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The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
I see from your recent edits at Dirac delta function and Common logarithm that you enclose systematically with {{nowrap}} a template {{math}} or {{mvar}} immediately followed by a punctuation sign. As far as I know, this is completely useless, as the parser treats as plain text the result of these templates, and, therefore, never split a line between them and punctuation marks (unless there is a space at the end of the content of the template).
I discovered this property of the Wikipedia parser with a similar rendering problem, the problem of formulas ending with a single brace: with "{{math|{A}}} is", the open and closing braces of set-builder notation are rendered in different fonts, because the closing brace is considered as being out of the template. "{{math|{A} }}is" is rendered correctly, but the source looks strange. Surprisingly (for me), "{{math|{A} }} is" is rendered correctly with only one space between the formula and "is", since the rule that several consecutive spaces are rendered as a single space applies here.
Please don't change math styling just for the sake of changing math styling, as you did in this edit: none of the available options for formatting mathematics on Wikipedia are ideal, and changing from one to the other is disruptive and tends to introduce errors. The specific guidelines for this are MOS:STYLERET (the general principle) and MOS:FORMULA (specific to math formulas). Thanks. --JBL (talk) 15:40, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Also - please do not change my edit as you did here link - because the intention is to make the fonts the same to avoid confusing readers. If the formula has an italics lower case 'x' having a particular font, then the text that refers to that symbol should also be an italics 'x' with the same font style ---- not a different font style. Otherwise, you should change the 'x' in the formula in order to match the font. KorgBoy (talk) 12:14, 3 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please stop your disruptive edits. Math formatting does not need to be turned into templates. It is a disimprovement. It makes the formatting inconsistent. Template-math is uglier than math-math and doesn't format its variables in the same way. You are making the encyclopedia worse. Noting that you have been warned for this before and promised to stop but haven't. Stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:24, 12 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
When did I promise to stop? And yes, math template is a little uglier but it's more accessible. Even if it's inconsistent I would rather get to see math text than having grey blocks appear because the whole thing is reliant on javascript and significantly slows down page loading in my experience. But your point is taken. Singular edits from <math> to {{math}} will be stopped. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 19:06, 12 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
So fix your math display preferences, don't impose your problems on other readers. The default method for rendering math on Wikipedia does not involve javascript or special fonts. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:33, 12 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
To what? My current setting is (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback) where my browser of choice uses SVG, (and so probably does my mobile browser, but I cannot be sure). Either the drawing takes a long time on mobile, or displaying a PNG does, because the effect is noticeable (and that is not mentioning network issues, where a connection isn't always reliable and no images load at all, default preferences or not). Moreover, I tend to use Wikipedia on library computers that have default settings (logged out), and for example, in the determinant page the formula is shown as 'a [matrix] b [matrix] | c [matrix]' where the horizontal line effectively disappears (taking the minus sign and part of the plus sign with it) unless the zoom level is changed, something that is not an intuitive solution. So since LaTeX caused this issues both as a logged-in and logged-out user, and on multiple platforms, I went ahead with the edits which actually fixed the aforementioned issues. And since apparently I've been doing more harm with my edits, I will stop. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 04:07, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
<math> has more fallback options and only shouldn't be used in titles.
For future compatibility and support idiosyncratic Wikipedia markup will never compare to the de facto and de jure standard MathML. The external consensus around MathML and Latex is massive.
There's screen reader support for MathML with Latex but not idiosyncratic Wikipedia support. Are you talking about easy accessibility wins or harsh accessibility tradeoffs?
MathML reduces the moat to contribution since people can copy-paste legitimate Latex, and Latex is the lingua franca of math encoding, without even a 2nd place contender in sight.
Sometimes there's visually ambiguous text that's sensitive to browser or platform configuration. Capital lambda is one of them, because I've seen it edited as logical AND or the wedge product. Editing passages from one encoding to multiple encodings is really dubious.
The sum effect of these arguments is to say that your position doesn't offer CLEAR wins for accessibility. But you are EVERYWHERE making the tiniest edits! Like easy => simple, that => this, followed by conversions to other math templates. Consider as a sample:
First see MOS:FORMULA: "For inline formulae, such as a2 − b2, the community of mathematical editors of English Wikipedia currently has no consensus about preferred formatting."
Then see MOS:STYLERET and wp:CONSENSUS. So next time you like to make such edits, you go to the article talk page and propose your changes. If you get no response after a few days, you go ahead and point to the talk page in your edit summary. The alternative is to ignore our guidelines and policies - DVdm (talk) 00:18, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
* I've responded directly to arguments about accessibility. Since you're not bringing that up anymore, I must ask: What happened to those arguments on ACCESSIBILITY? Were they made in good faith?
* And then you have this argument on going to the talk page to get consensus. Are you under the impression that this user goes to the talk page to build consensus or something? The user has made trivial edits to an insane number of articles within a matter of days.
* I intentionally avoided mentioning the Wikipedia rules because it's such a bad argument, I thought, what's the point? And then you voluntarily bring up the issue. People already pointed out that this is against site-wide rules.
I was sleeping, so I didn't reply. Yes, the arguments on accessibility were in good faith, but I see that the use cases I encountered weren't the norm. I would still say that the templates provided a better viewing experience, considering on library computers as a logged out reader where entire fraction bars just disappeared, but for the major part the bad outweighs the good for the edits I made. Also, the arguments on this talk page were rather me trying to justify my edits, which, yes, did get out of hand. And as for the site-wide rules, yes, I will remind myself. I have evidently taken the "Be bold" advice a little too liberally. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 03:32, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize for my accusations of character. I agree that data usage is an accessibility issue, although I wonder about the library issue because that sounds like a bug.
I bulk-unedited because I had difficulty separating the different kinds of edits your made, otherwise I would've left the majority of your edits untouched. SirMeowMeow (talk) 04:09, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
{{block indent}} cuts off long formulas completely on narrow screens, without any chance of wrapping. :-indentation at least allows one to scroll sideways through the image. Here, any content after 'Hom' is completely cut off with no sideways scrolling capabilities to access it. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 05:32, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the thank you button. I have a lot of pages edited by you, so I'm going to ask Salix alba to operate a bot that replaces deprecated format of the math tags. thanks! --SilverMatsu (talk) 07:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Editor User:Hellacioussatyr, am sure you are far cleverer than I am, and I don't know the current convention for deprecation of format. But I very much prefer inline format such as . My reason is that this format has just the same font as equations such as
.
Other formats have different fonts that definitely distract and might confuse a reader. I find your many format edits probably clever but certainly unhelpful and troublesome. I do not find loading on a particular device a good reason against this. I am sorry I don't have time to go through your edits and undo or revise most of them that I encounter.Chjoaygame (talk) 08:12, 13 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about the above failure-to-parse response. It didn't show up on my preview. It just showed up when I published. I guess it may be due to some kind of nowiki or somesuch higher up on your page. I don't know how to fix it. Perhaps just deleting my comment would do the trick. Feel free; I don't want to mess up your talk page. But I do want you to read my message.Chjoaygame (talk) 08:20, 13 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You are right in that the font is uglier in template math rather than tag math, but I was not talking about devices in general. The default for wikipedia is to use images to load the formulae, and on low-speed networks (which happens in more places than one might expect), the formula images slow down the page loading time considerably, and sometimes outright fail to load in others. On a mobile screen moreover, the alt text/raw LaTeX isn't immediately visible, at least not that I've found it. So I chose having to look at uglier text rather than no text as a default. You should note that I have already stopped changing inline TeX math to template math, and am now doing small fixes instead. When the network has loading problems, the text might still load in {{math}} but the styling may not. In that case one can still have access to the content itself even if the formula blends in to the descriptive text. The math tag does not offer an immediate and obvious fallback. There are also concerns about screen readers which have been raised, which I understand, and haven't quite figured out a compromise to that. So yes, the {{math}} was a little distracting and possibly confusing, but only for a split-second, and I took the approach that "something was better than nothing". I will reiterate that it is a moot point, as I have since stopped such edits. (There's also some talk about using MathJAX for the <math> tags, but I am not well-informed on that topic to weigh in yet. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 09:00, 13 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your careful reply. Much of this is over my head. It seems that my outdent was the cause of the failure to parse? I am not saying that the other styling is ugly; I have no opinion about that. My concern is just that differences in font suggest differences in signification. Just now, out of curiosity, I looked up the temperature article on my mobile phone. Both on a new line and in the same line, the LaTeX formulas showed up very small. Also out of curiosity, I just now removed the \left and \right symbols; in this case, it seemed to me that they make no difference, but perhaps they do, in some way not evident to me? Sometimes they do make a difference.Chjoaygame (talk) 02:18, 14 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Basij Jahrom". The reason given for Basij Jahrom's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: Please see: w:en:Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Mahmoud-rezaei tehrani".
I noticed a pattern that you change all <ul> and <ol> HTML style lists into * and # lists. I checked Wikipedia:Manual of style and I did notice any policy preferring * and # over HTML tags. Are you doing these changes to make articles compliant with some Wikipedia policy that I do not know about? (I'm asking because if your answer is yes then I would like to know this so that I can stop using HTML style lists.) Best wishes - Mgkrupa21:21, 9 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think there's official policy about it, only that it makes things more compact and simpler in the source. (Although the style guides do mention that more inexperienced editors are more comfortable with * and # lists) Moreover, and actually what is the more important reason, it forces any :-indented <math> to be formatted using display="block", which is preferred due to accessibility reasons. I do still use HTML tagged lists in some pages where the situation requires more complex formatting; but for most cases that simply isn't necessary. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 21:28, 9 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
My understanding is that if using *, then an : indented <math> expression would look something like this:
<ul><li>Text
:<math>z = \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} z_i</math>
for all...</li></ul>
Text
for all...
I do not see a difference in how the :<math> expression is display. They both appear to be displayed as blocks. Is this because of my browser or do you (or other people) see a difference? Mgkrupa22:24, 9 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The difference isn't in appearance. The rendered html is the concern here. :-indentation produces invalid html, which causes accessibility problems. Therefore it is better to not use it at all. One way to get around this is to use the 'display' attribute for <math>. Of course, I also have been indenting with colons in this very talk page, so the matter is complicated. More details are available here MOS:INDENTGAP. (However, note that {{block indent}} endorsed on the MOS page comes with its own issues, which is illustrated in earlier sections of this talk page.) Hellacioussatyr (talk) 22:48, 9 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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Hi Hellacioussatyr, thanks for the accessibility adjustments you made to the page Dirac equation which I have been editing.
I wanted to ask about your removal of the collapsed proofs. This was a deliberate choice so that the proofs would not interrupt the narrative flow of the article and to declutter the page of technical details, while still including the details for an interested reader.
MOS:COLLAPSE puts out the reasons for limiting use of collapsed content. In my experience, when viewing on a mobile screen there is no collapse option visible and it creates its own frame that has its own scrolling effects that can be difficult to navigate. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 01:34, 24 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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Just a heads up, since you've been recently replacing various formulas indented by :<math> by <math display=block> (for example), when you do that you need to add blank lines around the formula. Otherwise the mediawiki software generates incorrect markup, with the following text put into a bare text node not in a top-level block element. Cheers. –jacobolus(t)17:16, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I was trying to preserve the higher level : indent and not fragment the "list" even further. That is, all of them under the same semantic element. Did not know about this effect though. Thank you. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 17:21, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, maybe it's a bug in the software? It's a bit tricky to figure out the right semantic markup for a paragraph with embedded block formulas, but the current markup generated is {paragraph}{block math}{bare text node}, when everything should probably be under the paragraph, like {paragraph {block math} more of the paragraph}. In any event, for now at least it works better to instead include blank lines to generate the markup {paragraph}{block math}{another paragraph}. As a side benefit, the markup is a bit more legible that way too. –jacobolus(t)17:44, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@David spector – There should be no visible change. The difference is that using : to indent creates a "definition list" (but without any terms to define), which is a bit of an abuse of this HTML element, whereas <math display=block> creates a "div" element. –jacobolus(t)14:16, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There are also accessibility issues, which is why this came about in the first place. Ironically, this is actually recommended in talk pages (this reply, for example). Moreover, recently there are actually changes as to using colon "indents" over display="block" on mobile screens, where if the formula doesn't fit it causes the whole thing to overflow and there is quite a large horizontal scroll space (?) (unsure of exact terminology), whereas display="block" centers the image of the equation, and places it in its own element that can be scrolled horizontally independent of the rest of the page. You can take a look for yourself at [1] (current revision) and [2]. Actually, for this comparison even laptop screens might overflow because the formula is so wide. Hellacioussatyr (talk) 14:54, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The "accessibility issue" is likely a bit overblown at this point – a decade ago when this display=block feature was first introduced some popular screen reader(s) stumbled over the way Wikipedians were using definition lists, but I don't think modern screen readers still have a problem. (Disclaimer: not an expert about this.)
The independent scroll box is a mixed blessing. In mobile browsers it is helpful, but on the desktop site it sometimes leads to an equation scrolling instead of being moved a bit to avoid collision with a floating image, and we get an absurdly narrow formula, requiring extra work by authors to reorganize the content / images to avoid. –jacobolus(t)15:01, 26 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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