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Look at the rendered page on the left vs. right sides of this diff
[1]. On the left side a bunch of the page content seems to disappear, and the change seen in the diff fixes it. Either I'm looking at something sideways, or there's a deep mystery here. On the left side, there's a clue when you open the collapse box titled Most are in favor of "vol." and "no.", but there are a few exceptions, then look at the bottom of the revealed text. I wonder if the {talkeref} has something to do with it, maybe an interaction with the collapsing??? (It is admitted that I'm grasping at straws here.) EEng16:41, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Mystery solved, though one wonders if there isn't some better way the parsing could handle that. When there was no < /ref> at all on the rest of the page, it seemed to understand where the ref ends anyway, but once another < /ref> appeared (even within nowiki) it glommed onto that. EEng19:03, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
It didn't seem to understand where the ref ended at all. In the absence of a </ref>, it treated the <ref> in the same way it treats any unrecognized tag (printing it, and its intended contents, inline in the text). Anomie⚔19:10, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Xaosflux was created in 2005, when MonoBook was the default. Vector did not become available until 2010; initially it was opt-in for all users, later it became the default for new users but existing users were left with their existing skin setting. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:53, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
#iferror does not work correctly with template:convert for me
I try to use {{#iferror:}} in a template which uses template:convert so that when the convert template gets invalid input, no "invalid number" error is returned. See User:Spike/Sandbox/Template:NFL predraft 2 for a simple example. But it does not work for me. When I use my new template User:Spike/Sandbox/Template:NFL predraft 2 on a page, see e.g. User:Spike/sandbox, I still see an "invalid number" error. The strange thing is that when I edit a page which transcludes this template, everything looks fine in the preview window: as I expected from the code, the error is simply replaced by the non-converted value. Try it out: Open User:Spike/sandbox for editing and click "Show preview" without changing anything. No error visible, #iferror replacement works perfectly. Only when I save the page does the error show up. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I have also tried another template which uses the same method, template:Ridership, and it seems that it has the same problem.
Until now I only have tried all of this in my own sandbox. Maybe it is a problem which only comes up in the sandbox and not in the proper Wiki. But I have not yet had the courage to do a change in the main namespace to try it out. Spike (talk) 14:47, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
{{#iferror:}} checks for class="error". {{Convert}} uses ispreview() in Module:Convert to only add that class in preview where a prominent red error message is displayed. On saving it adds the blue link seen in User:Spike/sandbox without class="error". {{convert|2{{frac|3|8}}|in}} produces:
As I understand it, "ispreview()" is not the issue here but the fact that {{Convert}} does not save "class=error". With such a saving, "#iferror" will work. (see also Template talk:Convert, looks good). Objections to "ispreview()", I'll encounter in other places then. -DePiep (talk) 20:19, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
My issue here is that the output of the template when previewed is wildly different from the output of the template when saved, which misbehavior "ispreview()" enables. Anomie⚔13:06, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Convert works like that because people requested it. The idea is that if an editor uses a convert with a bad parameter, the editor should be given a chance to see the problem with an in-your-face error message, but readers should not stumble over the defacement if the page is saved with the error. At least one other widely used template does the same. Editors often adjust convert parameters in a big wiki-gnoming edit, and sometimes they mess it up but do not notice the problem in the middle of a big article. There is not much point in having an ugly message visible, and the tracking category means the problem is fixed with a couple of days. What is the actual problem with ispreview? Johnuniq (talk) 22:39, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
The actual problem here was that the output of the template differed so that {{#iferror:}} worked in preview but not when the page was saved. In general, I'd say the point of previewing is that it should as much as possible show what the page is going to look like when saved, not something gratuitously different no matter how much some people might want it to be gratuitously different for their specific use case. Anomie⚔12:28, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
I am stuck owing to internet access reasons accessing Wikipedia via the mobile site. This is a substandard and very frustrating experience. As some of the key features are missing, including on talk pages the "add topic" button, tables of contents on talk pages, I can't access my sandbox, nor full settings. I can't even seem to escape t his experience as I am automatically redirected here. Any ideas how to fix this?? Frustrated, Tom (LT) (talk) 12:34, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
@Tom (LT): If you scroll to the bottom of any Wikipedia page on the mobile site, there is a link that says "desktop". Click it, and your device should redirect to the desktop version of Wikipedia. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 14:24, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
Any chance that phab T159403 can piggyback onto this? That's actually a feature that used to be supported, long before the creation of the "Knowledge Engine" group.
Not very likely, one is MediaWiki frontend work on top of existing functionality, the other search engine backend work. Mixing that usually tends to create more complexity than desirable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:52, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
We hope to start updating query parsing (to possibly include phab T159403) in a couple quarters, starting in Jan 2018. We are currently working hard on machine 'learning to rank' and other high priority items in our annual plan (program 1) and we will also be helping with the Structured Data on Commons project. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
Learning to rank seems difficult for laymen to understand. Except for "practical usage by search engines" which sounds like a "secret sauce" that makes PageRank work better. In other words, this is the core of the "Knowledge Engine" that was going to "compete with Google".
So what I hear you saying is that you can't take a minute to tie your left shoe lace, which I pointed out to you is untied, because you're too busy working on a new high-tech compound material for shoe soles, and that project will take several months, after which you will look into whether tying laces is possible. wbm1058 (talk) 08:24, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
No. That is not what Deb said. You asked if a not-insubstantial amount of work could "piggyback" on the work of the team. Both TheDJ and Deb, the product manager who defines and is responsive for the team's priorities, said no. Both explained some reasoning on why we can't just add more work to an already burdened team with established priorities. If you would like to discuss the methodologies that the foundation uses to prioritize and develop software that is welcome, but that is not the intent of this discussion. Also, mentioning a defunct proposal of staff long gone from the foundation as some sort of ongoing conspiracy does not encourage civil conversation. Many folks at the foundation who lived through that time are not keen on discussing it. It was a dark time for many. Empathy and understanding are appreciated. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:27, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
OK. Empathize with the idea that I'm in the dark about why that time was so dark (and content to leave it at that). Your mission is to "build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge". That seems about like what the mission has been all along; I don't understand what's defunct and what's not. "Program 1" is "Make knowledge more easily discoverable." Again, my understanding is that's been the program since the department was formed. Goal 1 of that program is to "Maintain our search systems and improve the relevance of search results." I believe my request is compatible with goal 1. Outcome 1 is "Through incremental Discovery improvements, readers are better able to discover and search for content." I believe my request is for an incremental improvement. Objective 1: is "Implement advanced methodologies such as “learning to rank” machine learning techniques and signals to improve search result relevance across language Wikipedias." Of course, this is subjective, but "advanced learning methodologies" strikes me as significantly more than an incremental improvement. Incremental improvements can usually be made in a matter of days, or weeks at most, while "groundbreaking advances" (sorry if I'm hinting at old hyperboles) take months or years of hard work. Part of my perception that you are working on a "groundbreaking advance" is the difficulty I have in understanding what you're doing. Is phab T101087 a component of this "objective 1" (aka “learning to rank” machine learning)? I honestly don't know. wbm1058 (talk) 23:06, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
I find it difficult to follow your train of thought. If you are in the dark about something, why mention it with such familiarity? Otherwise, don't. Questions are welcomed and I can help clarify. Perhaps there's a miscommunication between the task that was mentioned at the beginning of this conversation and the goals and objectives of the Discovery team? I am genuinely confused. I think the salient question I derive from your reply is if the Discovery department is working on improving the existing advanced search features (T101087). We are not, Wikimedia Deutschland is leading that development. We are aware and continue to support them where we can. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:23, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [2][3][4]
.mw-ui-constructive modifier class is deprecated and has been removed. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
It will be possible to restrict who can send you notifications on a wiki. This new feature will accessible in your preferences, in the Notifications tab, on Wednesday, July 26. Please see the documentation. [6]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 25 July at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the Wikimedia Foundation July 2017 Metrics & Activities Meeting. The meeting is about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement are perceived and understood by the world. The meeting will be on 27 July at 19:00 (UTC). See the agenda and how to join.
Future changes
New Filters for Edit Review, at the moment available as a Beta feature, will be released by default for the Recent Changes in September.
I'm fine with the big blue buttons in the regular edit windows. I am also an admin, and now when I delete a page, the big button that says "Delete Page" has a red background. For people with vision problems, the editors I think you want to accommodate, red is not a good choice. Especially in older people, or anyone dealing with macular problems. Red is one of the first colors that becomes harder to see. — Maile (talk) 00:14, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
Those colors are more for those who don't have those problems (it's a cognitive speed-up for most of us). But for the accessibility of those with visual impairments, there are basically two types of buttons: 'primary' (colored) and neutral/secondary (non-colored). For accessibility it matters if you can read the text (achieved by contrast between background vs text), and if can distinguish the primary choice from the other choices. The red color indicates the action is 'destructive', but the text is required to ALWAYS use wording that also implies 'destructiveness' (so that this is not solely communicated via color, which would be bad for screenreader users as well). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:44, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
Yes, but ... the delete button is white text with red background. If a visually-challenged person doesn't see the red, then they just have a field of white with no distinct lettering. Or, depending on their individual case, maybe that red fades and blurs until they see some kind of background, but the text is not distinct. Maybe other colors too. But I'm just saying that visually-challenged people have difficulty with colors. And if the button is white letters with any color background, what a visually-challenged person sees is just a block of nothing. — Maile (talk) 11:09, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
@Maile66: I don't know much about all forms of visual impairments, but I do know that the color sheet is at least AA and strives to be AAA as much as possible. The style has been tested for most color deficiencies. But macular degeneration is a rather problematic issue and depending on how far it has progressed, it will indeed significantly affect your ability to read anything that doesn't have the highest contrast ratios (black vs white). We have had a long standing wish to integrate some aggressive accessibility settings (font size, contrast, aliasing/smoothing) to tackle the last of these problems, but as most users have these tools as part of their OS as well, it hasn't had top priority unfortunately (there have been some experiments at hackathons though).—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:30, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the link, The DJ. The bottom line is that red is, for almost all Western cultures, associated with high risk/emergency/problems....and that is not the association that should be made with where the colour red is being used here. I've also done a little poking at the WCAG guidelines and haven't been finding statistically valid testing to back many of the assertions and principles of the project, but that's neither here nor there. End of the day, red is a much harder colour for MOST people to see when it is in skinny font - almost regardless of background - and it's not being used effectively in these interfaces. I'd much rather they skipped the red completely or, if used at all, always have it presented properly as a button with bold, fat fonts. The editing population is aging a lot, and neither the WCAG standards nor the WMF colour palette take this factor into consideration. It has nothing to do with macular degeneration. It has more to do with changes over time in the way people perceive colours. Risker (talk) 00:08, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
I suspect they chose red for "destructive" actions such as deleting a page specifically because of that association. I'll leave debate over whether WCAG took "aging" vision into account for others. I see TheDJ already created T171458 to determine whether the Monobook styling actually follows WCAG's guidelines (it wouldn't terribly surprise me if it turns out they had only looked at Vector before). Anomie⚔12:15, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
I'll back out a little from my prior comment "the whole scheme" is a bit vague - I'm really only referring to the red "Cancel" and "Delete" buttons links - perhaps just adding some font weight to them would be enough. — xaosfluxTalk15:45, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
Noting in passing that today I found the delete button to be white with red lettering. Now, I've got pretty good eyesight, and I could barely make out what the letters were because they were too faint. They need to be bolded, bigger - and NOT RED. Red is almost never a good colour for an interface, unless the intention is for it to be considered the "Emergency" button. I also can barely read the "Cancel" link in the editing window below - also red, thin font. How about making the "CANCEL" an actual button rather than just a word?Can it at least be CAPITALIZED? It should be considered an equal partner to the other buttons. Current FF, Windows 10, Monobook. Risker (talk) 23:53, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
I share some concern with you about the accessibility of the Apex (as it is called) oojs-ui style that monobook users receive. I have created T171458 to start with an assessment and documentation of the color combinations. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:07, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
The other problem is that scroll-down list of reasons has too much white space and is harder to scan. Also, the font seems lighter and harder to read (for me) on the white background. SarahSV(talk)22:14, 21 July 2017 (UTC)
TheDJ Don't exactly understand what you're saying, unless you're saying we should write a style gadget. But the issue with the drop down box spacing (at least on mine) is that every line is double spaced between the lines (LOTS of white space between the lines), larger type than before, and while the categories are in bold, the individual selections are grayish. I'm guessing ... but this seems to be what is about to happen to everything, including blocking, protecting pages, etc. etc. I know this was done in good faith, but it seems like it's being rolled out for a given editor demographic (whatever that is). — Maile (talk) 21:21, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
This is more trouble than it's worth. I'm not doing a screenshot. Sorry. I know you mean well. Editing on Wikipedia shouldn't require all this. I find the changes happening counter-productive to what I do on Firefox. That's it. And it isn't just this edit window. If I send you a screen shot on this latest, tomorrow it will be something else. And another. And another. And another. Little things started going whack-a-doo for me about a month ago, when everybody else started complaining about things like the missing toolbar or other stupid stuff in the edit window. And every time another change comes, something else looks whacked, and not everything going on behind the scenes works for everybody. Bah. Humbug. What's happening now is total junk.— Maile (talk) 00:35, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Also, I know you are very dedicated and are very diligent at trying to help editors. I don't mean to sound rude towards you, The DJ, but whatever they're doing is just too much. Sometimes I open an edit window, and everything looks normal. Sometimes it takes a refresh, or a preview, or any guess on a jiggle here or there to get things to load right in the edit window. And it's not consistent. And it's not a virus or malware. It's the re-programming that's happening. Unbelievable. — Maile (talk) 00:56, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
/* Remove some whitespace */.oo-ui-panelLayout-padded{padding:0;}.oo-ui-fieldsetLayout.oo-ui-labelElement>.oo-ui-fieldsetLayout-header>.oo-ui-labelElement-label{margin-bottom:0;}.oo-ui-panelLayout-padded.oo-ui-panelLayout-framed{margin:0;}.oo-ui-fieldLayout.oo-ui-labelElement,.oo-ui-fieldLayout.oo-ui-fieldLayout-align-inline{margin-top:0;}.oo-ui-fieldLayout.oo-ui-labelElement>.oo-ui-fieldLayout-body>.oo-ui-fieldLayout-header{padding-bottom:0;}.oo-ui-fieldLayout{margin-top:0;}.oo-ui-dropdownInputWidgetselect:not([no-ie]){height:1.5em;}.oo-ui-textInputWidgetinput,.oo-ui-textInputWidgettextarea{padding:0;}/* Make destructive buttons black */.oo-ui-buttonElement-framed.oo-ui-widget-enabled.oo-ui-flaggedElement-primary.oo-ui-flaggedElement-destructive>.oo-ui-buttonElement-button{color:white;background-color:black;border-color:black;}.oo-ui-buttonElement-framed.oo-ui-widget-enabled.oo-ui-flaggedElement-primary.oo-ui-flaggedElement-destructive>.oo-ui-buttonElement-button:hover{background-color:black;border-color:black;}
You can put that in Special:MyPage/common.css. You can pick and choose the snippets you want or copy it wholesale. If you think it's too squeezed up, you can just replace 0 with 3px or whatever values you want. Nirmos (talk) 12:02, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. It has no effect on the white spacing. But one thing it does, is change that red button to black. And what a great improvement the black is. So, thank you for providing this to me. Just for the record, I have previously tried deleting all my scripts, and that didn't work. I've tried changing my skin to Vector, and that didn't work. I unchecked just about everything in Preferences/Gadgets, to no effect. The phenomenons I'm experiencing in English Wikipedia do not happen on Commons or Wikisource, both of which look remarkably like they always did. — Maile (talk) 12:12, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Nope, nothing. But I have a question. There is something in my .css that I put there in 2013. I can't remember why I put it there, or what it's for. Could it be part of the cause? — Maile (talk) 12:43, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Nirmos I have no idea what that Gadget-navpop does, so I must have been reading some noticeboard when I did that. I'm using Modern skin. I clear my cache. Tried Vector skin with the changes you gave me. I am on Windows 10 , Firefox 54.0.1. — Maile (talk) 13:12, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
I misunderstood. Now I have tried the revision, both in Modern and Vector skins. What that does, is narrow the drop down box and the "Other additional reason" blank. But within the drop-down list itself, it's still double spaced between the drop-down reasons, and that's the original issue. Also, your changes not only narrowed the box on the Delete template, but as I'm typing this, I see it narrowed the Edit Summary box below this window. In case I was not clear, I can live with a wide Edit Summary box/drop down box. It's the lines between the drop-down reasons that are the issue for me. — Maile (talk) 13:37, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Maile66: How much space there is between option elements varies by browser. Firefox simply has more space in between than, say, Chrome. Nirmos (talk) 14:49, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Bingo! You just solved it. I don't normally use anything but Firefox. And the only other browser I have available to me it Edge, which does not show the extra spaces inbetween. It's Firefox. Sorry I wasted everybody's time on this. — Maile (talk) 15:49, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
@Maile66: I don't think you've wasted anyone's time. And if the "fix" that you got is the same as everyone else needs we may need to put it site wide. — xaosfluxTalk00:33, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
Xaosflux There's another piece to this puzzle regarding Firefox 54.0.1 (which I've just learned to live with) - that version of Firefox became available almost at the exact same time that Wikipedia started rolling out its changes. And there's more than just the double spacing issue. Opening an edit window in Firefox is funky, and I don't know if it's Firefox or the Wikipedia changes. And the issue with the Firefox edit window opening is that not everything loads (toolbar, and on opening things like AIV/RFPP listings, the "Show" link to drop down the templates) The solution to getting everything to drop down is to reload the page, or do a Preview, or whatever works at that time. And then again ... sometimes everything in the edit window opens up the first time. I haven't checked the Edge browser on anything but the double spacing, so I don't know if these issues are inherent in the current version of Firefox, or if all of these issues are a conflict with any Firefox version. — Maile (talk) 00:50, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
The "doublespace" problem does appear to be limited to Firefox (at least in FF v54.0.1) - verified with a separate account on testwiki - using chrome there is no doublespacing, with FF there is (with the new UI). — xaosfluxTalk01:32, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
that, in essence, means "take the whole of the page User:Lupin/navpopdev.css and copy it here". So any CSS on that page will affect your experience as a user, and any changes there will be outside your control. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:52, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Side note: The OOjs UI change (aka "Big Blue Button") has only been deployed to the Wikipedias so far. It will reach most sister projects on Tuesday, August 1st, and Commons sometime later. The reason I split this up is because it can affect some editing scripts, and there are only a handful of volunteers who really know how to fix some of them. I didn't want to overload them with all the wikis on the same week. The main downside is that you can't test a script this week at, say, Wikisource, to determine whether it's working under OOsj UI. Instructions for testing (including how to turn it off here for a single edit, by hand-editing the URL to include &ooui=0, so that you can see whether a problem you're encountering is actually related to this) are still at mw:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
How to link to a user talk page conversation?
I often want to link to a conversation on a user's talk page in a way that's future-proof. The problem is that people archive their talk pages, so the links go stale. I can use the Permanent Link tool, but that suffers from the problem that you get a link to a specific point in time, so the rest of the conversation, that happens after you create the link, isn't visible. Is there some better way to do this that gets me the best of both worlds? -- RoySmith(talk)00:01, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
There is no way to achieve what you want. One of the old archive bots used to fix incoming links when it archived a talk page, although the overhead of that seems excessive. Quite a few people just delete stuff from their talk so only a permalink would work. Johnuniq (talk) 00:59, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
What you would needs is WP:FLOW, which was strongly rejected due to various reasons on English Wikipedia. Some of the other languages, and the mediawiki wiki use it. — xaosfluxTalk01:11, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
You can use the permalink tool when the conversation is over. That should work unless the revision is deleted (or some other obscure thing that I don't know about). – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:54, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
This is a regular question here. You are using WikEd, which, on edit, automatically converts existing invisible non-breaking spaces to their HTML entity names. You didn't add them: they were already there.
I suppose that explains why every once in a while I see a post on a page like this that also changes NBSP characters in others' signatures into entity references. Anomie⚔15:11, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Hover over link doesn't suppress material that has been revision deleted
Hi. This morning I revision deleted a number of very abusive edit summaries from an editor who is now indefinitely blocked. Now if I view the normal history for the article, they appear greyed out and struck, although as an admin I can still choose the diff and then choose to view the edit summary if I wish, a matter of 3 or 4 more clicks. However, if I hover over the "hist" link on the relevant article on my watchlist, it shows the edit summaries immediately as they were before they were deleted - i.e. not greyed out and struck. Question: is this the same for all editors, or simply me as an admin? Because if the former, there's obviously a major problem... Thanks, Black Kite (talk)14:32, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Popups is apparently smart enough to know you have permission to see it. When I look at an edit where the edit summary was revdel'd, I can see the edit summary when I hover over it in popups, but when I log in using User:Floquensock instead, popups doesn't display it anymore. --Floquenbeam (talk) 14:40, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Hi, all, is there a way to see what this setting is on live enwiki? My sourcediving skills are not the best in the context of Mediawiki; I see that in DefaultSettings.php it's set to 1 and CommonSettings.php doesn't touch it (as far as I can tell), but I can't seem to find a way to look at LocalSettings.php (whether because it'd be a security risk or just because the aforementioned sourcediving skills). I don't think 1 is actually correct, but I can't say for sure. Anyone know? Writ Keeper⚇♔20:26, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Just as a minor note: LocalSettings is just a stub we generate automatically that includes CommonSettings and friends. There's nothing secret about it--it's just in a weird spot in the source tree and doesn't contain any actual configuration so it's not available via noc. It's weird, I know. You can see that stub file where it's generated by a scap plugin called prep. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY[u+1F602]23:20, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Recovering page history of a previous deleted version of a page
I asked User:Orangemike (conversation here) to undelete the old deleted version of Banc de Binary, an article that was subsequently recreated, because Wikipedia's editing of it was in the news and was raised in policy debate at WP:NCORP. He did this, at Talk:Banc de Binary/Deleted version (the strange name was my idea). But ... he didn't get an article history, seemed unsure how to do it (despite being one of the most experienced admins around) and we really need that to have a forensic sense of how well Wikipedia responded to the situation. Can someone explain what the issues are with this and whether there is a good way to do it properly? Perhaps demonstrate using this undeleted version as an example? I am alarmed because the old version of a page like this should have attribution to be CC-BY licensed -- so the restored version may be a copyvio without the history, and if the current draft of any article has been recreated from the deleted version (rightly or wrongly) then it could have issues if this isn't doable, and developer work may be needed to make it possible. Wnt (talk) 00:36, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
I can think of two ways. First is to just undelete the deleted entries. There are seven from before the May 2013 creation of the current article. Second, is delete the current article, undelete the seven entires and move them. Then undelete the current article. I'm not sure that the second one would work correctly. -CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq —Preceding undated comment added 00:52, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
An ordinary deletion would not have been a problem; but in this case, there was userfication and other complications. --Orange Mike | Talk03:26, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
Template incorrectly categorizing articles as templates
I routinely clean out some error tracking categories and recently have seen strange problems that I have not encountered before. I think it must have been caused by some MediaWiki change a few weeks ago. This report is too vague for action, but I'm posting to see if others have noticed similar issues.
A problem can occur when a page is rendered (that is, when MediaWiki generates the HTML for display, from the wikitext). The problem goes away when the page is purged so it can be overlooked and issues are hard to pin down.
Two problems have been reported:
T168040 Table of contents (TOC) missing sporadically without apparent reason
T170039 Pages display Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua
I saw a new problem at Fear, Love & War#External links 24 hours ago (it is still there, but will disappear when someone purges the page). An error can be seen just above the categories:
Lua error in mw.title.lua at line 59: attempt to index local 'ns' (a nil value).
List of Get Smart episodes#Season 5: 1969–70 currently shows the same message. I haven't investigated but my guess is that mw.title.lua would not be throwing that error unless something bad happened within Scribunto, similar to the mw.wikibase.entity.lua problem above.
Two hours ago I encountered another puzzle at Tornado outbreak of April 9–11, 2009#April 10 event. Just before "Brief tornado touchdown", a {{convert}} error is shown. The wikitext at that point is {{convert|1|mi|km}} but the error message is what would occur if the value (1) were omitted, or if {{convert}} (no parameters) were used. The article is in Category:Convert errors but it was not there 24 hours ago. The only edit since May was by InternetArchiveBot at 22:22, 16 July 2017—that edit did not affect the convert in question.
I’ve just had a look at it. It seems unrelated to the Wikidata problem. In Fear, Love & War the problem seems to be here in Module:Navbar with the title 'Killarmy' (from {{Killarmy}}):
And the 'title' object is pretty unremarkable. I can only guess the 'title' got corrupted. when those scripts ran. It happening twice is odd, but I can’t see any reason why – a code change, a wikidata dependence, or other obvious trigger. It could be something happened on the server once that tripped up mw.title.lua for a short time.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds13:24, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
That category always seems to need a null edit when I stop by to visit it. Changes to templates often add a bunch of pages that, when the template problem is reverted, need to be flushed from the error category. I wonder if we could ask a bot to null-edit all of the (non-sandbox, non-testpages) pages in that category once or twice a day. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:17, 17 July 2017 (UTC)
My report about mw.title.lua has to be a bug in the underlying system. I haven't fully examined the situation, but it seems impossible to me that the red error could be generated by anything a template or module could do. It would be better to record any examples of weirdness that have been noticed, and later plan workarounds if the problem cannot be resolved. Purging the pages I mentioned just makes it hard for others to see the problem. Johnuniq (talk) 01:14, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
The heading of this thread is pretty ironic, considering that the designers of the Module:convert are deliberately abusing a parser function to cause "Rendering problems" and potentially triggering 3 different views (preview, cached rendering, preview with error) of the same page.
As far as scribunto libraries are concerned. mw.title and mw.html are some of the worst of the crop. They don't careful protect themselves from errors caused by calling modules by catching the invalid use and outputting better errors. The same applies to module:convert which should catch that error and prevent it from ever reaching a page, and output a much better error.Apart from the wikibase problem which is certainly a software issue, it is quite easy to replicate the "mw.title" error noted above :
local ns = mw.site.namespaces[buu]
mw.log(ns.buu)
Module:convert uses a lot of related modules, so any one of them could at some point have facilitated the error above. Generally speaking, mediawiki needs a better error reporting tool that doesn't rely on crazy hacks like dumping errors to pages or using categories, perhaps Extension:Pickle or a related extension could one day facilitate this.
If you have positive suggestions for error reporting (rather than just complaining that existing methods are "crazy hacks"), feel free to suggest them in Phabricator. I suspect the title error described above (as opposed to your GIGO complaint) may be due to T166348, which is in the process of being fixed. The missing TOC error described above is also in the process of being fixed. Anomie⚔12:23, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
By the way, searching for "Lua error in mw.title.lua at line 59" in Special:Search or Google finds plenty of examples, and the Google cache shows them. Wang Maolin (last edited on 18 March 2017) is showing the error. Johnuniq (talk) 01:28, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
It seems that the error caused by the code above is intermittent and seems to show up whenever an unrelated uncaught script error occurs. It would probably happen with other unguarded related code even if that line didn't trigger it.
Improvement for the current error reporting seems to be already captured in phabricator. One approach might be to get rid of tracking categories, and red errors everywhere, and instead surface them using a centralized Linter like mechanism in mediawiki core.
In fact, it is already demonstrably superior to the tracking category, compare Special:LintErrors/self-closed-tag vs Category:Pages_using_invalid_self-closed_HTML_tags , and see T163430. At the time of this writing the former shows more errors, has a namespace selector, seems to be faster to update, can facilitate the collation of errors, identification of the template causing many errors, and unlike mediawiki core has a specific API for it.
There are also many related tasks that address a proper warning system phab:T141970, phab:T160102#3213366. Temporarily logging past errors is also way more useful than randomly popping them up in various pages. That is also partly discussed in mw:Help:Pickle/Test_log, and perhaps addressed by the pickle extension as a whole as far as lua is concerned. There are also plenty of phabricator tasks for pickle itself.
On wiki, wrapping the offending line in a xpcall would probably mitigate this problem until it is fixed server side. Such defensive programming is generally a good practice for data retrieved from a separate database. For specific scenarios like these intermittent errors, a targeted approach would be more useful than senselessly playing wack a mole, as some editors seem to be doing exactly because of the legacy error reporting system. 197.218.89.125 (talk) 07:58, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Scribunto !== Lua . You may also be confusing templates with a genuine programming language (LUA). It is fact that wrapping the entry point of the module (and/ or all functions within all modules) should still catch it, and if that doesn't work, then that truly merits a separate bug report. Looking at this error throughout various wikis, all of them seemed to make an unguarded call. In a worse case scenario the module could simply do string matching before outputting anything similar to the {{#iferror parser function. Someone mentioned a similar thing years ago (and was ignored) related to the tester (Module_talk:UnitTests#Add_a_value_to_nowiki_to_show_the_wikitext_only_if_the_actual_result_does_not_contain_a_script_error). If even that can't be done, then it is a pretty serious software issue.
Lua can even report the exact runtime variables at the point it errored, which would certainly help in tracking that and other errors without guessing. That's a fact, and something used in several other non-mediawiki platforms. However, scribunto developers deliberately neutered those powerful error reporting tools for security reasons, or due to lack of interest / resources to provide wrappers for it. 197.218.89.125 (talk) 11:16, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
Apparently a new type of error started showing up (with a new deployment), "Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 37: data.schemaVersion must be a number, got nil instead.". It also seems to be intermittent, and probably as easily caught as the mw.title one, e.g. testwiki:module_talk:Errorcatch.15:59, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
That is visible in the infobox at Zürich. It appears the reason for the new error message is that per T170039, a release with more precise messages has been released to investigate what's going on. It also appears another release soon may fix the problem. By the way, I just purged the list of articles with script errors, so what is now shows will be new stuff. Johnuniq (talk) 23:53, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
I just purged the list again. It had 7 entries after my previous purge. That had grown to 31 entries a couple of minutes ago before this purge. It now has 6 entries. That's about four articles per hour being added. Johnuniq (talk) 05:59, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
Hopefully people don't take this the wrong way, but this is "insanity". As defined by Doctor Albert Einstein, insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. No matter how many times these pages are purged, they'll keep returning until mediawiki developers fix the server software.
At the very least it makes more sense to use a bot and the search api to periodically purge all these pages rather than doing it manually if editors aren't interested in improving error checking in those modules.
The category is used to remove errors from articles but it is unusable when it contains mostly false positives. If you browse recent posts at T170039 you will see editors from at least two other Wikipedias asking for methods to clear the category so they can find articles that need to be fixed. Also, once the problem is fixed, it can take weeks or even months for a category like this to clean itself—the pages need to be purged sooner or later. I am using a home-grown Python script and am not "doing it manually". I don't know if you are reading anything here, but modules cannot catch these errors. Johnuniq (talk) 00:57, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
On some pages such as August 1973, the TOC is not shown even though the page has more than 4 sections and neither it nor any of its transcluded templates have "__NOTOC__" in their text. I have already fixed this one with a null edit. Are there any others that need to be fixed? GeoffreyT2000(talk, contribs)18:22, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
I have recently noticed the performance of a TLS handshake when Wikipedia pages load, and subsequently, a noticeable increase in loading times and secure connection failures. Currently, Wikipedia is practically inaccessible to me. Is this handshake something new, and could it explain the performance issue I am experiencing?--John Cline (talk) 23:29, 26 July 2017 (UTC)
TLS handshakes are a standard part of TLS--it's what provides provides the Secure in HTTPS. We've been using them for years and you routinely use them on any site that provides a secure version. On any semi-not-ancient hardware, performance of this is typically not an issue--perhaps it's worth reporting in Phabricator so ops can have a look (and possibly ask you for some more debug info). FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY[u+1F602]02:35, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
What browser? Is it a reasonably recent version (no more than six months old)? What do you see exactly? It is likely that a Google search would find discussions of the problem, and it is unlikely to be related to Wikipedia. Johnuniq (talk) 04:09, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, both of you. The link was helpful as well. My hardware may well be outmoded, (it does not bluetooth after all), and I've heard of an exodus from Firefox for similar cause, (which I currently use). I am prepared to assume the problems I am experiencing originate on my end; I'll see about bringing myself up-to-date.
Regarding specifics, my Firefox browser was stalling on a command line that said, "performing TLS handshake with en-Wikipedia", then waiting on en-Wikipedia.org", and then a time-out screen would appear, saying: "Secure Connection Failed". This would happen 4 out of each 5 attempts with the 5th attempt loading, or partially loading the given page.
The situation has since improved to an inverted end; 4 of 5 pages load with every 5th timing out. The latter is a trade-off I can live with and it is likely a problem whose solution resides in my hand. Thanks again.--John Cline (talk) 05:13, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Put the following into Google: firefox "performing TLS handshake"
A question has come up lately about the possibility of restricting users' use of the Cat-a-Lot script, which I don't believe has been considered before. The immediate problem: it's a js-script that's not hosted over here, but rather on Wikimedia Commons, and I'm not sure how much local control there is over it around here. I've noticed that when I use it, it sometimes does peculiar things - see here for an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about - and I don't know that there's a way for it to be customized locally to Wikipedia's needs. Given that, I'm not sure there's currently a way to introduce controls short of manual deletion of the script from users' pages. Or wholesale disabling of the script, which would be a pity; while it's frighteningly powerful, it does sometimes have its uses.
Commons doesn't have stubs, so commons scripts need not be aware of stub tags nor the need for special treatment of them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:59, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Caveat: I'm not technically competent to answer this question.
But I can't see any way to stop me from using whatever Javascript I wanted. For example: Let's say that we modify the script to use the AWB mechanism, which checks to make sure that your username is on an 'approved' list. Mine's not on the list, right? But I could bypass that by copying the (public) Javascript, deleting the "check to make sure your username is on an approved list" lines, and running my "jailbroken" copy in my userspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:19, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Also, I've been around for 12 years and I WORKED with stubs years ago. I would have made the same changes. An approval system is not gonna help with a conceptually arbitrary rule like this. I'm sure it will annoy many of our gnomes, but it's a wiki, not perfection. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:41, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
File:Dunes and Ripples in Nili Patera.jpg
When I am logged out, the File:Dunes and Ripples in Nili Patera.jpg does not appear to be linked to the article Nili Patera dune field, although it is one of the article files. On the file page, I get the message: "File usage
No pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file. (Pages on other projects are not listed.)" But when I am logged in, the file usage statement is correct: "File usage The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file Nili Patera dune field (pages on other projects are not listed)". I tried the other pictures in the article and they don't have this problem. Is there any explanation for this? Dr.K.22:37, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
While editing an article, I noticed a red linked category which I clicked on. The non-existent category was well populated, so I went ahead and created the category with a "Maintenance template" tag only. The category is Category:Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers. Don't know anything about it or why the category didn't previously exist even though it was being populated by some template. Safiel (talk) 04:59, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
– This page is for technical issues with wiki software, not change proposals. Since this is not a fully formed proposal ready for !voting, I'm moving it to WP:VPI instead of WP:VPR. ―Mandruss☎08:26, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
Just to be clear, Doug Weller, your edit didn't require review, but as long as any review-required edit upstream from yours was still awaiting review, your edit had to remain hidden. Why doesn't someone give D.W. pending changes reviewer privileges? They gave it to me, and if they'll give it to me they'll give it to anyone, I guess. EEng16:29, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
Why don't all previous unreviewed page edits get reviewed (patrolled) after someone makes autoreviewed (autopatrolled) edit? This is more intuitive. --Obsuser (talk) 13:44, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
OK but it should be patroller's responsibility to check whole article before saving it. Is it possible to separate edits somehow so that if one section is edited by patrolled used that was not touched by unpatrolled – edit is accepted? Or to exclude unpatrolled edits like they were not made and include patrolled ones (this would implicate when one clicks to Edit, one gets last patrolled version)? --Obsuser (talk) 14:45, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
That would require a much different model for editing pages than currently exists. Consider, for example, that currently edit conflicts happen mainly on very active pages where people are editing within the same few seconds or minutes and are reported to the editor immediately when a save is attempted. What would you think if your edit had an edit conflict weeks or months later, long after you "saved" it, because it took that long for someone to get around to patrolling it? Anomie⚔14:52, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata problem
I've come across three pages — Carlton Gardens, Great Melbourne Telescope and Melbourne Observatory — which are incorrectly linking to the disambiguation page at Victoria instead of to the title, Victoria (Australia), that actually contains the article about the Australian state that they're located in. The problem, however, is that in all three cases the incorrect link is in the articles' infoboxes, where it's being fed from Wikidata instead of being directly coded on en — but on the Wikidata side, it seems to have been coded so that undabbed Victoria is the Australian state, meaning that the Wikidata code is feeding these three articles an incorrect link that can't be repaired because it's impossible to add the "Australia" disambiguator over there. Can anybody look into how to get this fixed so that these three infoboxes are actually linking to the correct place? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 02:46, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
The problem is indeed in {{Wikidata location}}. In the |3= section, it checks for whether an article has the title given by "located on terrain feature, located in the administrative territorial entity" (which for Melbourne Observatory is ", Victoria" and that doesn't exist). If that doesn't exist, it then returns "[[located in the administrative territorial entity]]" (which is Victoria for Melbourne Observatory) without any check for being a dab. I'll try to apply some 'sticking plaster' to it, but it really wants to be re-written as a Lua module so the logic can be followed and amended more easily. For Mike's benefit, I've put a "beautified" version on Template talk:Wikidata location and created a debugging tool at Template:Wikidata location/debug. To be continued ... --RexxS (talk) 14:54, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
@RexxS: I was using the ifexist statements to check for the compound links, I'm not sure why I added them also for the single case. So I think that ifexist can be stripped out and replaced with a getValue call. If someone can Lua-ify the logic, that would be great, as the parser functions code has become a lot more complicated than it was at the start! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 15:47, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
The problem, Mike, is that there are five properties that relate to location on Wikidata, and there are no constraints (that I'm aware of) which limit which can co-exist with which, so that gives 2^5 = 32 possible combinations, many of which might be an article (or a redirect, or a dab page). At present, you're testing for some of these, but not all (e.g. P131 + P17 → Victoria, Australia, which is an article title). We probably need to talk through what are likely combinations and then I can code a module to do the job. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 16:05, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
Ah, I wasn't thinking about adding more support for different combinations. That would be useful. For now, the fix looks good, thanks! Mike Peel (talk) 16:32, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. Perhaps @Nikkimaria: can suggest the important ones to link together, since they suggested combining the location links in the first place. BTW, I've now remembered why the [[located in the administrative territorial entity]] code was there - it's for cases where there are multiple locations in P131 that need to be attached together, e.g. at Owens Valley Radio Observatory (Q174540) / Owens Valley Radio Observatory. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:50, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
Oleg Bezuglov
Someone came to my user talk asking why Oleg Bezuglov has a no index / no follow coding. I tried to override it with the {{INDEX}} template, but it apparently is still appearing. Why would this be? MBisanztalk02:54, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
Is there some .css issues going on ? I have random double, triple and quadruple spacing between words in talk page prose, edit summaries, watchlist items. I've been doing some customizing on my common.css page, but have removed all changes, but still have the spacing issues. - FlightTime (open channel)13:52, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
Why not an accident, if they copied it from somebody else's advice and that advice contained such a mistake? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:41, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
I guess I should have included a winky emoticon for the benefit of the humor impaired. EEng17:52, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
You're so unbelievably tone-deaf it's... well, unbelievable. Even now you don't seem to understand what's going on. EEng21:52, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
And upon that undisguised attack, I could rest my case, since EEng's intolerance is plainly demonstrated.
Or perhaps thay would prefer it like this: don't tell me what I am or am not - of course I bloody well understand: the problem as mentioned by Nirmos (talk·contribs) is that the rule
div#contenth4{font-sizeː116%;}
contains an invalid declaration, because the character between property and value is not a colon as required by the CSS syntax. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:07, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
My God, you still don't get it? My comment to Unscintillating had absolutely nothing to do with whether, in fact, this exotic character showed up by accident. Yet you keep trying to prove something about that. Stop digging, will you? It's embarrassing just to watch. EEng23:22, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
It started in Firefox, clicking Cite on the toolbar, and then Templates, and then Web. Then proceed as normal, clicking the magnifying glass to propagate the fields on the Web Citation form. Then clicking the date page to propagate the Access date field. Then filling in remaining fields manually, and adjusting any other fields. Once the information is final, click the Insert button. Nothing happens. I have the most updated version of Firefox, which is 54.0.1. (64-bit). In fact, it had just updated, and I thought that might have been what broke the form. I am running Windows 10 64-bit. So, I downloaded Chrome to try it out there. I am running the most current version of Chrome 59.0.3071.115 (Official Build) (64-bit). It worked for several days, but then it broke yesterday. You don't always know when Chrome has updated, so Chrome may have updated since when I start using it. Anyway, so now the form is not working in either browser. I am using the Visual Source Editor citation generator as a work-around for now. But I would really prefer to use the citation generator in the Source Editor. I am surprised no one else has reported this issue already. Appreciate any insight. Thanks! dawnleelynn(talk)16:55, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
TheDJ (talk·contribs) Hi, was away a few minutes. Thanks for your reply. I have the Syntax Highlighter under Edit enabled. It doesn't say it is a beta feature. I couldn't find any syntax highlighter that says it is a beta feature. Do you think I should disable this feature regardless and see if it helps? Thanks! dawnleelynn(talk)17:52, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
dawnleelynn (talk·contribs) I use the drop down citation templates mostly. I have no idea what the magnifying glass is for, since I've never used it (what does it do?). So, except for the magnifying glass (which does nothing on mine), the drop down web citation template worked for me in Firefox 54.0.1. (32-bit) I have the same Windows version as you do. The only thing that seems to be different between us is the bit-version of Firefox. — Maile (talk) 19:24, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
Here's another thing that sometimes works. Under Preferences/Gadgets/Editing, if you have either "wikEdDiff" or "WikEd" checked, uncheck them and see if that improves things. — Maile (talk) 19:48, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
Maile66 Thanks for responding. I checked my Preferences where you specified. I don't have either of those boxes selected. But you never know. Thanks for trying. dawnleelynn(talk)20:11, 10 July 2017 (UTC)
I know this issue is archived but it was still an active issue for me. And so, today, when it is suddenly fixed and worked, I am reporting that it is corrected. It started working today on Chrome. I haven't tried it in a few days. But I did try it sometime last week-so I know it was fixed sometime between last week and today. Thought someone would like to know. I have not downloaded any new versions of my browser. However, I tried Firefox, and it still the same version and it still does not work on Firefox. I just now went to check the version of Chrome and it was the same. However, now that I did Help - About, it's downloading a new version. I'll come back here and post if it still works or not with the new version. Thanks. dawnleelynn(talk)22:19, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
I updated your section header to make it clear that it's a problem with the mobile site in particular rather than a general issue. Anomie⚔23:19, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
The languages make no sense.
I understand that some languages are called "International", but other languages that are also spoken across other continents are still listed as "European", Danish is spoken in Greenland which is North-American. Dutch is spoken in Surinam and the Caribbean, German is spoken in Namibia (Africa), Latin is globally important across the Western World and was also spoken in Africa and Asia during the Roman Republic, and Empire. What even is "the Middle East"? Should Urdu be in there or South Asia? The same goes for Pashtu, Etc. some people say that the Middle Easr stops at Iran, others at Pakistan and some call former-Soviet Central Asia "the Middle East". The current organisation of the languages make no sense and is completely inconsistent. --2405:4800:148C:9119:29EA:78E6:5F00:20FD (talk) 09:05, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
What is this in relation to? Is there an article, template or other page with some sort of language problem? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:13, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
I don't think that this is about mw:Compact Language Links, which doesn't have "International" as a category. It uses "Worldwide" instead. One could argue whether e.g., Danish is an "international" language, but it seems reasonable to me to exclude it from CLL's "worldwide" status, since that language is commonly spoken in only one country outside of Northern Europe. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:33, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Lots of people misquote or invent terms when they report problems, also when they use quotation marks. In addition, the feature says "Europe" and not "European", and it says "Middle East" and not "the Middle East". So all three quoted terms are misquoted. That sounds very plausible based on my experience. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:12, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Pages with incorrect formatting
I've seen a lot of pages without any obvious sign of a cite error dropping into this category of late. I have been clearing them out by editing and saving without changing any data and that works. Question is, why are they appearing - sometimes they haven't even been edited in a while. Have a look [here] for example. Regards CV9933 (talk) 14:56, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
See Rendering problems. Since then I have seen four more articles reporting a {{convert}} error where there was no such error, and where there was no recent edit to the article. The issue has been reported (details in the link) and developers are working on a fix. Meanwhile, an easy solution is the null edit mentioned by PrimeHunter: click Edit at the top of page then click Save beneath the edit window. Do not put anything in the edit summary. No change occurs and the page history will not show anything, but the problem will be fixed. Johnuniq (talk) 22:44, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that uses Wikidata. The developers are working on fixing the problem. You can fix a page by opening it for editing and then saving without changing anything. [7]
Wikidata and German Wikipedia could not be edited for an hour on 28 July. You can read why and how we could avoid it in the future in the incident report.
Changes later this week
Some wikis already have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. All remaining wikis except Commons will have these from 1 August. [8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 1 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The default font in the edit window will soon change for some users. Instead of using the browser default it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [9]
I'm looking at phab:T171201 and trying to make up my mind about how much to spam people about it. This project changes the default font for the editing window at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing from "browser default" to "monospace".
Here are the facts that seem salient to me:
This change doesn't affect ~90% of editors, because their browser's default is monospace. It only affects some of the remaining ~10% (i.e., desktop Apple users who haven't already manually switched their account to use monospace, because their browser's default is usually sans serif).
This is only about the site-wide default; you will still be able to change it back to whatever you want.
'Aesthetic' changes often annoy experienced editors, but often just briefly (a week or two, or until you figure out that you can change it back to whatever you prefer).
If we don't change this default, then the syntax highlighter won't work correctly for most of these users.
However, since it happens that the default is changing to match my personal preference, and since I'm very much looking forward to the syntax highlighter, and since this change means that I won't have to continue changing my prefs at every single wiki, then it's easy for me believe that (almost) everyone will be pleased with the change. Thus:
My question for y'all: Is it worth spamming all the village pumps about this change, or do you think that this Tech News notice (and perhaps a second one right before the change is made) is enough? There isn't any way to contact only the people who will be affected. What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
A font change strikes me as hardly the sort of thing that merits a lot of spam. I'd reserve that for major policy changes such as allowing anon article creation. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:08, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
People rightly complain when changes occur with no warning and no possibility of before-the-event objection. I recommend a low-key message on several noticeboards, starting with soothing language along the lines that a font change in the edit window may affect what some editors see (brief details go here). However, most editors use browsers which will not be affected. Johnuniq (talk) 22:38, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
My opinion: if you don't asininely go out of your way to break existing scripts or make it unnecessarily difficult to change back, and especially if you give instructions on how to do so, people will have little reason to bring out the torches and pitchforks. —Cryptic00:04, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
@Winged Blades of Godric: I just made several fixes to scripts that you included, but I also note that you have like 3 AfD closing scripts installed.. (either directly or indirectly), as well as something like the 6tab vector script (via User:Equazcion/ExperiencedEditorPack.js) and maybe some more. While in theory, if all scripters wrote 100% resilient scripts, this shouldn't be a problem, in practice... it often is. I'd advice you to do some cleaning and only install those scripts, which you actually use, nothing more, and nothing twice. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:03, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ:--Your comments are earnestly appreciated.I will be soon embarking on a Mission-Cleanup!And in all seriousness, even I'm unable to explain why would somebody need 3 AfD closing scripts?!Winged Blades Godric14:57, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Purging pages and language list in sidebar on Wikipedias other than English
Why does purging pages on Wikipedias other than English require additional confirmation (one has to click button on generated newly opened page) and resets the original page (for example, when diff is being viewed and then "Purge" chosen from drop-down menu – page loads only with "?title=" in URL i.e. diff is no longer shown)? Is there maybe some script that needs to be copied to change default purging behaviour?
Also, why is on Wikipedias other than English shown compact language list and on English [and some other Wikipedias] full list is always shown when logged out (when logged-in, user can force compact list in Preferences)?
Short answer: because our purge gadget has been fixed, nobody else's has. Longer (but incomplete) answer: the official method for purging a page changed in 2016 from HTTP GET to HTTP POST. The old technique of adding an action=purge parameter to the query string (which is HTTP GET) always technically required a confirmation step, which in the past could be bypassed if you knew the appropriate token to also add to the query string; but the token is no longer available, so bypassing that step is no longer possible. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:49, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
And the underlying reason is that it is possible to exploit the former system to issue a denial-of-service attack on the servers. Johnuniq (talk) 23:23, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
That's not actually the reason at all. It's because any action that causes a change in server state uses a POST. Anything that is GET should be nothing but information retrieval. This was enforced as part of efforts in T92357FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY[u+1F602]00:42, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
I believe there are multiple motivations. I have managed a website subject to attacks by people abusing our poor underlying design which allowed GET clicks to perform actions on the website (the problem was fixed when a POST was required). Therefore I nodded in agreement when I saw "this is a security fix" at 09:27, 22 August 2016. Johnuniq (talk) 06:16, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
Can someone explain to me the need for this link at all? You can hide links and transclusions through the MediaWiki interface, which shows - redirects only. -- zzuuzz(talk)10:48, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
On a tangential note, this is why I never #link to section titles. Instead, I always create an anchor in the article, because editors are much more likely to preserve an anchor than preserve a section name. In fact, it's silly to imagine a section name will be preserved indefinitely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EEng (talk • contribs) 13:23, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
My point isn't about IP URLs per se but about making one of them widely-visible by putting it into a page in MediaWiki: space. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:42, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
See examples of the Graph extension, Demo. A much newer extension and the basis for {{Graph:Chart}}. EasyTimeline is ancient technology and is not likely to receive any further updates and improvements. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:48, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
It's waiting for an SVG validation service, otherwise it would have already served SVGs. Unlike EasyTimeline which will never support SVGs. Max Semenik (talk) 19:36, 31 July 2017 (UTC)
It would be easy, but it would not work because generating the wikitext for an SVG does not create anything that current software would render to a chart. That's the problem. The phab:T96309 discussion mentioned above shows that something might be done, but it appears to have stalled due to a security concern because allowing SVG created by anyone who can edit apparently would have problems as SVG has lots of tricks available. Johnuniq (talk) 05:51, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
@Koavf:{{Pie chart}} doesn't generate SVG. To quote its documentation, it draws pie charts using a single image, a lot of (inline) CSS code generated by parser functions, and absolutely no JavaScript. It uses a technique for drawing diagonal lines in CSS exploiting the fact that borders set on elements are miter joined In the example on that doc page, the yellow wedge is created using this HTML:
@Redrose64: Ah. Coloring in sections with CSS is legit, too. I'd be surprised if a similar hack couldn't be done for the requested template above. But it's a lot of work for something that should be fixed on a more fundamental level. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯07:52, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
Ideally we'd be able to use pure SVG images directly; unfortunately, the uptake of SVG by browser vendors is apparently not yet high enough. Users of some browsers have been able to enjoy SVG images for over twelve years; those people who are devoted to the products of the Gates empire have had to wait significantly longer. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:21, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
Biography Portal cruft
I'm seeing strange content being rendered at the beginning of the boxed material at Portal:Biography, which is not part of the transcluded Portal:Biography/Intro. When I look at the rendered portal page, I see content that starts like this:
Farxaan muxumed salaad oo kumagac dheer cilmi wuxuu ku dhashay dalka somalia g/ahaan marka sanadii 1987A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts...
I don't see a transcluded template that could be responsible for this. It was not present in version 790258138(oldid link) of of 15:51, 12 July 2017. (Although for some reason, when I use Special:Permalink to link that exact same version, it *does* show the cruft, so perhaps this is a clue: version 790258138(Special:Permalink link)). If you know what is/was doing this, would appreciate an explanation (as well as a fix).
At this writing, the Special:Permalink link does not show the cruft, and neither does the Portal page. The google search still links Portal:Biography as result #4. What the heck was this? Mathglot (talk) 04:05, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
(ec) I added ?action=purge to the URL of the page to purge it. That removed the text. This diff added the junk to Portal:Biography/Intro/4 on 31 July 2017. The global contribs for the user show similar nonsense at Commons (example) and other projects. An admin might like to deal with those. Johnuniq (talk) 04:07, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm suffering from the usual edit tools disappearing when trying to edit, then reappearing (maybe) if the purge button is clicked before editing. I've had a look in Preferences and found "CharInsert: add a toolbar under the edit window for quickly inserting wiki markup and special characters (troubles?)" and clicked troubles but the remedy instructions aren't helping. Can anyone translate them into descriptive English pls? Regards Keith-264 (talk) 23:39, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
@Cordless Larry: You should ask questions like this one at Help talk:CS1. The editors there are best-equipped to answer it. That said, the reason I think it fails is indeed the spaces at &207103 - Cultural Diversity.xls. Substituting the spaces for %20 works. --Izno (talk) 12:38, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, Izno, and apologies for asking in the wrong place. I thought it was more of a general link issue than a citation template specific one. Cordless Larry (talk) 15:02, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
Sortable tables not sortable with Chrome
I've noticed that WP articles I view with Google Chrome version 60.0.3112.90 (Official Build) (64-bit), and some earlier versions, no longer sort sortable tables, and that they sort just fine with Firefox. Could this be a problem with the CSS for class="wikitable sortable" or what? Wtmitchell(talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 07:41, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
@Wtmitchell: Table sorting is not done with CSS, it's all JavaScript. A possibility is that one or more JavaScript files failed to reach your device, or arrived corrupted. The original fault may be at our end, your end, or with the myriad connections between. Since you are experiencing the problem in one browser but not another, the browser with the problem may have cached a bad copy of the javascript file; so try clearing its cache and forcing a reload. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:50, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
Tired of hearing from me yet? I throw in the towel that this is not going to get better unless Firefox 54.0.1 makes some changes. The issues I initially found in the edit window on Wikipedia, now that it's rolled out more universally, are even more frustrating in other wikis. As far as I know, I have no scripts loaded at Wikisource.
Spontaneous reloading as I'm typing text, wiping out my edits in process. On this issue, Wikipedia used to do this a lot of years ago, and it just somehow got resolved. It's back.
Wikipedia - I'd noticed it before, but thought maybe I'd triggered it.
Wikisource - Right in the middle of when I'm typing, it will reload and wipe our my edit. Maybe only a few times in a day, but it's a phenomenon.
Edit window toolbox and other links. Same in Wikisource and Wikipedia, but more time consuming in Wikisource.
On Wikipedia edit window, to get the toolbar to show, or to get everything on the tool bar to work like it should, mostly it takes a reload or two, or a Preview or two, to make it work. On something like AIV or RFPP, opening an edit window and getting the "show" to work on the drop-down templates, takes a reload - not always, but about half the time.
On Wikisource, the spontaneous reload while I'm in an edit window is more noticeable, because the whole purpose there is to proof or validate hundreds of pages in a book. Getting all the tools to load in an edit window requires this process repeated two or three times: Reload, Show Preview, Reload - repeat as many times as necessary to get all the tools to load.
I've come to accept that the browser incompatibility will probably not be resolved within Wikimedia. But I'm putting this here as feedback that it's annoying, but on Wikisource it's just nutz. — Maile (talk) 14:36, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Special:notifications
I posted last week that I am no longer getting notifications. The good news is that I learned that I can manually click to Special:notifications. But is this going to remain broken? This seems to be a rather important feature, as in the past the count of notifications displayed on every page I displayed. Unscintillating (talk) 21:22, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Wikimedia Toolforge Templatecount tool not working
I've been improving Canadian band stubs. I find them by navigating to the "Template:Canada-band-stub" page, and then selecting "What links here". Up comes a list titled 'Pages that link to "Template:Canada-band-stub" ', with a link to the template count tool, which I've been checking occasionally to see how many stubs were left to be done. For the last few days, though, instead of accessing the template counter, the link just gives me a 502 Bad Gateway error. Perhaps something has been changed?—Anne Delong (talk) 14:02, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
That category appears to not be included by the infobox itself but set at the bottom of the article. If you change that, it should work although it could take a while to propagate. —PaleoNeonate – 19:28, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
Should Template Editors be able to edit the MediaWiki namespace?
I know I am not a template editor, but I am asking this question anyway. Should template editors be able to edit the MediaWiki namespace? I am asking because template editors still have the ability to edit pages transcluded in an interface page. Ups and Downs (↕) 01:39, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
If there were a technical way to allow them tro edit the interface texts, without allowing them to edit the interface scripts, I wouls say yes; editing the templates transcluded in these pages is certainly on the same level as the texts. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu03:34, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
No. It is best to not pose hypothetical issues that many people will stop to consider unless there is reason for thinking a change would be desirable. I have seen template editors make bold changes to templates that should never have occurred without prior discussion and sandbox testing. Admins seem to be accustomed to the fact that great care should be used when fiddling with interface messages, and there is no backlog of requests for messages to be updated. Johnuniq (talk) 04:21, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
I am fairly sceptical that developers will let that happen. There are so many ways one can break the wiki in MediaWiki space (especially by messing with the JS pages) that I would expect them to say "nobody who hasn't received community review akin to a RfA has any business editing the MediaWiki namespace" with an office hat on. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:17, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
@Jo-Jo Eumerus: This is a community decision not a developer issue. We can pick who may edit what. Globally, and on some other language projects, there are user groups that may edit anything (often called "technicians" - including mediawiki, protected pages, userjs, usercss pages. The "rules" for what they may or may not edit are up to the communities, along with enforcement. This isn't so much of a "can this happen" question as to a "is this appropriate for us" question. — xaosfluxTalk15:11, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Not necessary (and I'm a TE). However, a good mechanism to suggest changes and test them in various contexts would be welcome. — JFGtalk13:50, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Admins understand policy, template editors understand code; each requires orthogonal skills. I would contribute far more if it weren't a multiday affair. — Dispenser02:26, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
Nope, absolutely not. editinterface is actually the most sensitive permission we can grant (yes I'm including deletion, checkuser, oversight). If we were redoing the implementation today, it probably wouldn't be coupled with admins by default. I'm pretty sure WMF Legal would veto such a move (cf: non-admin access to deleted materials), as would most of the developers. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY[u+1F602]23:02, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Odd looking block message
Well, having tried and failed to replicate the problem (and locked myself out for an hour in the process), I figure I should at least make good on the promise I made at User talk:Worm That Turned... WTT was caught by an IP block and saw this → rather odd looking block message; I said I'd bring it up here for the more technically skilled elements of our community (i.e. those that don't block themselves by accident) to take a look. Yunshui雲水12:16, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
I don't know anything which can be placed in MediaWiki:Blockedtext/en-gb and MediaWiki:Blockedtext/en-ca to always display the same as MediaWiki:Blockedtext if it uses $ parameters and isn't adapted for the purpose of displaying the same as the other messages. int: from mw:Help:Magic words#Localization doesn't allow a language parameter and {{int:Blockedtext|$1|$2|...}} for en-gb users will just try to use MediaWiki:Blockedtext/en-gb istself instead of MediaWiki:Blockedtext. {{MediaWiki:Blockedtext}} in MediaWiki:Blockedtext/en-gb will not pass the $ parameters as we see above. {{MediaWiki:Blockedtext|$1=$1|$2=$2|...}} will pass them but then they have to be referenced as {{{$1}}} instead of $1 in MediaWiki:Blockedtext. {{MediaWiki:Blockedtext|$1|$2|...}} or {{MediaWiki:Blockedtext|1=$1|2=$2|...}} will pass them but then they have to be referenced as {{{1}}} instead of $1. Maybe MediaWiki:Blockedtext could say {{{1|$1}}} instead of $1 to check for {{{1}}} in case it's transcluded. Another option is for both MediaWiki:Blockedtext and MediaWiki:Blockedtext/en-gb to do nothing on their own except calling a template with all their $ parameters. Then the template can reference them as {{{1}}} without caring where they came from. Both options rely on adapting MediaWiki:Blockedtext to allow synchronization. We could also make a database report for en-gb and en-ca pages which differ from the en page, so an admin can periodically fix unwanted differences by copy-pasting. If the report includes a diff link between the two pages (diffs can be between revisions of different pages) then it should be easy to spot unwanted differences. I wish the software allowed a fallback setting for all MediaWiki messages saying "If the default en is customized but en-gb is not then display the customized en version to en-gb users." That would solve a lot of problems. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:24, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Let's remove "en-gb" as a language option (and "en-ca", while we're at it) and force everybody over to the vanilla "en". After all, what would they really lose? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:37, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can now see which Wikipedia language versions are read in a specific country. This tool is called Wikipedia Views Visualized. [13]
You can get an email when a page on your watchlist was edited. You can choose not to get emails for minor edits. There is a bug that means that you then don't get an email when someone does a normal edit after a minor edit. The developers are working on fixing this. Until it has been fixed you can activate "Email me also for minor edits of pages and files" at the bottom of "User profile" in your preferences if you want to. [15]
The thanks button sometimes didn't work for mobile users. This was because of a new bug and has now been fixed. [16]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 August. It will be on all wikis from 10 August (calendar).
Future changes
Editors and readers who still use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP will not be able to use Wikipedia. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP can't connect securely to the wikis. When we allow them to do so it means that we get less security for everyone else. If you use Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP you can install Firefox 52 ESR instead. Around 0.1% of the traffic to the Wikimedia wikis comes from Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP. [17]
Links to sections on Wikipedia don't work well in languages that don't use the Latin script. The URL in the address bar in your browser shows Latin characters like .D0.A1.D1.81.D1.8B.D0.BB.D0.BA.D0.B8 instead of the section heading in the wiki's language. Links to sections in non-Latin scripts will be in the script of that wiki in the future. This will happen in the next few months. [18][19]
Wiki pages printed by the web browser "Print" function will have an updated style. This new style will be similar to the when you download a page as PDF. It will be better at showing tables, infoboxes and headings. [20][21]
Can I get a list of articles which use Wikipedia as a reference?
Every once in a while I run into an article where Wikipedia is used as a reference. Since we don't allow Wikipedia articles to be used as references for other Wikipedia articles, it would be useful to have a list of articles with such a reference - specifically, any instance of an external link to a Wikipedia article between a set of ref tags, or as the url= field in a citation template having that field. Please let me know if this is doable. Cheers! bd2412T20:50, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I get a manageable number with the search string, insource:wikipedia insource:/\<ref.*https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/*\<\/ref>/. bd2412T01:58, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
This problem also affects the "Watch this page" checkbox. A fix for displaying either checkbox is Ctrl- or Ctrl+.
The focus has also been affected by the changes. The focus is not visible when a checkbox is checked. The focus is also not visible on the "Save changes" button. Thanks, Unscintillating (talk) 18:48, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
It seems you are using a 9 year old browser. Something from when the iphone was first released is unfortunately no longer supported. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:17, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Why break things that have been working for nine years? That is Microsoft's policy so that they can sell new operating systems. What is Wikipedia's policy? Unscintillating (talk) 02:46, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Unfortunately, the policy is to not (fully) support such old browsers. Your browser is not actually blacklisted (for performance reasons), but most bugs caused by your choice of web browser will not get the resources needed to fix them (although patches from volunteer devs are always welcome).
Under XP, Firefox has been ridiculously slow since about version 50.0.1. When going through a watchlist, it should not take several minutes to load and display a diff, and twice as long to return to the watchlist - sometimes ten minutes for the pair. Occasionally it just stuck completely, and I needed to use the three-finger salute to start the Windows Task Manager, and use that to end the task. This of course causes Firefox to detect an abnormal termination, and so attempts to send a crash report back to Mozilla... but even that usually times out and fails. I've switched to Opera 36 - which has a few annoying features, and a severe lack of customisation options. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:04, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
As for the minor edit checkbox not displaying, I have a one- or two-keystroke fix with Ctrl- and Ctrl+ that will work reasonably well going forward. Thanks, Unscintillating (talk) 02:41, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
CirrusSearch
Is there any documentation for how the regular expressions in Special:Search work? Its behaviour is peculiar and tends to have weird quirks; searches containing \s or \n don't work, for instance. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me10:29, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, 197.218.89.59 and John of Reading. Is there another way to search the source of every article/page in the wiki, other than manually downloading every page? Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me12:37, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
Is this intentional behaviour or not? It looks bad when items are separated only with bigger spaces. I see no bullets in infobox data hlist on latest Chrome. --Obsuser (talk) 13:40, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
@Obsuser: This is some weird "feature" of the mobile CSS wherein a different class is supposed to be used instead, but obviously no one was informed of this as the class is completely unused. I have filed bugs but no action has yet been taken. A temporary solution would be to request the addition of proper hlist formatting to MediaWiki:Mobile.css. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me12:51, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Now there are bullets on sr.wiki mobile (they are a bit weird, and dark blue and overspaced relative to desktop normal ones I think, but better to have something than nothing; text is otherwise separated with bigger space what is very confusing, and {{hlist}} is very widely used template). --Obsuser (talk) 17:45, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
hello. Jon here who works on the Minerva skin (mobile site). The hlist-separated class you talk about is a class used by the Minerva skin. Since the name "hlist" is very common in software development when we introduced horizontal lists to the mobile UI we happened to choose the same name that editors came up with. This is good as it means we can avoid introducing additional CSS that's not necessary and make hlist rules more general. That was the intention of keeping the same name once we realised there was a clash.
You are welcome to use the hlist-separated class as it is native to the skin and not an editor created class so it's likely to make UIs consistent with the rest of the user experience. We have some lists in the mobile skin which look bad with separators between them - so that's why it exists, although hlists inside the article should behave differently (whether they are working as they should is another matter).
MediaWiki:Mobile.css is JavaScript only so I advise you not to make any changes there - that would result in a flash of unstyled content in the mobile site (this is for performance reasons - rendering our mobile site as early as possible is very important in mobile development).
I'm not quite sure I understand the issue here. The Minerva skin uses the core hlist styling rules. There are some new styles relating to hlist currently riding the train (and will be deployed on Thursday) which may help, but I'm struggling to understand what the bug is here to tell you whether that will happen. What pages are you seeing the problem on? What are you expecting to see? What are you actually seeing? Yes, these styles are likely to look different from the Vector skin but I can't tell you whether that's intentional without that information. It's best to follow this conversation on the Phabricator ticket - I was aware of that issue, but not this discussion. Thanks TheDj for the ping! Jdlrobson (talk) 23:50, 1 August 2017 (UTC)
Oh and with regards to "but obviously no one was informed of this as the class is completely unused". This is quite new, and an advisory note about this has been in MediaWiki:Mobile.csssince November 2016, but it's hard to know to circulate this to all the wikis we support - there are so many and commenting on every single village pump wouldn't scale. Is there a central place we can make these sort of notifications so they get seen? Jdlrobson (talk) 00:07, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
@Jdlrobson: Not sure, but a note could have been put in the weekly Tech News (or a separate mass message could have been sent, if the change is important enough) asking for comments on Meta. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me14:04, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
The issue is this: screenshot – no bullets in mobile, so items in 'Occupation' are unseparated and can cause very dangerous confusion if certain words find themselves next to each other separated only with bigger space. After adding hlist-separated in sr:Module:List, we get overspaced blue bullets with space before each next item: screenshot (note spaces before each next item, that's why I selected text). My question is can hlist-separated be added in Module:List too and if not why (it was added but removed shortly after)? --Obsuser (talk) 01:44, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
Yes! Please do add hlist-separated to Module:List. The blue color is definitely a bug our end and I can get that fixed. I've applied a temporary fix to MediaWiki:Mobile.css and will get this looked at. Does that work?
yes and it will continue to work like that unless " hlist-separated" class is added to the underlying template alongside 'hlist'. The class will be harmless on desktop but will make mobile render as you are suggesting. FWIW I find that example perfectly readable even without separators, but if they are needed that's how to fix it - by an edit to Module:List Jdlrobson (talk) 14:30, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
@Jdlrobson: Wouldn't it be better to edit the CSS page so that only one CSS class is needed, or change the class name in the Minerva skin? This doesn't solve the problem for uses of the hlist class which don't use the module (although I'm not sure if there are actually that many, aside from Module:Navbar). Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me13:58, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
A strange system error or malfunction problem on wikipedia
Hello! I want to bring a system error issue here, sometime back I moved the page Abdul malik Afegbua for capitalization purpose, The page was created by another editor. But when it was tagged for Proposed deletion I got a notice on my talk page. This system error is faced by many other editors, This error also affects page creation credits. Can anyone solve it ?
AnoptimistixLet's Talk07:34, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
It's working as intended. A move automatically creates a redirect at the old name. The mover is registered as creator of the redirect while the original creator of the old name is registered as the creator of the new name which takes over the old page history including the original page creation. Somebody turned the redirect page into an article but you remain registered as creator of the page. Trying to do it otherwise would cause other confusion. A redirect is just a page with certain content. A given page can change between redirect and article multiple times. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:41, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
Problem suddenly found when printing out RDT line templates
Each of the three RDT line temeplates that I have printed out this week have suddenly shown a blank line completely across the printing between each of the stations shown. Can this be investigated and corrected, as this has never happened to me before on Wikipedia.
Yes, the CSS change would solve the issue. The print CSS currently has a lot of other !important declarations which might not really need !important, although those don't seem to be causing problems yet. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me09:49, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
New filters for edit review Beta feature: how to show new edits on watchlists?
Based on the feedback the Collaboration team have received so far (we still welcome your feedback), we plan to move on by providing those filters on Watchlists as a Beta feature. I'm contacting you about a custom feature you have enabled on Watchlists on English Wikipedia.
First, a quick reminder: the New Filters for Edit Review provide a feature to highlight particular edits. When a given edit is highlighted by more than one color (because it possesses more than one highlighted property), the system highlights that edit with a blend of the relevant highlight colors. For example, yellow and blue highlights will blend to make green. On the left, the bulleted list is also used to emphase the highlight: if a particular edit is highlighted by one color, the bullet is colored; if the line matches two colors, two bullets are shown, each of them with one of the colors used (example). Testing shows users find these dots very helpful, especially when multiple colors have been applied to a particular edit.
At the moment, on Watchilists on other wikis, the titles of pages with unseen changes are in bold. However, English Wikipedia Watchlists uses a green dot for unseen changes instead of bolded page title. The green dot approach is not compatible with the use of multiple bullets to mark the multiple colors applied to one particular edit.
So we are asking for your input for this case, the different solutions we have so far are:
Have titles in bold, like on other wikis.
Have a distinctive mark for unseen changes; our proposal is to use the bulleted list and have a filled bullet for unseen changes and an empty bullet for seen change (see the mockup).
Both boldfaced titles and filled/unfilled bullets.
Your input will help us to take a decision about Watchlists styling. Please leave your comments about this specific feature by replying to this post, or directly on Phabricator.
IMO, it's well past time to revert the mistake. For those coming in late, here's the timeline:
In December 2011, a discussion at Village pump (proposals) asked to turn on the MediaWiki feature that bolds titles on the watchlist of pages that haven't been visited since the last change.
The necessary configuration change was made in May 2012.
People jumped the gun in trying to restyle it in a less obvious manner, rather than just providing a gadget for people to disable it, and it just inflamed the situation.
Eventually we wound up with the current situation: green bullets that are barely distinguishable from the normal bullets plus several of gadgets to re-enable the standard behavior or provide additional different styling.
IMO the better solution would have been to keep the standard behavior as the standard and let people who dislike it enable a gadget to give them green bullets or whatever, rather than making nearly-unnoticeable bullets the default. Even though it's five years later now, it's not too late to fix the situation. Anomie⚔12:22, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
I agree that it needs to be sorted and that we should return to the default. We should also ensure we have The Gadget To Make The Unhappy People More Happy ready prior to reverting to the default (whatever form The Gadget takes). --Izno (talk) 14:04, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
Let me add my voice in agreement with Anomie and Izno. It may be necessary to make a watchlist notice (perhaps more prominent than the usual ones, or placed in a different location) to explain the change to users, and inform people of how to turn on the relevant gadget. — This, that and the other (talk)09:55, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
Thank you all for your comments! The discussion is still open, at least for a few days.
If you really have to enable the in-your-face ugly bolding, then at the same time provide an easy, working, and fast way to turn this off for everyone who doesn't want it (which, judging from the last time this happened, are quite a lot of people). Better still, if you know from last time that this will get protest from many people here, start an RfC to get approval for this. Oh, and Anomie, if you check that RfC which was for enabling this, the RfC was for enabling highlighting unvisited changes (which I support), but was not for bolding them; how exactly the highlighting should be done was going to be decided afterwards.
We then had Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Watchlist survey, which decided that the feature was opt-in only (and with most people clearly opposing the "bold"). That RfC had a fairly wide participation (more than 100 participants), so I don't think changing this with a short discussion among a few people here is wise. (If there have been more recent RfCs about this, please list them here). Fram (talk) 12:52, 4 August 2017 (UTC)
@Fram: Your reading of that initial RFC seems to be faulty. I see a few people mentioning that it would be possible to change the styling, including the initial statement, but there appears to have been no specific wording there that actually supports your assertion. As for the followup RFC that was dominated by the bad feelings from various people fooling around with the styling instead of just making a disable gadget, that was five years ago and consensus can change (and I hope it did).
As for "start an RFC", WP:VPT is the usual place for technical RFCs, isn't it? Here we are. Feel free to advertise the discussion if you'd like. Anomie⚔21:57, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
@Anomie: VPT is not the place for RfCs, technical or otherwise. Please find one from the last five years (or so) which wasn't moved elsewhere (or otherwise terminated) within 48 hours. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:07, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
And looking at the ones that were moved, it seems to be because people have generally gone along with your personal crusade against having RFCs on this page. Several were begun here, then moved after you personally complained about it. Anomie⚔21:29, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
RfCs are proposals - "should we do this or not?"; VPT is about discussing technical matters - "can this be done; if so, how?". The two can follow on from one another, either with the RfC first as in "having decided that we want to do this, how should it be done?" or with the RfC second, as in "having determined that this procedure is possible, should it be done?". It's about keeping the how and why distinct, in order not to sidetrack. For examples of discussions where the two have become mixed, leading to stalled discussion, see the last few archives of Help talk:Citation Style 1 and look for the discussions about access lock icons (small coloured padlocks). Others have shared my opinion. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:59, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
Thank you all for your comments, they have been very useful. I'll recontact you when the Watchlist Beta feature will be available. You will then be able to try the new design we have chosen from the 3 ideas, and of course provide feedback.
Thanks. Some people in that thread seem to think this is a very minor problem not worth bothering about. I disagree. While obviously it is not show-stopping, it is highly misleading, and even worse than I realised actually, if a date of 1926 is shown as 1 January 1926. Clearly it needs fixing. Mypix (talk) 20:52, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, you're right. A bot changed it from "March 2017" to "2017-03". When I changed it back, it fixed it in Media Viewer. I have left a message here suggesting that such automated changes should not be made until the bug in Media Viewer is fixed. Mypix (talk) 17:57, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
New contributions
I was trying to use a translation tool and all of a sudden Wikipedia thinks I want to translate articles. I just want to see what something on German Wikipedia looks like in English, but I didn't succeed in doing that. Instead, I am supposedly now able to get a list of my translations. Can I just remove that from my list of contributions when they are displayed?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:50, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
What makes you think that the number of characters in the URL has something to do with the speed of your machine and internet connection? --Malyacko (talk) 10:30, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
The url is sent to my machine. This is a de-facto use of about 1.7k. My machine then sends it back, another waste of the same amount. Obviously 3.4k is very minor by today's standards, but if this is symptomatic of the the whole, the implications could be very large. Consider that overheads will probably add another 10-20%. While many of the individual parts of loading a WP web page are there for good reason, the overall impact is that to view a 55 byte piece of source I need to transfer about 1M of data. If something is already going wrong, this is, to say the least, unhelpful.
@Rich Farmbrough: This has already been identified before (we then changed the way this link was built slightly). It's on the radar of the performance team, but significantly changing this atm, probably doesn't have a good cost/benefit ratio (aka the time of the performance team is better spent on other tasks with larger gains, than on fixing this) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:16, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
Lua error - searching
On doing the search:
incategory:"All orphaned articles" incategory:"Genes on human chromosome 6"
One of the results is showing:
UNC5CL
Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 37: data.schemaVersion must be a number, got nil instead. Unc-5 homolog C (C. elegans)-like is a protein in
539 bytes (51 words) - 13:53, 1 August 2017
It's temporary. The error was recently displayed on many articles. Individual pages can be fixed by a purge. The search function happened to cache (computing) the article UNC5CL when it displayed the error. A search on part of the error message "data.schemaVersion must be a number, got nil instead" currently gives me 326 pages. None of the examined pages display the error now. The search cache could be updated faster by editing the articles (a null edit might be insufficient), but I wouldn't worry about it. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:48, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
Is it technically possible to allow collapsing only part of a table, such as in {{Collapsed infobox section begin}}, {{Infobox station}} and {{3 (New York City Subway service)}}, without nesting tables within each other? The Norwegian Wikipedias have a sort-of-solution, but this only allows for one collapse button per table. (In addition, is it possible to prevent a table cell containing only images from wrapping, so that the images stay left to right? This would solve the other nested table problem in the third template.) Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me12:32, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Some infoboxes (e.g. station, Chinese, soap character) have the collapse built in, probably for the sake of not filling up people's screens. I suppose it's bad to do this in the middle of the prose, but for sidebars, etc., it's not really problematic to collapse content. FWIW the Wikipedia app automatically collapses all infoboxes. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me14:19, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
"In addition, is it possible to prevent a table cell containing only images from wrapping" yes, you set a fixed width using CSS on the table cell that contains the images. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:49, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
The problem with this is that {{Routemap}} does not have a parameter for the width of the centre icon column, and some icons have the wrong width prefixes/suffixes so it's not yet possible to calculate width automatically. If it's not possible with HTML then it's not really a big deal (a regular screen reader couldn't read the diagrams anyway) and the problematic icons will probably be renamed eventually. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me14:19, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
MediaWiki revision navigation is not excluded from printing
Consider an old revision such as Special:Permalink/794918659 and print the page (or use print preview). The navigation for previous/latest/next revision is printed, despite not being interactive or useful on paper, unlike the #mw-revision-info above it.
Will return soon. A sockpuppet investigation concluded that an account was a sockpuppet, was then blocked on en.wp and consequently went on a deletion spray on with his sysop rights on Commons. quite sad. Over 1600 pages/files deleted, including the Commons mainpage, several gadgets etc.. restoration is being worked on. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 05:29, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
Is it possible in {{Challenge Cup}} to remove the first six entries in list1 and maintain the right alignment of the remaining entries? I can see that previous editors want the columns lined up in decades and the first entries are dummies solely to achieve this as the competition didn't start until 1896–97. I did wonder about using template:0 but I couldn't work out a way to make the bullets invisible. Nthep (talk) 15:45, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
@Alex Shih: You've left in the td and tr tags. Remove the tr tags, replace td with div, remove the width: 70%;, and change platinum to silver (platinum is apparently not a real colour). Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me07:52, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
Hey guys. I was wondering how you can make one parameter replace the whole texts on a template if a value is given? For example: this is an example template. {{#if: {{{example2}}} | yes | this should replace the previous texts entirely.}} can you do that? ◂ épinetalk♬01:04, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
@Épine: I'm not sure what you're trying to do. If you want to ignore the rest of the template if |example2= has text, then your template should look like {{#if: {{{example2|}}} | «text to display if example2» | «if not, then rest of template here» }}. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me07:14, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
If you want to understand how it works so you can make other code in other situations: If the parameter example2 is not set then {{{example2}}} produces itself, i.e. that exact 14-character string. But {{{example2|string}}} will produce string if example2 is not set. So {{{example2|}}} with nothing after the pipe will produce empty. {{#if:string|yes|no}} produces yes if string is non-empty and no if it's empty. Therefore {{#if: {{{example2|}}} |yes|no}} produces yes if example2 is set to something non-empty , and no if it's not set or is set to empty, i.e. |example2= with no value. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:24, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
Windows 10 and spellchecker
I recently started using Windows 10 and am having trouble with spellchecker in the Wikipedia edit window. Apparently, Windows 10 tries to spellcheck every box that can be typed in whether it is a Windows application or not. The result is that every piece of wikicode on the page gets a squiggly red line under it. I have turned off autocorrect and spelling highlighting in the settings page. I have also run the registry changes downloaded from this forum page but nothing seems to work. Anybody here got any ideas how to deal with this? SpinningSpark19:28, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm using Firefox, but I don't think it's especially browser related. Word has the same problem for instance. I never had any of this while I was using Windows 7 (still don't on my old PC). Definitely seems to be an issue with Windows 10. SpinningSpark21:51, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
"national youth handball team" or "youth national handball team"
Resolved
– This section is neither the correct forum (there are no technical issues here, only naming policy issues), nor still relevant (as the OP has moved the "youth national" titles to "national youth"). עוד מישהוOd Mishehu12:28, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
Which word order is correct? Men's national teams use "national youth", women's – "youth national". For example:
KISS principle supports Redrose64's answer. The template will soon become unwieldy if it has to cater for every disambiguation. If you're sure that every NY means NYS, not NYC then AWB or a bot could churn through the job of altering the template call. Cabayi (talk) 07:55, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
The documentation for the template states "These subcategories are named after WikiProjects." Until the project changes name there's no need to include this change (nor to move the category) in the workflow from the RM - is there? Cabayi (talk) 12:28, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
MinervaNeue skin
Hi, like this new skin, big improvement but there is an issue with editing. When you click "edit" it tends to ignore the lede and go to sections lower down. I would rather just a simple "Edit" button and you can access the whole article at the top. Can this be fixed?♦ Dr. Blofeld08:02, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
Most common search strings work, and I can type in words I see on the screen and see them light up. But my most common search string, "scout" automatically turns red, although I have myself made 3 edits on my watchlist to Scouting topics in the last 72 hours. What's afoot?--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 07:34, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia has no feature to search the watchlist so I guess you are using a browser feature to search a string on the current page. Check whether it has enabled options which limit search results, e.g. by being case sensitive or only searching whole words. Are you sure the watchlist actually displays the exact string you search for? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:01, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
Help's on the way, in the form of filters that will show the most recent n changes that you haven't seen yet. (So just no breaks for the next month or so. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:23, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): By "changes that you haven't seen yet", does that mean that I would need to view the most recent edits before any earlier edits become available to view? Seems backwards. What about introducing offset= and dir= parameters into the query string, as presently permitted by page history or a user contributions? Then, if I knew that my last watchlist check was at, say, 22:15 yesterday, I could use the query string parameters dir=prev&offset=20170811221500 to view watched edits going forward from that moment. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:54, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
That's my impression, although it's not my project, so I could be wrong.
I like the &offset= idea, but it feels like the sort of thing that's really only useful if you show each change individually (rather than the default). I know one editor who never checked diffs until the page hadn't been edited for a week, so s/he would probably appreciate an offset that hid the most recent 6 days. (Apparently, it's a good strategy for avoiding disputes.)
I believe that you could also filter by namespace to 'extend' the list: the 1000 most recent changes that I haven't read in this namespace, followed by the 1000 most recent changes in that namespace, etc. If your watchlist is reasonably diverse, then this may work around the problem now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:09, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Might have been practical when we had 16 namespaces, two of which (MediaWiki and MediaWiki talk) I never touched; but now we have 32. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:41, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Searching for insource:/Class 31\|/ should work, if you're only looking for Class 31|. I think symbols are ignored without both regex and insource. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me15:31, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm not looking for piped links (although that editor has been violating WP:NOTBROKEN too). I'm looking for double piped links, those where the second pipe is visible in the rendered text, as with the content of this section. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:17, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
I would start with this. There may be more, but I am bad at regex so the search times out. A database scan may be the best way. (WT:AWB has some pretty good regex types that you might inquire with.) --Izno (talk) 17:58, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Short answer : No, it is not possible to search for certain visible tokens or symbols such as a pipe on a page. Proof (https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?search=%7C). There's no way only a single article has it visible ...
Longer answer: The search engine deliberately removes this to improve general search.
The best way to use insource is to make the regex efficient and to use a very good filter to prevent it from timing out.
One sneaky and a bit crazy way of searching all those pages edited by that user, is to temporarily add a hidden category to each of them. Then this would be as simple as writing "insource:/\[\[.*\|.*\|.*\]\]/ hascategory:temporary_search_cat123". Considering that at the time of this writing the user has only edited ~ 204 pages, it is probably a non-issue. Though others may disagree. Other possibilities include finding a common category / template or term in all those pages and using or alternating between all of them, for example, a lot of those page titles contain the word "rail"(intitle:rail), "line", or "class".
This won't help if the general goal is to find all these.In such cases the dumps are better. Fine tuning a query like : "insource:/\[\[[A-Za-z0-9 \_]*?\|[A-Za-z0-9 \_]*?\|[A-Za-z0-9 \_]*?\]\]/ hastemplate:reflist" will make it possible to find all such occurrences. As a sidenote, even google chokes with a similar search : '"|" site:wiki.riteme.site'.
22:06, 6 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.90.95 (talk)
The user has "only" edited 198 articles so I cheated by downloading the current wikitext of them all, and searching that. There are no occurrences of problematic links like [[...|...|...]]. Johnuniq (talk) 23:03, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
Nice workaround, it might be suitable for a basic userscript for users with few contributions. Anyway, it seems that at least a few search engines can find such characters, e.g. http://symbolhound.com/?q=%7C&l=&e=&n=&u=wiki.riteme.site . According to that site there currently seem to be ~ 570 indexed pages with visible pipe symbols. Scrapping that site for such occurrences could be used as a short term workaround for this problem. 10:24, 7 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.88.42 (talk)
Sample data for viewing:
[[British Rail Class 31|Class 31|Brush Type 2]]
while formulating:
insource:/"[["[^\]]*\|[^\]]*\|[^\]]*"]]"/ prefix: a
Note how the regexp pattern only works on pages whose titles begin with A, (otherwise it will timeout), without images, but captures unwanted "double pipes" caused by instances of valid template pipes informing the wikilink label. From the highlighted matchings, note the impossibility of the existing or other further refinements.
Please find and contribute time towards the improvement of the search documentation. It's on WP, MW, {{search link}}, {{regex}}, etc. Prod their talk page. Then bring it up on phabricator. But, I know, here at WP:VPT it is so big city, and there their talk pages are small country. — Cpiral§Cpiral09:43, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps this is a Safari thing, but while poking about the Wiki using Random article (which demonstrates the Wiki to consist largely of gazetteer entries and obscure one-season sports players) I found that hitting the "back" button did not, in fact, return me to the last article, but the first one it served up, a disambig page for Petts. This seems wrong. Maury Markowitz (talk) 10:37, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
If you have a setting which causes a new window or tab to open when clicking links, this could be the reason. It also works for me, although I don't have Safari to test. —PaleoNeonate – 11:16, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
I want to search for articles that come within the scope of WikiProject Medicine in the hidden category Category:All articles to be merged. There are several thousand articles in that category, so is there a search parameter or tool that will allow me to filter those out more easily? Regards CV9933 (talk) 15:16, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Thank you both for providing the above information, running the query was a very useful way of letting me know which box I wasn't ticking. Cheers. CV9933 (talk) 19:38, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Bureaucrats can now set users as confirmed. Previously only stewards could do this on most wikis. Nothing will change for wikis that have previously decided to let administrators set users as confirmed. [25]
Problems
The symbols in the language list that show that an article is good or featured in that language doesn't work. Links to the Commons category in the sidebar doesn't work either. The developers are working on fixing it. [26][27]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
There are two problems at Category:Renault vehicles. The first is simple: the page (last edited in May 2014) is broken—click edit then preview to see what it should look like. Please don't purge the page until others have had a chance to see a new kind of problem, namely that templates can be broken by some underlying system glitch, probably related to T170039. The second problem concerns unraveling the history. Why does a category have a navbox, and why does the page have a history showing edits over a ten-year period? Is the page the inadvertent result of a move to the wrong namespace? Johnuniq (talk) 11:00, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
The edit history looks OK to me - most of it is the gradual addition (and then final removal) of interwiki links, plus various tweaks to the categories. DH85868993 (talk) 12:01, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
There's no reason a category can't have a navbox. It is not typical--I've been thinking it should be, but that's a discussion for another forum. Either the template needs to be fixed (this is simply due to someone missing some brackets somewhere in the template) and then the category page purged, or the category page simply purged if the template has already been fixed. --Izno (talk) 12:40, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, I missed seeing that diff, and I have got a bit paranoid after seeing a handful of weird issues while checking articles with script errors. Johnuniq (talk) 22:50, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
This is a Wiki that anyone can edit. If you 'break' something, then I'm sure someone else will see it and fix it :) -FASTILY06:06, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Pagecounts-ez dataset hasn't generated since JUL-23
The daily page-view files at [28] stopped generating/aggregating on JUL-23. Any ideas on who to ping to get this restarted? Documentation suggests they should still be chugging along. West.andrew.g (talk) 19:17, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for reporting. We migrated to new stats server (faster than originally scheduled). I'll look into this Monday. Erik Zachte (talk) 15:56, 29 July 2017 (UTC)
All data have been generated. Now I'm waiting for rsync to be fixed on new server. Request has been sent to operations. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:10, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
Files are online till August 6. Sorry for long outage. Reorganization of Wikistats environment after emergency move to new server is ongoing. Erik Zachte (talk) 09:26, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
Some time ago, I found GunnMap, a pretty interesting tool that allows the creation of thematic world maps directly from an excel file (e. g. File:World Map of Price Levels 2015.svg). But the tool is somewhat inflexible, as the colors cannot be chosen manually. Now I had the idea that such a tool could be developed for WP porposes, as editable basic maps like File:World location map (W3).svg do already exist. Since I do not having any programming skills: Is that an idea that could be possible realized?--Antemister (talk) 12:55, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
Yes, it is possible. But there are many places where one can create maps like those, and creating one for Wikipedia specifically is not necessary as long as there is a tool that uses a worldmap that has a license that is compatible to our licenses.
I need somebody to code a bot to run this contest. Wikipedia:ContestBot would be an ideal name. It will need to read article prose length when submitted and check there are no unsourced paragraphs. I will pay for the work if you want it.♦ Dr. Blofeld09:15, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll need something which can tick or cross entries as they're submitted on the contest pages though, prose count for the contest is important.♦ Dr. Blofeld18:52, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Requesting OCR help at mr.wikisource
Hi,
At Marathi language mr.wikisource we have planned a student workshop tomorrow. We are looking for unicodification support from people using linux operating system. Since our usual voluntters to are not around.
Broken edit syntax highlighting on (expected) unclosed tags
When editing, bare tags such as <br>, <hr>, or <p> will highlight subsequent text in pink (as long as there is a "<" somewhere below). In the case of the first two, one can manually close them, however<p /> (which fixes the incorrect highlighting) is invalid per Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags. Has this issue already been reported? Thanks, ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~12:31, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
As mentioned here [29], apparently when autoblock does its thing (blocking not-logged-in access via an IP recently used by a blocked account) it declares the name of the blocked account which is causing the IP to be blocked, thereby doing something we go to great lengths elsewhere not to do i.e. associate IPs with accounts. This obviously isn't a problem if only the blocked editor is using that IP, but where an IP is shared (e.g. at work) it does something we go to great lengths elsewhere not to do i.e. tell people the IP from which a named account has been editing. It is really necessary for the autoblock message to give the name of the blocked account? EEng11:35, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
Unfortunately, we need some reasonable mechnism to allow normal admins to see who the original blocked user is. The only alternative is that only CheckUser users be allowed to deal with autoblocks - and I think that would be worse. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu02:42, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
How does showing a not-logged-in IP editor the name of the blocked user help admins see the name of the blocked user? EEng23:41, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
As the software is right now, the only way anyone, including admins, can see this information is in the publicly-visible autoblock reason. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu07:57, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
I guess I'm confused. I thought this was a message displayed to the IP when it makes an attempt to edit. When/where is this message displayed such that an interested admin (or, perhaps, any editor) can see it? EEng15:36, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Discrepancy between count of pages in a category and actual number of pages
Apologies if this has been covered before. I did a half-hearted search but didn't find anything.
On some maintenance categories, there is an inconsistency in the page count message when compared with the actual number of pages in the category, even when taking into account the delayed update. For example, a category might tell me "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 209 total." (looking at you, Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the Schaff-Herzog), yet when you page through after the first 200 entries, it says "The following 14 pages are in this category, out of 209 total." and indeed there are 214 total pages listed in the category. One page is in non-main space, which isn't enough to account for the discrepancy.
I suspect, and in one case I know, that the affected categories have had articles added to them recently. But even accounting for a possible delayed update, resulting maybe in the total count coming from a different database table than the list itself, shouldn't the "page count" message reflect the count of pages being actually displayed? If not, it damages credibility. Or change the message to say "out of 209 or more total." David Brooks (talk) 00:25, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I have removed the none main name-space entry for the Schaff-Herzog category as it was accidental added by me some years ago -- PBS (talk) 08:05, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
This is behavior that has existed for a long time. My understanding is that it is related to the job queue, and also in a larger way to T132467, T157670, or both. The short version of those bugs is that it takes way too long for categories to catch up when something changes that affects them.
My rudimentary understanding is that MediaWiki maintains a category member count, which may not be correct, and it increments or decrements that count by the correct number as pages are added or removed, but the number will remain incorrect. My personal experience has been that the category count on the category page becomes trustworthy only after the category membership drops below 200.
I could be wrong about any or all of this, but that has been my experience over the last few years of editing. (Edited to add: T18036 appears to be the canonical ticket for this problem.) – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:13, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
The message is made by MediaWiki:Category-article-count. If a discrepancy is common and it can go both ways then we could change "out of $2 total" to "out of around $2 total". If it's only an issue for more than 200 pages then we could add "around" in that case: out of {{#ifexpr:{{formatnum:$2|R}}>200|around}} $2 total. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:30, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I think it would be great to be honest about this eight-year old bug. I would love to see "out of approximately NNN" ("approximately" seems less jargon-y to me than "around") in category lists. Whoever edits that MediaWiki page could add a hidden comment or a note on the corresponding talk page pointing to T18036. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:10, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Can anyone confirm whether the proposed trigger of 200 articles is coincidentally the same as the display chunk size, or if it is directly related in some way? For example, I would find it believable that a one-page display would count its contents directly while the first of a multi-page display would have to use the (sometimes incorrect) category count. David Brooks (talk) 18:18, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
It's directly related. When viewing the category without using the 'from' or 'until' parameters, if there are fewer than the display chunk size pages shown in the view then MediaWiki can easily check that the stored count is correct or not (and if not, it can trigger an update in the expectation that it'll be cheap to do so). Anomie⚔19:01, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
ETA: I realize that's exactly what happens. "The following n pages are in this category" is correct; it's "out of n total" that's often wrong. Perhaps the solution, until and unless the database error is fixed, is to do something like the History display, with a set of next/prev/first links. Or is the database bug rare enough that this would be overkill? David Brooks (talk) 18:53, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
What do you mean by next/prev/first links? There are already "next page" when you are not on the last page, "previous page" when you are not on the first page, and clicking the "Category" tab jumps to the first page. Do you mean not displaying a count at all, like history pages? We could omit the count in MediaWiki:Category-article-count but I oppose that as long as the count is not wildly off most of the time. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:20, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Well, yes, that's what I meant, and I guess I was mistaking form for function. "Next 200" might be an alternative label, but that's confusing on the penultimate page (also true of History). And, as you imply, the effort may not be justified if (a) I'm the only one making a fuss or (b) as you imply, the count is right most of the time. Can the fraction of seriously-wrong counts be measured?. David Brooks (talk) 22:38, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
In my experience, the count is almost always wrong (although usually approximately close, within a few percent) unless the count is below 200. I think that adding the word "approximately" would be far better than omitting the total altogether. As for the "next 200" discussion above, I don't understand how that would be better than the existing "next page" link that exists at the bottom of each populated page in the category. And as for a "first" link (or any other place within the category), that is what the TOC templates are for. What am I missing? – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:57, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
As announced several times, Ops is dropping all support for Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP (and a few other, even rarer, combinations), for privacy and security reasons. "All support" means that if you are using an affected web browser, you will not be able to either read or edit pages.
Sometime today, affected browsers will start getting an error message on 5% of page views. Reloading the page will (95% of the time) get you to the article. But support is going away, and the number of errors will increase steadily until it reaches 100% in approximately two months or so, so please change browsers as soon as you can. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Google.com works for me with IE6 (with a better dense interface). Anyway, can we link to www.getfirefox.com or use call-to-action buttons (Buy Windows 10 for US$ 99)? — Dispenser18:06, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
IE under 10 doesn't receive JavaScript. Here, we're talking about removing the ability to connect to Wikipedia for even older stuff. Max Semenik (talk) 18:51, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
You're violating our Manual of Style by using comma as the decimal separator. You WMF guys think rules don't apply to you.[FBDB]EEng19:56, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
A day may come when I learn to pause and think about which language I'm writing in when I come to the decimal separators. But it is, apparently, not this day.
(1,000.67 is written 1.000,67 in my native language. This is seriously one of the most confusing aspects of switching back and forth between languages.) /Johan (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Dear editors: I edit a lot of music articles, so I often reference Billboard Magazine. There are four Cite templates on the drop down list in the edit window: web, news, book and journal. Since "Cite journal" is the closest, I have been using that. While attending a session at Wikimania, I learned that there is also a "Cite magazine", and that using the journal template for magazines can cause categorization problems. Is it possible to add "Cite magazine" to the drop-down menu?—Anne Delong (talk) 19:47, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Categorization problems? How so? {{cite journal}} and {{cite magazine}} are essentially the same except in how they render volume, issue and pagination:
{{cite journal |title=Article title |journal =Journal |volume=1 |issue=2 |page=3}}
"Article title". Journal. 1 (2): 3.
{{cite magazine |title=Article title |magazine=Magazine |volume=1 |issue=2 |page=3}}
"Article title". Magazine. Vol. 1, no. 2. p. 3.
The rendering engine Module:Citation/CS1 does not categorize according to the type of cs1 template used. Perhaps you can explain what it is that you mean by categorization problems.
There's a gadget somewhere (found it Wikipedia:RefToolbar!) that has a default list of templates to use: Cite web, cite news, cite book, cite journal. The request is to add cite magazine to that list. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}20:12, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Just click in the white box at the top, where it says "Start a new topic". It will likely all make sense after that. However, Anne doesn't seem to be using VisualEditor, so the citoid service isn't immediately related to her request.
Sorry, I was away from my computer. The presenter whose talk I attended ([30]) was using an algorithm to harvest and analyze journal citations from Wikipedia articles, creating statistical information about which academic journals were being cited with what frequency by articles in which categories, etc. He was using this information to find and fill gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of notable journals. Billboard kept coming up on his list of journal citations, much to his annoyance (I sat quietly embarrassed in the audience and said nothing....) He was categorizing references, rather than articles, so the categorization problem was indirect, but still, I was cluttering his dataset by using the wrong template. It appears I can just change the word "journal" to "magazine" after the citation is rendered, but I thought if it wasn't too much work for the tech people to add one more item to the citation template list, it would be helpful to others who add magazine references as well as to me. There are a LOT of citations to magazines. I could also just cite the magazine directly without using the Cite template, but several talks at Wikimania have convinced me of the value of structured data.—Anne Delong (talk) 21:57, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
We could rename it {{cite periodical}}, to reduce the belief that "journal" means "academic publication", but then we'll have people using that template for newspapers (which are also periodicals). WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Glad you attended my talk Anne! A few things, most of the issue comes from way back, when {{cite magazine}} redirected to {{cite journal}} and were rendered the same. That changed a few years ago, but as far as the project is concerned, misuse of the templates concerning magazines vs journals really isn't that big of a deal. Sure it might be a cleaner dataset when excluding the magazines, and it might be nice to have a "Magazines Cited by Wikipedia" compilation (I think I'll ask J-LaTondre to build one in fact, because why not?), but it doesn't really affect our work as far as categorization/article creation goes.
It causes issues when you try to do what I did and try to find some patterns in the data, or do original research like I did, but short of that, it's not a critical difference. There are actually some benefits, as magazines that make their way on the list get more attention.
Any Popups guru out there? As a Crat, WP:BN is a really important page for me, but weirdly I can't see its page history using Popups when I hover over the appropriate place on my Watchlist.
Just to deepen the mystery, other Projectspace pages seem to work fine.
There is some issue that effects a number of scripts that work only intermittently. Possibly a resource that for some reason could not be loaded, which stops further loading on that particular page. I have turned to bookmarking those pages and reopening from the bookmark list, which has a high success rate. Agathoclea (talk) 08:46, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
JPG missing content when thumbnailed
Something is up with File:Stonehenge Q&R.jpg - at full size (and some thumbnail sizes) it has overlaid key text and stone locations marked (eg. [31]), but at other thumbnail sizes, including the one used in the Q and R Holes article, it just shows the grey background blocks (eg. [32]). What's happening here? --Gapfall (talk) 10:51, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
That image, as well as the others uploaded by that user, have the hallmarks of not actually being free images. New user, claims they are his images, clearly zoomed-in on some page or another. The question might be somewhat moot. --Izno (talk) 13:12, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
I am having trouble figuring out how the advanced find/replace rules in AutoWikiBrowser work. I have nested some regex rules (if rule 1 then (if rule 2 then (rules 3–5))), but the subrules are run regardless of whether or not their parent rules are actioned upon. Is this a bug, or am I doing this wrong? Are the rules for the entire tree ignored if there is a match in the "Not contains" panel, or does it do something else? Jc86035 (talk) 14:40, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
What happened: it scrolls all the way to top instead of staying at your original position. Chrome only, tested with Version 61.0.3163.49 (Official Build) beta (64-bit) and 62.0.3188.0（Official Build）canary.--fireattack (talk) 07:11, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
I cannot reproduce the problem using Chromium 59. Scroll position remains correct. Have you reported a bug to the Chrome developers? --Malyacko (talk) 11:57, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
Why is it that t: works as a shortcut in English Wiktionary but not Wikipedia? This small change could save a whole lot of time. Pariah24 (talk) 19:31, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
The Community Tech team has released a new security feature this week: LoginNotify, which gives you a notification when someone tries and fails to log in to your account. This project was wish #7 on the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey.
Here’s how it works:
If someone tries and fails to log in to your account from a device or an IP address that hasn’t logged into your account recently, then you’ll get an on-wiki notification at the first attempt. For a familiar device or IP address, you’ll get an on-wiki notification after 5 failed logins. This is on by default, but you can turn it off in your preferences; you can also turn on email notifications.
It’s also possible to turn on email notifications when there’s a successful login from a new device or IP address. This is turned off by default, but it might be useful for admins or other functionaries who are concerned that their user rights could be misused. This means that you’ll get a notification every time you log in from a new device or IP address.
We want to take this opportunity to thank Brian Wolff for all of his work in writing the underlying extension for this feature.
There’s more information on the feature on the Community Tech project page on Meta, and please feel free to post questions on the talk page: Community Tech/LoginNotify
If you're also active on another wiki, please feel free to copy and share this information with your community.
PS: If you’re wondering what happened to the Syntax Highlighting beta feature that we deployed a couple weeks ago and then had to roll back: it’ll be back soon! -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:19, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
When viewed using the internet browser on my Android phone, the {{archive-top}} templates, at least as used at WP:ITN/C, are showing several screens worth of blank space between the horizontal line under the header and closure summary box and the start of the included text.
I haven't time atm to investigate whether it is just this template or other similar ones and/or if it is idiosyncratic to that page. Awkward42 (talk) [the alternate account of Thryduulf (talk)] 11:44, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
It looks like what's happening there is that the skin sets overflow:auto on all <dd> and sets class quotebox to auto-width (and also sets word-wrap:break-word at a high level). So when the browser (at least desktop Firefox 52.2.0) tries to lay out the <dd> containing the "The following discussion is closed" and so on next to the floated quotebox with the close reason, it winds up making it 0 width and breaks the line between every letter. Anomie⚔12:28, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
When I am editing a page, click the "Show preview" button, than go back to the edit window my position is lost – the text now starts at the top again. I have to scroll back down to find the text I was changing. With "edit this page" on a large article it introduces a fair amount of scrolling. This is a new feature. Will it be fixed? Aymatth2 (talk) 22:23, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
@Cpiral: The editing preferences change fixes it with Chrome. For some reason the display momentarily fades before showing the preview, but edit position is not lost. Solved. Thanks, Aymatth2 (talk) 10:53, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Not fixed. I use User:Ucucha/HarvErrors to check that the {{sfn}} citation links are good, and User:Anomie/linkclassifier to color links to disambiguation and redirect pages. When I choose "Preferences → Editing → Show previews without reloading the page", those scripts do not kick in. Problems are not visible until I save the page. I would rather lose edit position than lose the script functionality.
Something must have been changed to introduce this problem? I am sure the edit position used to be retained after "show preview". Aymatth2 (talk) 16:17, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Wikimedia Commons watchlist problem
Hi, I've recently had a problem with my watchlist on Commons (elsewhere, everything is fine). It doesn't open, instead I get the following message:
"[WZlJ3gpAMFoAADyMDKwAAAAE] 2017-08-20 08:36:42: Fatal exception of type »Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError«"
There are about 90,000 pages on my watchlist. I don't exactly remember the maximum number of changes, but I would say it is 1,000. --Eleassarmy talk10:48, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
It could be related to these changes. Anyway, at this moment, my watchlist does not work at all... Re work here, I find this rather urgent. In addition, I'm most probably not the only one with a non-functioning WL. --Eleassarmy talk11:32, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
I have made {{Encodefirst}} as a general workaround which can also be used in templates without the caller having to do anything. {{la|{{Encodefirst|*}}}} produces:
Please don't add more internal complexity to {{la}}, it was a series of "enhancements" (by Technical 13) to that and related templates that caused a large number of XFD listings to fall over with WP:TLIMIT problems back in 2013-14. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:24, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
The price of adding {{la|*}} to my userpage was 34/1000000 Preprocessor visited node count, 13/2097152 Post‐expand include size, 5/2097152 Template argument size, 0.01/10 seconds Lua time usage and 0.09/50 MB Lua memory usage. If adding 1 instance of this template increases the results by 1% of the maximum, then adding 2 to {{la}} would put a limit of 50 page listings on any AFD page - and yesterday we reached 104. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu06:52, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
You mean you added {{Encodefirst|*}} to your user page. Where do you get 1% of the maximum from? 0.01/10 seconds is 0.1%, and 0.09/50 MB is 0.18%. And {{Encodefirst}} is cheaper when the parameter doesn't start with one of :;*#. Nearly all uses would be the cheap case where it only tests the first character and then returns the whole parameter unchanged. That gives zero Lua usage and allows tens of thousands of calls of {{Encodefirst}}. The expensive case with the special characters could be optimized with a dedicated Lua function. I only used template code which calls a general Lua function via {{str right}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:01, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
{{#invoke:Sandbox/trappist_the_monk/bob|encode_first|:some text}} – in real life replace ':some text' with {{{parameter}}}
which, for this example would give this output:
<strong class="error"><span class="scribunto-error mw-scribunto-error-7c52fa29">Script error: The function "encode_first" does not exist.</span></strong>
I'm skeptical that such a function is needed but there it is.
is there any way to extract infobox from en wiki and save it in txt?I want to write aricle by bot.
is there any tools in wmflabs to help me?
--Monorodo (talk) 17:08, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Your watchlist can now have the option to unwatch pages. You have to turn this on in your preferences. [37]
If a table has several columns you can often choose which column you want to use to sort the table. This has not worked for some columns for readers who have used Firefox or Safari. This has now been fixed. [38]
The RelatedArticles extension has shown related pages on Wikivoyages. You will now see the related pages at the end of the article together with an image. Previously the links were in the sidebar. Wikis that want this extension can request it on Phabricator.
Changes later this week
Videos will now be played in the WebM format in all browsers. Previously some browsers used Ogg Theora (.ogv). If you use Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge you may see slower playback speed at high resolutions. Instead we will get better quality and smaller file size. You can still upload video as Ogg files. They are automatically converted to WebM. This doesn't affect Ogg audio files. [39]
The default font in the edit window will change for some users this week. Instead of using the browser default, it will be monospace. Users can change this in their preferences. This should only change this for some users on Macs and iOS devices. [40]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 August at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 22 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
New notification when a page is connected to Wikidata
Hello all,
The Wikidata development team is about to deploy a new feature on English Wikipedia. It is a new type of notification (via Echo, the notification system you see at the top right of your wiki when you are logged in), that will inform the creator of a page, when this page is connected to a Wikidata item.
You may know that Wikidata provides a centralized system for all the interwikilinks. When a new page is created, it should be connected to the corresponding Wikidata item, by modifying this Wikidata item. With this new notification, editors creating pages will be informed when another editor connects this page to Wikidata.
This feature will be deployed on September 5th on English, French and German Wikipedia. It has already been deployed in May on all the other Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects. This feature will be disabled by default for existing editors, and enabled by default for new editors.
If you have any question, suggestion, please let me know by pinging me. You can also follow and leave a comment on the Phabricator ticket.
What an excellent idea! Very nice to hear from you after Wikimania, I've attended your Wikidata talks and they were just great!Headbomb {t · c · p · b}14:34, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
It's Thursday. The watchlist has changed. Previously, at Preferences → Watchlist → Maximum number of changes to show in watchlist, if you had set a value of zero this would be treated as "infinite". Now it's treated as zero, so I now need to set a positive non-zero integer - with an enforced maximum at 1000. This means that when somebody with AWB and editcountitis has decided to make changes to 1001 pages on my watchlist (and it has happened, several times), there are going to be changes that I will simply never see. At present, my watchlist won't show me anything earlier than 14:06, 8 August 2017 - 55 hours ago. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:02, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm not experienced with the issue you're facing, but from a technical standpoint "zero really means zero" somewhat makes sense. If there was no enforced maximum, maybe -1 should be made to mimic the old behavior? I can only guess this change was done for performance reasons, but until someone who knows tells more I don't know. 2001:2003:54FA:D2:0:0:0:1 (talk) 22:02, 10 August 2017 (UTC)
I suspect this is a side effect of the improvements to deal with watchlist queries crashing. Ticket phab:T171027. In that case it's possibly an intentional limit to guarantee performance for of the system. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 02:28, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
Please change it back (or atleast revert these "watchlist fixes" as instead of fixing the watchlist another problem has been created instead, Mistakes happen so not going off on one but going from 3 days worth of pages to 250 isn't ideal for me at all..... –Davey2010Talk11:47, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
As usual, TheDJ is correct. I asked around, and learned that this is a WP:PERFORMANCE issue. Disallowing infinite page length on Special:Watchlist was the least-bad of several bad options.
I understand that a partial workaround is in the works, to let you filter out changes you've already looked at. (So you read the most recent 1000, then hide the ones that you've already read, and see the next-most-recent 1000, and repeat – you'll never miss any, but you won't see 1,0001+ on the screen at the same time.) However, this probably won't be available for approximately one month. In the meantime, please reset your watchlist numbers to something greater than 0.
If you'd like, I believe that 0 could be re-defined as whatever the maximum is. However, even if that change were written today, it wouldn't reach this wiki until next Thursday. Because of the delay, I'm not sure that it's worth it: most of the few editors affected by this will want to reset their watchlist lengths immediately, rather than waiting a week for an automatic fix. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:04, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
Comment - Is there a way to make the default number of watchlist items 50 items? Can the system require the user to specify a date range? --Jax 0677 (talk) 15:28, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
My watchlist is suddenly blank?
My watchlist has recently stopped listing any articles. I've tried this on several browsers and OSes. I have also logged out and back in. I have also removed all the filters. I have over 2,400 watched pages, so I know I have stuff on there. Any help? (EDIT: I won't really be able to tell if anyone has replied to this since... well, my watchlist isn't working. I'll be sure to check back frequently.) PureRED (talk) 01:39, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
from above: "at Preferences → Watchlist → Maximum number of changes to show in watchlist, if you had set a value of zero this would be treated as "infinite". Now it's treated as zero". Try setting it to 500 or 1000. Power~enwiki (talk) 01:43, 11 August 2017 (UTC)
If I recall correctly, if the "filter bot edits" checkbox was selected, you would see the most recent non-bot edit to a page, even if a bot had edited it in the meantime. Now, it pages where the most recent edit was by a bot are filtered from the watchlist entirely. is it just me, or is this a regression? Power~enwiki (talk) 03:25, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
If the most recent edit to a page is hidden and "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" is not enabled in preferences then the page will not appear on the watchlist. An earlier edit is not shown instead.[1]
References
^Bug 9790: Watchlist doesn't show earlier normal edits when hiding bot edits or minor edits.
When I look at 30 days of my watchlist, it only shows a few days. Is it limited to 250 changes? Please {{ping}} me when you respond. --Jax 0677 (talk) 14:54, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
For the past month my watchlist notification list has been empty, so I update the Talk:: page of one of the articles in my list and the next day I checked to see if it would appear in my watchlist and it did not. For some reason I'm no longer getting entries in my watchlist.
I think we should unbreak it. I'm just over two days behind on my mainspace watchlist checking (all because of a bunch of edits like this where one editor did only part of the job, or even made mistakes, leaving others to fix: so hundreds of pages now have 2, 3 or 4 edits since 00:01, 20 August 2017), and it's on the point of maxing out at 1000. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:28, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
"Place the category box above all other content" and section anchors
This is an oldie but goodie. When "Place the category box above all other content" is checked under Preferences > Gadgets, the category box is moved to the top of the screen, which makes categories more accessible, etc. However, if this is checked when the editor arrives via an anchor/section link, the category box often moves after the browser view has navigated to the section, offsetting the the link or visual anchor by the height of the category box such that the link/visual anchor is no longer at the top of the editor's window. Would there be any way to change the loading order such that the category box moves to the top of the page in advance of the window navigation, so I can navigate as intended? (Please {{ping}} me if you respond with a question.) czar20:03, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
It's a browser problem. As noted above, the cat box is moved by javascript; but some browsers (like Firefox and Opera) navigate to the anchor as soon as the page is loaded, they don't wait for javascript to finish first. This is probably because on some web pages, the Javascript is non-terminating - it executes continuously (rolling banner adverts are an example, as are news feeds), and so on these pages, the browser would be waiting for an event that will never happen, and so will never jump to the anchor. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:04, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
As a stopgap, would it be possible/practical to have the browser re-navigate to the anchor after the category box moves, as part of the gadget? czar22:26, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
(This is not—yet—an RFC.) A new MediaWiki skin called Timeless is being developed, mostly by Isarra. I was wondering if there would be any community interest in adding it to the English Wikipedia as a non-default preference.
There are no downsides to adding it, and it may be used by people who like it, so why not? It may be a good idea to wait until Isarra thinks it is ready to be used. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 12:37, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
This seems to have been a bit unclear. My fault, and my apologies. What I referred to was the wikis mentioned in phab:T154371 and other wikis that decide they want it (like English Wikipedia could do here). /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:32, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm not involved in the development or deployment of Timeless, so I'm not intimately familiar with the plans – I'm just trying to discourage people from reading too much into the Tech News announcement. If the information is coming from other sources, then my objections are irrelevant. (: /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:53, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure why linking to an IP address from the interface would be any more or less problematic than linking to someone's personal web domain from the interface, as we are currently doing. — This, that and the other (talk)04:51, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
To make sure that larger images don't overflow the viewport of the device. Unfortunately there are no selectors for 'small images', so i don't see how it can be made more specific. And it's not just tables, it's table layout (for which again, there is no selector). It's a difficult problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:06, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Wasn't there this bug whose fix used JavaScript to disable lazy loading for small images (defined there as less than 50px in either height or width)? (Or is this not fixable or too computationally expensice to fix with JS?) Jc86035 (talk) 14:44, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
I suggested that you ask here if there were a demonstrable need for such a category. What would be done with it? Johnuniq (talk) 08:15, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Need is simple. There are articles having infoboxes using this template outside infoboxes. I guess that is not how it should be used. With such a tracking category, we will be able to move the template to infoboxes used in those articles. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo(talk·contribs·count)08:21, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
There is nothing in the documentation saying {{Coord}} is only for infoboxes. It has 1.1 million uses and tens of thousands are probably without infoboxes, e.g. Londinium, Tribeca, Noachian. The only way this might be a little useful is if it only lists articles which do have an infobox and the used infobox does have a coordinates parameter, but {{coord}} is used outside it. It cannot be done with a tracking category but would require a database scan. It doesn't seem worth the effort to me. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:56, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Likely a thousand external links broken by comma-space errors.
I have recently done a test run searching about 150,000 articles for comma-space errors. One recurring error that I have seen a few dozen times is the kind typified by this correction. The external link contains a comma between the URL and the intended external link text; the external link is broken while the comma is there; removing the comma fixes it. From the sample of repairs done, I would estimate that there are probably a thousand additional instances of this error. What is needed is a way to search for broken external links containing commas that would work if the last comma in the link was changed to a space. bd2412T14:40, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
How common are false positives, i.e. a URL that ends in a comma? The regex for this would I presume be single(not double) left bracket followed by http: then a string with no spaces, commas or right brackets, followed by a comma, then a space.Naraht (talk) 14:59, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
The given example does not have a space after the comma, which makes the problem quite difficult. There are many valid URLs that do contain embedded commas (see quarry:query/21030 for examples). DMacks (talk) 12:55, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
That is the problem in a nutshell. The way to find these is to find broken links that happen to have a comma before the last string of text, and see if changing that comma to a space would turn the link into a working link. The ones I have found have primarily been because the link just looks wrong even in AWB. bd2412T13:20, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
Then the question becomes how many valid URLs have a string at the end consisting of comma, capital letter, string of lower case letters.Naraht (talk) 14:07, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
That, I have no idea. However, if there's a way to test URLs and skip the valid ones, we should be able to generate a list of non-working URLs with this characteristic. bd2412T19:08, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Watchlist category changes
I made the changes as suggested in Help:Watchlist#Limitations, but in the watchlist I can't see if a page is added or removed from a category. Just to be clear, my expectation is that if I am watching a category and if any of the pages in that category removes this category from the page, I get to see in the watchlist, but that doesn't happen. Coderzombie (talk) 06:43, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
It works for me. Is "Hide categorization of pages" disabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist? Have you enabled any of the hide options there? Which category are you watching and which page did you expect to see? Does your watchlist display edits which are older than the edit which removed the page from the category? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:58, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: I had done everything, except "Have you enabled any of the hide options there?". I made a change in category, but I had hidden "my edits", so that's the reason it was not showing. It works now. Thanks! Coderzombie (talk) 00:53, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Listeria bot
Hello. I am using Template:Wikidata list. I have created two list. Both are showing the managers of a both teams. The first one take the values for the team item and the second one takes the in formations from managers items. But, no one shows the references.
On September 5, the Beta feature will have a new option. Watchlists will have all new features available on Recent Changes Beta now.
If you have already activated the Beta feature "⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽", you have no action to take. If you haven't activated the Beta feature "⧼eri-rcfilters-beta-label⧽" and you want to try the filters on Watchlists, please go to your Beta preferences on September 6. It will not be possible to try the filters only on Recent Changes or only on Watchlist.
Please also note that later in September, some changes will happen on Recent Changes. We will release some features at the moment available in Beta as default features. This will impact all users, but we will provide an option to opt-out. I'll recontact you with a more precise schedule and all the details very soon.
On the New pages page, which lists recently created articles, it says, "Yellow highlights indicate pages that have not yet been patrolled." Lately when I look there I don't see any articles highlighted, though I used to see highlighted ones pretty often. Is the highlighting function broken? Or is there some other explanation? — Mudwater (Talk)19:59, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
I am getting yellow-highlighted entries. Of the first 10 pages listed, 3 are yellow, 1 was marked as patrolled by Twinkle while PRODing it, and the other 6 were created by users with the Autopatrolled right. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu21:48, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
A lack of yellow-highlighted pages normally means that people have been patrolling from the front (newest) and not the back (oldest), contrary to the advice at the top; and this in turn means that unpatrolled pages at the back eventually get old enough (31 days?) to drop right off the list without ever being patrolled. Apart from that issue, patrolling from the front can be WP:BITEy, since pages get CSD-tagged within seconds of creation. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:28, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Although not in contradiction, it's worth recalling that it says here that While it is a good idea to reduce the backlog of unreviewed pages by working from the back of the list, it is nevertheless important that serious breaches of policy such as spam and attack pages are deleted very quickly. O Fortuna!...Imperatrix mundi.10:48, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Yep, those two (possibly also copyvios) are the sort of thing where CSD should be applied ASAP; but that does not extend to every CSD criterion. I have seen pages tagged {{db-nocontext}} or {{db-person}} within a couple of minutes - in cases like these, the page creator must be given the chance to flesh it out. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:06, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Hello. I'm reviving this archived thread because, in case anyone is interested, I just figured out the answer. Some months ago -- October 2016, maybe? -- the rules for patrolling new pages were changed. Now non-admin editors, such as myself, can only patrol new pages if they have new page reviewer rights. I didn't know that until quite recently. I just got new page reviewer rights, and now, on the New pages page, I can see the yellow highlights again, indicating which pages have not been patrolled. To say the same thing in a different way, the yellow highlights are only visible to editors who have new page reviewer rights, and as of some months ago that's a much smaller group. — Mudwater (Talk)02:28, 7 August 2017 (UTC)
This discussion just made me realize that this is a total accessibility issue, where information is communicated solely by color highlighting.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:09, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ and Xaosflux: Just now I noticed that no pages are highlighted, and none of the li's have the not-patrolled class associated with them. As far as I know, I still have my NPP bit. Are either of you aware of any recent CSS changes that may have caused this? – Train2104 (t • c) 02:08, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
Having the same problem. Makes it difficult to patrol pages right now. At first I thought I might have accidentally been logged out, but that didn't happen. Can this be fixed easily? Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew04:17, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
Recent changes is actually a kitchen sink that many other pages related to new changes steal content from. So, as a side-effect of the new filters, everyone can actually see the patrolled status of a "new" page using it. Even if that weren't the case, this has probably always worked using the API. As a workaround (until this is fixed) simple way to see all new pages that haven't been patrolled is to use a link like so:
In case others also have breaking custom CSS after this change, what I had to do to fix mine was update the .mw-editfont-default class to the .mw-editfont-monospace one ([47]). This might be different if not using the monospace font setting (but it always was monospace for me and I like it this way). —PaleoNeonate – 20:29, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
I'd strongly counsel not using the font as the selector. textarea#wpTextbox1 will work for a long time without risk of disruption when the user changes their font. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
As mentioned in tech news, we are sunsetting Ogg Theora (.ogv) video derivatives in favor of playing back WebM on all browsers, including Safari/IE/Edge which use a JavaScript decoder shim.
Starting today, playback in Safari/IE/Edge will start using WebM derivatives in favor of Ogg most of the time; if nothing seems explodey we'll turn off the generation of Ogg derivatives tomorrow.
Playback may be slower on very slow machines, especially running Internet Explorer, but this improves quality and file size and makes server-side maintenance a lot easier.
Note that Ogg videos may still be uploaded -- they are converted to WebM for playback. Non-ogg audio files also still produce Ogg Vorbis (.ogg or .oga) derivatives. -- Brion VIBBER (talk • contribs) 19:53, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
The .ogv video derivatives are now switched off; only .webm video derivatives will now be generated and used. If anyone is specifically using .ogv derivative files (not the original uploads), beware that in the future you'll need to use the .webm versions. --brion (talk) 23:41, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
It would make more sense to take the opportunity to kill 3 birds with one stone, and fully kill off all ogg transcoding. Audio is better transcoded into mp3 rather than ogg, as that can be used by more devices, and users who want full quality can always download the original file. It seems that task (or related https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T45149) is stuck on needless bureaucracy... 21:51, 23 August 2017 (UTC)~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.80.227 (talk)
I think only fairly old devices can't play Ogg Vorbis nowadays. Is mp3 completely unencumbered by now? If it is, then I suppose even the few devices that can't play Ogg Vorbis are some sort of argument, but if there are any intellectual-property restrictions on it whatsoever, then I don't think it's worth it. --Trovatore (talk) 22:33, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Also, somewhat offtopic here, this is about transcoding not uploading, but anyway, Mp3 can be uploaded, commons isn't the only wikimedia project that allows direct upload. Other projects can also easily ignore whatever decision commons makes, and request mp3 uploading separately (mw:Manual:$wgFileExtensions). 197.218.80.227 (talk) 23:04, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
We do intend to add .mp3 audio derivatives soon, which will provide mobile playback for iOS, and native (non-shim) playback in desktop Safari, IE, and Edge. There's not a pressing need to turn off the .ogg audio derivatives (they don't require ffmpeg2theora or libtheora on the server, which were becoming maintenance problems), but that will be something we have an option to consider in the future once the .mp3 derivatives are available. --brion (talk) 23:41, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Who here has wmflabs access
User:Citation Bot has had major code updates in the pipeline for a long while, but they've never been deployed because the updates (github link) never get deployed to wmflabs.
@Headbomb: The actual live code lives in the "citations" tool, which I don't have access too. None of the maintainers of that tool are still active on Wikipedia, though :( Kaldari (talk) 17:48, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
@Kaldari: - As a "solution", could the current citations tools be taken down/disabled, and new ones be uploaded instead. I don't mean uploading over the existing ones, but rather something like creating a User:Citation Bot 2, blocking User:Citation Bot, and pointing all scripts/gadgets/whatever towards the new code rather than the old one? Headbomb {t · c · p · b}01:16, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
If you can let me know how to pull the necessary code updates, I'm happy to do it. Afraid I haven't the time to remind myself of the process. Drop me an e-mail. Martin(Smith609 – Talk)09:23, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Is it just me?
Hi,
I'm having a problem with editing pages. Sometimes, things such as the editor buttons and Twinkle simply do not load. When they do not, I have to keep refreshing until they do. I could not find any other mention of this problem in recent threads. I'm using Firefox 55.0.2 64-bit (Windows 10), but this was also happening with older versions. Is this a problem with Wikipedia, or is there an issue with my connexion? It's worth noting that I had a look at Firefox's Web Console, and in the cases when they do not load, I get a "TypeError: mw.util is undefined" message for index.php:329:3 that I do not get when it does load. The problem happened to me when I went to type this thread, and I got the same message (that said, it happened again when I tried to preview, and I did not get that message, so who knows?). I have tried cleaning my browser's cache. Does anyone else have this problem, because it is getting rather annoying. It sometimes hinders anti-vandalism work, as I sometimes cannot warn vandals and report them to AIV because I have to fight with the system just to be able to do so. Thanks. Adam9007 (talk) 23:10, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
@Adam9007: It's not you. It's Firefox, and it's been going on at least since the previous release a month or so ago. Straight across the board on Wikimedia. Firefox is not compatible with everything in the editing window. I do the same thing you do. — Maile (talk) 23:20, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I haven't read about a workaround. I use Firefox. You should try it on WikiSource, repeated refreshing of the page combined with repeated clicking on "Preview", to get all the tools to load. I like Firefox and don't want to switch at this time. But Firefox and Wikimedia are not currently compatible. — Maile (talk) 23:33, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
I don't know if the problem I came to report is exactly the same, but it's similar enough. Along with Twinkle, many of the helper scripts that I regularly use (including WP:POPUPS for example) are not loading, and it's becoming more often than not. But I'm on Chrome in Win10. Any ideas? Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 23:53, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Actually, this problem sounds like one that can be fixed--it sounds like one of your user scripts/gadgets is not declaring its dependency on mw.util. Which gadgets are you using? (Cc TheDJ, the prognosticator of scripts.) --Izno (talk) 23:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
@Izno: I'm using (under "Editing"): "Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries", Citation Expander, Syntax highlighter, HotCat, "Form for filing disputes at the dispute resolution noticeboard" (what's this anyway? I never use it), CharInsert (which also doesn't load when the buttons and Twinkle don't), refToolbar, and "Add extra buttons to the old (non-enhanced) editing toolbar". Adam9007 (talk) 00:02, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Nope, didn't work . I also still get the "TypeError: mw.util is undefined" message. What is of interest is that I also get messages like "This page is using the deprecated ResourceLoader module "jquery.ui.core". Please use "mediawiki.ui.button" or "oojs-ui" instead." Maybe this has something to do with the problem? Adam9007 (talk) 00:34, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
per my userpage, im on the road atm, so i cannot debug a persons scripts right now. Blanking everything, and then waiting for the cache to expire is the guaranteed way out. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:52, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
@Nirmos: I'll try that, but I'm not sure that'll help: I just had two instances of the editor of that page open. One loaded correctly, the other did not. There was no difference in errors between them except the one that loaded correctly had an additional message: "Automatically scrolling cursor into view after selection change this will be disabled in the next version set editor.$blockScrolling = Infinity to disable this message". Also, by "editor buttons", I meant the toolbars, not the save, preview, and show changes buttons. Adam9007 (talk) 22:09, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: I've been using Wikipedia with your scripts installed for a day, and couldn't find anything significant. But I can't really look over your shoulder and be sure that our setups are actually similar of course. mw:Help:Locating_broken_scripts has information on how to retrieve more information if problems do occur, and I have also added a gadget that you can enable in your preferences, called "Show an alert when you encounter Javascript errors", that might help you track down potential problems. If you can discover more information around the error you encounter, then maybe I can help you further at that time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:38, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I find it annoying when there are unclosed break tags (<br>) in a page as they mess up the syntax highlighting. I then have to look for them and close them (<br />) before proceeding with my actual edit. Is there some way this can be automated? Or could a bot (perhaps AnomieBot) include this as a clean-up practice?—Cpt.a.haddock (talk) (please ping when replying) 15:13, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Ideally there shouldn't be any html break tags in an article at all since wiki markup should be able to handle all sorts of line breaks. From my experience they keep getting used though in infoboxes and other large templates where {{plainlist}} and the like should be used instead. So as a first measure I wouldn't mind a bot closing open breaks. De728631 (talk) 15:20, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
The <br> tag is valid HTML5 (as is the <br /> tag) and is also whitelisted for MediaWiki. We should not be using automation (whether by sending in a bot or somebody using WP:AWB) to alter one form of perfectly valid markup to another form, with nil effect on the rendered page. This is what WP:COSMETICBOT and WP:AWBRULES item 4 are all about. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:16, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
@Redrose64: According to the highlighter's docs, "For performance reasons, the highlighter requires all tags to be valid XML. For example, make sure that if you start a <p> tag you end it with </p>, and use <br/> instead of <br>." Where can this be followed up? On Phabricator? Thanks.—Cpt.a.haddock (talk) (please ping when replying) 15:23, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
The syntax highlighter might require all tags to be valid XML; but Wikipedia serves HTML5, and has done since September 2012. So there should be no need at all to alter valid HTML5 constructs to suit a markup language that we have not used for almost five years. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:03, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
@Cpt.a.haddock: Pages at Wikipedia are written in wikitext, not HTML. Please do not change the style of existing wikitext, particularly with no visible benefit. What suits some people using old syntax highlighters does not suit other people. See this explanation for technical details. Johnuniq (talk) 23:43, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I have auto confirmed status then even I am not able to edit most semi-protected pages. I have had a discussion over this with MusikAnimal and he only suggested me to seek help here. Bingobro(Chat)11:01, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Are you sure that they are semi-protected and not extended-confirmed protected articles? The latter require the extended-confirmed group, which is automatically added after 500 edits and a minimum of 30 days. Maybe that specifying the name of the semi-protected article you cannot edit would be a good idea. It's also possible that an edit filter issue prevents your edits, but the only event that I can see is Special:AbuseLog/18906070 which was an article creation attempt without references. Thanks, —PaleoNeonate – 12:46, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
@Bingobro: I saw some of your posts on the other pages, and it is unusual. A few questions: have you tried editing from a different computer? Have you made any edits from tor? — xaosfluxTalk12:49, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Yup, Cars is a semi-protected page and as for the article I created I did provide references although they may not have been considered valuable.And for tor , the only browsers I have installed are Chrome and Internet Explore and my OS is Windows 8.1.And I doubt my pc's specs could be a problem? Bingobro(Chat)13:50, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Permalink to the discussion on my talk page (and at WP:PERM/C), for reference. I agree with Xaosflux – let's try editing from a different computer. If it still doesn't work, while you are logged in, please create a new account at Special:CreateAccount. This will show up as an account created by Bingobro, which we can then manually confirm. If with the new account you find you are able to edit these semi-protected pages, we can isolate the issue to some weirdness with the Bingobro account, and rule out your browser and operating system — MusikAnimaltalk16:13, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Wait, wait.. Wont creating a new account loose all my contributions i.e. around 200+ and my media from commons.I thought I soon would have an extended confirmed account but creating a new account I'll have to start all over again! And if you guys wont to try out the confirmed flag again, I'd suugest to do it with this account. Bingobro(Chat)10:47, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
@Bingobro: When MusikAnimal (talk·contribs) suggested that you create a new account, this wasn't with the intention that you use it in future and abandon your present account - the idea is to see if an account which is uncustomised, and so still has the default settings, is having the same trouble. If it is not having such trouble, we consider the customisation that has been applied to your main account; for example, you might have enabled two gadgets that are not happy together. For this reason, I created Redrose64a (talk·contribs) some years ago, where I have not altered any of the configuration settings; and to make sure that I have all of the current defaults, I periodically use the "Restore all default settings" feature at Preferences (n.b., if you have any Custom CSS / Custom JavaScript pages (see Preferences → Appearance), this will not alter or disable anything set up in those). If I have trouble with my main account, I try out Redrose64a and if the trouble is gone, I know that it's a settings issue. Such additional accounts are permitted under WP:VALIDALT. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:23, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
I added the manual confirmation on it for now, try to make 10 edits and we can remove when it is auto confirmed. At that point if there are still issues we can get a phabricator ticket open for a developer. — xaosfluxTalk14:39, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: Well, 10 edits are done no problems whatsoever the pages now say edit source. And, its the same computer and browser I'm using. BingobroA(Chat) 14:48, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
I think, trying out the confirmed flag (temporarily) on this account could help although previously it only partially worked. Bingobro(Chat)15:09, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
@Bingobro: if you would check back in in 4 days, that account should become autoconfirmed and you can test at that point. I've added the confirmed flag temorarily back to this account until then. — xaosfluxTalk15:17, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
Hello! 16 days ago I got a notification that this page that I had created months ago was reviewed. But despite that, the page still doesn't show up in google results. What might be the problem? --Expectant of Light (talk) 14:04, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
On the one hand, Expectant of Light said that the page has been patrolled. On the other hand, it does show up in my search results for both Google and DuckDuckGo – though for Google, simply searching for Mosul Liberation wasn't enough for it to come up in the first page of results; Mosul liberation wikipedia did it, though. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:33, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
Works for mehttps://www.google.com/search?q="Mosul+Liberation"+site:wiki.riteme.site&source=lnt&tbs=li:1 shows this is indexed by google. — xaosfluxTalk21:09, 26 August 2017 (UTC)
Is there a way to find all articles that where created with the editsummary starting with "Created page with '{{inuse}} {{Infobox Album"? Agathoclea (talk) 06:00, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
AVT not working?
Hello, has anyone else lost the Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool (AVT) from their toolbox? Mine disappeared around 19:27, 24 August 2017 and has not come back, despite clearing cache, checking my common.js file and trying on a different computer and three different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and IE). Any suggestions? Loopy30 (talk) 02:55, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
@Loopy30:. Thank you for reporting. It was using a removed JS module and had thus broken. Please note however, that LAVT is almost 12 years old and has not had a maintainer for almost 8 years now. As such it is extremely likely that it will break at any time, possibly in an unrecoverable way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:49, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks TheDJ, it works now! Yes, I was indeed aware that LAVT has been unsupported for several years and will eventually fail completely. Ultimately, I shall have to look for replacement tools for spellcheckers... 'Cheers, Loopy30 (talk) 11:17, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Character countdown again
The "character countdown" number has re-appeared in the edit summary recently - and in the "subject/headline" field when I create a new section on this page. It's still a nuisance, obscuring the last few characters of the text. Is this intentional? Can we please remove it again? I'm using MonoBook skin, Pale Moon (web browser), Windows 7. Mitch Ames (talk) 13:42, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Does it actually scroll incorrectly such that there's no way to view the last few characters of the text, or are you just offended that you have to scroll when the text is long? Anomie⚔14:46, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Also, please report the browser you use and the version of the browser you use, otherwise people cannot try and reproduce your problems. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:14, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Hmm, can't help with that (No windows, and no good version of it for MacOS) (And it seems to work as expected in normal Firefox, which explains why we have not seen more complaints.). Any volunteers to dive into this ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:49, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
The browser is Pale Moon v27.4.2 (the current version).
A little experimentation shows that the last few characters of the text I enter in the edit summary are visible, but the caret (normally a flashing vertical line) is not, as my typing reaches the remaining-characters-count. It works OK with Firefox 54.0.1, so may be a rendering issue with Pale Moon.
However, even in Firefox the countdown is annoying - I thought from others' comments in subsections of #Save changes buttons - accessibility above that it was generally disliked, and removed. (It did disappear for a while, then came back.) Is there an option to turn it off?
Even if it is kept, it should certainly be a separate display field - including it inside the edit summary text field is just wrong. Perhaps put it after "Edit summary (Briefly describe your changes)", where you'd have enough room to explicitly say "nnn bytes remaining", which would be much clearer. Mitch Ames (talk) 08:26, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
It was generally disliked because it was broken. Now it's fixed and there have been no complaints other than yours so far (which makes a 1 : 20000'ish complaint ratio ?). Please remember that whatever change is made, only those with a problem will show up, the people without a problem have no reason to chime in. Such discussions are therefore skewed by default.
The problem appears with MonoBook. Both Vector and Modern display the caret correctly, with exactly the same version of Pale Moon.
I do notice that with MonoBook and Vector the count appears inside the text edit control, but with Modern the count appears outside the text edit control, which is shorter. Having the count outside the text edit control is better, in that it is clearer - but of course that is at the expense of a shorter edit control that hides more of my summary! (I know, you can't please everybody...) Mitch Ames (talk) 12:09, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Global preferences – do you want local overrides?
Hey everyone,
m:Community Tech are working on global preferences, to make it possible to set preferences for all Wikimedia wikis instead of for each one individually (which you’ll still be able to do – global preferences will be optional). You can read more at m:Community Tech/Global preferences.
The developers are now investigating how important it is to override global preferences locally, which would mean you set a preference for almost all wikis but still have different settings on one or a few wikis. Maybe because you’re more active on one wiki, maybe because you edit in different ways there. If you want to be able to set exceptions to global preferences it is important that you tell the developers this now. Tell them what, how you’d use it and why it is important on this talk page.
This is only necessary if you want global preferences and exceptions to them. If you only edit one wiki, or are happy having the same preferences everywhere, you can ignore this.
I just took care of the 150 pages using unsupported coordinates parameters, leaving only 64 pages with unknown parameters for you to take care of manually. I haven't looked at the "multiple names" category, but I adjusted the template to make categorization work as apparently intended. – Jonesey95 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:31, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Syntax highlighting is now a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. It will come to right-to-left wikis later. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. [49][50]
You will now get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account and fails. If they try from a device or IP address that have logged in to your account before you will be notified after five failed attempts. You can turn this off or choose to get an email notification in your preferences. You can also turn on to get an email when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. [51]
Problems
Some pages show the error Lua error in mw.wikibase.entity.lua at line 34: The entity data must be a table obtained via mw.wikibase.getEntityObject. This problem happens on pages with a Lua module that use Wikidata. This has now been fixed and no new pages will get this problem. You still need to fix pages that were broken before and still show the error message. You can see how on this page. [52]
Changes later this week
You can block users from sending you notifications. [53]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 29 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
In the future you will have global preferences. This means you could set something in your preferences to work in the same way on all wikis. You will not be forced to use global preferences. The developers are now asking if editors need exceptions. This is where you want to use global settings on almost all wikis, but have some wikis where you want it to work in a different way. If you want this you need to tell the developers now. You can do so on the talk page. [54]
New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [55]
The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 in September 2017. Wikis can ask on Phabricator to get it early, so they can help find and solve problems now.
Would it be possible to create a version of {{Clickable button}} which does not change colour upon hover (perhaps called {{Unclickable button}})? Most buttons are now using the OOjs style, and {{Button}} (used in the FA edit notice) cannot be changed directly since some of the buttons which were previously grey are now blue or red. Jc86035 (talk) 11:10, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
The same class (mw-ui-button) is used for both the transition and the rest of the styling. It is theoretically possible to change and add CSS, but that is rather difficult to achieve. It is much easier to create a new template using the code I posted above, and use that in the places where you want a button that does not change color onhover, unless you want to use it in many places. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 04:09, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
In Google Chrome you can simply rightclick the button and chose "inspect" and you'll see the CSS is:
You basically want to get rid of that first part with the transitions. If you want to use this in a handful of places it is probably easiest to create another template that has all that code except those transitions (it works but it is not an elegant solution). If you want to use this in many places you may be able to find and convince someone who is experienced with editing Wikipedia's CSS files.
(((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 04:09, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Seems to have been offline for me a couple of days now (entrez nous, the entire toolabs landing page too). Any suggestations? Cheers, — fortunavelut luna11:43, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for that R'n'B :) of course, strictly speaking the notice is only massive when one is told to f***ing go and look at it!!! :p Many thanks! I say nothing regarding the use of 'Afraid's' Cheers mate! — fortunavelut luna11:51, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
and so on, across many infoboxes about physical locations or events. A while ago, we had a similar situation for image parameters, and resolved that by standardising them.
We should now do the same for maps.
The first steps should probably be to survey what we have, see what is most common, and determine consensus for what the standard set should include - ensuring that it caters for all (or all common) use-cases.
Update and discussion about the new User Mute features
Hello Wikipedians,
The Anti-harassment Tool team invites you to check out new User Mute features under development and to give us feedback. Join our discussion here about uses and potential improvements.
Something seen in passing that relates to this: what seemed like Jimmy wales editing an article, was actually him asking someone to stay off his talk page. The user in question essentially told him to take a hike in "politically correct words", and mentioned that they'd continue using it because the page was akin to a notice board. A pretty funny situation, considering that the founder has both social capital, and influence to prevent such an action. If nothing else, they could just threaten to not respond to any more drama, as long as the individual kept posting there. But if someone of Jimmy's status is powerless to stop that then really there is something wrong.
The core problem is that aspect of a wiki wasn't modeled properly. In the real world volunteering to something doesn't automatically entitle people to bombard a person with a gazillion notifications or random messages. The internet makes this easier than the real world, especially in a spam magnet like wikimedia sites. Some admins both on wikimedia wikis, and non-wikimedia wikis even get annoyed that a user blanks their talk page when this is the most natural thing, e.g. someone receiving an email / sms / snail mail , and simply discards it. In fact, this is a pretty good reason not to get an account, no pointless bombardments. The way to deal with that is by creating a proper warning system that the end-user can dismiss, and other users / admins can look at as much as they want. Unfortunately, it would likely meet with the classic resistance to change.
As far as this tool is concerned, the real way to deal with this is to model it after the real world. Instead of a "mute list" it should be a "allow list" that doesn't require people to play wack-a-mole, requires them to always see brief "warnings" or system notices, and informs new users they can opt in to being bombarded if they so choose. 18:22, 29 August 2017 (UTC)~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.90.139 (talk)
The infobox at Hoover Dam isn't formatting properly. Specifically, the embedded "Infobox power station" distorts the alignment of the rest of the infobox. The only fix I could find was removing the "Infobox power station" template. Thanks for your help! Magnolia677 (talk) 11:12, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Fixed. There did not appear to be a good reason to embed the power station infobox, so I used the native infobox dam parameters. It all looks right to me now. If I broke something, fee free to revert. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
The rowspans gave a different number of cells in the rows. It's invalid but browsers react differently to it. Does [56] look like you want? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:18, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
I've pre-reserved beds for both of you in the Home for the Bewildered, in anticipation of the effect this effort is going to have on your mental states. EEng21:36, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Listeria bot and non-free images
This was previously discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 154#Listeria bot again, but Listeria bot is back adding non-free files to page outside the article namespace: this time Wikipedia:GLAM/Amnesty International: Human Rights Defenders. File:Liu Xiaobo.jpg is non-free content, and it is shadowing a freely licensed image on Comomns of the same name. FWIW, the Commons' file is likely a copyvio claimed as "own work" and should be deleted shortly, so there's no point in changing the local file's name and this file should no longer be an issue when that happens. Is there, generally speasking, a way to tweak the bot's settings so that it can differentiate between (non-free) files uploaded locally to Wikipedia and files uploaded to Commons even when they have the same name? I've tried posting about this at User talk:ListeriaBot, but there's been no response. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:57, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
This isn't a problem with the bot I believe, it is a problem with us having a different file from Commons under the same name. I'd fix that instead of changing the bot. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 14:41, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
I am aware, as posted above, of the shadowing. I also posted above that the Commons files seems likely to be deleted for lacking permission, so changing the non-free's name at this point seems unnecessary; moreover, if the Commons' file is kept, the non-free will no longer be needed and can be deleted per WP:F7. The "problem" is more of a general one in that the bot will keep re-adding a non-free file which has been removed per WP:NFCC#9 because it believes it is adding a file from Commons. So, I am curious as to whether the bot can tell if the file it is actually adding is from Commons or Wikpedia because if it can do that then maybe there's a way for it to tell whether the file is non-free. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:43, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Shadowing is normal for free files. For non-free files over Commons files, I think it's clearly a Bad Idea and should be fixed by moving the images. --Izno (talk) 15:34, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
What's with the yellow highlight in a user contributions listing?
Izno, in this case it is not related to any Beta feature. It is only related to ORES and Highlight likely problem edits with colors and an "r" for "needs review"PrimeHunter mentions below. I understand it can be confusing, because the two features have highlighting options. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi. I want to run some pywikibot scripts automatically. I have this line on my corntab: "30 * * * * jsub -N script python3 $HOME/pywikibot-core/pwb.py script.py". Actually, I receive emails with this content: "Your job 8988710 ("script") has been submitted" but nothing happens on the Wiki. BTW, the script works when I type run it manually. How can I solve this?--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 23:01, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
IPAc-en misrendered in beta version on Android phone
On my Android smartphone* I usually have two ways of using WP: through a browser (usually Firefox, sometimes Chrome) or through the Wikipedia Beta app. Just now, reading Couscous in the Beta app on my phone, I was surprised to see in the second paragraph of § Etymology the sentence
Couscous is or in the United Kingdom and only the latter in the United States. As far as I have been able to test it, the problem occurs only on my Android phone* in the Wikipedia Beta app.
The wikicode has {{IPAc-en|ˈ|k|ʊ|s|k|ʊ|s}} and {{IPAc-en|ˈ|k|uː|s|k|uː|s}} respectively where the icons appear. These are displayed in a browser (Firefox or Chrome) or on my laptop, in either the mobile or the desktop view, as /ˈkʊskʊs/ and /ˈkuːskuːs/. The icon indicates that this is a sound file, specifically of speech, but when you click on it there is no sound, only a large version of the IPA notation
/ˈkʊskʊs/ or /ˈkuːskuːs/
centered in a white strip overlaid on the text, which is greyed out. Since there is no graphics code for the icon in the viewable template code, it must lie deeper inside, where I have neither the knowledge nor the authorization to go.
I see no value displaying an icon instead of the IPA and forcing the user to click on it to see the notation; and I see only negative value in using for this purpose an icon that leads the user to expect to hear a pronunciation.
*
Samsung S-6 Verizon SM-G920V
Android version 7.0, Nougat
Baseband v. G920VVRS4DQE1
kernel version 3.10.61
Hardware version G920V.07
Seems deliberate (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164310). The apps can essentially change the output to whatever they like, they aren't bound by what editors add. One should also expect the unexpected when using of beta versions of anything . 10:16, 31 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.90.62 (talk)
Not just the apps.. EVERYONE can do whatever they want (within reason of course). Google, Facebook and Apple Dictionary integrations also modify a variety of things that editors add. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:21, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
Popups enabled briefly on 2017-08-30 evening?
Hi All -- I am sure I didn't imagine it! Did anybody else notice something like Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups on the main English Wikipedia, for half an hour or so on the evening (UTC) of 2017-08-30? I have very conventional Firefox without extensions, and nothing changed on my browser, not even restarted. I wasn't logged in, so have no way I know of to enable those popups. I noticed popup images of George Plimpton and Wikipedia logo for certain, and it happened enough to make me go ask in IRC, but then it stopped. Anybody know anything about this? Kind regards to all. Jonathan. 82.69.229.22 (talk) 12:43, 31 August 2017 (UTC) (Firefox 41.0.2 on Ubuntu 15.10)
Perhaps they meant that it stopped working. Looking at the console error. It seems that they've recently changed the code to use a function that is only available in jquery 3. So it will fail on all wikis that don't load it in some manner, e.g. a userscript.
P.S. It is possible to enable them for anonymous users (when they are working) by clicking a link in the footer, although that seems to only work on wikis that have the a/b test. 197.218.84.22 (talk) 07:32, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Commons images
I've been having a problem recently with photos hosted on Commons not showing up in articles, and Commons itself showing a server error message when accessed. When this happens, photos just show as their filename or alt text. This been a regular thing for the past few weeks. I've tried the latest versions of Chrome, Edge and Firefox and had exactly the same issue with each. Cloudbound (talk) 23:41, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
Me too, Opera 36, except I get a blank space until the image arrives. Which can sometimes not occur before I give up after 20 mins. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:10, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Links to examples are always helpful. I had one today that would not show up in an article (I got a broken image icon), but I was able to click through to Commons, where I saw that the thumbnail was broken. I was able to regenerate a thumbnail using a tip I found on Commons, which fixed the image in the article. For what it's worth, the image was File:Winter Go West Tour - Portland,OR - Paramore.jpg. I can see the thumbnail on Commons now. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:13, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): See commons:Category:1882 in Finland which currently shows a blank page. When I appended ?action=purge a few minutes ago, it displayed "Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem ... Error: 503, Service Unavailable at Fri, 25 Aug 2017 08:07:02 GMT". That was reported at T170039 about a probably unrelated issue. Johnuniq (talk) 08:11, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
To be honest, it is sporadic, and when it does happen it's within any article with a file hosted on Commons. I don't even get the outline of the thumbnail frame in an article, it just leaves the caption. Cloudbound (talk) 12:57, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
Commons is itself still down, with the following message when I attempt to connect to any Commons page:
"Request from [IP] via cp3048 frontend, Varnish XID 411806751
Upstream caches: cp3048 int
Error: 404, Requested domainname does not exist on this server at Fri, 25 Aug 2017 13:32:06 GMT"
Cloudbound (talk) 13:33, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
A page at Commons which just works is commons:Category:Netherlands. The html source of that page includes "Lua memory usage: 49.69 MB/50 MB". I have been thinking about a fix by replacing commons:Template:Countries of Europe with a call to a new module that would do the work much more efficiently. However, the real bottleneck may be the intense work that it does, and using a module might not fix the excessive memory usage. The template generates a horizontal list of 61 country names, each linked to the Commons category for the country. For each country, it uses #ifexist to test if the category page exists, and it uses Wikidata to display the localized name for the country depending on the reader's language preference. Does anyone know if the 50 MB memory limit might be hit simply from using #ifexist (expensive) 61 times, and doing 61 Wikidata reads? Johnuniq (talk) 05:03, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
Yes. Simply using data from an arbitrary wikidata item (not connected directly to page in question) increments the expensive parser count( see mw:Extension:Wikibase_Client/Lua#mw.wikibase.getEntity), and seems to use about ~930KB (for Q42), e.g. mw.wikibase.getEntity( 'Q42' ):getLabel(). Basic lua usage without any special coding is about 500KB. So it will probably max out at around less than ~70 arbitrary wikidata calls (for heavy items), unless some of it is cached. The actual memory usage is variable and seems to depend on the amount of data stored within each wikidata item, e.g. Q1 uses about ~400KB.
The real problem is that the template was designed in an incredibly inefficient manner, it has template calls inside lua calls inside template calls inside lua calls, and doesn't seem to cache its data. 11:00, 29 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.91.149 (talk)
Thanks. Yes, the strange internals of the template initially made me think replacing the lot with a module would quickly fix the problem, but when I unraveled more of what the template does I wondered where the bottleneck really was. I guess I could do a Q&D module to call ifexist and fetch some wikidata for 61 countries and see what happens. Johnuniq (talk) 11:37, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
The bottleneck is probably commons:Template:Label and its related module, and this seems to have been reported already in the talk page. It is called multiple times through multiple nested templates. It will be considerably more efficient to extract all labels for countries and load them locally using mw.loaddata. Countries don't change their names that often. 13:29, 29 August 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.91.149 (talk)
Module:Convert/wikidata/data does that for {{convert}} and I was contemplating that for a new Commons module, but it's tricky because the result varies depending on the user's language. We could cache en + fr + de and others, but then only people with a less frequently used language would see a problem, and it would never be fixed. Johnuniq (talk) 22:08, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
I created commons:Module talk:Country to test what happens when a very small module uses getLabel to fetch the Wikidata label for each country in Europe. The results are as predicted by the IP, namely the memory usage is near the limit, and the time usage is high as well. I'll think about how caching might work, but I don't see how it would be feasible to cache every country label for every language. Johnuniq (talk) 10:51, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
It is not clear why there is a need to use mw.wikibase.getEntity, unless one wants to fetch a label in an arbitrary language. : If the goal is to obtain labels in the user language wikibase.label works much better, and seems to use a negligible amount of memory probably because it just fetches one element rather than the whole entity. Caching would still be useful for the more popular languages, and to reduce the impact of vandalism.197.218.92.43 (talk) 11:53, 30 August 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. On review I see that I used mw.wikibase.label in Module:Convert/wikidata but had not realized it applied language fallbacks. I updated the test module and the results at commons:Module talk:Country show the Lua time usage has dropped from 3.6 to 0.03 seconds, and Lua memory usage has dropped from 42.92 MB to 683 KB. I will work on finishing the module in due course. Johnuniq (talk) 02:22, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
In a URL, Wikipedia can handle %3D as a synonym for equals, but it can't handle %3F as a synonym for question mark.
Since the problem is that after clicking the question mark is escaped to %3F, which Wikipedia can't parse back to question mark, it doesn't help to escape the special characters in the markup. For example, the above bullet pre-escaped renders as above and when you click on it, the same problem occurs:
Yes, the pretty and portable way is to use fullurl at mw:Help:Magic words#URL data. You can use Wikipedia:Plainlink to omit the external link icon. <span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:Special:LintErrors/bogus-image-options|namespace=0}} Lint errors: Bogus file options]</span> produces: Lint errors: Bogus file options. But fullurl gives the same limitations as external links made in other ways. It doesn't work in edit summaries, it doesn't show up at WhatLinksHere, and at mobile it gives a link to the desktop version. Users on a mobile device may remain at mobile but not desktop browsers on the mobile site. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:07, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Email change reports don't (with changes in Wikidata)
I've recently started receiving email reports of changes in pages I'm watching that claim "No change". One such change was attributed to User:Sintakso. I asked about this on User talk:Sintakso. Sintakso replied saying s/he had NOT recently edited that article directly but had "recently edited the corresponding Wikidata item (Q131143)".
As the usage of Wikidata increases, emails notifying users of changes like this will clearly increase as well.
Thanks for the ping, TheDJ! @Sintakso: You should not be getting email notifications about changes happening on Wikipedia. This is very strange. Is there any chance you can forward such an email to me? My address is lydia.pintscher at wikimedia.de. Then I'll have a closer look at it and try to figure out what's going on. Is anyone else getting similar emails? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 18:12, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):@PrimeHunter: Yes, I have enabled options like that. And I just sent an email documenting this to lydia.pintscher at wikimedia.de. Thanks for looking at this.
The Watch list is very powerful for managing vandalism. It should not be contaminated with unexplained "(No difference)" messages.
I think the best fix might be to generate an official entry in the history of each page that uses a Wikidata item when that item is changed. I want to know of changes in Wikidata that affect an article I'm watching: I would want to be notified of a change in Wikidata that affects the Pseudomonas article, for example. Currently I get a notice, but it says, "(No difference)", even though there is a difference. If it's vandalism, I'd want to know so I could revert it. If it might challenge my understanding of pseudomonas, I'd want to know.
Are people discussing the use of Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Wikiversity and Wikinews with Wikidata to crowdsource research? If yes, where can I find such a discussion. (If it's in German, French or Spanish, I can probably handle that.)
A moderately sized project of this nature would involve updating the 2008 RAND study on "How terrorist groups end": The authors identified 648 terrorist groups active between 1968 and 2006. Some splintered. Some were still active in 2006. They found 268 that had ended in that period.
In v:Winning the War on Terror I describe how these data suggest that the West is using the least effective approach to terrorism:
Terrorists were more likely to win than be defeated militarily (in this data set).
However, a retired senior US military officer recently told me that RAND did NOT have a good reputation among serious policy makers.
My response is to port those 268 cases to Wikidata and invite the world to add fields and cases to test the robustness of the conclusions. There are many different definitions of terrorism as well as different definitions of whether and how the groups ended. All these issues could be discussed openly in Wikiversity and Wikipedia -- rather than being restricted to elites, many of whom have conflicts of interest in getting answers that please their funders. Many discussions of these issues are classified and therefore not available for public discussion.
In this way, the Wikimedia system can help limit this insanity, I think. (Wikimedia threatens venal elites, as acknowledged most explicitly by both Turkey and China.) DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:38, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
If a user moves a page (from mainspace to draftspace) without leaving a redirect and the draft page is then speedy deleted, does the move still show in the user's move log (with source and target both red links? Thank you in advance (but I'll also give thanks retrospectively!). Thincat (talk) 09:13, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. That has enabled me to check that of about 100 mainspace articles wrongly moved to draft (and now restored), none were G13-deleted whilst in draft space. Thincat (talk) 10:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
When I joined in trying to sort out the fiasco at WT:WikiProject Cricket#Draftification of over 500 cricket biographies I discovered the relevant move log and checked (visually) to see if any move had red source and target. No, except for a move to an incorrect title followed by a move to correct it. The individual has apologised for their mistaken moves but not, I think, for using this as a technique for "quality control" claiming authority from the consensus at AN. And, at the cricket discussion, someone else is saying if any drafts not meeting their personal article quality standards are returned to main space they will move them back to draft space. Speedy deletion hardly comes into it. There does seem to be consensus on both sides that approval was required. We urgently need a guideline and an approval procedure. Thincat (talk) 21:24, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
At Gold#History my phone browser (Chrome 59 on Android) "cleverly" decided to represent the sun symbol as an emoji. Likewise at Nicholas Bourbaki#Influence on mathematics in general, the "dangerous bend symbol" is represented as an emoji that looks completely different, which is singularly unhelpful. Firefox 54 doesn't have this issue. Is there a way to force it to show the proper symbols instead of these stupid emoji glyphs? I thought of {{font}} or <span style="font-family:...">...</span> but several choices of font-family didn't work. Hairy Dude (talk) 14:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
I don't think there is a sustainable way to correct for a problem like this. I'd suggest to file a bugreport with the manufacturer of your phone. (Not very likely to succeed, but it's where the problem is). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:52, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
I just checked: the Wikipedia app also has this issue. I think it uses the Chrome rendering engine, complete with its choice of typefaces. Hairy Dude (talk) 15:14, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
Some more cursory research turns up the following:
No variation sequences are defined for U+2621 or U+2609 (see [59]), so (if I understand correctly how they work) one would not expect any change. The fact that emoji glyphs exist is a bug in the font, or (since just having emoji glyphs isn't really unreasonable) in the browser for using it as the basic font. (Previously a similar lack of restraint in typeface design led to Greek chi using a glyph identical to Latin x in the Android system font, making certain IPA sequences unintelligible.)
For code points for which varition sequences are defined, e.g. U+2640 FEMALE SIGN (compare text style ♀︎ vs emoji style ♀️), there is a known bug in Chrome: it simply ignores variation selectors.
It doesn't have that right now, but references lists do, so I think we might be able to solve this with some site CSS. I'll have a look later today. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:18, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
@Anomalocaris: It's because that kind of linebreak prevention only works for lists, and this thing doesn't use a list.. Which in itself might be something that should be fixed... However, as to not have perfect be the enemy of good, I made a change to {{legend}} that should at least fix the linebreaking problem for those specific elements. Is it any better ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:32, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ: This is a start. {{legend}} now does "keep together" within columns, but, unfortunately, it moves the "kept together" item to the second column, meaning that the second column is longer than the first, and normally if the columns are unequal, the first is longer than the second. —Anomalocaris (talk) 10:06, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
@TheDJ: I tried what you did; I got the results you did; I described the results you got. See how "(Csa) Mediterr. dry, hot summer" is at the top of the second column instead of at the end of the first column, so the first column is shorter than the second, which doesn't look right. That's why I left the br's in. —Anomalocaris (talk) 11:09, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
PrimeHunter: Thank you, but I don't think you understand the issue I have raised here. I am saying that Lint is localizing the Tidy whitespace bug too broadly and it should narrow it down. —Anomalocaris (talk) 09:53, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Nested templates are generally always a headache (for developers and end-users). It seems like something or someone has already fixed the underlying issue. What is left there is a cache of the previous lint error. So it is hard to tell whether that was actually the case. Generally though, individual templates may not trigger such errors but sometimes they do when combined. It might be worth getting a bot to purge all those pages with high priority lint errors. To reduce the time people waste chasing down ghost errors.
> By the way, is there a way to run an edit preview through Tidy?
There is a parser migration extension / preference that allows one to see what it would look like once the parser is switched, see mw:Parsing/Replacing_Tidy/FAQ . 10:13, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Someone is editing the Tidy whitespace bug pages with great speed, so I don't know how much longer Yesh Atid will be listed, but it is listed right now. The true error is {{nowrap|[[Liberalism]]<ref name="DW">{{Cite news |first=Günther |last=Birkenstock |title=Yair Lapid, the big winner in Israel's elections |publisher=Deutsche Welle |date=24 January 2013 |url=http://www.dw.de/yair-lapid-the-big-winner-in-israels-elections/a-16546766 |accessdate=26 January 2013}}</ref><br>[[Secularism]]<ref name="Secularists">{{cite news |author= Jodi Rudoren |date=29 January 2013 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/world/middleeast/israeli-secularists-find-their-voice-in-yair-lapid.html?pagewanted=all |title=Israeli Secularists Appear to Find Their Voice |newspaper=The New York Times |page=A4 |accessdate=19 September 2013}}</ref><br>[[Social liberalism]]<ref name="AFP">{{Cite news |first=Judith |last=Evans |title=Israeli election: Live Report |agency=AFP |publisher=Yahoo! News Singapore |date=23 January 2013 |url=https://sg.news.yahoo.com/israeli-elections-live-report-173532066.html |accessdate=14 June 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/A-capitalist-government-306747 |title=A capitalist government|author=Editorial |newspaper=The Jerusalem Post |date=2013-03-17 |accessdate=2015-02-02}}</ref><br>[[Zionism#Liberal Zionism|Liberal Zionism]]<ref>{{cite news |author=[[Carlo Strenger]] |url=http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/.premium-1.578511 |title=Israel today: a society without a center |publisher=Haaretz |date=7 March 2014 |accessdate=14 June 2015}}</ref> }} and what's required is to remove the space before the closing curly braces. But the Tidy whitespace bug is reporting the bug as being in the surrounding {{Infobox political party}}. The outer template is not the problem. The problem is within {{nowrap}}. —Anomalocaris (talk) 10:43, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
It might have been the case at some point. But they deployed a recent update that improves the reporting: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T173096 . The problem of course is that they don't currently refresh the pages when they deploy these updates, so there are certainly a lot of false positives in those lint errors. Although new ones will pop up eventually as users edit pages. 197.218.90.181 (talk) 10:55, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
I'm using Firefox 52.1.0. When I open pages (e.g. Conformal_gravity) that include math content, it shows in SVG pictures instead of normal: I can fix it by changing the CSS (in the Firefox devtools) to remove these rules:
Why is this bugged? I set it as MathML with SVG fallback in preferences, but I'm getting the SVG even though the browser is MathML capable. Thanks! —{{u|Goldenshimmer}}|✝️|ze/zer|😹|T/C|☮️|John15:12|🍂19:58, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Page move selector not available under More due to interaction with GoogleTrans
I'm noticing that Page move is not available under 'More' to the right of the watchlist star. No other function is available either. Mousing over 'More' pops up 'GoogleTrans (on)' (which I don't want and haven't noticed before) and clicking 'More' merely highlights the box that it is in. Purged the page, same problem. Went to another article, same problem. Switched browsers (from Chrome, to Opera, IE, Safari) same thing. Mathglot (talk) 04:35, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
I clicked the 'GoogleTrans (on)' to turn it off, which brings up a dialog box, where I selected GoogleTrans off but that doesn't help. Please roll back this release. Mathglot (talk) 04:39, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
the call for placing the GoogleTrans gadget in the MORE combo box is a Wikipedia standard, and this code hasn't changed for years. I did notice that MOVE appears when I go to Platoon_535, Embree–Trefethen constant, in fact, any random article, but the MOVE doesn't appear on the main page. I suggest this is intended because most users aren't allowed to move such pages. Anyway, this weekend I'll look at the code to see if any new standard call has replaced the old one. Endo999 (talk) 15:29, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
It was broken on every (article) page I looked at until 04:55, 3 September 2017 (from numerous browsers) and working properly on every page I looked at after that. HTH, Mathglot (talk) 18:40, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Watchlist cuts off at 250 entries
No matter how long a timeframe ("Period of time to display") I select, I only seem to be getting at most 250 entries. I know in the past I've been able to select longish timeframes and see the full timeframe, which based on the usual edit loads is well over 250 entries. Is this a new hardcoded limit, or is something timing out somewhere? DMacks (talk) 04:18, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
Feedback requested for new tools: Deletion analyzer and AFDCloses
Hi there. I'm not a prolific coder but I tinkered a bit and created (with valuable help from MusikAnimal) two tools to analyze deletions on Wikipedia:
DelAnalyze.php attempts to parse all deletions (up to 100,000) by a single user and displays them in some graphs and tables, allowing to see which areas a user most works in and which speedy deletion criteria they use most often
AFDCloses.php parses AFDs closed by a single user and displays the outcomes in a graph and table (that one I created because some users claimed I was biased towards keeping and I was genuinely interested if I really tend to close many AFDs as keep)
Since I am not a great coder, I am asking for feedback on these tools, especially bug reports. Regards SoWhy08:07, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
@SoWhy: Naturally, I tried the deletion tool on myself to see what it would say. I was initially surprised to see so few FFD, because I had worked in that area recently (prior to a bot taking over the boring task), but I'm now guessing that it reviews the first 100,000 and stops. I wonder if it would be useful to allow searching the most recent deletions rather than starting with the first.
I note that almost 43,000 of my deletions fall into the type "other". I'm curious what's included in that category.
I was initially surprised that G8 was the largest single category for me but, on reflection, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. Many of the deletions in other criteria also have a talk page, so the article deletion may be Gx, but the associated talk page deletion will always be G8.
@Sphilbrick: Yes, I added a hard limit of 100,000 to avoid 504 errors. I'm still experimenting where the limit should be, so I will probably increase it. It should display the most recent deletions first though. limiting the script to 1 yields a G13 which corresponds with your deletion of User:XBobcat/Kris Knoblauch.
As for other, the script now allows you to display those. Most of them seem to be you using "g 3 (TW)" and similar, which the script does not parse because it does not include a link to the CSD policy. As noted, it relies on parsing the deletion comment for things found in MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown and other standardized deletion summaries. Start using those and the script can parse them
@Sphilbrick: I increased the limit to 500,000 which means all your deletions are now to be found, however, I cannot find any FFD deletions - not under "Other" as well. Either you did them without a comment or they are not caught in the query. Can you point me to one deletion so I can check? Regards SoWhy16:57, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
@SoWhy: I did say FFD, but I was thinking F5, for example I see the updated table shows 70 F5, but I believe I had 17k in June. I also see the new table has 12,532 Old file revisions, but that's too low if it counts deletions of old versions of fair use images. Let me emphasize that this is not a big deal to me, but I am assuming you are interested in making sure the tool is accurate. Almost all entries in this list (except the last one, also qualify.)
@Sphilbrick: Thanks for the reply. The script previously only parsed deletions where the page was completely deleted. It now also parses revdels, check it out. You have 54,213 F5 deletions now =) Regards SoWhy19:54, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
I hope you appreciate I wasn't being critical, but just wanted to help you sort out any issues.If you don't mind checking one more thing, I do a number of rev dels in connection with copyright work. It hadn't occurred to me until now that deletion of an unused version of a file might count as a revision deletion. When I recently looked at User:JamesR/AdminStats I was surprised at how many rev dels I had, but I am now wondering two things - does the admin stat tool count the deletion of unused image (F5) as a revision deletion? And second, you report 941 revision deletions for me, so how does that differ from the Admin stat tool definition?--S Philbrick(Talk)20:39, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
Don't worry, I am happy for the feedback :-) As for the question, "Revision deletion" in my tool means under WP:CRD. Other revision deletions, like for F5, are sorted into speedy deletion. I'll put splitting the tool in page and rev deletions on my to-do list though, it needs just two different queries and parsers. Regards SoWhy21:13, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
@SoWhy: I tried the tools on myself. I'm not sure what the first is representing; is it articles nominated for deletion, or actually deleted? I have a whopping nine speedy deletes, and three mysteriously marked as "other". The AfD analyzer unsurprisingly lists all closes as "keep", since I haven't been able to close with "delete" since 2012, but there are only two articles listed, and I know there are more closes. I presume this is because of the way I closed them. The March 2016 case is unusual. I closed, then reverted my close because although the nomination was withdrawn, there was a good-faith delete vote, and you can't use SK1 in that case. Another editor subsequently closed it on consensus to keep. Hawkeye7(talk)22:22, 2 September 2017 (UTC)
@Hawkeye7: Thanks for trying. Yes, the first tool analyzes only actual deletions, not taggings, since that would require analyzing deleted pages and the database does not contain them for logical reasons. 12 deletions corresponds with your public log. The other deletions can be shown when you check the parameter [60]. As for AFD closes, it relies on edit summaries created by XFDCloser or Mr.Z-man's script. If you closed them manually, there is no standard edit summary to parse. If you used a script and it did not parse them, please mention an example. As for the March 2016 example, I am still looking for a sure way to detect such reverts... Regards SoWhy10:44, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
The other way around. I didn't expect to see anything, because I thought I had closed them all manually. (I was also surprised by the deletion log - how did I manage to speedily delete two pages in November 2016?) Hawkeye7(talk)12:34, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Anyone can have G6 deletions. These occur when you move a page over a redirect. (This action was previously not logged.) — JJMC89 (T·C) 21:29, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia:TemplateData/Tutorial#TemplateData says that "The TemplateData is added to the template page itself inside tags, or anywhere on the template's documentation page if it has one." However, when I added some TemplateData to Template:Float box/doc, and then went to the sandbox to test it, I could only see it having an effect if I tried to insert Template:Float box/doc itself, rather than Template:Float box. Is this normal, or have I done something wrong? User:GKFXtalk14:12, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
That's possible, but I see the same effect for Template:Biochem reaction subunit, whose template data is about 19 hours old at the time of writing, and it seems a bit odd that the data takes effect immediately for the /doc page but not for the intended target. I'll wait a bit longer. User:GKFXtalk14:53, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
A purge will update the display of the template page itself. TemplateData is used when you add or edit template calls with VisualEditor. It shows up now for {{Float box}} but I don't know whether it was triggered or the normal delay just ended. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:00, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
We are asking Tech News readers five questions to make the newsletter better. You can answer the questions here. We are grateful for every reply we get.
Recent changes
The RevisionSlider user interface has changed. You can now select revisions by clicking on the bars. You can move the blue knob past the yellow one and the yellow one will move along, and the other way around. [61][62]
Problems
Some users have problems loading very large watchlists. It is working better than earlier but the problem has not been solved. The developers are working on fixing it. Until it has been fixed you can turn on "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in your preferences and see if it helps. [63]
Changes later this week
New filters for edit review is a beta feature to improve recent changes pages. It will work on watchlists from 5 September. [64]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Is anyone familiar with the app and how main page sections like "In the news" for it are put together? There's a rash of vandalism occurring adding porn pictures to articles that are featuring in "In the news" e.g. North India and I can't work out how to remove the vandalism. Normally I'd look through related changes for template changes but I don't see any - mind you the new way of filtering related changes may be hindering me here. Nthep (talk) 11:24, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
I've made a couple of null edits to the main page thinking (bear with me, I just woke up and have never looked into the app) that will accomplish at least nothing (if not result in some beneficial accident). Ian.thomson (talk) 11:51, 31 August 2017 (UTC)
In Wikipedia articles, subsections are collapsed by default. But in Wikipedia templates, you will have to scroll down through entire documentation. There no collapsible section. Can this be made collapsible so that scrolling can be reduced? -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo(talk·contribs·count)18:55, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
Since yesterday, I have had problems contributing to discussions on project pages like this one and my User Talk.
Sometimes (but not always) when I edit a section, it shows me two edit panels - the lower one looks like the panel I'm used to (I never use Visual Editor) and the upper one has a different font - I think it may be the VE, but I've hardly ever used it. I've discovered that if I add a reply in the lower one, my text just disappears when I hit Preview or Save Changes. I think that if I edit in the upper one it takes my text (but one time I had three attempts to correct something in that window before my correction took).
I did not intentionally change any preferences before this stopped happening (though I did accidentally go to my preferences page once yesterday, when my machine was being slow: I don't believe I changed anything then though). Afterwards I went there and selected "Always give me the source editor", but that doesn't seem to have had any effect. --ColinFine (talk) 09:31, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, TheDJ. I picked Edit on this section: a single edit panel appeared, looking like the lower one in this screenshot. Then I picked Preview, and got what you see in the screenshot. At the top is the original page, then there are two different-looking edit panels, neither of them containing my new text (you can't see that in the bottom panel, as I couldn't get it all on the screen, but it's not there).
I'm typing this reply now in the middle panel: I shall copy it before I hit Preview, because I have no confidence that WP isn't going to throw it away again. --ColinFine (talk) 11:19, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
This is due to incompatabilities between wikEd and the new beta feature for SyntaxHighlighting that is in your Beta-preferences. Disabling either one will solve your problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. I now remember it offering me Syntax Highlighting out of the blue - I thought it was before yesterday, but maybe I was wrong. So it's true that I hadn't been to my preferences page, but not that I hadn't changed my preferences. However - I have now tried three or four times to turn syntax highlighting off in my preferences page, and it won't go away. So I've turned WikEd off. --ColinFine (talk) 11:32, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
As Cacycle, the developer of wikEd has not been active for a while, I have made some changes to his gadget, to avoid loading when the beta is enabled. That should be a bit safer for the average joe. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:48, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
"Enable previews" button when logged out -- where is "Disable previews"?
The problem
When logged out, I can enable article previews, but cannot figure out how to disable them. The image on the right is illustrative of the problem. Eman235/talk21:48, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
When you open a page preview, there is a cog wheel inside it, which allows you to disable. You can also do it straight from the preferences, at "Appearance" -> "Page previews". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:07, 4 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi there. I'm interested in making a new infobox that is specific to Canadian legislation, as the current infobox is based on US parliamentary procedure, and does not translate well to Canadian procedure (e.g. the committee stage is different). But, I've not found an easy "how-to" for designing a new template. Are there any resources on Wikipedia that anyone could point me to? Thanks! Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 05:49, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
@Alex Shih: It's not the office holder template that I'm interested in, but the template for legislation: Template:Infobox legislation. The main difficulty is that this template assumes that the committee stage comes at the end of the legislative process, after all of the readings in both chambers, when there is then a conference committee between the Representatives and the Senate to resolve discrepancies between the versions of the bill passed by the two chambers. However, that process is an American one. In Canada, there are two committee stages, between second and third reading, in both the Commons and the Senate. There is no conference committee between the Commons and the Senate, which is how the template is structured. If I try to use the current infobox template, the committee stage always follows the third reading, even though the date of committee stage was before third reading. And, it leaves the reader with the impression that the Canadian parliamentary practice for committees is the same as the US practice, which is just plain wrong. I have suggested in the past that the current legislation infobox be amended to provide this as an option, but no-one was willing to do that. There are already specific templates for EU legislation and UK legislation, so creating one that accurately sets out the Canadian legislative process would consistent with those precedents. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 07:16, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
@Mr Serjeant Buzfuz: I see. I don't think there is a easy guide for advanced templates. It would be much easier to work as you go based on existing pages (in this case, the UK version is probably a good starting point). I have started a page at Template:Infobox CA legislation if you would like to work together on this. Alex ShihTalk08:21, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
Instead of a new template, consider getting the existing infobox modified to suit your needs. If you are unable to build consensus, consider a wrapper instead of a fresh new infobox. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo(talk·contribs·count)09:51, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
My personal view is that it's counter-productive to try to have a "one size fits all" template for something that has no much national variation as legislative process. I would prefer a separate template, customised to the Canadian practice. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 03:36, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
@Mr Serjeant Buzfuz: The Canadian process is based upon the British process (First Reading → Second Reading → Committee Stage → Report Stage → Third Reading in one House, then the same five in the other House, then ping-pong until both houses agree or one rejects outright). So have a look at {{Infobox UK legislation}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:47, 28 August 2017 (UTC)
True, there are similarities, but the Canadian legislatures have gradually departed from the UK model. For example, at the provincial level, the Legislatures are all unicameral, and in Quebec, they have abandoned the terminology of "Readings" of bills. The template should reflect that, rather than try to be all things to all nations. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 03:36, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
What do you mean? Special:ExpandTemplates works in both the desktop and mobile version. Some templates render differently or not at all in mobile but that's because of the code they produce and not because they are templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:20, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Thx. So we know, some templates show different in mobile view (visual changes). You say that is not because for mobile, a different (HTML-)code is produced from m.wikipedia? It's the mobile browser only that renders it differently? (eg, class=navbox does not show, ignoring css-textformatting like lineheights). -DePiep (talk) 06:36, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
If you just want to see how something renders then you can preview it anywhere at desktop or mobile (some things depend on the namespace and a few on the page name). The main purpose of Special:ExpandTemplates is to see the generated wikitext from wiki source using templates. As far as I know, exactly the same wikitext is generated at desktop and mobile. I don't know whether different html is generated from the wikitext. The bottom of all desktop pages have a "Mobile view" link. This includes Special:ExpandTemplates although it doesn't remember content you entered before switching. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:34, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
In my to-do list of future articles some entries are redirects and thus are blue rather than red, so I have to regularly click on them to check whether some of them became articles. Is there some tool or template that facilitates distinction between redirects and articles among blue wikilinks in real time without redundant clicks (e.g. by labels, different color or hovering popups)? Brandmeistertalk10:57, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
The simplest change is to add something to your common.css file of the .mw-redirect{csshere} sort. I happen to have .navbox.mw-redirect,.vertical-navbox.mw-redirect{font-style:italic;color:red;} so that I know when there is a redirect in a navbox, but not elsewhere in a page. --Izno (talk) 15:50, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Is there any special reason why certain areas of certain Edit Histories are censored? If so, it is not well explained. A clearer explanation should be posted somewhere, in the various technical and policy pages. Here is a screenshot that shows what I'm talking about:
Censoring certain revisions is done under strict conditions which can be seen at WP:Revision deletion. As to any specific case, the best advice is to clock on the "View logs for this page" at the top left; and look for any entries which say "changed visibility of # revisions on page" (with some number in stead of the number sign). In cases of RD1 (copyright violation), you can frequently see the URL of the source if you look at the last revision before the time of the revision deletion log entry; in this case, it's http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40752061. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu06:35, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
"In rare cases, all or part of a page history entry may be shown in grey, struck out by a horizontal line. This indicates that information has been hidden from public view by an administrator or bureaucrat. See Revision deletion and Oversight for more on this."
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Temporary unavailability
There was a short unavailability, a few minutes ago, at least from some places.
WikiProject assessment page not updated after running "Update project data"
For WikiProject Catholicism Assessment page it does not update the "Importance" column labeled with "???" after I ran the "Update project data" (http://tools.wmflabs.org/enwp10/cgi-bin/update.fcgi). Even after doing "Purge", logging off, checking again after several hours. This is not urgent, but it used to work correctly & now not. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk)12:33, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
It was working for me at almost exactly the time that it wasn't working for you.[66] What's your browser/OS? Is there anything unusual about your internet connection? Is it working for you now? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:22, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
Vivaldi latest stable on Win10x64. My connection is most likely to be working, as I can visit anything w/ no trouble, including heavy content like videos or online stores, and the same page I was trying to edit is refreshed no problem. Only VE originating requests to api.php somehow didn't go through.
I did some quick search, and it seems to be something about how HTML works? I'm not sure though. I just know that some infoboxes works just fine in mobile view, but some will just "break" the page in mobile view. Also, sometimes the information on an infobox (say, First World War) will work just fine, but the "Theaters" field will not show on the mobile site. User:Tetizeraz. Send me a ✉️ ! 23:53, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
The Quixotic Potato None in this is breaking this article. I'm just checking in the mobile view on my desktop (Firefox v55, Fedora Linux 26). However, as I mentioned in my original question, some templates don't show up, and I would argue they are great links for curious people about a subject. Yes, they are linked somewhere in the article, but it appears earlier than those mentions. Anyhow, Template:Campaignbox World War I and Template:Events leading to World War I don't show up in mobile view, just as an example. User:Tetizeraz. Send me a ✉️ ! 01:04, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Specifically, these types of template (navbox and sidebar) are set up to belong to the navbox and vertical-navbox classes, which in mobile view are set up with the CSS declaration display:none;.
Here in Virginia, we're stuck with both a Richmond, Virginia and a Richmond County, Virginia that are completely unrelated and nowhere near each other; it produces a bit of confusion among humans, and now apparently our image servers have gotten into the act. User:Nyttend/Virginia NRHP/City of Richmond has always included the city map, File:Map of Virginia highlighting Richmond City.svg, but for some bizarre reason it's now displaying the county map instead, File:Map of Virginia highlighting Richmond County.svg. What's more, if you mouse over the map, you're told that it's actually the city map, and clicking on the county map takes you to the city map. I discovered this upon going to the userspace page, but since I had to edit the page I didn't worry, thinking it some bizarre caching issue that would be cleared up. To my surprise, it persists despite my edit. At the same time, this isn't universal; the city map appears in the top right corner of National Register of Historic Places listings in Richmond, Virginia and in the city's infobox, for example, and the county map appears everywhere that it should. The last edit to either file was more than ten years ago, and this category tweak by me, six months ago, was the last time anyone modified either description page.
Any suggestions? I'm using IE 11 and Monobook, but the same situation appears in Firefox 55.0.3 when I'm logged out. Nyttend (talk) 11:37, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
I posted this at the Teahouse initially, but was referred here. In the "recent changes" section of my preferences is set to show only potentially problematic edits. Before today this has always worked. Today I logged on and went to recent changes, and it displayed as if I had not logged in, with one difference: in the options pane of recent changes, instead of saying "hide probably good edits" as would normally go with that, it said "show probably good edits" as it normally does when the feature is working. Clicking it has no effect. I checked my preferences and the feature is enabled. I am using Google Chrome version 60.0.3112.113. -A ladinsane(Channel 2)02:47, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
Okay, this is still A lad insane, but logged out. (don't freak out, it's a dynamic IP address.) The recent changes "hide probably good edits" seems to work as an IP editor. 174.22.16.226 (talk) 15:05, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Works for me (see image right). 
Resolved
CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. This will make it easier to make templates look good on mobile devices. This now works on mediawiki.org and Wikitech. It will come to more wikis later. [2][3][4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 23 § Enlightening images and text - tied together
- FlightTime (open channel) 16:59, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
(File:SVG-edit logo.svg). But it displays https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/SVG-edit_logo.svg/72px-SVG-edit_logo.svg.png instead of the uploaded https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/SVG-edit_logo.svg. It would be odd to combine this with allowing an extension to generate SVG images for display. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:39, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
. I also still get the "TypeError: mw.util is undefined" message. What is of interest is that I also get messages like "This page is using the deprecated ResourceLoader module "jquery.ui.core". Please use "mediawiki.ui.button" or "oojs-ui" instead." Maybe this has something to do with the problem? Adam9007 (talk) 00:34, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Nirmos (talk) 16:08, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
Fixed. There did not appear to be a good reason to embed the power station infobox, so I used the native infobox dam parameters. It all looks right to me now. If I broke something, fee free to revert. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:42, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
or 
/Archive_158#c-Dr.K.-2017-07-27T22:37:00.000Z-File:Dunes_and_Ripples_in_Nili_Patera.jpg){kind=link}
![[22]](https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/File:Sketch_map_of_Metlakahtla_Annette_Island,_Alaska,_to_show_the_part_seized_by_the_misson._From,_Metlakahtla_case._A...._-_NARA_-_298063.jpg#/media/File:Sketch_map_of_Metlakahtla_Annette_Island,_Alaska,_to_show_the_part_seized_by_the_misson._From,_Metlakahtla_case._A...._-_NARA_-_298063.jpg){kind=link}
.svg){kind=link}
![[31]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/56/Stonehenge_Q%26R.jpg/461px-Stonehenge_Q%26R.jpg){kind=link}
![[32]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/56/Stonehenge_Q%26R.jpg/576px-Stonehenge_Q%26R.jpg){kind=link}
