars are not equivalent, see MDN. One is (traditionally associated with) the width of an m in the font face, and the other the width of 0 (which apparently is somewhere in the realm of half an em by default). So it's closer to 120 columns.
That infobox is abnormally large. Probably should be closer to the default, and the tables removed in favor of some reasonable <br>s. Izno (talk) 19:01, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Well, not in the terminals, really... They use a fixed-width font, so an em will be quite equal to the size of each of the other characters. But okay, guess in time i'll get used to looking for the LCW toggle. -- 89.121.253.228 (talk) 20:36, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-10

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

  • The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
  • On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [23]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
  • A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [24]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

NOTOC and vector 2022

I'm using the new Vector skin and noticed that on a page like List of quarter tone pieces which uses {{Auto compact TOC}} (which uses the "NOTOC" magic word) the table of contents which appears on each article on the left side is not there. Is there a way in my user preferences to set it to ignore the NOTOC magic word? I find it very helpful for navigation to always see the ToC. Gonnym (talk) 12:12, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

@Gonnym: I don't think that is possible. mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Frequently asked questions#How do magic words work with this feature? mentions that NOTOC works. mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Repository has no feature to change it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Oh, thanks for pointing me to that. Ok, so follow up question. Is there a way in Lua (or in regular template code) to check the user's skin type? Gonnym (talk) 13:35, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
@Gonnym: No, and that is very unlikely to be implemented. The generation of wikitext is unrelated to skins and the same wikitext should be generated for all skins for caching reasons. But we can influence how a page is rendered in different skins with pages like MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css. This could be used to add a class to content which should be hidden or shown in a specific skin, but the resulting confusion may not be worth it for anything. I suppose we could omit __NOTOC__ and instead place __TOC__ in a class which is hidden in all skins in MediaWiki:Common.css. Then it would be hidden in the body but still show in the Vector 2022 sidebar. But this seems too hacky for me and has unwanted consequences, for example for reusers who copy our pages without copying our CSS. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:58, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
One could also hide the ToC only in some of the skins that show it inside .mw-parser-output in TemplateStyles. Nardog (talk) 14:01, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
This is being discussed and worked on in phab:T317818. XanonymusX (talk) 11:02, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Use of webkit prefix in signature

So I was hoping to do a gradient and I came up with this. SkyTheWolf (Talk) But dont know if it is allowed to be used due to the fact it uses webkit please let me know. SkyTheWolf (Talk) 18:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

In non-Webkit browsers it will look like this: SkyTheWolf which I suppose is acceptable. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:31, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
@Redrose64 If it was able to be longer length then just those characters I would make it check if it was supported by browser but I cant so its fine right? SkyTheWolf (Talk) 18:42, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
@Redrose64: What exactly is "webkit"? I'm curious now. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:43, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf: WebKit is the underlying engine that certain browsers like Safari and (at least some versions of) Chrome are based on. In this context, it refers to certain CSS features that were implemented as part of this engine, that aren't part of the CSS standard, so while said features will work correctly on WebKit browsers, there's no guarantee they'll work on any others. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 19:40, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
In fact, in almost all cases they will not work on others. There is a small set of "legacy" properties that the CSS standard writers said "all you other browsers need to support these" (mostly Chrome-specific properties), but support for those is lacking in most of the others. Izno (talk) 20:17, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Interesting. Never heard of WebKit before and I see why. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 20:19, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
I don't really love it, but it's not strictly against our rules (see Wikipedia:Signatures#Appearance and color and other sections). The contrast at the end is quite low, making the (...lf) hard to read in some cases - that's not specific to the "webkit" thing though. I don't recommend any of these, but if you can accomplish what you want with linear-gradient instead of the -webkit hack version, that may be more future proof. — xaosflux Talk 18:56, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
It fades because its a light color I can make it a darker version.
SkyTheWolf (Talk)
But it doesnt look good anymore. SkyTheWolf (Talk) 19:43, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
You can remove the webkit from the linear-gradient style. SkyTheWolf -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:54, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
linear-gradient is supported by all grade C browsers that MediaWiki supports. Compare caniuse with mw:Compatibility#Browser support matrix. Even were it the case that it were not supported by MediaWiki's supported browsers, you do not need the vendor-specific prefix and should use the standard property. Most properties will gracefully fallback.
Regarding the other properties, background-clip is well-supported by most browsers that visit MediaWiki (having done the work previously, page views are almost all > version 80 in the evergreen browsers; IE11 is really the only ancient browser at this point) with any sizeable page view count. See caniuse. Though apparently Chrome which needs the vendor-specific property still doesn't support text version.
text-fill-color is one of those "legacy" properties I mentioned earlier, but as such is apparently supported. Izno (talk) 20:14, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Newlines in templates?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T331486

When I run the visual editor on UTF-8, the table in UTF-8#Codepage layout blows up. The affected cells appear to be ones with a &#10 inserted in the {{chset-cell1}} template. That's an ASCII newline. Is this a bug in VE? Or just plain template/table layout abuse? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:59, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that character entities are permitted in HTML title= attributes. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:27, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
That's the only way to include some obvious characters like ' and ". I think it is more likely a bug in VE. However, I don't see &#10; in that template's source? Izno (talk) 20:12, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
It's probably not going to render properly here, but using "edit source", look right after the "U+00BF" in:
{{chset-cell1|U+0080—U+00BF&#10;Latin-1 Supplement|[[Latin-1 Supplement (Unicode block)|2]]|style=background:#DFD}}
-- RoySmith (talk) 21:24, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Oh, you mean in the source of the table? Yeah, I see it. I'd just remove it. I don't see any reason for it to be there at all. Even if there's a VE bug, which I guess you could file if you wanted. Izno (talk) 21:30, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

The mysterious "SecurePoll" namespace

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T264476

I was looking into Test Wikipedia when I found a particularly unusual namespace. Some namespaces are restricted and can only be edited by users with certain rights, like the Gadget namespace here for example. However, "SecurePoll" catches my attention because it is extremely unusual not because it can't be edited by normal users, but because the "edit" action isn't even existent. If you attempt to edit or create a page in "SecurePoll" namespace, it will say "view source" or "no permission," but it won't tell you why when you click and it will just say "no such action." In fact, several other actions have been disabled for this namespace as well. When I want to see how the pages were created in the first place, the pages I checked only have one revision and is impossible to view how it was created. Information, such as the content model, rights needed to edit, and text added, is impossible for me to access. Can someone explain this mysterious namespace? Cmnpt (talk) 04:01, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

It's part of the mw:Extension:SecurePoll extension WMF occasionally uses for running votes --Chris 05:48, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
So it can be edited, just not in the normal way? Cmnpt (talk) 05:57, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Cmnpt it is where configuration data may be stored from securepoll, and you would trigger udpates (if you had permission) via testwiki:Special:SecurePoll. If we ever get "local" securepolls, we could see it here, but for now it won't exist here. — xaosflux Talk 15:20, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Pages load in basic HTML format

Hello! So I've noticed that today, whenever I go to any page, it loads normally initially, then it loads in a basic HTML format, and then it loads normally again. I don't exactly know what's going on here, however it doesn't seem to be browser specific as it happens both in the latest version of Opera GX and the latest version of Google Chrome. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:34, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: I suspect a flaky connection somewhere, see FOUC. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:41, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
@Redrose64: ah alright. Is this something that needs to be fixed on my end or is it something on Wikipedia's end? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:47, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
It could be either, or both, or anything in between. You could try the old chestnut "turn it off, wait a minute, turn it on again" (including your router, if you're not using somebody else's). But that probably won't make any difference unless the whole of the problem is at your end. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Tried turning off my wifi for 30 seconds, no difference. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:27, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
Ok this is really starting to get annoying. Anyone know a solution? I'm willing to try safemode to see if it's one of my userscripts that is causing this issue. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 20:02, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf, I have the same problem. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:06, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm glad it's not just me. I was starting to think it was. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 21:07, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
When you say "basic HTML format", do you mean the text appears completely unstyled? Usually this means there was a delay in loading the stylesheets for the page. Does it happen when you browse Wikipedia, without logging in, from an anonymous / incognito brower window? If so, are you using the wide content width setting for anonymous users? I don't know the details of how it was implemented so am not sure if it might be delaying the loading of the stylesheets. isaacl (talk) 02:09, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Issacl: Bold of you to assume I'm using Vector 2022. But in all seriousness, the wide content width doesn't seem relevant here. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 02:27, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
I didn't (in fact, I assume the opposite, based on my vague memory of what you've said in the past, but I didn't go and doublecheck). I was asking what you see when you try to browse without logging in from an anonymous browser window, and thus without any extra gadgets or user scripts running that might possibly interfere with the stylesheets loading. In that scenario, you would be using the Vector 2022 skin. isaacl (talk) 02:46, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Ah. Lemme look. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 03:01, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Ok so I did that and I also added &safemode=1 to my URL and the issue went away which means it's one of my userscripts/gadgets/CSS things. So... that's gonna be fun to dig through. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:36, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Sine Qwerfjkl also said they had the issue I might see ask them what userscripts/gadgets/whatever they use to see what is common between us to make the search easier. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:40, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Issue seems to have been resolved. Turns out it was Ingenuity's AntiVandal script which he fixed. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 16:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion tools on mobile Wednesday

It'll look like this.

Hey, all,

As promised in mid-January and announced in Tech/News, editors on the mobile site will get the rest of DiscussionTools. They said they'd schedule if for this coming Wednesday, 3 March.

This is mostly visual changes, like adding a note about when the most recent comment was posted. If you want to see what this looks like, try these links:

Mobile version: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtenable=1

Desktop equivalent (enable in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures if you want this now): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtenable=1

The numbers look good from the previous tests, and it was rolled out to the other half of the wikiverse two weeks ago, so I'm not expecting any problems. But if anything unexpected comes up, you know how to ping me... Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF), today is 3 March. I gather you meant 8 March? :) Izno (talk) 21:42, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
I gather you meant 8 March? :)
Great spot, @Izno – thank you for saying something.
This deployment is scheduled for Wednesday, 8 March 2023. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
wikitech:Deployments says it's scheduled for the late backport window, so this should happen in about four and a half hours. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Deleting js and css pages

Is there any way to delete my js and css pages like User:ImmortalWizard/common.js since I no longer want to use them? IW. (talk) 18:47, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@ImmortalWizard: You can tag your CSS/JS pages with {{Db-u1}} — WP:U1 notes that the template does not display on certain pages (such as .css and .js pages), but its categorization will work. I'd suggest blanking the CSS/JS page before adding the {{Db-u1}} template — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 19:25, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, that works. Alternatively, find an active admin and ask them nicely. —Kusma (talk) 19:31, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Yup just tag them, if tagging is giving you a problem tag the talk page with a note. For the "main" ones like common.js, I suggest you just blank them though - in case you want ever see what was in it before. — xaosflux Talk 19:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
You can also just blank it, there's really no reason to delete your common.js/css unless you want to hide something from their history, as you'll likely come across another script or tweak you want to install. Nardog (talk) 21:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Bullet-indent-talkquote-next-paragraph bug

If you start a comment with *: (or similar), and then you use {{tq2}} or {{talkquote}}, and you want to put another comment after the tq2, *: leaves the trailing bullet (doesn't continue the list markup in HTML, it's rendered as a new list), and :: won't line it up right (because colons and bullets have different indents), and paragraph breaks don't work after the tq2 for whatever reason, and a <br> after the tq2 (or nothing after the tq2) will make the next line appear as if it's in {{code}}.

Is there any fix? TrangaBellam (talk) 12:45, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 This is being caused by this edit of yours I believe? The extra newline is creating a new bulleted list after the template? 192.76.8.84 (talk) 13:52, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
Quite possibly. Please link to an example. I am unable to parse that long sentence. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:08, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 Try the following 

*:Foo
*:{{tq2|bar}}
*:buzz

You get a second bullet point in front of "buzz" because the newline is creating a new list. 192.76.8.84 (talk) 14:11, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

I see what you mean. Indenting block content is tricky, and it often does not work as one would hope. The template code has some compromises built into it in order to make it work in the majority of circumstances. Feel free to experiment in the sandbox and on the testcases page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:22, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
As a general rule, the <noinclude>...</noinclude> wrapping the post-template code (documentation, categories, etc.) must follow the "real" template code directly, without intervening spaces or line breaks. This is because the MediaWiki template parser first transcludes the whole of the template source and then strips out the noincluded portions, and doesn't perform a subsequent whitespace trim. So that extra newline ends up in the transcluding page, usually with undesirable effects, such as the terminated list described here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:55, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
@Redrose64 The extra newline was added deliberately, per the HTML comment. If you look at the testcases here [25] you can see how the bullet after the template is broken now. The problem is that this particular way of fixing that issue causes WP:LISTGAP problems, as complained about by the op. 192.76.8.84 (talk) 21:28, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
That's not a fix though. Anyway, someone who actually wants to include some block content should do like so:
  • Content

    * Content {{tq2|Quoted content}} Some more content.

    Some more content.
If you want to be able to do a list after, you have to use one of the inline lists like {{bulleted list}}. These are well known and resolved issues, and adding the whitespace there makes it worse to deal with them and less consistent ultimately, not easier. Izno (talk) 21:51, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
The hard part is that on a talk page, it would mean converting everyone's previous comments to be encompassed in the template, and subsequent commenters would have to go along, and I just don't see this happening. I guess you can put the talk quote block inside an extra list nesting level to encapsulate it. Let's start an additional bulleted list to make the issue more clear:
  • Commenter A
  • Commenter B: inserting a talk quote block inside an {{unbulleted list}}:

    • This is the first sentence inside the talk quote block. I can't get this to work properly with a second paragraph inside the talk quote block.

  • Commenter C
So that seems to avoid closing all the lists after the talk quote block and re-opening them. However, as I said within the talk quote block, it only seems to work with one paragraph. When I tried to add another, it was placed outside of the <blockquote> element. isaacl (talk) 22:31, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
If you're quoting multiple paragraphs in one template, you're going to have issues regardless, because the parser simply cannot handle that situation. Leaving the space in the template however breaks it for everyone who wants to use it in a not-first-level comment, which is most people. Izno (talk) 22:43, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
I personally agree that I don't think the extra white space should be added. However, my quick test using preview mode on a change to the sandbox showed that without the intentionally left space, the test case with a following list item resulted in that list item being outside of any lists (which is visible with a bulleted list item by a smaller than normal bullet), so it's broken without it, too. I don't know the ins and outs of the parser well enough to suggest a better fix. If encapsulating the talk quote block in an unbulleted list template helps, can some additional markup be added within the template that would accomplish something similar? isaacl (talk) 22:58, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
The live version of the test case I added when I was troubleshooting this problem looks pretty messed up to me. The new bulleted list called "Bullet after" after the tq box is left-indented to a place where no bulleted list should end up, at least in my browser and skin. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:44, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
That is caused by putting the end curly braces on the same line as the end of the list. Parser.php will screw that up regardless and is an issue with the fact it's not a true parser. It is fixed by Parsoid, though in the mean time you can just move the end curlies to the next line. Izno (talk) 03:05, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Isaac, Izno, Jonesey: Isn't the real fix for all of these problems phab:T230683, namely that we create some new wikitext syntax that means "please don't let my formatting screw up the rest of the page"? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Sure, the basic problem is that wikitext isn't expressive enough to cover this scenario, so the ultimate fix is to expand wikitext syntax. We're just discussing what might be possible in the meantime. isaacl (talk) 18:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
This seems to be blocked on available dev time, but the question that looms larger in my own mind is: Would you all rather see <<<This protective code>>> or {:That protective code:} in a diff? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:07, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF), I don't think either are useful. As I think I said on that task/near it, no-one is going to know to close the block and then we still have the problems we do, someone will have to fix/explain what happened. Editors are very much used to thinking in "open tag", not "open and close tag".
I've already given my opinion on what syntax I prefer.
Besides that, Anomie was doing a good job disagreeing for me. Izno (talk) 22:43, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

New prototype for Vector 2022. Visual separation between regions

Hi everyone. Thank you all for your continued involvement and participation in the conversation around the Vector 2022 skin. Over the past two weeks, we have been focusing on addressing one of the main concerns which has come out of the feedback around the skin so far - the separation of content and overall brightness of the interface. As we've shared before, we've been working on a few prototypes around this and have finally settled on a final prototype we would like to get your feedback on. We also want to have a conversation around how we want to measure the potential changes as compared to the current layout. We've posted more details and specific questions on the talk page of the project – we welcome your feedback and questions there! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Delete request

Anyone on Russian Wiktionary who could delete my user page? Cmnpt (talk) 02:24, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

 Done - next time you could post at meta:Steward requests/Miscellaneous after it has been tagged for a reasonable period. — xaosflux Talk 03:13, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Non-working script to "Highlight duplicate links"

To enable detection of duplicate links for a large article, I imported the script - importScript('User:Evad37/duplinks-alt.js'); - to my User:Zefr/common.js page, and it seemed to be active. When in edit mode to activate it to show duplicate links, it reports "no duplicate links were detected", but another editor tells me there are numerous duplicates. Solution, please? Zefr (talk) 16:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

@Zefr: Please give steps to reproduce so we can see whether you are using the script correctly and test it for ourselves. I clicked the "Edit" tab on Hummingbird for a source edit of the whole page, clicked "Show preview", clicked "Highlight duplicate links", and many links in the rendered preview were marked, e.g. iridescent in the first paragraph of Hummingbird#Description. Did you remember to preview first? Was Hummingbird the page? Did you edit the whole page? PrimeHunter (talk) 18:08, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for checking, PrimeHunter. I copied the script from the User:Evad37/duplinks-alt.js page, then followed instructions to refresh my script page to activate it, appearing to work because it reports as active and shows on my left toolbar. I notice this possible glitch from early Feb.
When I go to identify dup links while editing the Hummingbird article, the tool shows as active, but reports no dups. I tried the upper right preview function, but that didn't correct the issue. Is there a different script one can use to check for duplicate links? Zefr (talk) 18:26, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
@Zefr, maybe the next step in de-bugging this is to use it on a sandbox page that definitely contains multiple copies of the same link. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:10, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
Hummingbird does. I gave an example marked by the script for me. @Zefr: Many tools can affect editing. Does it also fail on the rendered article before you try to edit? What is your browser, and your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:33, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
The script is now working. Thanks for your prompt attention and recommendations for solving this issue. Zefr (talk) 04:01, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot malfunction

Fyi, InternetArchiveBot has malfunction as seen with tons of edits [26][27][28][29] made by it where it would archive again by adding Webarchive template even for those citations that are already archived. I did a quick scan/count through the contributions shows more than 50+ articles were affected by this malfunction with the count still increasing as of this comment. I have reported the issues on the bot's page at Meta however maybe consider blocking the bot temporarily to prevent it from causing further havoc. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 16:02, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Ping to bot operator: @Cyberpower678: — xaosflux Talk 16:14, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
Looking —CYBERPOWER (Around) 17:10, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
A transient issue caused the template definitions to get dropped. Bot has been rebooted. —CYBERPOWER (Around) 17:14, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678 Thanks for the speedy fix. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 02:58, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

On the latest run of Special:WantedCategories, there's one redlinked category, Category:2010 Winter Olympics ice hockey group standings templates that is already entirely empty of articles, yet the list still insists that there's one page in the category, and is not striking the link out as cleared, despite the lack of any content in it. I tried recreating and redeleting it, and it did indeed strike out when it was blued in but then went right back to "one member, no strikeout" as soon as I redeleted it — and I've also already tried running an incategory search on it in case the problem was related to those phantom draftspace redirects from page moves that I brought up last week, but nothing was in the category that way either.

Could somebody take a look at this so that it doesn't just sit on WantedCategories as a permanent problem? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 16:53, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

{{PAGESINCATEGORY:2010 Winter Olympics ice hockey group standings templates}} produces 0 which says 1 when I write this. gerrit:756107 by Legoktm says: "Now using action=purge (via index.php or Action API) will also cause the category counts to be refreshed if the category has less than 5000 items". But it makes no difference to purge with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:2010_Winter_Olympics_ice_hockey_group_standings_templates&action=purge. Does this method not work for red categories? PrimeHunter (talk) 18:59, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter, it looks empty to me. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:09, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@Qwerfjkl: What looks empty to you? I think the category page Category:2010 Winter Olympics ice hockey group standings templates looks empty to everybody when we actually view the page. {{PAGESINCATEGORY:2010 Winter Olympics ice hockey group standings templates}} is using a magic word from Help:Magic words#Metadata to say how many pages MediaWiki thinks there are in the category. It incorrectly renders as "1" for me instead of "0" every time I have seen the rendering, also after several purges. Are you saying it renders as "0" for you? Here is the rendering: 0. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:22, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter, nevermind, you're correct, that shows as 1.
Normally the solution for these problems is to undelete and redelete the category (I think). — Qwerfjkltalk 07:07, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
For the record, I already tried undeleting and redeleting the category, and it failed. Bearcat (talk) 16:16, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
@Bearcat Have you tried undeleting and redeleting Template:2010 Winter Olympics men's ice hockey group A standings? 163.1.15.238 (talk) 16:19, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
I hadn't seen that explanation until just now when I posted the reply, so I didn't know until a few minutes ago it was the implicated content, but I just tried restoring and redeleting the template and it worked. Bearcat (talk) 16:24, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Looking at the DB replicas on Toolforge, it looks like the mystery entry is from Template:2010 Winter Olympics men's ice hockey group A standings, somehow the categorylinks row didn't get deleted when that template was. Anomie⚔ 20:46, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

I got used to 'What links here' under the old skin, but cannot seem to get to it with the updated menus of the Vector 2022 skin. Is this menu item accessible from Vector 2022? Thank you, --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 00:25, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

There is a hacky way to get 'What links here', which is to open another tab and paste in the current page name, then search that list for a match with current page name. -- Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 00:46, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
Next to the "Read", Edit", "View History", and star (watch page) links at the top of the page, below the language selection menu, is a "Tools" menu. The "What links here" link is in the Tools menu. isaacl (talk) 00:52, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
There is also a keyboard shortcut, Alt+j or Alt+⇧ Shift+j in Windows browsers. See more at Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
Also, the hamburger button top left opens up the old sidebar (pushing the TOC down). What links here is then in its familiar place. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:18, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
For me, it doesn't appear in the main (sidebar) menu. isaacl (talk) 02:46, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
I tested when logged out, hence I should have picked up the default configuration. I infer that there is something about your prefs which suppresses it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:26, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Maybe it's a logged in/logged out difference. I don't see a Tools menu when logged out. isaacl (talk) 18:39, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Font peculiarity

I noticed a peculiarity in the "Komika Axis" font, and I'm not sure if the question can be answered here, but here's my question. Komika Axis is an all-caps font (both a and A would resemble A, both b and B would resemble B, etc.), logically the eszett (ß) should be displayed as SS, ß, or ẞ. Unexpectedly, it's displayed as ⅔, a character which ß has no resemblance nor connection to. Even more unexpectedly, the actual Unicode character "⅔" is not supported by the font. To summarize the concept: Character A is being wrongly displayed by a font as Character B, while Character B, on the other hand, is not even supported by the font. It just seems weird, and I don't know if it had to do with the mix-up of the way codepoints were assigned in the creation of the font, or if there is another reason. Does anyone know reasons to something like this? Btw you can look at User:Cmnpt/sandbox to get an idea of what I'm taking about. Cmnpt (talk) 04:17, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Both characters render correctly for me. I see the eszett in the first example and the 2/3 character in the second example. As the edit notice for this page recommends, tell us what browser you are using. Also try other browsers if possible. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:54, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Can you see both characters correctly in Komika Axis font? Because it appears to be a problem with the font, I usually can see both characters correctly, but they are mixed up in this particular font. Can you take a screenshot of what you see on your side? My current browser is Google. Thank you! Cmnpt (talk) 06:03, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I see them in that font. See the screen shot to the right. This was taken in the Brave browser, latest version, on Mac OS. I do not have the Komika Axis font installed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:14, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Fonts are rendered by your own computer, not by Wikipedia which just sends HTML with the number of the character and name of the font. If you don't have the font then a fallback font is used. Here is "a A ß ⅔" in Komika Axis: "a A ß ⅔". I don't have Komika Axis and my fallback font works so apart from minor font differences, I see the same characters in both cases, including a small "a" which should have looked like capital "A" in Komika Axis. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:22, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Seems like a bug with the font. Nardog (talk) 09:56, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, that's what I thought the issue was. This isn't the first time I've seen something like this, so I was wondering, what seems to be the main reason that causes these codepoint mix-ups? Are the two characters related in codepoints somehow, or does it have to do with an error in assignments to the display of each character in a font? Thank you! Cmnpt (talk) 20:25, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
This forum is for help with English Wikipedia technical aspects. I don't think we can help you any further on that line of questioning. Izno (talk) 20:41, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
In hexadecimal Unicode, ß is 00DF: ß. ⅔ is 2154: ⅔. I don't know how Komika Axis mixed them up. Computing questions unrelated to Wikipedia can be asked at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:09, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Global RfC filled to enable global abuse filters on large Wikimedia projects by default

Hello!

On Meta-Wiki, a set of global abuse filters is maintained by Meta-Wiki's administrators and the stewards. Global abuse filters are a powerful tool designed to fight against long-term abusers that operate cross-wiki. It is especially useful (and often irreplaceable by other means) when a cross-wiki LTA starts to rapidly change IP addresses (when that happens, regular blocks are significantly limited due to the IP hopping).

As of today, all small/medium Wikimedia projects (as-determined by number of articles) are automatically subscribed to global abuse filters. They are not, however, enabled on several Wikimedia projects classified as large (except several large Wikimedia projects who opted-in, such as Wikidata). This makes it possible for global long-term abusers to vandalize a project with no global filters enabled, which makes it significantly more difficult for the Stewards to fight against the abuse.

By this message, I'd like to let you know I submitted a global RfC (request for comments), where I propose enabling global abuse filters on large Wikimedia projects as an opt-out feature. This change will make global abuse filters an even more effective tool for combating long-term abuse at the global level. Please feel free to participate in the discussion, which happens at Meta-Wiki.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
--Martin Urbanec (talk) 17:15, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Confused about s2cid parameter

I originally asked this question at the Help Desk, but another user suggested I come here.
About a week ago, I added a documented parameter (s2cid) to the TemplateData of {{Citation/doc}}. Today I noticed an error message, |s2cid= is not a valid parameter. Confused, I searched the Citation Module for any mention of it, and found nothing. My memory may be faulty, but I remember finding this elusive parameter in the Module before. I don't understand Lua, so the answer may be hiding in plain sight. I was going to remove the parameter from the TemplateData, assuming I had made a mistake, but tested it first, to confirm it was not, in fact, a "valid parameter." It worked: Climatic influences on the genetic structure and distribution of the common vole and field vole in Europe, S2CID 55192908, and the parameter is in use in a number of pages (e.g., El Cid). So should the s2cid parameter be removed from the TemplateData on {{Citation/doc}}?
Thank you in advance,
Edward-Woodrow (talk) 18:24, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

@Edward-Woodrow: Where do you see the error message? Give steps to reproduce if you cannot post a link where it's displayed now. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: The error message has disappeared- I assume whatever oddity there was has been fixed. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 20:02, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
You probably saw it at Template:Citation/doc#TemplateData. It was fixed by [30]. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:14, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Yes, thank-you. Edward-Woodrow (talk) 20:18, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
@Edward-Woodrow: For future ref, problems with any citation template (or doc) should be reported at the talk page for that template; most of them redirect to Help talk:Citation Style 1 which has more than 450 watchers. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:52, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Issue with images in Velociraptor

In the Velociraptor article, the images File:Velociraptor Restoration.png and File:Velociraptor_mongoliensis.jpg are showing images of a Jurassic World velociraptor, rather than the actual image. However, when the images are clicked on, the proper image is shown. According to the talk page, this issue only seems to occur for some users. Purging the page didn't seem to fix the issue. Does anyone know why it's showing up like this? Thanks in advance! -- KomradeKalashnikov (talk) 23:38, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Press CTRL+F5 maybe? To make sure you're clearing your cache Darkwarriorblake / Vote for something that matters 23:39, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm using Chrome on mac, so I'm not able to do CTRL+F5. However, I have tried shift+refresh, as well as manually clearing the cache in Chrome settings. -- KomradeKalashnikov (talk) 23:46, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
The correct image displays for me, but click on it to generate the preview and it's the Jurassic one. Then click "more details" and the correct version loads on Commons. It looks to be a problem stemming from a vandal who overwrote the Commons file with the version from Jurassic World. [31] The Jurassic version got deleted from the history, yet somehow is still rendering in some cases. Home Lander (talk) 01:31, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
@KomradeKalashnikov: See WP:BYPASS#Google Chrome for various techniques, some of which may be more effective than others. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:04, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
Ok, that seems to have fixed File:Velociraptor Restoration.png, but File:Velociraptor mongoliensis.jpg is still showing up as the Jurassic World one, not the actual image. -- KomradeKalashnikov (talk) 15:38, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
I executed a purge of both file pages on Commons and on en.wp. Hopefully that bypasses the cached files. I suspect when the versions were originally deleted, some events missed eachother an the the thumbnail delete wasn't properly completed. Or it is a datacenter specific issue, that we have seen more often. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:51, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
That appears to have worked. Thanks! -- KomradeKalashnikov (talk) 16:00, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-11

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
  • Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [32][33]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:17, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Browser/OS-specific issues with MediaWiki:GeoHack.js

Please could anybody with Linux and/or Chrome installed check out Template talk:GeoTemplate#Map jumps upon first zoom click. Since this is a problem with MediaWiki:GeoHack.js and not with Template:GeoTemplate, I have raised the matter at MediaWiki talk:GeoHack.js#Map jumps upon first zoom click and it's probably best to discuss potential solutions on that page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:06, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Help with lint error

Hello! Can someone with experience in lint errors help me fix a lint error in my homewiki? I have the LintHint gadget active and it tells me there's a lint error in our main page (w:sq:Faqja kryesore) but it's been 2 days hunting it down and I can't really figure out where it is exactly coming from. (It must be transcluded from some other place, not exactly in the main page.) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:02, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

sq:Stampa:Lexo is outputting an extra </span>. {{#switch:...}} and <span>...</span> are misnested (}}</span> should be </span>}}). Nardog (talk) 10:23, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Nardog, thanks a lot! Might if I ask how you found out? Or just plain eye analysis? I was led up until that template with the aforementioned gadget's help but that's where I stopped. — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:32, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
I ran LintHint on ExpandTemplates, then located the responsible template by repeating the process of previewing the source with {{ replaced with {{subst: a couple times. Nardog (talk) 10:37, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Nardog, thank you! — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:42, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Shortcuts box messes up cell phone view in narrow portrait orientation

Screenshot of problem

See: Template talk:Wikipedia how-to#Shortcuts box messes up cell phone view in narrow portrait orientation. --Timeshifter (talk) 10:31, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

It is because the Module:Message box family is not responsive. There's been some ideas on that, but none are currently deployed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
As for ideas, it's less ideas and more "I have to work through the slog of any/every other box that might possibly be doing something really really bad with assuming the structure of message boxes. Right now I know of just the templates including the relevant TemplateStyles directly (among them the mess that is WikiProject banner), but there may be others. Izno (talk) 20:43, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
@Izno maybe something like this can help here ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:29, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
@TheDJ I'd rather just throw some caution to the winds and nowrap the links in the shortcut box in TemplateStyles until mbox is actually responsive. Not surprised this showed up as quick as it did. :) Izno (talk) 20:38, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
That isn't the problem here though. Its that the shortcuts squeeze the mbox-text content of the ombox. Mostly because of text inflation algo blowing up the 'expected' size of imageright. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:55, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
@TheDJ, I am aware it's not the issue. I am suggesting a workaround for the time being in Module:Shortcut/styles.css, which already has some CSS for the special case where it's in an mbox. We can either directly override break-word on it or apparently apply white-space: nowrap according to my test. We knew this would be a special case when I raised it on the task a couple weeks ago. Izno (talk) 20:46, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
I've made some modifications so that the shortcut clears the message and thus no longer squeezes the message. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:30, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
I've reverted. @TheDJ, you gotta engage with what I'm suggesting. If you don't like that, that's fine, but I think your path is wrong. Izno (talk) 15:54, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
I must have not understood your suggestion in that case ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:58, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
@TheDJ, in Module:Shortcut/styles.css, one of: 
  • .mbox-imageright .module-shortcutboxplain a { word-break: normal }

  • .mbox-imageright .module-shortcutboxplain a { white-space: nowrap }
I'm inclined to the former. Izno (talk) 21:19, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
I was just in the process of adding a screenshot, because i think we are talking about two completely different things.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:23, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Ok, yes, that's not the same issue. However, hacking around it by forcing a table into display: block is not the solution. If we want to fix it, let's actually fix it. I would appreciate help. I've now mentioned the correct fix in no less than about a dozen places and I'm tired of saying it. Izno (talk) 21:28, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

TheDJ and Izno. How about changing Template:Wikipedia how-to so that the shortcuts are just placed in a new line at the bottom of the box. No one would have to do anything. The template would do all the work of changing the location of the shortcuts.

{{Wikipedia how to|WP:SORT|WP:TABLESORT}} would end up as this line at the bottom of the box:

@Timeshifter because this pattern of placing shortcut boxes in |imageright= of a message box is not exclusive to that template. Please be patient while we work on the problem. Thanks. Izno (talk) 21:39, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
TheDJ and Izno. There is more discussion from others at Template talk:Wikipedia how-to. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:18, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Thumbnails not generating

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T331820

I've noticed that thumbnails across several pages are failing to generate. This one that I placed on an article this morning took about an hour before I got anything other than a broken image, and this one that I just placed is still broken as I type this. Opening those images gives me: 

Error
Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.
See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information.
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.
Request from [redacted] via cp1078 cp1078, Varnish XID 51659240
Upstream caches: cp1078 int
Error: 404, Not Found at Tue, 14 Mar 2023 22:10:12 GMT

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:11, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Probably phab:T331820. Izno (talk) 22:53, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

SVG and prefers-color-scheme

For testing purposes, I've uploaded a revision of File:Northern Quest Resort & Casino (logo).svg that uses CSS @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) to render the logo in a reverse format when used in a dark setting. Sadly this doesn't work here yet, but if SVG is served directly in the future this would work with a functional dark mode. I'm debating creating a template and possibly a tracking category for editors to mark images that support dark/light modes as such (this would also help future editors who may accidentally remove such functionality if they run it through a tool that doesn't understand prefers-color-scheme). I feel like it's worth it to future-proof images, especially since for some vector logos it's more than simply turning a dark color white. Is there already a template/category for marking SVG files as supporting this? Any thoughts/feedback on this? —Locke Cole • t • c 04:50, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Just for follow-up, I've created Category:SVG images that support dynamic color schemes and {{SVG supports dynamic color schemes}} to mark images that support this. Probably something a bot could check for and tag automatically too (ideally MediaWiki would detect this automatically at some point). —Locke Cole • t • c 15:53, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

No style sheet on preferences page?

My common.css includes:

#pt-logout { display: none; }

to hide the logout link. Special:Preferences still shows the link. Any idea what's going on there? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:19, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

@RoySmith: I've read somewhere that this is intended. All your customised js/css is skipped when loading the preferences page, so that the page is safe to use even if the js/css has been damaged. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:47, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
Hmmm, auto safe mode. That actually makes a lot of sense, thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:51, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
There are a few special pages that have disallowUserJs, etc on them, on purpose. Part of it is for user access resiliency, part for user security. — xaosflux Talk 16:02, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
We have the default false for mw:Manual:$wgAllowSiteCSSOnRestrictedPages so sitewide css is also skipped in preferences. It appears there isn't even a MediaWiki option to allow it for js. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Tool for bypassing redirects in see also sections

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) § Tool for bypassing redirects in see also sections. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:42, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Script or tool for finding duplicate citations

Is there a tool or script for checking an article for duplicated citations, that will, if any are located, give an option to group those references using <ref name=>? Nthep (talk) 19:51, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

See WP:REFILL. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:34, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Vector 2022: possible "overflow to the left" in tables with images

Using a table to place images next to each other can result in an "overflow to the left" (overlapping the contents table), which would not happen under Vector 2010. I tried to demonstrate this in my sandbox. Is this a bug or a feature? Kallichore (talk) 00:16, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

You are not giving the renderer any choice. You created a table that is four cells wide, and each cell contains a thumb-sized image. If four thumb-sized images are wider than the content column, the images will overlap the left sidebar or the right sidebar. If you want the images to stay within the content column for all viewers, use <gallery>...</gallery> tags or a similar flexible image display mechanism. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:34, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
As per Jonesy, plus: the table has the (obsolete) align=right attribute, which forces the right-hand edge of the table to be within the pane; consequently if the table is wider than the pane, it's left-hand edge must necessarily project outside the pane. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:36, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, I agree that the solution with gallery is better than the “table version”. So this is an example for the following advice from this FAQ: “Q: Some tables and templates don’t fit within the limited width. A: We should make sure that all of our content is as responsive as possible to accommodate all visitors.” --Kallichore (talk) 00:59, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Is English Wikipedia using "natural sort order" for alphabetical sorting

See: natural sort order and this discussion:

--Timeshifter (talk) 12:25, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

Atom (web standard)

Atom (web standard) - when I'm on my Watchlist page, the sidebar under Tools has always had a clickable icon for Atom. I don't think I've clicked on that for more than a decade, if I ever did. However, clicking on it now, no matter what the browser, it brings up, "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." Seems to me, this is serving no purpose. Can it be removed from that sidebar? — Maile (talk) 01:33, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

You can remove it from all pages with this in your CSS: 
#feed-atom {display: none;}
Are you suggesting to remove it for everybody? I assume some users have feed readers and use it. See Wikipedia:Syndication#Atom (1.0) feeds. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:00, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. Actually, I was thinking it was something obsolete that needed to be removed. But since it's possibly still used, I'm happy to leave it alone. — Maile (talk) 03:29, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
The XML file is used by feed readers; if you have one installed (and your browser knows about it) it will load there and be processed accordingly. As for the message, MediaWiki is just serving the XML file. The "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." is being displayed by your web browser as part of its generic XML display in the absence of a feed reader. Anomie⚔ 11:37, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Opt-out from future global edit filters

A proposal to enable global abuse filters managed on the meta-wiki is being discussed. Should it pass, local projects would need to opt-out if they want to only continue to use their local edit filters. Links and local discussion are open for comment at our edit filter noticeboard. We can pre-opt-out if there is a local showing of support. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 09:53, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Categories to delete

Can anyone work out what's populating Category:Wikipedia:WikiProject WikiLoop/Inconsistent Birthday/Fixed, Category:Wikipedia:WikiProject WikiLoop/Inconsistent Birthday/Validated & Category:Wikipedia:WikiProject WikiLoop/Inconsistent Birthday and how to zap it. All three categories are to be deleted per this discussion but it's tricky to see how to implement it. Timrollpickering (talk) 23:53, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Nothing, following edits like these. You either need to visit each category and WP:NULLEDIT all pages found there, or wait for the job queue. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:03, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Mis-tagging

This edit and many others that added {{Elmer Fudd in animation}} got tagged as "Disambiguation links added". Broken regex somewhere? DMacks (talk) 22:28, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

No, it's because of this edit, and was fixed by this edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:50, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
Ah, so an edit to page X to transclude template:Y, where Y contained a DAB link, tags the edit to X for adding a DAB link? Interesting! DMacks (talk) 02:40, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

About Module:Adjacent stations

Hi, I am from Chinese Wikipedia. I think it should have a new function.

In Template:Adjacent stations, each line has two colour boxes. However, they can't be different. I suggest the new function below: 

 	["line A"] = {
 		["color"] = "114514", -- This is the main colour which used in Template:Rail color. This colour appears at the left colour box.
 		["color2"] = "191981", -- This is not the main colour. This colour appears at the right colour box.
 		["left terminus"] = "X",
 		["right terminus"] = "Y"
 	},

This function is useful in Japan railways. I hope it can be added. 阿南之人 (talk) 04:53, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Please post this at Template talk:Adjacent stations which covers discussion of the template and the module. You should get a response there, but if you don't, try WT:WikiProject Trains. Johnuniq (talk) 05:55, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Some headings don't show on WP:PROCC

When I visit WP:WikiProject Climate Change on mobile (link), only the first two headings are shown / the third heading and below is not collapsible. Is there some magic to fix this? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:58, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

@Femke: Fixed by closing unclosed divs.[34] I don't know where they were intended to close so I just closed them right away although it leaves code which does nothing. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:29, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Question re: desktop vs mobile

When accessing Wikipedia (WP) on a smartphone, but via that device's own internet browser (and not via the WP app), WP always opens up in "mobile view", and I then need to switch it to "desktop mode" (my personal preference), and sometimes this needs to be done repeatedly.

And speaking of "preferences" and using the search function on the "Preferences" page, I used "desktop" as a keyword for a search, but I only found one entry, that was under:

"Gadgets"

  "Testing and development"

   □ "Mobile sidebar preview: show page in mobile view while browsing the desktop site (Vector skin only)"

So, with all that said, my question is: is there any setting in the my account preferences (or by any other means) that can be used to make it so that when I access WP, via a smartphone's browser, the default can be set to "desktop mode" instead of "mobile view"...? Thanks & Cheers - wolf 04:31, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

See this thread from a couple of weeks ago. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:59, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
OK, Cool. Thanks for the quick reply. (just a note: the colors here were just a demonstration, they weren't meant to be "accessible" or in anyway useable.) Anyway, I have a common.js page already, so if I copy the script from User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion.js. over to my common.js page, will that do it? (ie; is that all I need to do? will it work?) Thanks - wolf 05:21, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
See User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion. Nardog (talk) 06:05, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I saw that in the last reply and even noted it in my response, where I had a question about Þjarkur's script. (btw- any idea if that's a yes or no on that?) Thanks - wolf 03:00, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
@Thewolfchild: No, User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion is the documentation page for the script User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion.js, and it says: Add this to the top of your common.js file: mw.loader.load( "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:%C3%9Ejarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript" );. Nardog (talk) 14:01, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog: See comment at bottom, after the
" Resolved" tag. - wolf 14:12, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
I did. And I'm telling you that's not how you're supposed to install a user script. Your method happens to work for the script in question as it does not use ES6 syntax (which the linter for common.js rejects), and is marked CC0 so there's no license problem, but be sure to find the documentation and follow its instructions next time you come across a script you want to install. Nardog (talk) 14:22, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
Hey, I asked and didn't get a reply, so I went to the instruction page and followed it, with the exception of putting it at THE TOP as there was already another script. It was either gonna work or not. If not, I would try something else. But it did work, so... I think we're done here, right? Thank you, and have a nice day - wolf 14:39, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
That's not the only exception. The instruction page didn't tell you to copy and paste the content of the script itself. Nardog (talk) 14:47, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
I kinda think it did. But anyway... where are you going with this? - wolf 15:15, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
Resolved

Nm, I copy&pasted the script onto my own page, then dumped my cache, and it seems to do just what it's supposed to so far. So thanks to Þjarkur and Jonesey. - wolf 07:08, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Table of contents broken (serious)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T331176

The page table of contents is currently totally missing and broken in the Vector 2022 skin. It is a blank white space unless JavaScript is turned on. 92.51.252.71 (talk) 15:05, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

They are working on fixing this at phab:T331176. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:54, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Nice improvement to table headers and footers

Very nice upgrade for persistent table headers and footers while scrolling. Who do I thank for this? Mathglot (talk) 10:09, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot: Did you recently enable Make headers of tables display as long as the table is in view, i.e. "sticky" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? The gadget is from 2017 and hasn't been edited since July 2022. It breaks some tables and I only like it on some long tables so I made User:PrimeHunter/Sticky headers.js to reload the current page with the gadget code without having the gadget permanently enabled. I suggested at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-StickyTableHeaders.css#Proposal to add toggle to build something similar into the gadget. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:41, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
Ohh, thanks! I make changes to prefs sometimes, and occasionally flip something else beyond I came there to do; it's possible I did that, without it registering on me. Thanks for resolving the mystery! Also for your script, and for suggesting at mw-talk, to which I've added a word for support. Mathglot (talk) 18:36, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Talk page archive bots

For many years now one of my more gnomish tasks when I come across talkpage posts that have no sig and timestamp has been to search the page history and find the lost sig. That's because archive bots need that in order to archive the posts. Otherwise the posts just sit there cluttering up the talkpage. I checked this page's archive to see if this had been discussed before, but I couldn't find anything. So is there maybe something in the works that will upgrade a bot's ability to sense an old talkpage post that does not rely on a post's timestamp? Maybe something that senses the times from the history page(s) rather than from the talkpage itself? Such an upgrade, to be useful, would require the bot to add the lost sig to the post and then archive the post. That would cover the everyday work; there would also be the one-time cleanup of the talkpages that have existing old posts that need timestamps and to be archived. Is this a doable? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 12:56, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

I think technically sinebot is supposed to add missing signatures, but only for new comments. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:16, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for that, BW! For some reason, even some new sigs get missed, and I come across old ones every now and then. Most recent were two posts at Module talk:College color. At this present moment, the two sections are § Some incorrect colors, and other thoughts and § Request, both from late 2021; they'll probably be archived in the next day or so. Brings to mind the related issue as to whether the bot archives the old posts chronologically, or does it just tack 'em onto the latest, youngest archive pages? Odd I've not checked that before, but I'll check it this time. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 13:44, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Ya I've noticed that Sinebot will sometimes ignore unsigned comments even if it isn't in a category indicating comments should be automatically signed. I have no clue why, it's just how the bot works. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:47, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Also, the bot will just add them on to the most recent archive, regardless of how old they are. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:53, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Suspected as much. Thanks again, Wolfie !>) P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 15:03, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Not necessarily. If the page is archived by ClueBot III and the by year and numbered format is used, or the page is archived by lowercase sigmabot III and the date-based archives format is used, the bot will place threads into different archives according to the most recent timestamp in the thread. Examples for ClueBot III and for lowercase sigmabot III. Thus, unless incremental archives are used (which is most cases), threads signed years late can still go to an archive that is reasonably appropriate for the time period. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:13, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, thank you Redrose64! Suspected that, too, that there was some way for the bot to sense and sort by date. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 21:37, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello, Paine. I often do the same thing, and I would say that, when I am editing such a page, about 30% to 40% of the time the sections are in some weird (not oldest at the top) order. So I'm signing and rearranging as I trawl through the history. I doubt a bot would do well with the rearranging, and I'm thinking placement could hinder its effectiveness with the simple signing task. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 14:39, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello, John. Suspect it's alllll in the programmin', and have seen the devs do some pretty amaaaazin' things over the years! Nice to know there are others doin' some trawling for sigless editors; thank you for that! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 14:51, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
Given the popularity of DiscussionTools (=Reply tool and its friends), we should see fewer of these than we used to. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:17, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
And here I thought it was all because of my awesome, years-long effort!>) P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 21:33, 16 March 2023 (UTC)
I hope you will have half as much of that work to do in the future. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:17, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
Yeah I do a lot of this gnoming work too. Unlike lowercase sigmabot III, ClueBot III uses the revision history rather than signatures to determine when a post was made and SineBot doesn't usually sign posts when a user has more than 800 edits (but, as noted above, it can randomly fail for all sorts of reasons). Graham87 00:50, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

Going forward

Guess it all boils down to how important is it to have talkpage archives in chronological order(?). We see above that, under certain circumstances, both ClueBot III and Lowercase sigmabot III are able to sort talkpage sections to the correctly dated order when archiving. ClueBot III, run by editor Cobi, and σbot III, which uses MiszaBot/config and is run by editor Σ, are both already able to sense history-page entries and to archive talk sections to their correctly dated positions in an archive.

There are some talkpages that are not configured that way and are clogged with old, untimestamped sections. Is this issue important enough to see if the widely used MiszaBot/config can be altered so that it will be able to capture those old, untimestamped sections, give them a proper {{subst:Unsigned}} (or {{subst:Unsigned IP}}) sig, and archive them in chronological order? In other words, I don't mind doing the gnome work; however, if there is a not-too-difficult way for the bots to do it automatically, would that not be an improvement? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 09:49, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Suppose it should be disclosed here that when I look into the page history, find the editor who posted without signing, and add that sig to the post, I then sit and wait for the bot to do the rest. And that means tacking the post onto the end of the latest archive page. If the config can be set to do at least that much, in other words, if the dated order is not all that important, and the bot could do what I've been doing, even that would be a pretty good improvement, eh? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 10:22, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

σbot III, ... already able to sense history-page entries and to archive talk sections to their correctly dated positions in an archive - I really don't think that it can, laat time that I checked it went purely by the latest timestamp in the thread. Can you point to any cases where a truly undated thread was archived by lowercase sigmabot III? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:37, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
Guess I misunderstood you on that. So σbot III must always have a timestamp in the talkpage post to archive the post. And if ClueBot III can use history-page date entries rather than talkpage date entries, then perhaps σbot III can be programmed to do that, too? P.I. Ellsworth , ed. put'er there 12:53, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
I was under the impression that archiving bots would already automatically pick up a section to be archived once a date is added to the end of the last post in the section, and the archiving criteria were met, tacking it onto the end of the latest archive page.
I don't want to discourage brainstorming improvements, because of course interested bot operators may take them as inspiration to introduce new features. Just a word of caution to temper expectations, though: bots can do whatever you can describe in a very precise, algorithmic manner (covering corner cases is the tricky part); it's just a question of how much computing resources and time will it use. At a minimum, the bot has to be able to finish its work fast enough to keep up with the incoming rate of new work. ClueBot III, for example, breaks when encountering pages with a lot of updates, so high-traffic pages don't use it (if I recall correctly, it stops its run and so further pages aren't processed). (ClueBot III tries to fix links to content that has been archived, which may be the cause of the issue.) Figuring out the right archive to use for sequentially-numbered archives (as opposed to date-based ones) means scanning them all, figuring out what date to assign to each section, deciding what page is the best fit, and then where in the page is the best location. It's all doable, but I'm not surprised if archiving bot operators decide that the cost-benefit tradeoff isn't in favour of implementation, and are wary of the ability of the bot to keep up if a lot of people choose this option. isaacl (talk) 17:13, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
@Isaacl: Yes, archiving bots do automatically pick up a section to be archived once a date is added to the end of the last post in the section, and the archiving criteria were met, but they only tack it onto the end of the latest archive page if incremental archives are in use, see my post of 18:13, 16 March 2023 (UTC). But the point of this thread concerns talk page threads without any valid timestamps - some have no timestamp at all, in others the timestamps are all in an invalid format. The former may be due to forgetfulness or newbie's inexperience, but the latter are normally due to very old threads dating from the period when timestamp formats were not consistent - see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive A for some examples of variant formats. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:48, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
I was responding to the last comment from Paine Ellsworth, where they asked if the bot could archive a post after they added the date, even if the bot just added the post to the most recent archive. isaacl (talk) 19:52, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
It doesn't matter when or how a timestamp was added, or even who added it: if the most recent valid timestamp in a given thread is earlier than the date threshold for archiving that page, the bot will archive the thread (subject to the other archiving criteria - minimum threads to archive, minimum threads to leave behind, etc.). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I know this, and I read your previous comment. isaacl (talk) 01:13, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you (mobile editor)

I'd just like to thank the developers for finally enabling us to edit our Talk-page posts in the mobile (browser-based) editor. Creating typos, then not being able to fix them—you can imagine how frustrating that was for us obsessive über-fussy dedicated text maniacs underutilized underachievers literary loose cannons contributors. Cheers! (If there's a better place for this, feel free to move it there.) – AndyFielding (talk) 08:47, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Mainly a mobile user. I used an article's talk page today, after being mostly away for some time. The basic functioning of the new interface is significantly better than the old one. Thank you! TooManyFingers (talk) 15:34, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

@PPelberg (WMF) Just sharing some positive feedback for you and the rest of the team. And I'll add my own, very glad to see this live! the wub "?!" 22:18, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
@AndyFielding, it feels good knowing you're finding the new mobile talk page experience useful ^ _ ^
And thank you for pinging, @The wub – the entire Editing Team was pleased to log on and see the comments from y'all.
Of course, if as you're using the new experience you notice areas that could be improved, we'd value being made aware of that too. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 01:14, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Problem: External postings of article title links continue to drop endings of titles?

Problem: External postings of article title links continue to drop endings of titles?

@An anonymous username, not my real name, Hike395, Jonesey95, PrimeHunter, Rhododendrites, Tamzin, and Viriditas:

PROBLEM: Posting links to WikiArticle titles on social media (like FaceBook and others), EMail programs (like Pop Peeper and others) and/or newspapers (like The New York Times (NYT) continue to drop the ending of the WikiArticle title (esp "}", "?", "quotation mark" and "apostrophes") resulting in a WikiError page rather than the WikiArticle as intended. A typical recent example of this Problem ("bug"?) was my recent Published Comments in The New York Times at => https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/theater/dancin-broadway-review.html#permid=123888206 - regarding the WikiArticle title of Dancin' where the ending apostrophe was dropped, resulting in a WikiError Page - my temporary solution was to create a Dancin WP:Redirect (RD) in which the ending apostrophe of the original WikiArticle title of Dancin' is dropped - the WikiRD directs the NYT Reader to the correct WikiArticle as intended.

This same Problem ("bug"?) was posted earlier in 2018 (please see my posting => Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_162#Workaround_for_dropped_")"_in_titles? ) and continues to be a Problem today - seems a similar ("bug?) Problem may have occurred on Reddit as well, but may have been solved in 2022(?)

Hope my description of this Problem ("bug"?) helps in some way, and a Solution is found - easier access to WikiArticles from outside WebSites and related is very important to Wikipedia I would think - in any case - Stay Safe and Healthy !! - Drbogdan (talk) 16:12, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

That looks like a bug in The New York Times's commenting system. The character "'" is valid in a URL, but their parser appears to incorrectly exclude that character from the end of a URL. I think you'll need to send feedback to the Times. (Edited to add: Editors of MediaWiki sites have been trying to work with developers for many years to come up with a reasonable workaround for inevitable problems related to punctutation at the end of wiki page titles. See T28556 and T23615 and T40265.)– Jonesey95 (talk) 16:16, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
See Help:URL#Fixing links with unsupported characters for encodings you can try when posting a raw url in a place where some software converts it to a link and has to guess where the url ends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancin%27 would probably have worked (but doesn't look pretty). If a place both has an automatic feature to convert raw url's and an add-a-link feature where you can give the url and link text separately then use the add-a-link feature, also if you enter the exact same string as url and link text. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

@An anonymous username, not my real name, Hike395, Jonesey95, PrimeHunter, Rhododendrites, Tamzin, and Viriditas:

SOLUTION (possible): Although not the ideal Solution - BUT - simply adding an UNDERSCORE to the end of such "problematic" WikiArticle Titles may help Workaround the Problem - at least for current FaceBook and my current EMail (Pop Peeper) (and, possibly, NYT) posts as follows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readin'_and_Writin' directs to a WikiError Page - BUT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readin'_and_Writin'_ (with an added underscore) directs to the correct WikiArticle Title Page instead - and Not to a WikiError page - and Not with the use of an additional temporary WP:Redirect Page (see Dancin example described above) - although not tested, this Solution should work in other social media postings (and newspaper postings) regarding such "problematic" WikiArticle Titles - this Solution, in part, was inspired by a suggested Workaround — Hamlet A.D.D..) — in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T28556 - in any case - hope this helps in some way - Stay Safe and Healthy !! - Drbogdan (talk) 01:12, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

The underscore trick even works in MediaWiki itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr. skips the ending period when a link is made. It only works because there is a redirect page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr._ includes the period and underscore in the link and works without a redirect page. However, it does involve a redirect: If an incoming link has a trailing underscore in the page name then MediaWiki automatically redirects to the url without the underscore. It only applies to underscores after page names. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Luther_King_Jr.&action=history_ is broken. I don't know whether there are significant disadvantages in relying on the automatic redirect on page names with an underscore appended. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:24, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Using a WP:Redirect seems like a good workaround, especially for existing non-wiki pages in the real world, which typically can't or won't be changed. However, this workaround has a drawback: there are editors who patrol redirects and have an allergy to such redirects. They may delete them as encountered, or collect them and propose deleting them at WP:RFD. I have the impression that the regulars at RfD have a predisposition to delete these sorts of redirects. An example involving the trailing ")" URLs mentioned above is this discussion, which ultimately deleted a group of over 60 such URLs, including some that had over 10,000 usages over the preceding year. --R. S. Shaw (talk) 01:25, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Reading that discussion both sides made good arguments; those in favor of keeping argued that it helps out readers, those in favor of deleting argued that it causes issues in search results, that the problem only exists because of bugs in other peoples code, and that readers are already soft-redirected to the target article by MediaWiki.
One solution would be to turn that soft-redirect into a hard-redirect, but that will require us to convince the WMF to do so. In the meantime, it may be worth having a discussion about whether to modify PAGs to support or oppose the creation of these redirects, to stop constant debates about them. BilledMammal (talk) 03:34, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Is something wrong with Massmessage?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T93049

The Signpost got feedback from a reader that they were sent the current issue twice via Massmessage. I did some checking and saw around a dozen instances of this. Ene subscriber even had it posted three times: User talk:Newyorkadam. This particular user seems to have had many different Massmessage triplings from various lists since around November 2022. Is this a known issue? ☆ Bri (talk) 16:53, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

@Bri It's a long-running issue with the tool - T93049. Sam Walton (talk) 17:18, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
Since 2015, OMG. Maybe we need to send more donations to the Foundation. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:20, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
The WMF doesn't want to spend donations on Wikipedia; they have other priorities. - R. S. Shaw (talk) 01:51, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
They probably spent a good chunk of it on the new Vector skin that nobody asked for... — DVRTed (Talk) 06:47, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
MassMessage is a volunteer-maintained extension, more contributors are always welcome. Legoktm (talk) 06:38, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Unable to login to tools?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T332650
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T332349
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T332636

I have tried to login to Copypatrol and the Wikipedia Library without any success. Copypatrol thinks for a bit and then comes back with no error messages. The Wikipedia library tells me "Permission denied" with a yellow box near the top stating "Access token generation failed." This happens on my desktop and tablet and happens on Chrome or Edge browsers. -- Whpq (talk) 18:09, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

@Whpq The Wikipedia Library login issue is affecting all users sporadically (trying again might yield better results) - T332349. I'm not sure if the CopyPatrol issue is related. Sam Walton (talk) 19:43, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. The number of editors trying to log in to Copypatrol is likely very limited compared to the Wikipedia Library. -- Whpq (talk) 20:13, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
Just took me about 3 attempts to log in to CopyPatrol — clearly something is up, but does trying a few times work for you? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 20:17, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
I managed to to get logged in to Wikipedia library on the third attempt. I still get an error message but the end result is that I am logged in and was able to get to JSTOR. No luck with madly clicking on the login button for Copypatrol. I must have tried at least 20 times and did not get logged in. -- Whpq (talk) 20:45, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
We may have identified a larger issue with OAuth that affects many tools. It's being tracked at phab:T332650. In the meantime, while it may take numerous tries, you should eventually be able to login to the these tools. — MusikAnimal talk 14:38, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Max for table that also scales to viewport

How do I make a table scale to viewport (the main content container) if the viewport width is under the max width, but only have width at the max width if the viewport exceeds the max width? I previously posted this at HELP:DESK but since this is not about policy it isn't forumshopping right? Aaron Liu (talk) 01:10, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

There are ways to do this in CSS with their various min(), max(), and clamp() functions, but using the viewport width in a way that produces good results is typically dependent on the specific layout, and thus hard to do in a skin-agnostic way. If you're just doing it in your own personal CSS file, that's fine, but I don't think it's a good idea to deploy generally. isaacl (talk) 01:30, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
Well, those other functions are pretty new; clamp particularly is only recently in the specs.
For the most part, tables (data tables) don't need something like this. Most either want to be min-content (which is basically their default) or they want to be full-width. I struggle to think of a case where I would prefer the table be 80% at desktop resolutions (or other arbitrary width) and 100% at small resolutions, especially when at small resolutions tables are so inflexible as to be nearly guaranteed to be 100%. If you do want to set a width for the table, width: xem; max-width: 100%; should mostly guarantee that it will shrink when expected. Izno (talk) 01:36, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
I agree I don't think we should be trying to deliberately break tables out of their containing block, and max-width is a well-supported approach. (On a side note, min() and max() have been supported by major browsers for over three years now. Still too new for mw:Compatibility#Basic (Grade C) support, but good candidates for progressive enhancement, in other situations.) isaacl (talk) 02:24, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
Strictly speaking, the clamp() function isn't in the specs yet - the only W3C doc that I can find that mentions it is CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 (19 October 2022) and being a W3C Working Draft, is some way from being ratified as a W3C Recommendation (even CSS Values and Units Module Level 3, which doesn't mention the function, has been at the Candidate Recommendation Snapshot stage for over ten years). The function has been in CSS Values and Units Module Level 4 from the start (First Public Working Draft, 14 August 2018) but even so, shouldn't be relied upon: it may yet be modified, deferred to a hypothetical CSS Values and Units Module Level 5 (as indeed happened for the toggle() function), or even dropped entirely (all three of these have happened to other functions and properties). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:46, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
Well, toggle() was flagged as being at risk for removal in that first draft... My side note was respect to min() and max() (also first appearing in the first draft), and although they too could in theory be changed or removed, I think they remain good candidates for progressive enhancement adjustments. Given their widespread use and utility, it seems unlikely that browsers will remove support for them (and thus if the CSS spec were to change, it would have to account for this). isaacl (talk) 16:13, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
It’s like some ems on desktop, and 100% on mobile. On skins such as legacy vector on widescreens 100% is too wide Aaron Liu (talk) 10:51, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, forcing 100% can fail because it won't take into account other padding or positioning that may affect the end rendering. It's an example of why trying to do this in a skin-agnostic way is complex and prone to breaking. isaacl (talk) 16:17, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Feedback for module I started: Module:Speedy

Hi, so I have been working on this module called "speedy" for the purpose of speedy deletion tagging. The rationale for this is that it is much more flexible than the system we currently have.

I do need to add more sufficient documentation to explain how this works but it is much much simpler than our current system:

  1. Speedy deletion templates and notices are encapsulated in the same module. If you see Module:Speedy/config (where all the configuration for the speedy templates are), the module can generate both speedy templates and speedy notices.
  2. The templates that would result would be very flexible. If you see Template:Db/testcases you can see some of the key features I have added and the advantages of this. It would allow for listing of multiple criteria and filling in the full reasons.
  3. Speaking of templates, there would need to be less of them. As soon as a criteria is repealed it can be removed from the config module, and the template transcluding that can be speedy deleted as uncontroversial maintenance.
  4. Page blanking and page hiding: different criteria such as copyright violations and attack pages can hide the contents of the rest of the page as well as allowing for the immediate deletion of such content.

Some of the other things I have been thinking about adding include:

  1. Custom categorization: We can have the config specify categories to add to the templates. Currently, the two categories that would be added by this template are Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Candidates for speedy deletion (deletion code). I do think there is an advantage to the latter categorization model, especially because it allows for new categories to be spun up easily and because of a standard categorization format.
  2. Adding more aliases: I started with a few basic aliases but I think there are many more aliases that can be added to this, such as negublp, and their own custom messages.

All in all, this change would be welcome in making speedy deletions easier to do. I look forward to implementing any other things that would be helpful for this module in the future. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 23:31, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Feature creep amounting to a solution in search of a problem.
  1. Speedy deletion templates and notices are encapsulated in the same module -> you're not establishing why that's simpler; I would argue that adding more layers of indirection makes things more complex.
  2. If you see Template:Db/testcases you can see some of the key features I have added and the advantages of this -> I'm really not seeing anything there that isn't already supported by {{db-multiple}}, possibly with slightly different syntax.
  3. Speaking of templates, there would need to be less of them. As soon as a criteria is repealed it can be removed from the config module, and the template transcluding that can be speedy deleted as uncontroversial maintenance. -> Again, I'm not seeing why this is an advantage. In the current system repealed criteria templates get sent to TfD, and I'm not seeing why the use of a module makes them become deletable as housekeeping when they weren't previously.
  4. Page blanking and page hiding: different criteria such as copyright violations and attack pages can hide the contents of the rest of the page as well as allowing for the immediate deletion of such content. -> {{db-g10}} AFAIK already does this, and in any case any kind of template blanking magic is not sufficient as display:none does not hide the content from indexing bots 2) noindex has no effect in namespace. {{db-g12}} could easily be made to do so, if there were consensus for it.
  5. Adding more aliases: I started with a few basic aliases but I think there are many more aliases that can be added to this, such as negublp, and their own custom messages -> {{db-negublp}} already exists, and nothing is stopping you from creating more redirects to CSD templates if you think they're needed.
I've never been a fan of the "encapsulate everything into a god module" programming style, although I acknowledge it's used in some other places, and see no benefit to doing so here.* Pppery * it has begun... 23:46, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
See Special:Diff/1051672359 for my general views on when modules should be used. This looks very much like a use[] of Lua that do[es]n't fall into any of the above three cases and [is] instead done solely for the sake of internal complexity. * Pppery * it has begun... 23:52, 19 March 2023 (UTC)
A "God Module" might be more helpful for new users since a new user might use {{db}} without understanding that there are more specific deletion templates to use.
Also consider that a deletion template has three things: the template itself, the notice for speedy deletion nomination, and the notice for actual deletion. {{db-multiple}} (and to a lesser extent {{multiple issues}}) works by splicing whatever reason is inside the template page, whereas the proposed module would just use a data file with all the deletion reasons.
Having a centralised module also allows for one template to serve three purposes: it allows for the correct template to be used for the correct occasion (since an addition of "|notice=yes" builds the deletion notice for the talk pages, and if the page does not exist it mentions that the page was deleted), it allows for internationalization (to some extent) if someone decides to snipe our deletion template and use it for their own purposes, and it allows for the addition and removal of deletion criteria (with consensus) in a centralized place.
This will also greatly reduce page clutter. All of the {{db-notice}} and {{db-deleted}} templates need to be kept in sync with one another when updating reasons. Whereas updating one config module only requires one edit after consensus.
I was also thinking about using msgnw for deletion reasons that need blanking to see whether the deletion template is the only thing on the page. As for hiding copyright violations, we do that with {{copyvio}} regularly, but I can't figure out why it isn't done with the db template at this moment.
I believe this complex and "feature creep" might be helpful to make it simpler for new editors how each criteria works. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 02:34, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, this still isn't convincing me. New users doing CSDs probably either use Twinkle or add a manual CSD template and copy the wikitext it suggests to use for notices (or don't notify at all), and all of those processes will remain unchanged even under your new system.
{{db-multiple}} (and to a lesser extent {{multiple issues}}) works by splicing whatever reason is inside the template page, whereas the proposed module would just use a data file with all the deletion reasons. -> Yes, of course, you're describing what you did, as if its benefits were self-evident (they're not).
Having a centralised module also allows for one template to serve three purposes: it allows for the correct template to be used for the correct occasion (since an addition of " -> this says nothing; the syntax |notice=yes is not substantially different from the syntax -notice, and I would argue having one template do completely different things makes things worse.
[...] and if the page does not exist it mentions that the page was deleted -> no it won't, we fully subst out user talk messages by convention, so whatever logic you use to produce them won't be dynamic.
This will also greatly reduce page clutter. All of the {{db-notice}} and {{db-deleted}} templates need to be kept in sync with one another when updating reasons. Whereas updating one config module only requires one edit after consensus. -> This would, at best, reduce the number of templates by ~30. There are hundreds of thousands of templates, so this is not greatly reduc[ing] anything. And edits to CSD criteria are rare enough and visible enough that there's little need to spend effort streamlining the process.
I was also thinking about using msgnw for deletion reasons that need blanking to see whether the deletion template is the only thing on the page. The same thing could be done with one line of code in {{db-meta}} ({{#ifexpr:{{PAGESIZE:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|R}} > NUMBER|BLANKED|NOTBLANKED}}) if someone felt so inclined.
I believe this complex and "feature creep" might be helpful to make it simpler for new editors how each criteria works. You're failing to explain how. Even from a black-box perspective, this shifts the system from one complicated user interface to another one that seems equally complicated to me, and likely can be understood by fewer of Wikipedia's technical contributors.
This-is the sort of discussion where I think it's clear neither of us is going to convince the other one of their position, so I likely won't be replying further. * Pppery * it has begun... 03:27, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
@Awesome Aasim On page Template:Db/testcases I see "The contents of this page is currently hidden pending review by an administrator" a few times. Wherever that text is coming from, "is" should be "are". David10244 (talk) 10:58, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
@David10244 Thanks for the feedback. I fixed that. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 21:22, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
I generally think modules like this are a net positive, as long as the configurations are in an easily understandable format so that even those not well-versed with lua are able to edit them. When more involved edits to the logic are required, it always requires more seasoned editors, whether it's written in lua or using intricate wikimarkup. – SD0001 (talk) 08:12, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Repeated generation of redlinked roller coaster categories by the infobox

{{Infobox roller coaster}} is currently programmed to autogenerate categories based on the content of various entry fields, but this results in the repeated appearance at Special:WantedCategories of nonsense redlinks for categories that don't exist. This typically takes one of two forms:

  1. a roller coaster that was previously in operation closes for renovation, so people flip the status from "open/closed" to "under construction" — but since "under construction" status is programmed to interact with the content of the opening date field to generate a "Roller coasters planned to open in YYYY", but the roller coaster already opened 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago, that generates a "Roller coasters planned to open in [10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago]" category that I can't legitimately create and can't leave there, forcing me to flip the status from "under construction" back to "closed".
  2. even though the infobox documentation plainly states that "type =" is only looking for whether the roller coaster is made of steel or wood, people keep adding other types of information to the "type =" field anyway, such as "Dark ride" or "Spinning dark ride" — which causes the generation of a "Dark ride roller coasters" or "Spinning Dark ride roller coasters" category that I can again neither create nor leave there, again forcing me to go in to strip the misuse of the field.

Per WP:TEMPLATECAT, however, templates are not allowed to autogenerate categories based on variable text field entries, precisely because this can result in the autogeneration of redlinked nonsense categories in the event of any errors in or misuses of the template, so the template has to be prevented from being able to autogenerate any redlinks. But the problem is that I previously asked for this to be addressed in December at Template talk:Infobox roller coaster#Automatically-generated categories, but nothing was done about it and such categories are still happening — so I need somebody with more skill in template coding than I've got to step in and disable the category generation functions so that the redlinks stop. Bearcat (talk) 13:57, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

@Bearcat, removing the automatic categories is trivial. Ensuring they are already directly on the articles of interest is a matter of busywork (there's a lot of articles to go through), but also trivial (use AWB). If you were to do the work to ensure each roller coaster article has each relevant category in its wikitext, I am fairly certain someone (me, even) would process the relevant edit requests.
I basically already said that in this earlier discussion. @Jonesey95 also said as much to you in the discussion you referenced. Izno (talk) 18:05, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Somebody has to do that AWB run, certainly — but there's no rule that it has to be me, and it's not going to be me, because I'm the only person who gets to decide what busywork I do or don't have the time, energy and inclination to take on. But regardless of whether that other busywork does or doesn't get done in a timely fashion, the autogeneration of redlinked categories has to be unconditionally rendered impossible immediately, and cannot wait out another three months of inaction — there must never be another "Roller coasters planned to open in [30 years ago]" category showing up on WantedCategories ever again, because that creates an unnecessary and unhelpful burden of work for other people to have to fix. Bearcat (talk) 18:16, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
@Bearcat, if you're going to complain about it, you're the one who is going to have to do the work. Sorry, squeaky wheels don't get greased here, because you're not the only volunteer here. And speaking in absolutes about what must be done is not likely to win you any favors to boot. And this is coming from someone who agrees the work should be done. Izno (talk) 18:35, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
You're asking me to take on a busywork project that is completely tangential to the core problem of the template autogenerating redlinked categories that don't and can't exist before I'm allowed to request a fix to the problem of redlinked categories? Sorry, that's not how this works: none of what you're telling me to do here has anything to do with the problem of nonexistent categories, and there's no rule that I have to take on an unrelated busywork project before I "earn" the right to request a fix to a problem that has nothing to do with it.
It's also not my responsibility to have to put up with these redlinked roller-coaster categories repeatedly returning, and repeatedly having to ask for something to be done about it because somebody doesn't like my tone of voice or the fact that I haven't chosen to take on a busywork project that's completely tangential to the problem, either. The redlinked categories can be fixed without forcing me to put other projects on hold to do something about non-redlinked categories that do exist and aren't the problem. Bearcat (talk) 18:46, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Then stop making it your responsibility. You cannot on the one hand say "I'm going to deal in redlinked categories" and then on the other hand say "I am unable or unwilling to deal with the consequences of dealing in redlinked categories" and then expect anyone to take you seriously or to help.
Anyway, I'll move on. Good luck with your mission. Izno (talk) 18:51, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, no. Just because there's an essential maintenance task that has to be done on a regular basis, the people who deal with it are somehow supposed to quietly put up with the repeated generation of autogenerated redlinked categories that are significantly more difficult and time-consuming to actually clean up than regular category declarations are, even though there are other technical ways to stop those redlinked categories from being generated at all?
Working with redlinked categories has three essential components: (a) removing and cleaning up redlinks that genuinely shouldn't exist, either because somebody tried to add a category that isn't reflected in our category tree or because they just mistyped or misspelled a category that exists at another spelling, (b) creating categories that genuinely should exist, and (c) identifying patterns where categories that genuinely shouldn't exist are being generated by processes that shouldn't be generating categories at all, such as errors and violations in template coding. So if a template is generating redlinked categories that it shouldn't be generating, then getting that fixed so it stops happening is part of the job description, and nobody is entitled to tell me any different.
The entire point of working with redlinked categories, after all, is to make them go away. Ideally, no redlinked categories would ever happen at all, but since we're not there yet and there are typically about 300 new redlinked categories to fix per week, the job also includes identifying ways to reduce the load in the future by noticing that templates are causing problems they shouldn't be causing. So sometimes that's just "remove category". Sometimes it's "create the category so that it's not a redlink anymore". Sometimes it's "remove category from a template that's transcluding it", and sometimes it's "either fix template, or get somebody with more experience in template coding to fix it, if the template is autogenerating bad categories by some process other than a straight category declaration". But that's all part and parcel of the job, and it's not my responsibility to take any lectures from anybody about it: If I identify a pattern of bad categories that are repeatedly being generated by a template that shouldn't be generating bad categories, then getting it fixed is part of my job, not me shirking anything. One thing that isn't in the joib description is "shut up and suck it because somebody else finds it annoying". Bearcat (talk) 19:42, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
As I said, good luck with your mission. Izno (talk) 19:55, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Condescension not needed or deserved. If you don't wanna help fix a problem, you don't have to help fix it, but you don't get to tell me that I'm not allowed to ask for a problem to be fixed unless I choose to take on some other busywork project that isn't actually related to the problem, or that I'm being unreasonable in asking for help fixing a problem in the first place. Just move on if you wanna move on, but I don't have to take being insulted or condescended to in the process. Bearcat (talk) 20:03, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
It is not condescension. I sincerely wish you good luck. Izno (talk) 20:07, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Mobile view for deleted pages broken?

I was trying to provide advice on a deleted page to a new-ish editor today and found what seems to be a problem with the mobile browser view of deleted pages. I directed the user to the deleted page MV Feisty Gas to give an example of a deletion log, but I found when I tried to access the link in my mobile browser, the page briefly loaded with the page log, but then immediately loaded the source editor over top of it, so the log could not be read. Closing the editor caused the page to navigate back to the previous page, so the log was still not visible. Is that behaviour intentional? I am using Vector 2010 if that makes a difference. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 14:52, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Why not send them directly to the logs for this page? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:02, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
Because they hadn't provided the name or a link to the page they were asking about and I couldn't figure out which page it was from their deleted contribs, so I was trying to show them how to find the rather easily viewable log at the deleted page's location (the page I picked was from my own deletion log). Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 15:20, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
My understanding is that this behavior is intentional, based on some ancient discussion I recall reading in the vicinity of phabricator. It reflects and/or is the behavior of VisualEditor/its wikitext mode to do this also. Izno (talk) 18:09, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
It's not intentional, and I had even thought that I've fixed it a few years ago in T201852. The editor opens when following a red link, but you're supposed to be able to close it. (On desktop as well, although the editor lacks a dedicated button for it, and there are some bugs filed about that [@Izno You might be remembering T211379], but you can press Esc on the keyboard.) I don't know whether it broke or if it never worked. Testing on that page now, closing the mobile editor works correctly for me when it's in visual mode, but not when it's in source mode. I can't look into it now, but please file a bug. Matma Rex talk 22:07, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
(... yup, that would be the one.) Izno (talk) 22:08, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
I just tested again while trying to write up a bug report, and now it works as expected (closing either the visual editor or source editor reveals the log and does not navigate backwards). The error only seems to happen if I navigate to the deleted page in desktop view, and then switch to mobile. If I'm in mobile when I click on the redlink then it works as expected. Given that that's a pretty limited case I don't think it's worth filing a bug report. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 20:52, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Proposal for next steps following the closure of the Vector 2022 RfC

Hi everyone,

We know that many of you have taken part of and kept an eye on the ongoing conversations around the deployment of the Vector 2022 skin. We have just posted some of our current thinking for next steps following the closure of the Vector 2022 RfC, and would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Thank you! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

How to expand this sidebar?

Hi all, I'm trying to fully expand {{Human history}} on the Human history article but am not sure how to do so. The sidebar code is a bit unclear and {{Human history|expand=yes}} isn't working. Any ideas? Aza24 (talk) 02:48, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@Aza24, you can either set |expand= to the specific section you wish expanded by its name set in the wikitext (e.g. expanding the Holocene section which has |list1name=Holocene, you'd set |expand=Holocene). To expand all, set |expand=all. Izno (talk) 03:20, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Great, thank you! Aza24 (talk) 03:33, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Placement of images in articles with infobox

Recently someone added an infobox to the Rani Pokhari aricle. Since then, it appears no longer possible to place images in the text to the left of the infobox. All images are pushed to below the lower edge of the box, no matter where you put it in the text. This creates a messy look, plus the illustrations are no longer next to the texts they are supposed to illustrate. Is there a solution to this? Judithcomm (talk) 12:36, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@Judithcomm The issue here seems to be that the first image in the article (the one with the caption "Wide view of Ranipokhari before 2015 earthquake.") is set to float to the right, so it appears after the infobox. The image that floats to the left is set to appear after this, so it appears further down the page.
You generally should not place images floating to the left of an infobox per MOS:SANDWICH, as doing so causes display issues on narrower screens. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 13:14, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Problem solved! Thanks! --Judithcomm (talk) 13:23, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
{{stack}} is the technical solution. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-12

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

  • Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [35]

Changes later this week

Meetings

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:24, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but CentralAuth is already in MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer and I'm sure that it's been there for years. I don't use any scripts or gadgets that affect that box. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:22, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
That's an enwiki customization, the default value for that message is empty. Anomie⚔ 11:45, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
The new link will be in the line of links under the page heading. I don't expect software conflicts with any scripts. phab:T331743#8693808 says: (imho, this "conflict" will be "two links appear"). MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer added the link in 2011.[37] If we remove it then there will probably be protests from users who don't notice the new link or have simply gotten used to the old location. Interface changes tend to cause drama. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:00, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Now discussed at MediaWiki talk:Sp-contributions-footer#Protected edit request on 24 March 2023. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:02, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Is Special:PasswordReset broken?

Just tried to reset my password and I got internal errors saying my IP was blocked (it wasn't) half the time, and when it did load, it just loaded the normal login page. Had to go to Meta to reset my password. Has something changed? Anarchyte (talk) 10:38, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@Anarchyte Special:PasswordReset loads for me. Were you trying it while logged in or logged out? Did you get the error on opening, or only on submitting? — xaosflux Talk 12:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Logged out. I couldn't submit a password reset request because it asked for my username and password (with a login button), not username and email. Anarchyte (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Note that now that I'm logged in, it loads fine while both logged in and logged out. Perhaps it was something to do with swapping IPs between WiFi and phone hotspot, and one being incidentally hit by a range blocked? Anarchyte (talk) 12:49, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Quite possibly, it could also be due to administrators getting an IP block exemption by default, so you wouldn't be affected by any IP blocks while logged in. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 14:41, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
Double check that you used Special:PasswordReset and not Special:ResetPassword. Anomie⚔ 19:29, 24 March 2023 (UTC)
That might be it, though I also recall there being no "Forgot password" button on the main login page when I had this problem. The "Help with logging in" link was there, but "Forgot your password?" wasn't. Anarchyte (talk) 02:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

adding GeoJSON routes without infoboxes

You can include an image by doing this: 

[[File:Filename.jpg]]

You could also do this in the infobox (depends on the infobox): 

| logo = Filename.jpg

For GeoJSON routes you can often include them in the infobox thusly: 

| map = {{maplink-road|from=Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railroad.map}}

But what if I wanted to include a map outside of the infobox? Like maybe the route of something or other has changed over the years and I wanted to show how it's changed over the years. I mean, I guess I overlay the GeoJSON onto, say, an OSM map and then screenshot it and upload the screenshot but you lose a lot of resolution if you do that. Like with a GeoJSON you can zoom in to whatever specific area you're interested in. Does this river / road / railroad cross this other river / road / railroad? You can zoom in to your hearts content and answer that question.

Any ideas? TerraFrost (talk) 05:17, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

{{mapframe}} does not need to be in an infobox. Izno (talk) 05:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

Thumbnail previews of infobox image

I think this is the right place to ask this sort of thing. I have a simple bullet list of 12 BLP articles at User:Zaathras/sandbox3, all have infobox images. When I hover the mouse over the link, the image from the infobox pops up in a thumbnail on all but 2 (the 2 are noted). I've looked at the articles and can see no difference, can someone say why these 2 do not produce a preview? Zaathras (talk) 13:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@Zaathras: The articles are Katie Cannon and Osinachi Ohale. It's the same for all links to them. The infobox images are chosen by mw:Extension:PageImages for those articles but then rejected by the popup feature because the original uploads are too small. See mw:Extension:Popups#Known problems. The description of the size requirement is cryptic to me. I suspect the actual rule is that width × height must be either at least 320 × 200 px or 203 × 250 px. I suggested a change with no reply at mw:Topic:X24ym9nooumpgr1h. File:Katie G Cannon.jpg is 194 × 213 px. File:Osinachi Ohale (cropped further).jpg is 207 × 238 px so the width os too small for the first rule and the height is too small for the second rule. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
Interesting, thanks. Zaathras (talk) 21:25, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
Page images are used in several places, mainly small images at search results to help identify a wanted article. Popups (Page Previews) shows a single larger image at a time. It apparently wants to show a fixed size without scaling up which gives blurry images. The images could be reuploaded at a larger resolution but they are already blurry so I don't recommend scaling them up. We should probably never scale up uploads just to get Popups to accept them. The requirement may change anyway. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:32, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

programming error in convert template

The convert template produces this incorrect display of the word "change": "reduced the temperature in the sickroom by 20 degrees Fahrenheit change (11 °C)." There's a workaround that only works when the abbreviations are used: Template_talk:Convert#incorrect_use_of_"change" --Espoo (talk) 11:47, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Please discuss this on the template talk page, it has plenty of watchers. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:12, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Israel

Resolved
 – Information provided, page is already marked as such. — xaosflux Talk 09:30, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not allowed to edit on the page Israel, but that's "impossible"; I have been registered for 4 months, have over 5 500 edits to my credit, have never (obviously) vandalised, and have always respected the rules. JackkBrown (talk) 23:49, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

@JackkBrown, the page is fully-protected, meaning only admins can edit it currently. Izno (talk) 00:07, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Script to move references back to prose?

Back in August, Teemu Leisti (talk · contribs) moved all of references in the article Enlargement of NATO to the References section, replacing each one in the prose with a named ref tag, like <ref name=foo_2020_01_01/>, to match. The user's edit summary was "Moved definitions of all references to the References section. Made the names of references more systematic."

I've never seen this sort of thing done before on Wikipedia, and I am now finding this makes working on sections or subsections of the article unnecessarily difficult, since to edit or remove an out-of-date reference requires constantly editing the full article using Ctrl+F to track down sources. Also previewing edits to sections is frustrating because all the references are listed as "Cite warning: <ref> tag with name foo_2020_01_01 cannot be previewed because it is defined outside the current section or not defined in this article at all."

It's been far to long with far too many intervening edits to undo this action. To put these back manually would mean individually copying, Ctrl+Fing, and pasting back 278 references, so before I waste hours on this, is there a script that could be run to put the references back where they normally go? Is there somewhere else I might ask about this? Thanks, Patrick Neil, oѺ∞/Talk 16:18, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I am not sure what you mean by "references in prose"? There are still in prose albeit in a separate section at the end of the article. As to ref templates, they are highly recommended for the use because they standardize ref appearance. Ruslik_Zero 20:02, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
See Help:List-defined references. I've seen scripts that convert pages to this style, but I've never seen a script that undoes the conversion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
@Patrickneil: Converting an article to WP:LDR should only be done with consensus, per WP:CITEVAR. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:57, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
You could delete all the references from the reference section and then wait for User:AnomieBOT to rescue them from previous versions, but you'd want to get talk page consensus before doing so. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:35, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
@Redrose64 and Whatamidoing (WMF): Thanks, "list-defined references" was the term I should have used. Yes, the user changed the article from footnotes whose information is in templates within the prose next to the sentence or phrase they are sourcing, to list-defined references at the end of the article, probably by using one of those scripts you mentioned. No, there was no discussion or consensus for this change in August, but I can start a discussion about changing it back on the article's talk page now. @Ahecht: Using the bot might not be the worst idea, something to look into at least. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patrickneil (talk • contribs) 21:56, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
@Patrickneil: User:Kaniivel/Reference Organizer may do what you want. Keith D (talk) 22:46, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

"Talk:" page comment -- about the "About the sandbox" page

Please forgive me if this was the wrong place to post this.

A new "Talk:" page section is here:

Wikipedia talk:About the sandbox#Obsolete info? (or what?)

Enjoy ... Mike Schwartz (talk) 08:08, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I have updated the text for Vector 2022.[38] PrimeHunter (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you.
Resolved
 – case closed
--Mike Schwartz (talk) 01:14, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@Mike Schwartz: Oh, I never knew it was posted here too. If I'd known I would never have started this help desk thread. Please see the guideline about multiple posting. Graham87 04:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
This thread is basically a pointer to the talk page section he started. I don't see how it conflicts with WP:MULTI. Nardog (talk) 05:31, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog: Yeah I guess not ... he should have made a pointer from the sandbox talk page thread to here though. If he had I would've been happy to wait for somebody from here to post at that thread. Instead, because I knew I was one of the only active watchers on that talk page and I couldn't help fully because of my blindness (even though it was a relativvely urgent issue), I felt compelled to get more eyes on the situation, which I did at the help desk (because I thought people there would be used to helping out new users). . It was a bit of wasted effort on my part. Oh well, what's done is done. Graham87 12:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Zombie WikiProject categories

Special:WantedCategories is suddenly flooded, for no reason I've been able to identify, with a glut of hundreds of redlinked class-rating categories for inactive or defunct WikiProjects.

I thought this might have been related to recent edits to {{WPBannerMeta}}, which "normalized" quality ratings by transferring them from direct code within the template over to Module:WikiProject quality assessment, but a temporary revert of the edit that was made to that template yesterday failed to make any of the redlinks stop being generated on the talk pages — so I've self-reverted my test revert, but am struggling to identify what else might have caused this. Of course, that might still be where the zombie categories are coming from, but it would require the expertise of someone with more experience in template coding than I've got to identify and fix that.

A subset (but not most) of the categories had already somehow been emptied back out before I saw the latest run of WantedCategories at all, but since there's no way for me to identify what the implicated articles were in the already-cleaned categories, I also can't determine what was done to clean them out so that I can apply it elsewhere. So could somebody take a look at this, and figure out how to fix it? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Never mind. Practically at the same time as I was posting this question, the editor who had made the original change to the template posted to my talk page clarifying that they had already identified and corrected the error, so the categories are clearing out on their own based on the processing of the job queue. So I'll revive this if it's obvious by the next WantedCategories update that they aren't clearing out and thus there's something else wrong, but so far it looks like this is resolved. Bearcat (talk) 14:52, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
If I go to the first one in the special page, i.e. Category:NA-Class Stub sorting articles (0) (which I am 100% certain should be empty because WPSS has never carried out page assessments), there are plenty of bluelinked categories. If I go to one of those pages (let's call it Category XYZ), the cat box at the bottom does not mention NA-Class Stub sorting articles at all. So the problem is with the links tables. If I then WP:NULLEDIT Category XYZ, it still does not mention NA-Class Stub sorting articles. When I then return to NA-Class Stub sorting articles and refresh it, Category XYZ is no longer listed. So the job queue should clear it; if that is too slow, you need to send a null-bot to visit all those bluelink cats. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:29, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

I saw this headline and was hoping for something about WP:WikiProject Zombies. :( Anomie⚔ 20:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Same names for SVG and PNG versions of same map

Commons will no longer allow me to use the same name for an svg file that is used for a png file. I had to add a tilde (~) at the end of the file name I changed:

This makes it difficult for people to change Our World in Data (OWID) maps in Wikipedia articles from PNG to SVG. Now that the SVG maps have been fixed by OWID.

The OWID SVG maps no longer have the problem of the OWID logo covering part of the date. It was fixed by OWID recently adding a Wikimedia compatible font, Liberation Sans. See:

--Timeshifter (talk) 18:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@Timeshifter, we can't help you with the issue. You should discuss at Commons. Izno (talk) 21:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
File:World map of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people by country.svg without a tilde already exists. You uploaded it. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
PrimeHunter. Oops. Thanks! S**t happens when I am sleepy. I struck out the incorrect info. I will try to get the tilde version speedy deleted.
Concerning Our World in Data (OWID). Let me try to salvage this by saying that people should feel free now to substitute the SVG version for the PNG version of almost any OWID map or chart. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:52, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Adding no search and reading history to the Wikipedia iOS app

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333443

I asked about this a few years ago, but it seems like there hasn’t been any major developments since. Can you give a timeline with regards to when I can expect this functionality to come? Regards, Interstellarity (talk) 00:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Asked where, who, what are we even talking about ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:54, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
@Interstellarity sounds like you want some sort of "private browsing mode" on the ios app? Have you opened a feature request for that? If not you can use this form to do so, it is certainly not something we can fix locally on the English Wikipedia. — xaosflux Talk 10:21, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Created here. Interstellarity (talk) 17:11, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

"Convert formatting to wikitext?"

When I put a template on a talk page (e.g. in this case {{BLP noticeboard}}, I get the message "Convert formatting to wikitext?". "You pasted content with rich formatting. Would you like to convert this formatting to wikitext?". What's the purpose of this? Seems like something that is rarely if ever needed. After a few times it no longer appears though. Fram (talk) 14:38, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

@Fram: I would assume it's because there's some other formatting other than just the template that isn't visible when just copying it. I believe it's also for if you just paste the template code in the Visual Editor. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:43, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
If I copy your signature ("Fram (talk)") and paste it into source mode, it will paste the literal text Fram (talk). If I click convert formatting to wikitext, it will fix it up to [[User:Fram|Fram]] ([[User talk:Fram|talk]]). My guess is that you copied from a template marked up as {{example}}, which is a link, so it tries to be smart and asks if you want to paste the literal interpretation of what you copied, a link to the template, rather than just the text. Legoktm (talk) 14:44, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to be the same though, I posted the exact text I gave at the top, which upon saving just gives the expected result (the template, not some unwanted simple text like with my username example). I tried it again at another page (without saving!), Talk:Salini (surname), and I get the same result. The example you gave (with my sig) is an example of a good use of this though, so at least it answers the question when this would ever be useful. But in this case, the end result is <nowiki>{{BLP noticeboard}}</nowiki>, turning a working template into a nowiki version instead of the other way around. Fram (talk) 14:58, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
My understanding is that it matters where and how you copied it from, rather than where you are pasting to. E.g. if I copy {{BLP noticeboard}} from your initial comment, I get no prompt. If I copy from the {{tl|example}} from my comment, I do get the prompt and it nowikis the braces and inserts a link.
There is some discussion related to this at T280745, presumably the feature could be smarter and try to guess whether the pasted content looks like it's already wikitext? Might be worth a feature request. Legoktm (talk) 17:08, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
You can also use ctrl + shift + v to force pasting as plain text, which will prevent this popup from appearing. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Changes in block process

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T332994

I'm not sure when it changed, but when I make a block on an IP now, the IP I'm blocking shows up in an uneditable grey box in the "Username, IP address, or IP range" field. It used to be easy to make a rangeblock by simply appending the range (e.g. /24, /64) to the IP number. Now that's not possible without clicking 'x' to remove the IP, writing or pasting the IP number back into the field, adding the range, and then blocking. This is also the case if you want to modify a block on a single IP to a rangeblock via Change block. It's extremely irritating.-- Ponyobons mots 23:21, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

@Ponyo, I think you're running into phab:T332994, which should be deployed next week? Izno (talk) 23:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
That's definitely the same issue. Thanks, Izno.-- Ponyobons mots 17:48, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-13

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

  • The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [39]
  • Some Global AbuseFilter actions will no longer apply to local projects. [40]
  • Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [41]

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

You will be able to choose visual diffs on all history pages at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias.
Just got this update! Thanks, all of you who worked on it, it's quite useful! Edderiofer (talk) 17:04, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, @Edderiofer. @TChan (WMF) did most of the work on that.
There are a few things that could be tweaked, but it's useful. I find that some diffs are better in one mode and others in the other mode. For most of them, I think they're both equally good. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

How to disable region-separated interlangs list in Vector 2022

How can I opt out of the multi-column region-separated list of interlangs that shows up when you click "n languages" in Vector 2022 (when that number is large, e.g. [44]) and go back to the single-column alphabetical list instead? I have "Use a compact language list" disabled in Preferences, but this doesn't appear to have any effect on Vector 2022. This has been a deal breaker for switching to the new skin for me. Nardog (talk) 08:53, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

You go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and disable the "compact language list" in the Languages section. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:44, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
Jinx. I already have. Does it make any difference on Vector 2022 for you? Nardog (talk) 09:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog: this is being looked in to with phab:T333321. — xaosflux Talk 10:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog oops, just saw YOU opened it :D — xaosflux Talk 10:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
And T319690 shows the option was deliberately made to be ignored in Vector 2022 so my task will likely be declined (h/t Stjn). So I'm just looking for a hack to force the non-compact list at this point. Nardog (talk) 10:33, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
@Nardog, I wonder if you might be able to get more traction in that Phab task if you could write a User story. It's a model that presents the problem, rather than the solution. I don't know what your own story would be, but I could imagine someone saying "As a person who reads two languages well, I always want to see the list of available languages. I feel disappointed when I click on the language switcher, only to find that there are only articles available in languages I can't read." Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
I might do that but again, I'm not hopeful the software will be changed to my liking so I'm just asking for a JS hack that works for now. For the record, I'm not looking for a way to bring back the interlangs list on the sidebar, I just want the single-column list when I click "n languages" as opposed to a multi-column region-separated one. Nardog (talk) 00:47, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

After a long struggle with the labyrinthine ULS code, I've figured this seems to work: 

$(document).one('click', '.mw-interlanguage-selector', function () {
	mw.loader.using('ext.uls.mediawiki', function () {
		$.fn.uls.Constructor.prototype.getMenuWidth = function () { return 'narrow' };
	});
});

Let me know if there's a more robust and/or future-proof way. Nardog (talk) 10:20, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Processing database dump

I'm trying to run the Missing Redirects Project. The code is outdated, so the dump is no longer at http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/20230320_cur_table.sql.gz; what's the new location?
Also, would it be better to just rewrite the code? — Qwerfjkltalk 12:35, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Do any of the links on https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html help? Certes (talk) 12:41, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Certes, perhaps https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-page.sql.gz? — Qwerfjkltalk 12:43, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I've not downloaded it to find out but if you're expecting 2.1 GB then it may be the right file for you. Certes (talk) 12:56, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Certes, looks like 7 43 GB to me. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:57, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I was going by the directory listing at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/. That may well unzip to 7.43 GB. Certes (talk) 12:59, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Changing my email in phabricator

Hi, I was wondering how I can change the email address associated with my phabricator account. I checked my user profile and settings, but I couldn’t find it. Any help is appreciated. Interstellarity (talk) 13:48, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Click the user icon and "Settings", then there are email options in the left pane. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:39, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Fetch page text

How can I get the plain text for a page, so that I can give it to the GPTZero API to check? — Qwerfjkltalk 16:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Module:Page
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:01, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Trappist the monk, sorry, I wasn't clear enough. In python, how can a fetch a page's plain text. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:23, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Depends on what you mean by "plain text".
Also, a bit of a side note / advice: when I tried it, GPTZero reported that basically every Wikipedia article I tried was likely written by AI. I think that's because all the GPTs have been trained on Wikipedia content, and so they often output text in a similar style, and it just detects this kind of content. Matma Rex talk 18:11, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Matma Rex, thanks, the third one looks like want I want. — Qwerfjkltalk 18:36, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

What is up with no access to JSTOR and The Wikipedia Library not working?

I cannot sign on to JSTOR today. I have never had an issue logging on before. When I attempt to log on with my valid username/password I get this response:

The username and/or password you entered is incorrect. If you have previously logged in or registered with a Google account, try logging in with Google instead.

There are a couple of recent phabricator reports about this issue - see Frequent OAuth failures on Wikimedia wikis since eqiad was repooled due to db-mainstash replication lag - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T332650 and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T332349#8707537. Couldn't get The WP Library to work either. Anyone know what is going on, when access - especially to JSTOR - might be restored? Thx, Shearonink (talk) 14:33, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I think I saw this problem some weeks ago, but it was very brief. I can access atm. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:23, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Just now tried JSTOR again and now it's working?... (*shrug*) oh well! Shearonink (talk) 15:34, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Shearonink I have to say, when I encountered the problem, I had a surprisingly strong "where the hell are my keys" panicky reaction. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:56, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, especially since JSTOR had always worked fine before... lol, of course when I did get onto JSTOR the article was only available as a paid download for the lowlowLOW price of $51. Yeah, not gonna happen. Shearonink (talk) 17:12, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Shearonink Just to clarify, are you logging in to The Wikipedia Library at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/users/my_library/, scrolling to JSTOR, and clicking Access Collection? We don't use usernames & passwords for JSTOR anymore, so any old account you might have had with them will probably no longer be active. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanking produced a separate url?

When I thank users, it usually just asks for confirmation and lets me thank them, but this time a separate web page opening in my browser, with this url. What is it, and how do I reproduce it again? This is the link. Thanks (no pun intended)! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:52, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I get that occasionally if I try to give thanks quickly before the page has finished loading, or perhaps before a script that removes the tedium of going via the intermediate page has had time to run. Certes (talk) 14:56, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
The "thank" link for Special:Diff/1147500461 does have the url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Thanks/1147500461. When the link is displayed there is JavaScript to handle it in-page instead but if the JavaScript hasn't loaded or you don't have JavaScript enabled in your browser then you go to that page. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:25, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Stuck loading, can't post edit

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333612

Hi everyone. I've had this issue multiple times on multiple different pages, just today, and I've never experienced it before.

When I finish editing and click Publish changes, it's stuck loading, and no matter what I do, won't post. I can't click the X button to go back to my edit. If I reload the page, and my edits are recovered, and I then try again to edit, the same problem happens.

I'm unsure what the issue is, or what I can do to fix it. I'm using Firefox, version 111.0.1, the newest version, on desktop, and this issue is occurring on the visual editor. Any help is appreciated. Thank you so much! HeyElliott (talk) 19:30, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Quick update: reloading the page (edits recover themselves), then switching to source view and clicking publish edits there worked. Unsure if this will work all the time, or just sometimes, as this issue has been happening on and off all day. HeyElliott (talk) 19:31, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Also just reported at the Teahouse - Wikipedia:Teahouse#Issue with saving. 199.208.172.35 (talk) 21:16, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
This also happened to me while editing David Andrews (politician). Is there an issue with VisualEditor and is it on Phabricator yet? Tails Wx 22:43, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Same here, changing to source worked. I created T333612 just now. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:27, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Shushugah can you try disabling your scripts or loading the page with ?safemode=1 and see if the problem is still happening? — xaosflux Talk 23:30, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@HeyElliott try turning off all of these and see if it is still a problem. — xaosflux Talk 23:29, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Huh, it just started working again, despite no changes to scripts! Tails Wx 23:36, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

It now also works again for me. SWinxy (talk) 01:02, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
So it worked, then stopped working, then worked again. I posted this comment. Then it broke again and is working again. I had to do a hard refresh (Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + R) and it began to work again. Seems to fix it ig. It should have an "Unbreak now!" priority. SWinxy (talk) 15:17, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
'tis fixed, according to our friendly local math king (explanation over on Phabricator). 199.208.172.35 (talk) 16:56, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Cannot publish edits

Hey y'all. I am actually @Knightoftheswords281, however, I am writing here to inform you of an issue. I cannot publish any of my edits on Wikipedia. Every time I hit publish changes, the site stalls and the editor never closes. I'm using Google Chrome. Does anyone know of this issue and how to fix it? 72.46.205.96 (talk) 03:29, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Update: I've now realized the issue only occurs when I edit any transuded templates in visual editor; non-template related visual editor edits or any edit in source mode are okay. 72.46.205.96 (talk) 03:43, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Mismatch in UTC clock in toolbar

The clock that appears in the personal tool bar is showing a different time from that in the toolbar dropdown. Both elements are called utcdate so I can only assume that only the one in the dropdown is picking up my user preference of adding the one hour time offset for daylight saving time (this came into effect in the UK last Sunday). Nthep (talk) 16:00, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

@Nthep I think you are referring to something you manually loaded from off-project in your User:Nthep/common.js file? If so, please report it on that other project. — xaosflux Talk 16:03, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux. Thanks, I'd forgotten that although it's in preferences it's maintained at mediawiki. But you have prompted me to remove a script from my js that is no longer required. Nthep (talk) 16:20, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
The drop-down was mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-LocalLiveClock.js. The other is enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets: "(S) Add a clock to the personal toolbar that displays the current time in UTC and provides a link to purge the current page (documentation)" . It uses mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js. They both work as intended. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:46, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
That's what i realised after X pointed it out. I didn't need LocalLiveClock any more and for UTCLiveClock I needed to add the relevant timezone to my js to get it to agree with my local time. Nthep (talk) 19:59, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Encrypted text?

Hello! Apologies if this isn't the right noticeboard for this. While I was checking out the most recently submitted drafts, I came across one that had an obvious copyright violation of one of the sources. The interesting thing is, when comparing the link it's a copyvio of to the text of the article (see this copyvio report), it shows up as a 0% match, with the relevant text in the source being no where to be found, despite it obviously being present when viewing the source direct. My thinking is the website might have encrypted the text somehow so that if there's an attempt to access the website from somewhere that isn't the website itself, the text shows up as pure gibberish keyboard smash. Am I right in this thinking or has Earwig's Copyvio Detector somehow not pulled the website correctly? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:42, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

While not quite encrypted, it looks like the page is initially empty and dynamically loads the actual obituary later using JavaScript. I don't know how Earwig's tool works, but it probably doesn't execute JS and therefore can't load it. The strange text you see at the bottom is just the terms of use, privacy policy and such. Rummskartoffel 20:41, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Deleted page admin text appearing for non-admins

When clicking on a link to a revision of a deleted page, I see the text "The revision #X belongs to a deleted page. You can view it; details can be found in the deletion log." This appears to be an error, as being a non-admin, I cannot view it. When logged out, I see "The revision #1147216828 belongs to a deleted page; details can be found in the deletion log", so I'm not sure exactly which of my permissions (it may just be having an account?), is causing the "You can view it" text to appear. CMD (talk) 10:22, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis please provide an example of the link you are following here. — xaosflux Talk 12:49, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Special:Permalink/1147216828? What page did this belong to? I got it listed as "Main Page", which cannot possibly be correct. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 15:04, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@LaundryPizza03 please provide step-by-step instructions that led you to that link, such that we can replicate the result and find out what is going on. — xaosflux Talk 15:09, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I dont't know how CMD found the broken revision, but I just used Special:Permalink. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 15:17, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
It's no longer in the revision table (though higher-numbered revisions are), so must have been deleted. I suspect a revdel or oversight happened between your being offered the link and clicking it, making the revision unavailable. Certes (talk) 15:11, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I managed to find the example which includes the page name by doing an insource search for the revision number: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Occult_writers_and_antisemitism&oldid=1147216828. The message is MediaWiki:Missing-revision-permission whether or not you have permission to see deleted pages. Both sysops and IP's get the message. The MediaWiki default MediaWiki:Missing-revision-permission/qqx always claims "You can view it". I guess the message was only intended for users who can actually view deleted pages. In 2021 xaosflux apparently saw it was used for everybody and customized the message by wrapping "You can view it" in <span class="sysop-show">...</span>. This should mean it's only seen by sysops but it doesn't work. PrimeHunter2 is autoconfirmed with no other permissions. I see it in that account, but not in PrimeHunter3 which is not autoconfirmed. class="sysop-show" is hidden by default in MediaWiki:Common.css and then made visible in MediaWiki:Group-sysop.css. The latter should only be loaded for sysops but it's apparently also loaded for autoconfirmed users. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:21, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: I can't reproduce this on my end; I created User:Writ_Keeper/sandbox with lines for each of the rights-based CSS rules, and it appears to be correctly showing just "autoconfirmed" and "user" for my test account, while I can correctly see "sysop" and "abusefilter" on this account. Moreover, the display:none; for sysop-show is correctly applied for my test account at the mainspace deletion notification; my test account cannot see the "you can view it" text, while my main account can. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:39, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter think I'm missing a step in the workflow. If someone manually just puts in a oldid= value I expect some edge cases may present. What is the step-by-step user workflow that would normally be followed that is leading them to a bad result? — xaosflux Talk 15:45, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, I forgot I loaded MediaWiki:Group-sysop.css in User:PrimeHunter2/common.css for some test in 2017. I have removed it and no longer see sysop-show in that account. @Chipmunkdavis: What is your interface language at Special:Preferences? We only hide "You can view it" for the default en and it's the same for nearly all customized messages. If you choose en-gb (British English) or en-ca (Canadian English) then you get a different interface from others and may encounter many problems due to that. Always say if you have another interface language when you mention interface issues. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:58, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
The example with en-gb: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Occult_writers_and_antisemitism&oldid=1147216828&uselang=en-gb. Everybody will see "You can view it" there. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:02, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Gotcha, per lots of warnings: anyone that uses en-xx should expect to have a bad time. — xaosflux Talk 16:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
It's a recurring issue. en-gb users see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?uselang=en-gb at their preferences. The top displays a mild warning from MediaWiki:Preferences-summary/en-gb. I tried a stronger warning [45] but it was opposed. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:32, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
We do also give them a warning everytime they go to their watchlist (example). — xaosflux Talk 18:55, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. I see you added the warning in 2021.[46] PrimeHunter (talk) 19:28, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Yup, there was support to discourage people from using en-xx. — xaosflux Talk 08:58, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Pages lingering in a renamed category that was populated by a template.

Recently, the category Category:Letter-number combination disambiguation pages was renamed via WP:CFDS to Category:Letter–number combination disambiguation pages, with an endash instead of a hyphen-minus. The template {{Letter–number combination disambiguation}} populated this category, and was not immediately updated to change the name of the category. When this change was done, most of the pages got migrated to the new title, but 21 dab pages with the template still had the old category name:

I fixed this issue by purging the pages, but the trouble is that these are still listed under the old category name instead of the new one. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 09:25, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

@LaundryPizza03 transcluded categories can take time to update, sometimes a while. I just looked at VR-5 and it seems to be done for example - does it look wrong to you? — xaosflux Talk 12:51, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@LaundryPizza03 The category and link tables are not updated on a standard purge action to save processing time, normally they are only updated when a page is edited. To remove a page from a category populated by a template you either need to null edit the page, or purge it via the API with the forcelinkupdate option enabled. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 13:31, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
It is now empty. Thanks for the help. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 15:01, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Forgot to mention it here, but I purged all of the category members, and that resolved the problem. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:11, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

A long word in a <div> with a fixed width can exceed the width, but the same word as a link will be split:

Code Result
<div style="width: 6em;">VeryLongWordWithManyLetters</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters
<div style="width: 6em;">[[VeryLongWordWithManyLetters]]</div>

What causes this difference, and is it possible to prevent the splitting of long words in links? Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 21:48, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Code Result
<div style="width: 6em;">VeryLongWordWithManyLetters</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters
<div style="width: 6em;" class="nowrap">[[VeryLongWordWithManyLetters]]</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters
How about class="nowrap"? – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:52, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
class="nowrap" (or style="white-space: nowrap;") will also prevent line breaks between words. Can you keep line breaks between the words but still prevent splitting of long words? Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 21:59, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Code Result
<div style="width: 6em;">VeryLongWordWithManyLetters and more text</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters and more text
<div style="width: 6em;" class="nowrap">[[VeryLongWordWithManyLetters]] and more text</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters and more text
<div style="width: 6em;" class="nowraplinks">[[VeryLongWordWithManyLetters]] and more text</div>
VeryLongWordWithManyLetters and more text
Maybe you want class="nowraplinks"? – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:15, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Code Result
<div style="width: 6em;">firstlongword and secondlongword</div>
firstlongword and secondlongword
<div style="width: 6em;">[[firstlongword and secondlongword]]</div>
<div style="width: 6em;" class="nowraplinks">[[firstlongword and secondlongword]]</div>
firstlongword and secondlongword
class="nowraplinks" doesn't work the way I want it either, as it also prevents line breaks between words in links. I want line breaks between words in a link to be possible, but not arbitrary line breaks within long words. So "firstlongword and secondlongword" should have the same line breaks, whether it is a link or not. --Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 23:26, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Links got a {word-wrap: break-word;} at phab:T327334, implemented in gerrit:895370. You can override it with word-wrap: normal;, at least when placed inside a piped link. Would it require a template with TemplateStyles to override it from outside the link? word-wrap: normal !important; doesn't do it in a div.
Code Result
<div style="width: 6em; word-wrap: normal !important;">[[firstlongword and secondlongword|firstlongword and secondlongword]]</div>
<div style="width: 6em;">[[firstlongword and secondlongword|<span style="word-wrap: normal;">firstlongword and secondlongword</span>]]</div>
<div style="width: 6em;">{{avoid wrap|[[firstlongword and secondlongword]]}}</div>
PrimeHunter (talk) 01:18, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
{{Avoid wrap}} uses the class avoidwrap. I don't know where it's defined but the template appears to do as wanted. I have added it to the above table. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:37, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, PrimeHunter. With your examples I was able solve a problem with links on location maps in dawiki. Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 06:18, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm Danish! Didn't know I was helping my own country. It's best to say from the start if you want help for another wiki. They often have different templates, styles, configurations and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:37, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Protection of articles

Is there a way to double lock articles in Wikipedia? This means that a prior agreement is needed to edit. (In case of editing war at the level of administrators) Arbabi second (talk) 09:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

No. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
However, administrators that are violating the protection policy may be blocked just like anyone else - and may find themselves no longer being administrators. — xaosflux Talk 14:53, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux In a dispute between two administrators , in practice both managers may have violated the rules. But usually only the access of one administrator is limited. Arbabi second (talk) 16:36, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're going on about here; you appear to have a specific incident in mind, but are speaking vaguely to mask the nature of that incident. Can you elaborate on which incident had a conflict between two administrators? --Jayron32 12:13, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Rather, please don't. The technical question was answered (it is a "no" as far as this is going to happen in this context, not going to go down a rabbit hole of SUPERPROTECT, filters, etc). If there is an admin violating the protection policy, you can report it at WP:AN/I. — xaosflux Talk 15:59, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@Ladsgroup, is this about a block you made at fawiki? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Somewhat but not related to English Wikipedia. Ladsgroupoverleg 23:08, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

removed text is not shown in diff

see this diff, there is nothing deleted, only added. try to search "qdinar" with ctrl+f, and there is nothing. then try to go to the previous revision by clicking "← Previous edit" and if you search "qdinar", there is a talk with me. so, it has disappeared, but is not shown in the diff. how can that be? is it a bug? --Qdinar (talk) 13:11, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

There was an unclosed <ref> tag further up in the page which had no closing pair. The most recent edit introduced a closing ref tag, which caused the earlier opening tag to consume all the content up to that tag (~12 sections). I've fixed that here. Aidan9382 (talk) 13:16, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
thank you Qdinar (talk) 14:50, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Issues installing user script

Hello, I am attempting to install User:Ohconfucius/script/EngvarB.js. I have followed the instructions to install it with User:Enterprisey/script-installer, but it is not showing up in the toolbox. I have successfully installed DYK check and highlight duplinks in the past, and those show in my toolbox, but I'm not sure why this one isn't. I'm using the latest version of Chrome (and after testing, it doesn't show on Safari either) and I'm using the Vector 2022 skin (if it matters). Thanks for the help in advance! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 13:57, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

@MyCatIsAChonk, it looks like you've installed it correctly. For me it looks like this (using Vector 2022). — Qwerfjkltalk 10:26, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I was unaware it had to be used in source mode, now I feel silly... thanks for your help. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 12:15, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Slideshow stutters as it loads next image

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333832

A slideshow that has been scaled down to 60% will briefly load each image at 100%, causing a glitchy appearance for a split second. When clicking through all the images this hurts to look at.

Example at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Capacity

A similar/same effect can occur even when allowed to take up the whole page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/117th_United_States_Congress#Party_summary

This effect does not occur if the slideshow is scaled way down to less than 363 pixels.

Fix? Alternative? Wizmut (talk) 10:14, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

@Wizmut: I opened phab:T333832 on this. — xaosflux Talk 13:21, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Proposed change to the behavior of Wikipedia:New user landing page

As you know, non-autoconfirmed users are not allowed to create new articles in the main namespace, as a result of WP:ACTRIAL. Currently, when a registered but non-autoconfirmed user follows a red link such as This page does not exist, they are redirected to Wikipedia:New user landing page, which offers some advice on other ways to contribute. (You can probably try this by visiting test2wiki:This page does not exist, unless you're autoconfirmed there.)

I'd like to change this slightly, so that instead of redirecting, the landing page message would be shown directly on the non-existent page.

This would allow the page deletion log to be shown above the landing page text, which was a wish that received 38 votes in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. It would also allow {{PAGENAME}} and similar magic words to work in this text, e.g. to let the user search for similar page titles or to prefill it in the link to article wizard, which was requested a few years ago at T204234.

I've already proposed the necessary code changes in Gerrit change 904865, but before I look for someone to review and approve them, I wanted to make sure that this won't cause any unforeseen problems, e.g. if there's a gadget or something that relies on the current behavior. The only potential problem I can think of is that the red link visits will no longer be counted as page views for Wikipedia:New user landing page.

Matma Rex talk 22:59, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

See Wikipedia_talk:New_user_landing_page#Potential_improvement_of_this_page for potential improvement of this page.--GZWDer (talk) 08:42, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Question: Will this also be visible to IP users? I think the workflow for IPs should be the same as new users. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 13:04, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Awesome Aasim No, IP users don't see this page now, and I'm not planning to change that. They see Template:No article text instead. Matma Rex talk 13:06, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Matma Rex That is a bit of a disappointment.
I think there are two classes of users that showing this page would be helpful to:
  • New users as you mentioned, namely non-autoconfirmed users.
  • IP users who have made edits before: When someone comes to save an edit it can put edit cookies on their browser (something simple like [lastEdited=1680527391]). Those edit cookies can then be used to change the experience for these users to show the new user landing page. If the IP user has made edits in the last 30 days, then it can show the "New user landing page".
Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 13:43, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Awesome Aasim I don't disagree, but I'm just trying to make a technical improvement here without annoying anyone. If you want to propose functional changes, that probably should be a discussion elsewhere. Matma Rex talk 13:52, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Ok I raised the thing on Phabricator: phab:T333846. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 15:19, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Special:DiscussionToolsDebug

In the spirit of both fake and real software launches on today's special date, some of you may find Special:DiscussionToolsDebug amusing. As an example, have a look at Special:DiscussionToolsDebug/Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Cheers! Matma Rex talk 00:51, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Man, I would love to be able to collapse sub-threads like that in real conversations. If Flow had looked like that, without all the wasted space, I doubt it would've had the opposition that it did. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:43, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Scheduled tools downtime next week

There's two periods of scheduled toolforge downtime next week. This means most tools and bots will be down. Details were sent to the cloud-announce mailing list (see message archive for details). The expected downtime windows include most of the day on Monday, and about an hour on Thursday. Processes which depends on bots (for example, main page updates) should start thinking about what effect this will have on their operations and how to deal with it. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:19, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Reminder: this is happening soon. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:49, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I've already seen a few questions here and there. It might be an idea to have this as a watchlist notice for the duration of today ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:27, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
added. — xaosflux Talk 10:49, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, was wondering. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 10:55, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Is there a list somewhere that will show everything that might be affected? I noticed that HBC AIV helperbot is no longer functioning since it runs on Toolforge so AIV and UAA have to be managed manually now. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:52, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
There are about 3100 hosted tools on toolforge and 2400 users maintaining them. Anything that relies on being able to write state to disk will not function. That's likely to be quite a lot, but impossible to say which tools specifically (nothing keep track of that). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Anything that relies on being able to write state to disk will not function. What exactly does this mean...? I understand the "Will not function" part but what does "Being able to write state to disk will not function" mean? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:03, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf so toolforge is up, if there is a tool that just provides a link for example, it could still work. But if the tool has an internal log, etc (that it would have to write to the disk on toolforge) it will likely fail. Some toolmakers may have put lots of checks in to their tool and present a notice, but that is up to those volunteers. 15:06, 3 April 2023 (UTC) — xaosflux Talk 15:06, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks! ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:08, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

System issue?

Several bots who issue reports I rely on have gone inactive so I was wondering if there was some system problem. There isn't a replag but I thought maybe someone here would know what's up. I've already informed the bot operators several hours ago. Any ideas? Liz Read! Talk! 03:42, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

See #Scheduled tools downtime next week * Pppery * it has begun... 03:43, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, * Pppery *. I'll stop checking hourly for updates then. I appreciate your response. Liz Read! Talk! 05:55, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Crop tool

Helly, anybody hanging around to take a look at the Crop tool? Seems to be down too. Thank you so much for your time. Lotje (talk) 13:42, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

@Lotje see the edit notice. — xaosflux Talk 15:03, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
It works again. Thanks Lotje (talk) 15:18, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Should be back up

According to the email on cloud-announce, the migration was complete about an hour ago and jobs were restarted, so everything should in theory be working again. There's another outage on Thursday at 17:00 UTC, but it's only for an hour and affects tools using ToolsDB. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:34, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

User:HBC AIV helperbot5 still appears to be offline and its maintainer probably isn't around anymore since their last edit was 7 months ago. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:07, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf many barely-there bot operators do respond via email, so try that if they don't answer their talk page. — xaosflux Talk 22:20, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Yeah it might need to be restarted. Galobtter (pingó mió) 22:45, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
The bot's back up and running! Should be all good! Tails Wx 23:17, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Subpages not moved when parent moves

Is there a technical reason or at least a Phabricator ticket for why subpages of a parent-page do not get moved, when the parent page gets moved? I can appreciate that name collision/other issues are unique per page. But if a page is moved, the talk page is also automatically moved, even though there could exist a collisions with the talk page, so why not for subpages? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 21:35, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

There is a checkbox for moving subpages. At least, there is for me. Surely that's not admin-only? --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:44, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I think it's admin and page-mover only. The rest of us have to move them manually. It would be nice to at least get notified when a move leaves a mess behind. (Further information: WP:Moving a page#Talk subpages.) Certes (talk) 22:04, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I do not have those rights, and I do not see the checkbox. I sometimes find myself cleaning up after page moves, including my own, that neglect to move all relevant subpages. It would be nice to get at least a notification that there are subpages that may need to be moved. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:10, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I'm afraid page moving is littered with tasks that most editors have permission to do badly but not well. The classic example is that I can't cleanly move a page over an existing page but could (if I liked the taste of trout) copy-paste its contents. Certes (talk) 22:16, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Is there a reason we don't allow everyone to move sub-pages? This is the second time in the past week that I have been involved in a discussion where many or most participants believed that this was a permission available to all editors, so it seems likely that there would be support for it if solely on the basis of "I thought this was a thing already". BilledMammal (talk) 22:36, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Page move vandals would have a field day moving the WP:AN archives :^). Izno (talk) 22:38, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Simply, most pages don't have subpages - and ones that do should be carefully handled. — xaosflux Talk 23:26, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
I can confirm I got an error and was unable to move a page, when I checked that an associated talk page should also be moved, but the talk page would collide with an existing page. Good to know there are atomic transactions only (all or nothing), but wish the error was more precise. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:30, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
It's determined by the move-subpages right at Special:ListGroupRights. You can move up to 100 subpages with the right. Bureaucrats, administrators and page movers have it. Others can request to become page movers at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions. Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 28#Restrict the "move subpages" feature to admins from 2008 had strong support for restricting the right due to page move vandalism. The page mover group didn't exist at the time. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:48, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Looking at the discussion, it seemed to be based on the belief that most editors didn't need it, as most articles didn't have archives. I don't believe that is true anymore - and I believe most pages with significant numbers of subpages, such as WP:AN and WP:WPT, are move protected, so editors can't move them and their subpages.
Perhaps a suitable compromise would be to give the permission to all extended-confirmed editors? BilledMammal (talk) 05:24, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, I think this permission should be given more widely, to prevent a proliferation of subpages that aren't moved (per Certes below that there are thousands of subpages at the wrong place). Galobtter (pingó mió) 11:05, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Got a statistic? Also this setting isn't about "articles" at all (which don't even support subpages), it would be about "pages" - and most pages don't have subpages. — xaosflux Talk 12:58, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, subpages are only enabled in certain namespaces. Article A/B testing is a main page, but Talk:A/B testing is technically a subpage of Talk:A (and might get moved carelessly with it in the extremely unlikely event that the letter is renamed). Certes (talk) 13:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Statistics: the four roughly scoped queries below identify 6426 pages which may need renaming. Certes (talk) 13:13, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Orphaned subpages

There may be a cleanup project for a keen page mover here. We seem to have 3201 orphaned talk subpages where the parent is a redirect (and the subpage isn't). For example, Talk:1979_energy_crisis/to_do exists, but Talk:1979_energy_crisis redirects to Talk:1979_oil_crisis to match their articles. Beware that some of the suggested new titles already have a page. For example, we have both Talk:2008–2010 Icelandic financial crisis/Archive 1 and Talk:2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis/Archive 1, despite one parent redirecting to the other. We also have 400 orphaned talk subpages where the parent talk page doesn't exist at all. (In complex cases like Talk:a/b/c/d, neither Talk:a nor Talk:a/b/c exists.) Certes (talk) 10:35, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Recently a whole number of GAs were moved to match parent move articles, which was done by bot for article which did not conflict with a new page and did not raise some other issue, the rest were done manually (both mostly c/o Mike Christie). I have continued to move new ones manually, and have also discovered that Peer Review pages are often not moved with their talkpage. A vexing issue is that some templates (eg Template:Article history) have page paths hardcoded in, so even once moved the subpage redirect should stay in place where possible. CMD (talk) 11:25, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Non-article talk namespaces also have redirected and missing parents. The latter check excludes User_talk: for now. Certes (talk) 12:44, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I am starting to move a bunch, but I notice many are /to_do pages with absolutely no content. For example I requested G6 deletion of Talk:1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade/to do. In the cases where even one link or content instruction is listed, I move the page still, though even there, copying it into the talk page would be more useful. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 00:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I've also made bold decision to move to /Archive # format where possible because they are more flexible and work by default with {{Archives}} and {{Talk header}} without needing to explicitly link. Could you change your bot to exclude pages that have a new move target that match the parent page, but don't necessarily have same subpage anymore? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:13, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Are you asking me to filter out some rows from one or both of the reports? If so, I don't understand exactly which rows to remove: please can you provide an example of a row you don't want to see? Certes (talk) 15:20, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Certes an example Talk:2 Entertain/Archives/2016 was listed with a redirect suggestion of Talk:BBC Studios Home Entertainment/Archives/2016 and I instead moved it to Talk:BBC Studios Home Entertainment/Archive 2 (in order to make use of conventional Archive names/linking). I see the report does not include this example anymore, do I need to do anything else? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:22, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Any page you move will disappear from the report next time you re-run it, even if you move it to a name different from the suggested title. Making up names such as .../Archive 2 automatically would be awkward and error-prone but might be possible. Certes (talk) 23:33, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Small question; I'm willing to do some move cleanup; should I leave redirects behind for these moves? (please ping on reply) Sennecaster (Chat) 13:16, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
If A is moved to B, and A is a redirect to B, i.e., A is not taken up by some other article, then leave redirects from A's subpages to B's. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 15:42, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Article assessments, including FA and GA, gone missing on WMFlabs tools

See discussion at FAC talk; perhaps related to a recent coding change that broke the article assessments. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

This is now resolved — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
So I've been told, but I've purged my cache (I think) and am still getting the error. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:29, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia You're seeing an error? Where?
The discussion talked about recent changes to XTools, and I just wanted to clarify that while it's true we're doing a major refactor, none of those changes have been deployed. So if page assessments are suddenly missing, it's because of something that was done here on the wiki. — MusikAnimal talk 16:27, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
MusikAnimal see also the discussion (linked above) at WT:FAC, particularly the info from Nikkimaria. At my top edited pages, some of the FAs are marked with a question mark icon YFA, while others are marked with the FA icon. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Similarly, Wiki Education Dashboard's tests against the pageassessements API started failing a few days ago, and I'm still getting results that often include unexpected characters, such as an `Y` or a trailing carriage return. Looks like it's fixed but the cached results are still broken, so a null edit on an individual talk page fixes it for that page. ragesoss (talk) 16:59, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks @MSGJ. People are going to keep seeing this for a few days until the job queue finishes updating the pages; in the meantime a null edit to the talk page should update it immediately. Legoktm (talk) 16:57, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Didn't work for me, but I'm dumber than I look. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:03, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
That would work too, but note that is not a WP:NULLEDIT. To make a null edit, just hit edit and then save without any changes. Plugging that article into Special:PageAssements (the source of truth) correctly shows FA. If you're still seeing the wrong values anywhere else (like XTools), then that must be another caching layer. For XTools, queries are usually cached for 10 minutes. — MusikAnimal talk 18:54, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Did I miss the memo?

See also: § Article assessments, including FA and GA, gone missing on WMFlabs tools

Hi! I was recently look at my list of articles created and I noticed that some of them now have a category of "YStub", "YStart", "YC" , and "XStart". These categories have a blue question mark as if it is "unknown". This is a very recent change and it seems to be random throughout my list, not just new articles or recently edited articles. Anyone know what's going on? Thanks in advance. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 00:52, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

That does look odd. Something is going wrong, as I looked at my own list and it shows that I've only created Main space articles ... which is completely incorrect; and I also see the odd categories. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Wow! you have a "Y¬"! Alas, I have NEVER seen anything but mainspace articles in the "Pages Created" list using that tool. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 01:18, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
@Ceyockey @WomenArtistUpdates The default behaviour is to show only mainspace pages, as that's chiefly what this tool is used for, and querying for just one namespace is much faster. See https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/en.wikipedia.org/ceyockey/all as an example for all namespaces. On all XTools result pages there is a "Back" button at the top-left that brings you back to form where you can change the namespace and/or other options. — MusikAnimal talk 18:23, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I believe this was caused by ongoing changes to the classification system and Template:WPBannerMeta. MSGJ might know more about this. And you can change what namespace you're looking at by adjusting the settings at https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/en.wikipedia.org.Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:42, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the tip about adjusting the settings to get more than the main space articles, Thebiguglyalien. You lost me at "ongoing changes to the classification system". Appreciate the quick responses and await further info. Best. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 01:51, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
You "real" list of articles created is here. — xaosflux Talk 09:00, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
This is definitely due to something that MSGJ (talk · contribs) has been working on recently (see Template talk:WikiProject banner shell, all threads), although I can't trace which module or template it might be. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:54, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the link to Template talk. It explains the changes that affected the article listing. I assume that since MSGJ has been pinged twice on this thread they are now aware of the issue. And I assume it was an unexpected consequence of the bot. I can't find any obvious clues after a random review of the talk pages on the articles I have created, with and without the new "designations". WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 15:48, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I can confirm there was an error (made by me) which was fixed 2 days ago, but due to caching some people are still seeing the effects — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:05, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks MSGJ! Do you mean caching throughout the wikipedia system or my computer caching? I believe I have cleared my cache and am still seeing the same problems I saw several days ago. Best, WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 20:46, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Pages in question will need either a WP:NULLEDIT or just wait and MediaWiki will update them in a few days or so. It's a very heavily used template, so there are a lot of pages that need updating. Legoktm (talk) 21:17, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
OK! I will wait for MediaWiki to update. Thanks to all for your promptness and patience explaining this to me. Best, WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 22:42, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Not fixed

Still not fixed, and I'm not convinced it's a caching issue because a) null edits don't remove it, and b) I'm getting it still on pretty much every editor I check. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:31, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

And there is also a serious problem with redirects as old talk pages are now being posted as unassessed. See for example Women's History assessment. Hope this will be fixed soon as it is difficult to identify articles really requiring assessment.--Ipigott (talk) 05:47, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Are you sure null edits aren't fixing it? I've tried a couple of random articles listed as YStart here and null editing is fixing it in Special:PageAssessments just fine. Just to confirm, the null edit needs to be on the talk page of the article, as that's where the WPBS template is. Aidan9382 (talk) 06:54, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
The null edits worked for me. I did about 20 -30 article talk pages and then waited about 1/2 hour for that cache to clear. My test cases worked. --WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 15:35, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
The problem with redirects is a separate and new problem which as far as I know is not related to the Y stuff. They have only been appearing on Wikiproject assessment lists for the past few days. If, for example, you take Category:Unassessed Women's History articles, you find a huge number of redirects. They can of course be eliminated by adding NA or Redirect manually to each talk page but this should not be necessary. Some accidental change must have been made in connection with the updating tools as this is a completely new phenomenon. It needs separate and urgent attention.--Ipigott (talk) 15:51, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I suspect this issue was actually solved a couple of days ago - here to be specific. Null editing the redirect talk pages seems to properly kick it out of the category. Pages may trickle in and out for a bit due to the job queue, but this should be a solved issue. Are there any specific redirects that are persisting beyond a null edit? Aidan9382 (talk) 16:05, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes, you are quite right that if I null edit one of these talk pages, it disappears but that's quite a job when in this category alone there are over 100. Also a long new list on Women writers resulting from redirects. I'll just wait for them to disappear over the next few days. In the meantime, I can work on those not tagged NA on the daily Xtools lists. Thanks for your help.--Ipigott (talk) 08:31, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
For reference, there's about 1.18 million pages left (quarry), but that number is definitely slowly going down. Legoktm (talk) 23:49, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Mobile watchlist diff points to wrong project

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333930

On the desktop, my watchlist includes the latest change to J. R. R. Tolkien, which is a Wikidata change. However, on mobile, my watchlist also notifies me of the Wikidata change, but when I click into it, it shows the latest Wikipedia change, which is incorrect and confusing. -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Mobile web, or mobile app (which mobile app)? — xaosflux Talk 10:16, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Mobile app. -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:17, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Which mobile app? Android, or Apple? Are you on the current release? — xaosflux Talk 10:18, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
The Wikipedia app? How many apps are there? -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:19, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I get you. Android. Version 2.7.50433-r-2023-03-13 -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:20, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
@Verbarson: thank you, this appears to be something in the software of that app, not a setting we can fix here on the English Wikipedia. I've opened phab:T333930 about this, feel free to add more details there - screen shots may help. — xaosflux Talk 10:28, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Screenshots added. Thank you. -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:53, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata messing with infoboxes

From time to time I stumble upon some misplaced descriptions which template:infobox seemingly takes from Wikidata, but don't always know how to fix them. E.g. ru:Ганнибал (Hannibal) article has "illustrious son" in the Awards field of its military person infobox, but the the related Wikidata item doesn't appear to mention Hannibal at all. And this doesn't appear to be fixable through local military person infobox... Brandmeistertalk 21:57, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

It comes from the Wikidata item on Hannibal, not the one on the award. See d:Q36456#P166 * Pppery * it has begun... 22:00, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Meh, never been the fan of including Wikidata into non-English Wikipedias... Brandmeistertalk 09:50, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Brandmeister: I don't know Russian but looking at the template, you can override the Wikidata value with |награды=. A blank value or no parameter uses Wikidata. A non-blank value forces the field to be shown so something like |награды=&nbsp; is ugly because the field name is still displayed. You could translate illustrious son to Russian. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:57, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
I've put a hyphen in that field, which fortunately made it disappear. Since Wikidata's default language seems to be English, I think that was a bad idea to let non-English Wikipedias borrow info from it. Brandmeistertalk 17:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Each Wikipedia language decides their own practices and templates. We can only advice on the technical side here. The Wikidata value is used by |викиданные17 = p166 in ru:Шаблон:Военный деятель. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:58, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Ru-wiki community would be happy to advise you here. Ghuron (talk) 10:31, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Ok, will see... Brandmeistertalk 13:45, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Too many pages on watchlist?

Lately, I've noticed that on a few occasions, when I've edited a page or posted on a talkpage, which is on my watchlist. It gets bumped off the watchlist. Is there a limit to how many pages, one can have on their watchlist? I've currently 121. GoodDay (talk) 20:39, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

There almost certainly is a limit to how many pages can be on a given watchlist, but it's much higher than 121. Do you have an example of a page which has been recently "bumped off" your watchlist? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 20:50, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
The most recent, was the Charles III page. GoodDay (talk) 22:18, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Make sure you didn't accidentally hit the "star". I've done that. BTW I have just under 2,000 on mine with no problems. North8000 (talk) 20:58, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Also, after entering the edit summary, don't uncheck "Watch this page" before saving. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:06, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
The range for "maximum" size is usually in the realm of 10-20k pages, but that maximum size is soft, caused by database timeouts and the like. There is no hard limit on how large your watchlist can be. Izno (talk) 22:28, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I've got 27,461 on mine. DuncanHill (talk) 22:37, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I reached about 24,000 before I decided to cut it down. It wasn't that the watchlist itself was failing, but that Special:EditWatchlist always timed out and Special:EditWatchlist/raw took an annoyingly-long time to (i) load; (ii) allow me to edit (even going to the bottom and typing one more row was slow); (iii) save the changes. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I've been steadily trimming mine since I hit 25,000... DuncanHill (talk) 23:05, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
25,000.... jeez! — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 10:21, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
@GoodDay watch that you aren't setting 'temporary' watches when you don't mean to. — xaosflux Talk 22:43, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I'll try to be more careful. It's quite possible that I have been accidently hitting a wrong button. GoodDay (talk) 22:45, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I used to have this problem of mysterious disappearances from my Watchlist, and I'm 98% convinced, via Occam's Razor, that it was human error on my part. I'm a big fan of rapidly hitting Tab-(type edit summary)-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Enter to save an edit, and sometimes, if one of the Tab presses doesn't register, or if I hit a stray key along the way, I end up de-selecting the "Watch this page" checkbox. YMMV. Some people make a habit of saving the entire contents of their raw Watchlist to a user subpage every once in a while, just in case weird stuff like this happens. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:54, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Memory leaks

Am I alone in experiencing severe memory leaks with Wikipedia? I have a few tabs open; they start out using 100-200MB of RAM, but after they've been open for a few hours, each tab take anywhere from 1.7GB to 4.2GB of RAM. This is a consistent pattern I've experienced for months, using V2010, V22, all Betas enabled (i.e. 2017 wikitext), all Betas disabled (i.e. 2010 wikitext), all non-default gadgets turned off, and a clean common.js file. This memory ballooning applies to articles in edit mode, or articles I'm just reading.

It's excruciating, because my SSD is completely being trashed, with consistently 40GB of swap just because of Wikipedia (and that's with only a dozen tabs open, no other app running). My SSD's going to die within less than half its expected lifetime if this isn't fixed. Chrome's "Memory" Dev Tool says the tabs' JS heaps only take 20MB, so I don't know how to diagnose this any further. DFlhb (talk) 11:35, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@DFlhb: You might find this phabricator task helpful (doesn't appear to be any solutions mentioned there, though). It may also be worth adding a comment to that task, iff the symptoms described there match what you're experiencing. Please be sure to include as much information as possible if you do — namely your browser/operating system (and versions) — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 12:29, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Done, thanks. DFlhb (talk) 13:02, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Incorrect preview images

The preview image (the image displayed when hovering the mouse over the article link, not sure if that's the correct name) for the articles Escape the room and Interactive film is the same preview image as that of Debridement, although the former two articles have no images and are not related. It may affect other articles with no images, but does not affect all articles with no images. Bug observed while accessing English Wikipedia with the skin Vector 2022 (as well as Vector and Monobook) on Chrome 111.0.5563.111 on Windows 10. PriusGod (talk) 16:29, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

@PriusGod, this is unfortunately not a bug but instead vandalism that takes a bit to clear from the system. You should be able to WP:NULLEDIT affected pages to clear the cache. Izno (talk) 16:34, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
I think there is a discussion going on at WP:ERRORS related to this issue on the main page currently. I'm basically worthless on technical matters such as this, but if someone could read the current discussion and see if the problem may be fixed, that'd be great. Thanks! --Jayron32 18:02, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
@Jayron32, yes, that is the same issue as described here. As above, null editing the pages which have the templates that were vandalized will correct the issue. Izno (talk) 18:04, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Which page is the affected one? The main page or the United States page? I'll be glad to pull the trigger on the fix, but I don't know which is the source of the problem. --Jayron32 18:05, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
@Jayron32, the one with the vandalized template. That would be the United States page in your question, I believe. Izno (talk) 18:08, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

Main page preview

Hey y'all. A discussion has been taking place at WP:ERRORS regarding the ITN blurb on the baseball world championship. People, including me, have noticed that article previews of the baseball teams of the US (and I guess Japan's too?) show this image, even on the mobile application version of Wikipedia. The image is not featured in both articles. @Jayron32 has stated that this issue isn't present for him and told me as such to go here, so I would like some input regarding what to do about this. - Knightsoftheswords281 i.e Crusader1096 ( Talk Contribs Wikis ) 18:33, 29 March 2023 (UTC)

pssst. Look up. --Jayron32 18:34, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Whoops. - Knightsoftheswords281 i.e Crusader1096 ( Talk Contribs Wikis ) 18:35, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi. I just found that the preview popups of Bopomofo, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and Romanization all show the same thumbnail image (debribement). Zhaowei Wu (talk) 02:19, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, same issue. Caused by a different vandal. Izno (talk) 02:23, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
The preview image for Egyptiotes currently shows a fly on a piece of feces. I do not know how to fix the issue. Pearse16 (talk) 04:20, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Template:Greeks was vandalized a day ago. The vandalism was quickly reverted but the page image uses caching. It's fixed now for that article after I purged it. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:46, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Multiple articles short description in iOS app are showing as "Consumption of feces"(!)

This issues seems to be iOS-only, and it's reeally weird (has the energy of a low quality April Fools' prank gone awry).

The description shows as "consumption of feces" but there are no edits showing the description being edited to this. Editing the description fixes the issue, and then even if it gets reverted back to the old description (which wasn't showing before), it reverts back OK. It was happening on GPT2 (current page is OK as there have been edits as described above) and I noticed it on the Fried dough page (there are two edits there from me, changing short description and then changing it back). I can see it right now on the Hi-Line (Montana) page (on mobile only). The search snippet I found to get me to that page (which included "consumption of feces" showed a search snippet which seemed to come from the Coprophagia article. Strangefeatures (talk) 21:34, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Looks like this was the other side effect of Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Vandalized_Preview_Pop_Ups_for_American_cuisine_and_a_Large_Number_of_Related_Articles - purgeing the page should fix it. Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:39, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
The GPT-2 temporary SD appears to have been caused by this edit to a template that is transcluded in that page. I am null-editing all pages that transclude that template and about a dozen other vandalized templates. It appears that somewhere over 1,000 pages were affected. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:30, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
There is one account listed at the ANI thread, another IP linked above, and there is a second account here. -- zzuuzz (talk) 22:39, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Strange and irrelevant pop-up image. (Trigger warning: gory)

Take for example

Mouse over shows a gory image (WARNING, GORE) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Necrotizing_fasciitis_left_leg_debridement.JPEG that is not in the article and not relevant to it. Looks like a hack, tbh. Any ideas? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 12:36, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

I suspect this is to blame for it appearing in the first place. I gave the article page a null edit and the image no longer appears on mouseover. Aidan9382 (talk) 12:42, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Rats, I didn't spot that. Maybe I was looking via mobile i/f at the time. TYVM. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Strange and irrelevant pop-up image. (Trigger warning: poopy)

Take a look at market fundamentalism. When I hover over it with page previews on, I get a cute little picture of a fly on shit. What's going on? --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 02:32, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

We're seeing that as a pattern of vandalism of transcluded sidebar templates (see WP:ANI#Vandalized Preview Pop Ups for American cuisine and a Large Number of Related Articles). Is it still happening? DMacks (talk) 02:43, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
yup --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 03:08, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I managed to reproduce it, but then purged the cache and it was gone (that's one of the tricks mentioned in that previous thread). DMacks (talk) 07:20, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Toolforge database downtime starting soon

ToolsDB is going read-only starting in about a half hour from now (1700Z). The outage is expected to last about an hour. More details here. I don't know exactly what tools use the database, but I would expect to see a lot of tools and bots not working properly during this time. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:31, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

@Xaosflux maybe you could do another watchlist message? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:33, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
@RoySmith I put it back, but reused the last cookie, not bothering with an edit notice here yet either. — xaosflux Talk 16:38, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Is that why my watchlist is screwed up? It's not marking changes as seen.Rja13ww33 (talk) 18:04, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333471
This is completed. The tech folks have requested that if you see any problems, add a comment to T333471 or ask in #wikimedia-cloud. @Rja13ww33 my guess is this wouldn't have affected your watchlist, as it doesn't (as far as I know!) use ToolsDB. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:17, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I figured it was connected because it started today. I will ask around.Rja13ww33 (talk) 18:23, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Disappearing edit taskbars

I recently updated my preferences, and don't recall everything I added. I did an edit and there were no taskbars above or below the edit window. I suspect that I turned on a gadget that is incompatible with the taskbars. I need advice on how to proceed. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:42, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Can you report the content of you browser's JavaScript console as described in Wikipedia:Reporting JavaScript errors? Ruslik_Zero 20:27, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Issue with Interstate 74 in North Carolina map

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T334187

Map

It seems that something is causing Data:Interstate 74 in North Carolina.map to crash and leave the text "Map" on Interstate 74 in North Carolina and the map on List of Interstate Highways in North Carolina which uses the same data file as well. DiscoA340 (talk) 04:15, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Opening the image directly gives: "Cannot read property '1' of undefined". Checking what I can find. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:18, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
This data has a feature that is of the type GeometryCollection. GeometryCollections are rather rare and behave somewhat different from other features, so I expect that recent work introduced a bug here. I'll file a ticket. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:32, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
@TheDJ Thank you, keep me posted. DiscoA340 (talk) 01:29, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Tool to one click copy to clipboard?

has there been a tool (any userscript or gadget?) to format some text for easy copying? something visually like this: 

abcd

Copy to clipboard

i note this has been asked long ago: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_94#Copying_pro-forma_templates Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_110#Link_to_copy_page_content_to_clipboard?. RZuo (talk) 14:28, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@RZuo nothing widespread, problem is that in most cases what this would need is to wrap the text to be copied in some sort of identifier (like a span with a class), then run a script that looks for that, generates the button, and does the copy. So why is this a problem? Because it won't work for anyone not running the script, and it won't work unless the text is marked up (which would also only be useful for people running the script). If it was for a unique case (like a single page of marked up things, the page could be loaded with an onclick script. — xaosflux Talk 14:50, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
"why is this a problem? Because it won't work for anyone not running the script..."
that's the same for any gadget not enabled by default.
anyway, i asked just in case i reinvent the wheel. thx for the assurance. i'll go try figuring this out with my limited coding skills. XD --RZuo (talk) 10:35, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
@RZuo, why do you want to do that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:13, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
because i want to easily copy a whole chunk of text? without manually selecting it with my cursor and then pressing ctrl+c? a template that has to be copypasted often? just like what other users that had asked the same question before would want to do? RZuo (talk) 12:09, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
@RZuo: I've created User:Nardog/CopyCodeBlock. It adds a copy button at the top right corner of each code block that is only visible while the mouse is inside the block. Nardog (talk) 12:59, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

is there any way to move footnote definitions out from inline but still in multiple places throughout an article?

Wiki markup is very difficult to read when the full text of footnotes (explanatory text and especially dense blocks of citation metadata) is included inline in paragraphs of prose. If citation templates are written compactly without line breaks they create a kind of "wall" of dense syntax which adds visual clutter and is hard to read and makes the surrounding paragraph also hard to read, while if the templates are fully expanded with a line for each parameter they take up a ridiculous amount of space, also making the paragraph very difficult to read. So for long articles I sometimes like to move the footnotes down to the <references>...</references> tag or {{reflist |refs=...}} template at the bottom of the page, to help clean up the source markup.

This has the advantage of making the markup much more legible and also separating all of the footnote contents making them easier to compare or modify systematically. However, it also has some downsides: It splits the footnote content (sometimes very) far from the paragraphs where they are referenced, it makes the footnotes not appear when a single section is being edited/previewed, and sometimes requires making an edit to a whole page instead of a single section or splitting one edit into two pieces, one to the body copy and another to the footnote content. Such separation also doesn’t tend to last, as other editors will (perfectly reasonably) afterward go on adding citations/notes defined inline.

Is there any compromise method, a way to define footnotes outside of a paragraph but still within the same section? That is, some way of defining <ref name=foo> elements which defines but does not directly display a numbered superscript link? (Perhaps the ref tags could be wrapped in some other template?) –jacobolus (t) 21:18, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

No. Izno (talk) 21:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
Is there any way such a feature could ever be implemented using some kind of template magic? (Or barring that, by adding a feature to Mediawiki?) It seems like it would be very helpful. –jacobolus (t) 21:43, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
No, template magic can not be used.
Many things can possibly be added to MediaWiki. This is not the thing I'd want a programmer to spend time on, but it is open source, so if someone wants it and can convince the relevant component's maintainer that it is valuable, then it will get merged and deployed. Izno (talk) 21:57, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
@Jacobolus, I suggest that you try the visual editor (works like Google Docs/Microsoft Office), and if you want to work in wikitext, have you tried the colored syntax highlighting? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I definitely do not want to use the visual editor. Thanks though. –jacobolus (t) 22:21, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
In that case, you might find that syntax highlighting (look in the toolbar for something that looks like a highlighter marker) helps, because you can more easily see which things are text and which things are formatting. I understand that it's possible to set custom colors, e.g., if you wanted to make something very light colored. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Fancy formatting

So I made this simple template: Template:Registered editors by edit count. The table has since been expanded by others. One of the editorial decisions that we had to make was whether to base the percentages on {{NUMBEROFUSERS}} or on the number of users who have ever successfully saved an edit. I went with the magic word, but now I want to complexify the template by having a sort of magic display/tab/collapse something, so you would normally see these numbers, but if you click on the <magic something>, then it would show you a different table, with the percentages based on the number of successful editors, rather than the number of successful account registers. I'm looking for a magic solution because I don't want the viewer to have to wait for the page to reload.

So you would normally get:

Registered editors by edit count
If you have made... then you rank in the... or the... That's more than...
0 edits – 45,000,000 registered accounts –
1 edit top 30% of registered accounts top 12,000,000 of registered accounts 70% of registered accounts

but when you click the magic something, you would then see something like this instead:

Registered editors by edit count
If you have made... then you rank in the... or the... That's more than...
1 edit – top 12,000,000 successful editors –
3 edits top 50% of editors top 6,000,000 of all editors 50% of all editors

Can anyone recommend a good way to do that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:25, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

This can either be done with a second template/page or it can be done in JavaScript, and the latter would take work.
Alternatively, I don't really see why you don't just put the successful editors version in the same table in 3 more columns. Izno (talk) 22:44, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
The only way I can think of to do this with CSS and without Javascript requires using an HTML input element, which isn't supported within wikitext, so it would require implementation via an extension. Using Javascript would of course require it to be loaded, either by default or through a special link. I agree that the easiest thing to do is to just add more columns or have both tables, one below the other. isaacl (talk) 22:52, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I suppose that, in the "one below the other" approach, the tables could be wrapped in collapse templates (one defaultly open and the other defaultly closed). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:02, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
PrimeHunter has helpfully pointed out that the requisite Javascript code is already being loaded on English Wikipedia, so the difference is just what type of user interface seems best. isaacl (talk) 04:23, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
{{Switcher}} is based on User:Jackmcbarn/switcher. It can be used on other things than images. It's tricky to pass a table in a template parameter so I didn't use the template below. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:22, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
Registered editors by edit count
If you have made... then you rank in the... or the... That's more than...
0 edits – 45,000,000 registered accounts –
1 edit top 30% of registered accounts top 12,000,000 of registered accounts 70% of registered accounts

Registered editors by edit count
If you have made... then you rank in the... or the... That's more than...
1 edit – top 12,000,000 successful editors –
3 edits top 50% of editors top 6,000,000 of all editors 50% of all editors

&action=purge does not work on normal desktop layout

1. Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fools/April_Fools%27_Day_2023?&useskin=vector

  • Page is out of date, at the bottom it says "This page was last edited on 31 March 2023, at 23:22 (UTC)."

2. Click on the (refresh) on the top template to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:April_Fools/April_Fools%27_Day_2023&action=purge

3. Click "Yes" to purge the cache

4. Go back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fools/April_Fools%27_Day_2023?&useskin=vector to restore desktop view

  • The page is out of date again, bottom of the page says "This page was last edited on 31 March 2023, at 23:22 (UTC)."
    • This is not fixed by Ctrl+F5 or clearing browser cache.

91.129.111.163 (talk) 00:26, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

  •  Works for me however, you must have an account to use "purge". — xaosflux Talk 22:24, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
    I don't think that's true, appending ?action=purge to a normal (non-query) URL has been suggested on this page in the past as being fine for IPs to use; indeed, WP:PURGE does not say that it's for logged-in users only. I tried testing it logged-out, but my IP is currently rangeblocked. I need to try it from a different machine, or maybe reboot my router. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:52, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    @Redrose64 notice the (purge) permission is on "Users" not on "*". IP's can do a nulledit though. — xaosflux Talk 10:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    I didn't say anything about a purge tab, I was referring to altering the URL in the address bar. I'm on a different machine now, and before I logged in I went to a page, appended ?action=purge to the URL, and was presented with a box containing "Purge this page", "Clear the cache of this page? (What does this do?)" and the button Yes; below the box was the text "Purging a page clears the cache and forces the most current revision to appear. For pages with random components, it also forces a new random selection.". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:37, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    @Redrose64 welp, yup - and it's been like that for a while - just the documentation is a mess - phab:T291316 also called for a revert of that lack-of-permission thing, but that is probably going to eventually be declined. — xaosflux Talk 13:36, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    Further testing shows that whilst the button is clickable, doing so fails silently. So, IPs can't purge pages, although they may not know that. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:05, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    @Redrose64 yea, seems like something is amiss with all that - perhaps they can "submit" the purge request, but then it fails. How are you sure that it failed? — xaosflux Talk 16:29, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
    Go to Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, pick a subcategory, follow the link to that page. Check the bottom line of the pink box, and if there is an obvious discrepancy (e.g. This page was last edited by ... at 04:59, 1 April 2023 (UTC) (38 seconds ago)), that's one to test with. If it doesn't, try another subcategory.
    Return to Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, right-click on the same link and select "Open Link in New Private Window" (or your browser's equivalent) which treats you as logged out. Check that the bottom line of the pink box still shows a discrepancy. Append ?action=purge to the URL, and when the box appears, click Yes and see if the bottom line has changed - for me it doesn't.
    Now close that private window, follow the link in the normal way, and again purge the page by appending ?action=purge to the URL and observe that this time, the text "(38 seconds ago)" changes to "(3 days ago)" or similar. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
  • URLs of the format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<title>?useskin=vector are non-canonical and are not updated by MediaWiki when a page is updated or a manual purge is issued. For those curious, the list of URL formats that get purged are mostly listed here. Legoktm (talk) 05:46, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

A new user-talk page got double-saved when it shouldn't...

...a minor inconvenience for someone who's experienced that problem on-and-off on Miraheze. (Specifically, User talk:Juustila from just a few minutes ago, posted via WP:Twinkle.) Can the second edit be deleted as a duplicate of the first? (Contributing here with Microsoft Edge through laptop.) --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 23:44, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

@Slgrandson, the second edit replaced the first because it was one minute later, so the signature timestamp was slightly different. I don't see the problem with just leaving as it is. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:41, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
Diff. If it had been registered in the same minute it would have been a null edit and not be logged anywhere. The revision numbers are 39 apart. There were 87 edits ([47] to [48]) in the minute of the first save. That indicates around 27 seconds between the two saves. I guess there were connection issues or other lag and Twinkle retried the edit but the first one actually saved. I don't see reason to delete the edit. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:14, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Enabling next and previous buttons in overflow-x:auto

Is it feasible to create a table encapsulated in "div style=overflow-x:auto" to have previous and next buttons like in this example? Qwerty284651 (talk) 01:33, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

No. Izno (talk) 01:41, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
@Izno, well, that settles that. 😅 Qwerty284651 (talk) 12:56, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_204&oldid=1168948572"