Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 159

Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly
Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly
Host country	United Nations
Dates	13 September 2016 – September 2017
Venue(s)	United Nations Headquarters
Cities	New York City
Follows	Seventieth session of the United Nations General Assembly
Precedes	Seventy-second session of the United Nations General Assembly

Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly
Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly
Host country	United Nations
Venue(s)	United Nations Headquarters
Cities	New York City

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Save changes buttons - accessibility

At some point between 23:23 and 23:34, 18 July 2017 (UTC), the edit interface has changed. Is it Thursday already? I notice that the buttons at the bottom (Save changes, etc.) have changed, are bigger and less readable: there's a contrast problem. Accessibility is something to be careful of. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:57, 18 July 2017 (UTC)

+1 I am not entirely sure what was wrong with the old version either, and it is certainly not yet Thursday. ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 00:00, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

They've been dutifully warning us of the buttons' fuglification for weeks, including that there's no practical way to repair them with user css. I'd have complained earlier, but of course it would've done no good. —Cryptic 00:07, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Redrose, accessibility for people with low vision is one of the main points. The contrast has been dutifully checked (several times by now, at least for Vector) and easily clears all of the standards.

Note that this is more than an aesthetic change, so a few old editing scripts may also break. See mw:Contributors/Projects/Accessible editing buttons for information on how to fix anything that's broken.

(P.S. It's a config change, which means it can descend on you on any day of the week. ;-) So far, it's only reached the Wikipedias and Meta. Other wikis will happen in a couple of weeks.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:20, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

They look perfectly fine to me. I don't see where any potential readability issues would come from even for those with eyesight issues. They're compliant. Amaury (talk | contribs) 01:27, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), could you please explain how making various interface elements exceedingly disproportional (like buttons being about 4 times bigger than hyperlinks) improves accessibility? If you care so much about these people (by the way, what is their fraction among the editors?), then maybe it would be better to make a special "accessible" style for them, with everything large and contrast? I can tell about my own experience with "accessibility": when I need to use a website with small fonts, I just press Ctrl++, and my browser magnifies everything proportionally. If I would do that with the current WP design, these ugly buttons will take half of the screen, actually decreasing the usability. And I also wonder very much: how artificially limiting the summary line to 80% of the width is supposed to help people with low vision? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 09:46, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

The intention, at least as stated in prior posts here, was to improve accessibility for readers using the desktop version on mobile devices. Never mind that this affects editors, not readers, and significantly degrades the desktop version on the desktop. —Cryptic 16:50, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Not just mobile devices. Touch devices. This includes things like Windows Surface laptops for instance. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:49, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I thought that all modern OSs have user preferences for sizes and colors, such that any interface built from standard elements will have a comfortable look and feel. Am I wrong? I do not have much experience with touch devices (believing that text editing on a keyboardless device is a bad idea), but how can it be that these users can tap hyperlinks, but cannot tap standard buttons (which are usually about twice bigger)? And again, how reducing the summary width to 80% helps them? Especially considering the problems (discussed below) with its wrong alignment and an overlapping counter. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Web pages cannot access OS user preferences (it would be a leak of privacy if they could), nor directly use the user interface elements provided by the OS (they use the user interface elements provided by the web browser, which may or may not resemble those natively provided by the OS). isaacl (talk) 23:54, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Web pages do not need to access OS user preferences because the browser itself should. In any case, browsers have user preferences for default colors, fonts, and overall magnification. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 04:42, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Sure, the browser could retrieve and expose this data to web servers, but I don't believe there's currently a mechanism for web servers to retrieve this info from web browsers, and it would still be a potential privacy issue. There are defaults for colours and fonts, but not size information for user interface elements. Most users, though, appreciate greater variety in the web sites they visit, and would not want all of them to use only the default background and text colour. Even just considering the implications on a single site, visual elements such as side bars would blend into the main text flow without a distinguishing background colour. isaacl (talk) 18:31, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Browser do not need to expose these preferences to web servers, they use them locally for rendering pages. If you have no idea how it works, please see [1], [2], [3], [4].

A variety in the web sites is fine, but kind of interferes with the accessibility, which was the declared reason for the changes we discuss here. And I still assert that neglecting user's setting actually does not "improve accessibility". — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 10:02, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks; I am familiar with how the default settings work. I was only responding to your original post regarding using the OS user preferences. Sure, it's possible to go back to the late 1990s look, with the web site using only defaults, and a single flow of content such as seen on many sites that are designed with mobile devices in mind as the primary viewing experience. But it's unlikely for any highly popular site such as Wikipedia to drop all styling, and in particular judicious use of background and foreground colours. For better or worse, most readers today expect both accessibility features to be respected and an engaging site design. Specifically regarding buttons: the key problem is that browsers don't offer good customization options to tailor their accessibility, and there is uneven support in adjusting their appearance via CSS. Accordingly sites will substitute their own button elements for the default ones. It's not a perfect solution, but it's what we have available. isaacl (talk) 16:29, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Mikhail, the use of 80% width on the edit summary box has nothing to do with this change. It's been like that for years (possibly since the creation of the MonoBook skin). However, the team can change it, and if people don't like the result, then they can complain. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, they have tried their best to impede user's CSS. I have added to my common.js some code to remove the offending classes:

// remove ugly styles from buttons:
$(".oo-ui-buttonInputWidget").removeClass("oo-ui-buttonInputWidget")
$(".oo-ui-buttonElement-button").removeClass("oo-ui-buttonElement-button")
// and checkboxes:
$(".oo-ui-checkboxInputWidget").removeClass("oo-ui-checkboxInputWidget")
// remove inflated field margins:
$(".oo-ui-fieldLayout-header").removeClass("oo-ui-fieldLayout-header")

This seems to help against the most evil stuff, at least so far... — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 09:31, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

What a relief! The awful new buttons couldn't be styled by CSS (by me at any rate), but this returns them to a usable legible state. And fixes my widgets too. Lithopsian (talk) 14:02, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I regret that I have but one thanks button to click for this edit. A css solution would be better - removing the classes in javascript still shows the irritatingly immense buttons briefly until the page finishes loading - but this is still a huge improvement. —Cryptic 16:50, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Since they are classes, you can redefine them using user CSS. For example, I have changed the color. If you want to have boring grey buttons again, you can use

.oo-ui-buttonElement-button {
border: 1px solid black !important; 
background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom,#eee,#eee 100%) !important;
border-radius: 0 !important;
padding: 0.5rem !important;
transition: none !important;
}

for example. Regards So Why 12:29, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Is there a CSS style that is just "look like a button, like all the other buttons - eg 'Go' and 'Search' in Monobook"? Mitch Ames (talk) 11:28, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

I just took a screenshot at File:Save_dialog_Wiki.jpg (FF 52.0.2, Windows desktop, Vector skin). Maybe that helps a bit to find remaining problems and script incompatibilites (obviously the buttons need fixing, and the "edit summary" field is cut by 1-2 pixels on the left side). GermanJoe (talk) 02:45, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

wikEd is making it's own style modifications. It will need an update. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:17, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I think they're awful – unattractive and huge, but I am more concerned with the fact that I no longer have any ability to leave an edit summary. Gone. The field is not even presented to me. I do/did have my interface tweaked to get rid of the gallons of material at the bottom of the page, and order it better. I'm assuming that is the issue. Can anyone advise if there's any way to tweak my customization or can identify the issue between my common.js and my my common.css?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:03, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Fuhghettaboutit: Eh, yeah you are doing some very uncommon manipulations there with both JS and CSS on your editOptions. If you want to hide something, you should always target as narrow as possible, not go high level and then selectively move things out of it with JS... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:37, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Any chance we have a preference like with VE ?, My main dislike is the huge blue button as well as the rather big tick (image) - Wouldn't be so bad if it was smaller, ofcourse I realise it's been designed for people with eyesight issues however without being disrespectful we're not all blind so surely there should've been common ground in terms of the design ?,

It pleases those with eyesight issues (which is absolutely great) but it pisses those off that don't have eyesight issues (FWIW I am short sighted and do wear glasses however the previous design was never an issue),

If we could have a preference option like with VE that'd be great - I know we can't please everyone I understand that but atleast to me the big blue button/tick is rather extreme... –Davey2010^Talk 16:41, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Davey, I know it seems like a pretty big visual change, but my bet is that if you wait a couple of weeks, you won't notice it as much any longer. Most people adapt to visual changes pretty quickly. Also, since most of us here are experienced editors, most of us don't really look at the buttons much anyway: It's just Tab ↹ to the edit summary box, type the edit summary, and Return to save the page. The buttons don't even need to be above the scroll.

We made this change at half a dozen big wikis two weeks ago. There were a few comments about the size and color there on the first couple of days, but I've seen nothing about it since then. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Ah see I don't do that - I usually hit any part of the scrollbar thus making it "ping" to any place - I then type whatever or use the arrow keys for autofil and then hit return,

Ofcourse I mean changes happen everywhere and not all are liked but we live with it but usually if something changes to my dislike I'll "dislike it but live with it" but here and I hate to be a little drama-queen but I actually hate it, The button is "too in your face" if that makes sense, I love the colour Blue always have so I love the colour choice here no problem but the button and tick are too big,

It would've been better to have it the same size as the previous and perhaps have implemented a tool where it could be made bigger in preferences or something, But I suppose it all goes back to "you can't please everyone",

Ah well it's changed and I guess there's nothing I can do except look in anger!

, –Davey2010^Talk 20:37, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Is this why the button is green?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:52, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Show changes clicks Editing help on Android

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T171495

On Google Android phone (Google Chrome) browser, the new oversize "Show changes" (button 3) clicks into "Editing help" (cheatsheet link) which is very bizarre because no "Cheat" buttons onscreen, and "Show changes" really should show changes on mobile phone edits (which are hard enough already). This glitch shows the horrors of user-hinterface experiments which can hinder simple processing, as the inverse consequence of wanting a modest improvement in user interfaces. "Kids don't do this: never move the brake pedal, gas petal or steering wheel while a car is being driven". We need an essay, "wp:Computer Screwups 101" to remind people to use alpha/beta testing steps on crucial user-interfaces, where experimental glitches can have horrific impacts (over 20,000 mobile phone edits per month). -Wikid77 (talk) 08:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

This report misses critical information. which page, which editor, which skin, which android device, which version of google chrome, did you test with disabling all your gadgets and userscripts ? How to report bugs effectively —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:05, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

It happens on any page (wikitext editor) in Vector skin (Monobook skin ok) while suppressing License blurb, but when logged out then "Show changes" clicks Show preview, on Android phone LG Escape2, version 5.1.1. To avoid preview horrors, the Monobook skin can be used (which shows avocado " Save_changes " rather than Vector blue Save changes ). -Wikid77 (talk) 06:08, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

New Edit summary window

The redesigned Edit summary window has the text left-anchored, with the result that most of the time you can't see what you're typing because it's off the right-hand end of the window (on an ordinary 13" laptop). Can that really be what the designers wanted to achieve? The remaining-character count is good, though. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:27, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Justlettersandnumbers: It is supposed to right align. If it is not for you, then that might be a browser specific bug. Please report what browser and version of it you are using. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:11, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Safari Version 5.1.10, TheDJ. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 09:14, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Ah, that browser is not really supported anymore, so I guess it's not too surprising. I've been saying that we should disable JS support for Safari 5, but so far it seems it's still included. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:51, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Similar but not identical problem in Chrome Version 49.0.2623.112; Firefox 48.0.2 is OK, though. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 09:20, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I use Chrome 36 (after I abandoned Firefox because v. 51 got waaay too slow - five minutes to load a Wikipedia diff, and ten mins to click "back" from that? Ridiculous) and I find that it's right aligned, but the last two or three characters are hidden by the bytes-remaining counter. Pressing End reveals them though. Perhaps that counter could be put outside the box? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:06, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Counter, what counter? Using the latest version of Chrome with Vector. Doug Weller talk 10:58, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Are you using wikEd? That makes its own edit summary box with no counter. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:38, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I suspect this might be interfering. And indeed so will wikEd. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and TheDJ: I got rid of the CSS but I want to keep WikiED, I'm ok without the counter, just nice to know why I can't see it. Doug Weller talk 15:40, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I'm not going to fix wikEd though, you will need to contact it's maintainer. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:50, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Of course not, why should you? As I said, I'm not bothered, I want to keep WikiED. Doug Weller talk 19:09, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: By "that counter", I mean the one described at Help:Edit summary#The 250-character limit (the bit about the figure 143). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:02, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I have the same problem on Firefox 52.2.1. Deli nk (talk) 12:43, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I have the same problem with latest version of Chrome for Windows. When I undo a change, I find myself removing most of the default stuff in the box so I can see what I'm doing. Annoying. Any way to go back until they fix it?--Bbb23 (talk) 14:04, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Please roll back the change to the edit window. This makes it harder to write edit notes. It is cute to have the little twitter character counter but it actually gets in the way many, many characters from the end. This must go'. Jytdog (talk) 22:19, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Edit summary field hidden

Not sure if this is related, but I came here wondering about why I was not able to see any edit summary field at all. I'm editing on a Kindle fire at the moment with the vector skin. older ≠ wiser 08:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

You have #wpSummaryLabel hidden in your vector.css (as did I). Just remove the line.[5] -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 09:06, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, that seems like an oversight in one of the IDs.. Please file a bugreport. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:11, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The id wpSummaryLabel ended before the box in an old version I compared to. You can currently place the below in your CSS to hide the heading but not the box. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:32, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

#wpSummaryLabel .oo-ui-labelElement-label {display:none;}

@Bkonrad and Zzuuzz: You can increase the specificity of the selector, like this. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:31, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks @Redrose64 and PrimeHunter:. Both your suggestions work, though I noticed PrimeHunter's suggestion also hides the count of remaining characters (something I had not seen before and is nice touch). older ≠ wiser 10:02, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

What is this number?

When I'm in the edit window in Firefox 54.0.1, logged in, there is an odd 3-digit number outside and to the right of the Edit Summary box. That same number appears no matter what article I open up. So, I opened Microsoft Edge without logging in. That same number appears no matter what article, except it's inside the Edit Summary. Are you tracking us? What is this number, and why is it the same number no matter what article, no matter if I'm logged in or not? — Maile (talk) 11:54, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Maile66: Type some letters into the edit summary box and you will see what it means! See also the first point at Help:Edit summary#Edit summary properties and features. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:57, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Ahhhhh ... it counts the characters in our edit summary and tells us when we've reached the limit. Thanks. — Maile (talk) 12:00, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Maile66: Specifically, it counts bytes rather than characters; if you type in non-Latin characters like "카나다", "Канада", or "קאנאדע" you'll see it drop more quickly. My colleagues in the MediaWiki team are working on making it possible to write more than the current limit of 250 bytes, which was a highly-rated Community Tech wishlist item recently. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Seems pretty pointless TBH. Another good reason why I ditched using edit summaries years ago. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 13:04, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Actually, it counts the bytes, not the characters. This distinction is what makes it particularly useful for people who aren't typing in English. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:34, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

@Maile66 and This, that and the other: A better link is Help:Edit summary#The 250-character limit, in particular the bit about the figure 143. @Jdforrester (WMF): 255 bytes, not 250. Same link. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:00, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

The counter is cool but should be outside the text field. The rest of the changes are just ugly. Rivertorch^FIRE _WATER 23:28, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Last characters in summary are hidden

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T169982

I came here to ask a related question, and saw this thread. How do I turn off the count box? I couldn't find anything in preferences. Is there a .css or setting that will kill it? On Google Chrome (with MonoBook skin), the box hides the last couple characters typed in the Edit Summary box - as a result, it just gets in the way. To verify I didn't leave off anything I need to back arrow then forward arrow to trick the UI to show me all the typed characters. If I type again at that point, they are again hiddent and I need to use the stupid back arrow/forward arrow thing again to view all my typed characters. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 17:06, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Put

.oo-ui-textInputWidget > .oo-ui-labelElement-label { display:none !important; }

in your common.css. —Cryptic 17:13, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Doesn't work—the countdown is still there. I'm sure this was implemented with the best of intentions but please, disable it until you can get it working properly—not being able to see what you're typing is remarkably irritating. We survived for 15 years without it, I'm sure we can survive another week while you work the bugs out. ‑ Iridescent 17:18, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

You're right - I was able to change the positioning and opacity with that selector, but display doesn't stick. I've added an "!important" to the above, which does work. (At least for me, in cologneblue, in preview.) Try that? —Cryptic 17:24, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Even if CSS allowed to hide it, note that this will not prevent the extra scripts from loading and running (every typed character will still be processed by them). —Paleo Neonate - 17:21, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Works here. It is an element and so it can be easily hidden. The selector is correct, make sure you copied it exactly and placed it in the correct file. Not to say it won't change tomorrow though. Also the count doesn't hide anything for me, so might be a browser-specific issue. Or just that skin? Either way, might work one day! Lithopsian (talk) 17:25, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake, I was using a different selector:

#wpSummaryWidget > .oo-ui-labelElement-label

Lithopsian (talk) 17:28, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Since "that browser" is Chrome and "that skin" is Vector, this is the most frequently occurring combination among Wikipedia editors by an order of magnitude—we're talking a major issue, not some obscure glitch that only affects a few users using archaic systems. ‑ Iridescent 17:30, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I figured out why this is occurring. Let's hope someone can find a fix for it soon. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:31, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

I also experience a strange bug where sometimes characters become hidden under the counter when typing using FF, after typing enough it resets and I can see the new characters again. I would really like if most of those new features systematically came with corresponding disable/enable preferences (large buttons, interwiki search, this counter are examples of recent features which lacked systematic toggling options. There's now a gadget to disable the search aspect (and it could be hidden by CSS), but that was still introduced afterward and does not prevent unnecessarily loading extra scripts (and all the interdomain pages, as can be seen in inspectors or security control addons); I also noticed that page loading time increased in the last months, scripts often lagging behind the actual page. I commonly click on the watchlist star before all scripts are loaded, causing the page to reload with the "add/remove" question like if JS was disabled. Another common occurence is for the page to load and jump at the proper anchor with scripts lagging, which when loaded cause sudden scrolling/jump, where I have to select the address bar and press enter again to scroll to the anchor. It's unfortunate for this bloat to become obvious for features I don't need, even on a fast system and fast connection... —Paleo Neonate - 22:50, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes please turn this "counter" off. It is a bug, not a feature. Jytdog (talk) 22:23, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Character counts on subject/edit summaries?

I'm seeing character counts on the Subject and Edit summary boxes now, which I wasn't before a few days ago. However, for long edits (such as after a revert) the cursor and last few characters are hidden.

Is this on for everyone, or is my Javascript (currently only OneClickArchiver) somehow causing this? Power~enwiki (talk) 21:37, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

see #What is this number? above, sounds like the same. Nthep (talk) 21:46, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

yup, same thing. Closing. Power~enwiki (talk) 23:44, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Process

What is the process through which this "Improvement" was implemented? Jytdog (talk) 22:24, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

God only knows. At the very least, there should have been a banner warning users of it. When I first saw it yesterday, I wondered for a moment if I'd somehow wound up on a spoofed site. Rivertorch^FIRE _WATER 23:26, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Obviously someone at WMF who never uses this site thought it would be a great thing to implement. Hats off to them! Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 12:11, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

It was pointed out to me here that this was done via phab:T36984. That in turn was related to phab:T165856. It ~appears~ to me that User:Jdforrester (WMF) was the person who implemented the request? I don't understand how the process of changing code works or how decisions are made to actually implement things. I suppose somebody thought this was a trivial tweak. I have no idea.

There is a Tech news thing where the devs communicate what they are doing, but I looked through the current issue and one previous issue and don't see this mentioned. Jytdog (talk) 12:31, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Obviously someone at WMF who never uses this site is wrong per Jytdog's phabricator link (which I dug up). The original feature had implementations on other wikis in gadget form (especially the non-Latin alphabetic wikis) and has anyway existed in VisualEditor for 5 years (without seeming complaint anywhere on phabricator, besides a handful of breakages). --Izno (talk) 12:37, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

User:Izno - I have appreciated your providing information but the implementation in the WikiEditor was crappy and broke things. Period. Whether it worked somewhere else is entirely irrelevant. People get angry when their tools get broken - irrelevant argument pours oil on the fire. Jytdog (talk) 13:10, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Indeed. So I guess we all need to start using VisualEditor so that we'll be forewarned about interface "improvements". It never ceases to amaze me: there are so many areas of the editing experience that could be improved, and WMF developers have repeatedly shown themselves capable of coming up with brilliant solutions, but they keep fixing things that aren't broken. And failing to give fair warning. Rivertorch^FIRE _WATER 13:57, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

It is rather amusing to see that almost everything now on my common.js and common.css pages exists solely to reverse various changes WMF developers made. And I certainly cannot thank enough everyone who has contributed here with wonderful solutions, with a special shout-out going to Mikhail Ryazanov and Cryptic! ^_^ Double sharp (talk) 14:36, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

@Rivertorch: Not having an indicator of how much information I could pack into an edit summary was more-or-less broken behavior and I'm personally surprised this change wasn't made earlier. "No-one got around to it because it would have been a pain before the train got rolling on the big blue Publish button" seems to be the indication from the phabricator task for the "why" of that. --Izno (talk) 15:11, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

@Izno: As I indicated elsewhere in this ever-growing section, the counter isn't a bad thing; the implementation of it is. The implementation is half-baked and was rolled out without proper notification. (It certainly wasn't urgently needed; one becomes rather adept over the years at estimating summary length and trimming as needed.) Rivertorch^FIRE _WATER 18:19, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

@Rivertorch: Agreed, generally. --Izno (talk) 18:31, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

@Jytdog: Having feelings about an (un)expected change is understandable. Communicating that in a non-collegial manner (that is, dripping sarcasm and obvious lack of research) is not. I am perturbed that you did not state an issue with his behavior but instead targeted my response, but sure, I'll move along. --Izno (talk) 15:11, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

User:Izno this was not feelings about an unexpected change - it is frustration with a change that broke something I rely on for every edit I make, that adds a "feature" that provides no value for me. Your initial responses were helpful and provided information. These last responses have not been helpful but are causing "feelings" that are decidedly not good. Jytdog (talk) 05:12, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Make it stop

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T169982

Please kill this counter. It is turning my edit notes into garble. This is so unbelievably stupid. TURN THE COUNTER OFF.Jytdog (talk) 03:00, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

This issue is being worked on. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The counter should be removed and made an option for people who want to see how much space they have left. I do not want this clutter. Removing it should be simple and fast, no? Whatever it takes to fix it can be worked out at leisure then, and It can be re-implemented as an option. Jytdog (talk) 13:13, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The counter gets in the way of editing on a mobile / tablet and makes it impossible to leave a meaningful edit summary when reverting an edit using the web interface on an iPhone. For example:

Undid revision 12345689 by Example (talk) consensus on the talk page is that this information violates the biographies of living persons policy and should not be used.

Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 09:43, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

It stopped!! Thank you devs, very much. Such a relief not to have to fight with the software to leave an edit note. We take simple things that work for granted, so I wanted to be sure to say thanks. I would prefer not to have the counter re-implemented but if it must be, please keep it out of the way. Jytdog (talk) 21:42, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Hello again, Jytdog. Recently, the number counter has been reinserted per Phabricator task, which was about fixing the bug itself... maybe? I think filing a Phabricator task to disable the feature is not a good start as it needs consensus. Some of the tasks that I started got rejected (for various reasons, I think). I sense some disdain toward the counter, but I don't think the Technical subpage is the right place as this is a mere complaint rather than an error report. I wonder whether you or I can propose adding the user option to opt-out/opt-in the number counter in the editing page at the WP:Village pump (proposals). You can see how my advice led to a proposal discussion. Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 08:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah i saw it when they reinstated it. it stays out of the way now so i no longer HATE it. now it is just a distraction that i would just as soon not have but cannot get exercised over... Jytdog (talk) 13:26, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Cancel button no longer a button

Why is the Cancel button no longer a button, just a bolded red text link?

What on earth is that about? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:20, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The link has changed colour and size, but it wasn't a button before: 2014 screenshot -- John of Reading (talk) 09:29, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The word "Citations", also without button, is floating just above the line between "Show changes" and "Cancel". (Monobook, desktop, current Firefox): Noyster (talk), 12:32, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

That sounds like you have a user script or gadget that needs updating. Anomie ⚔ 12:45, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

The color change was not a good idea, because now it looks like a redlink, instead of just an editing page option. kennethaw88 • talk 00:00, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Well... to experienced Wikipedians perhaps.. to the rest of the world, probably not as much. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:05, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

It may not have been a button before but it looked okay then. It doesn't now. It looks wrong. Jason Quinn (talk) 10:19, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: In Vector it is a bit more readable - do we have an wiki-side options for increasing the font weight in monobook? — xaosflux ^Talk 11:35, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I've added bolding to the cancel button in MediaWiki:Monobook.css. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:44, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Jason Quinn, I agree entirely. The new implementation is visually, and cognitively jarring. "Cancel" is an option at least as important as "Save" or "Preview". For workflow option choices such as this my brain would expect to be choosing between a set of equally prominent buttons, or a set of equally prominent links, not an odd, indiscriminate mixture. If it was "wrong" before then it never really caught my attention as such, so, for me at least, it must now be more jarringly "wrong" - probably due, in part, to the increased prominence of the buttons. I use vector. -- Begoon 11:44, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Shortened edit summary

Nobody else seems to have mentioned it, so I will: Since the implementation of the accessible save buttons, the length of the edit summary seems to have been cut in half. I usually edit on a Windows 7 machine using 64-bit Firefox 54.0.1, using WikEd and these scripts; here is my CSS. Any suggestions? If I undo an edit, the automatically generated portion of the edit summary (the diff number and the links to the editor's contribs and talk page) take up more than half the length of the (shortened) edit summary. Thank you. — Malik Shabazz ^Talk/_Stalk 02:47, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

I was wondering about that, but I think it's unchanged. There is a bug in that when scripting is disabled in the browser, there is no visible cursor in the edit summary box once the cursor hits the end of the box (129 characters in my browser window at the moment—that depends on how wide the window is). I can continue typing (with no visible cursor) until 200 bytes have been entered. I think that is the same as it used to be, although 255 bytes are available when scripting is enabled. Johnuniq (talk) 01:40, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

The 200-byte limit was lifted for everybody with the release of MediaWiki 1.17 back in February 2011; making this gadget somewhat redundant (it's no longer listed at Preferences → Gadgets). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:42, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

OK, but I tested before posting my comment above, and 200 bytes is all I can put in an edit summary box with scripting off, and 255 with it on. Johnuniq (talk) 09:57, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

I think it is just wikEd racing the oojs ui. If wikEd is first, it gets 200 limit (because that is the fallback if OOjs UI has not finished enhancing the view). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:06, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Thank you all for your comments and assistance. I tend to agree that it's probably a conflict with WikEd, because it doesn't happen on every edit. Just the ones for which I need a long edit summary.

— Malik Shabazz ^Talk/_Stalk 02:02, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

No preview of edit summary with live preview

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T171156

I'd like to also express my disapproval of the new bigger "Save changes" etc buttons. More importantly though, I no longer get a the preview of edit summary that I used to get when I clicked "Show preview" or "Show changes". I use the MonoBook skin, but the same problem occurs when I switch to Vector. The preview of the edit summary itself is quite useful because I frequently include wiki-links in my edit summaries - most often to the relevant MOS guideline shortcut (eg MOS:BOLD) when editing pages to meet those guidelines. The summary preview showed me a clickable link (red if I've mistyped it) which I can ctrl-click (open in new tab/page) to check. Can we have the summary preview put back please. Mitch Ames (talk) 09:52, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

When I try it, in both Monobook and Vector, the preview shows up just under the edit summary input. I don't think it has even moved due to this change. Anomie ⚔ 12:11, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

If I try in in a "private browsing" window, so I'm effectively not logged in, the preview appears, so perhaps there's something in the new style that conflicts with one or more of the settings in my preferences. I could reset them all to defaults and work through them all, but that will be tedious. Does anyone have any suggestions as to specific settings to try? Mitch Ames (talk) 13:34, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Mitch Ames, if you are using the Live Preview option of your preferences, then there is currently a bug where the preview of the summary doesn't work. This is ticket phab:T171156. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks - that's the cause in my case. I do have live preview enabled, and if I disable it the summary preview reappears. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:22, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T172844

By the way, does anybody know how to get "Templates used in this preview" working with "live preview"? Now it shows "Wikidata entities...", "...member of categories" and a rather useless "Parser profiling data", but not the templates, so getting to template documentation is a nontrivial task. (In :ru, "live preview" is invoked by a different button, so a "regular" preview can still be easily done as a work-around. But why can't it just work properly?). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:42, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Show Preview and Show Changes on a single button

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41666

Since everyone's focused on this general topic, can I renew my plea for a single button that will give "Preview" and "Changes" at the same time? It's such a perfectly obviously useful thing, and there should be zero design issues. I'll just sit here and hold my breath until that's done. Thanks. E Eng 13:43, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ:: What's the status of your experimental script for this? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ:, I'd kill for this feature. E Eng 12:53, 29 July 2017 (UTC) Note: Not actual threat to kill anyone.

You didn't say that you'd kill a person. How about killing off your choice of maintenance categories instead? ;-) Weeding the stale templates out of Category:Pages actively undergoing a major edit looks a fair trade, if the script is still viable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:56, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Completely fair. I'll do it in dribs and drabs ~~today~~ over the next few days (visitors). E Eng 13:29, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

A month of visitors, it turns out. I sure hope you're ready to make good on your side of the bargain. I'm counting on you. E Eng 17:26, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

August can be like that. Please give it a try before you get any further; it may do more than what you want, or it may have broken in the last four months (since the last edits). The installation instructions are at User:TheDJ/Actual Live Preview. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:03, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

With continued apologies for not having upheld my end of the bargain (yet), that's not at all what I'm looking for. Normally, when editing, below the edit window there are four buttons: Save changes; Show preview; Show changes; Cancel. I want an additional button (or maybe it replaces Show preview and Show changes) called Show changes and preview, which gives you the diff (like Show changes gives you) at the top, a preview (like Show preview gives) in the middle, and then the edit window at the bottom. This way, I can review how my unsaved version diffs from the current live version of the page and I can preview the rendering of my unsaved version, at the same time. This seems so perfectly obviously desirable that I'm astounded it's not just the way it was designed in the first place, instead of (as we have now) two separate buttons forcing you to choose which of two ways (diff vs. rendered) to review before saving. E Eng 13:17, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

If anyone's still curious, I've retooled my four-year old script that does just this. Should be working again. :) Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 05:48, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

@Writ Keeper: This works wonders, thanks! I would second EEng's request to display changes at the top of page, then preview, and finally edit window. The reason is that diffs are generally small whereas article or section preview can be several screenfuls; with diffs on top, they are easier to quickly review for typos and such. — JFG ^talk 06:53, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

@JFG: done! Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 13:22, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Splendid! — JFG ^talk 15:18, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD! EVERYONE INSTALL IT!

mw.loader.load("https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=User:Writ_Keeper/Scripts/previewAndDiff.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript");

E Eng 22:15, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Citation expander

The Wikipedia:Citation expander gadget adds as "Citations" link that hasn't been beefed up for the new button scheme. Would somebody more familiar with whats going on with the buttons right now be willing to file a phab report about that? Jason Quinn (talk) 14:51, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

@Smith609: I assume that you don't actually want a Phab task about MediaWiki:Gadget-citations.js. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

I came here to report something about this, too. The "Citations" button is no longer a button, but just the word "Citations", in a very small font, in a superscript position for some reason, and it doesn't even look like a link, much less a button (conditions: Mac OS 10.12, Chrome 59). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:37, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

I don't know what a Phab task is, but it looks like the link has now been buttonified? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:26, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Delete page

The Delete page button looks like a redlink. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:53, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Replacing a template with another one when rendering a page using user JS?

Hi there. Okay, basically, what I want to do is to replace the {{Find sources AFD}} template with a customized template (like {{User:SoWhy/find more sources}}) on AFDs I view without touching the AFD's template itself (so I can add resources available to me for a quick check). Is this actually possible or does Javascript only allow manipulation of the HTML generated (which is a bit tricky afaict since the template has no id to get)? If the latter is true, is there a way to get the whole code block and replace it? I have a function in PHP that allows selection between two strings but I have no JS skills whatsoever, so my next question would probably be if someone could create such a script for me Regards So Why 07:06, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

I believe you can get the raw wikitext with a call to the API (I don't know if you can display another template's wikitext), but it might be easier for you simply to change the DOM. It doesn't look like the find sources template emits any sort of class to identify its use, which would be the first improvement; once that is changed, you can probably replace the generated HTML pretty trivially by selecting on the element class and then adding some generated HTML of interest. --Izno (talk) 12:49, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Assistance requested to fix a few hundred dead links

CEEOL have identified that the majority of their approximately 450 links on Wikipedia are now dead links because of a website restructure. They're in the process of compiling a list of replacement links to send to me, but I need some community assistance in replacing all these links with their new URL. If you have the expertise/desire to fix these links in a (semi-) automated way please let me know! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 10:45, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

@Samwalton9 (WMF): Can InternetArchiveBot take care of that? I don't know if it runs automatically, but it's operated by @Cyberpower678: and @Kaldari:. — Maile (talk) 11:48, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps, though IABot does a lot more than simple replace one link with another. I have a list of pages, the old link, and the new link, it just needs something to run through the list and simply replace the text. It might want to be semi-automated so that any dead link templates can be removed too though. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 12:11, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

For simple text replacement, WP:AWB is your friend.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:19, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Make a WP:Bot request; a number of AWB users watch there for AWB-able cases (which this is one). --Izno (talk) 12:57, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Izno, will do once I've got the full data! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 13:08, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Large revdel error?

Hi all, I was trying to revdel (for copyright reasons) a mass of edits at Jamai Raja (TV series), from 16:21, September 16, 2016‎ (UTC) to 16:09, September 8, 2017‎ (UTC). This took a few minutes of clicking. When I clicked the Change visibility of selected items button, Chrome returned "This site can’t be reached - wiki.riteme.site unexpectedly closed the connection. ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED". Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:21, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Sounds like a temporary failure - try again. Try a single revision first, to make sure there isn't something else going on as well. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:31, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

I have had a problem when trying to do large chunks of articles. If I break it into smaller around 200 edits, it works. ~ GB fan 16:41, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Thumbnail not displaying

On British baseball, File:Wales Vs England Baseball International ball.jpg won't display. Any ideas? ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:22, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Works for me Maybe it was https://upload.wikimedia.org/ being slow again. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:45, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

@Redrose64: https://screenshots.firefox.com/McTzPHHZq9c8m2gb/wiki.riteme.site ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:52, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

@Koavf and Redrose64: I meant to comment on this -- at the time Koavf reported this, I saw the image on British baseball, but when I clicked on it to show it in MediaViewer or view the file page, it wasn't there. I do see it now, though. Anyway, JudeccaXIII is apparently having a similar issue with File:WikiFilterLogo.png, see their post on my talk page. Someone else reported the same issue to me almost 2 years ago, so I don't think this is a new bug, or maybe it's a regression. Trying to search Phabricator but haven't found anything yet... — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:29, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: It seems your topicon has updated, and I'm able to view the updated file now when I click on the image on my user page. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 22:38, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

For what it's worth, it displays just fine now. Thanks all. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:25, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

API:Imageinfo returns null for &iiprop=comment

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175443

Lately, I have been getting back null for the comment value when making this (action=query&format=json&prop=imageinfo&titles=File%3AExample.jpg&iiprop=timestamp%7Cuser%7Ccomment) Imageinfo API query on File:Example.jpg. I'm expecting to see "Minor tweak to text placement; diminish image height by 1 pixel.". Could someone help confirm if this is a MediaWiki bug, or if I am doing something wrong? Thanks, FASTILY 23:34, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

That should work...I can replicate the lack of a comment every image I give it. I'm not finding anything in Phabricator about it either, you may well have stumbled onto something here. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 02:23, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi 😂. Thanks for the input; I just opened phab:T175443. Regards, FASTILY 06:00, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Edit conflict options spoiling my edit

I just met an edit conflict. I now have to manage two columns, seven colors, twelve options, and still cannot get it. Right now, a straight F*K YOU is appropriate. -DePiep (talk) 00:38, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

What are you going on about? Edit conflict management is a lot better now. On the right is the current version of the page. On the left in yellow are your changes. I haven't had an edit conflict in a while, but I believe the changes made by the editor who caused the conflict will be highlighted blue. Amaury (talk | contribs) 00:41, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I said: it is NOT better. I see lots of colors, dozens of options, and loads of textual 'helps'. Two columns, five text squares. Fussed texts. Texts talking about "your text" — which is invisible. -DePiep (talk) 00:46, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

It's not even a process (wizard, step-through). -DePiep (talk) 01:05, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Wait, isn't the new edit-conflict interface opt-in-only, under beta features? I agree that the old one was plain awful, and I generally had to resort to going back in my browser to retrieve my edit manually. —Cryptic 02:52, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it's normally opt-in (at Preferences → Beta features); but if DePiep has "Automatically enable all new beta features" set at the top of that page, it becomes opt-out - but they can't turn off individual beta features without turning off "Automatically enable all new beta features" as well. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:16, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

{{Archive box collapsible}} seems to be broken when using Google Chrome

Template talk:Archive box collapsible

Transcluding issue here for help, please.

UPDATE: I just looked at {{Collapse}} and have the same issue. What should be expandable sections don't display the [show] button. So it's apparently something to do with the way Chrome handles that function. Thanks for any help that can be offered!—D'Ranged 1 | VT^alk : 10:09, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Works for me in Google Chrome 61.0.3163.79 on Windows 10. Try updating Chrome and restarting the computer. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:20, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Most of the time, it means one of your userscripts/gadgets/browser extensions broke. I didn't fully look into your scripts, but at least this from User:D'Ranged_1/vector.js was causing you fatal errors on every page load. Please regularly evaluate what you use, and if it creates errors in your browser's console. See also: Help:Locating broken scripts. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:37, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Proposal: XTools ArticleInfo gadget

Hello! The XTools team is happy to announce the revival of the popular XTools gadget. Before this was offered as a user script (meta:User:Hedonil/XTools), but now we'd like to propose it as a proper gadget here on the English Wikipedia, meaning you could turn it on in your gadget preferences. The gadget will work with all skins. Here's a screenshot:

Documentation can be found at mw:XTools#ArticleInfo gadget. If you'd like to try it out now, add the following to your common.js (or global.js to install for all wikis):

mw.loader.load('//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=XTools/ArticleInfo.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

Thank you for your consideration! — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:44, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Seems useful, works, no objections from my part. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:07, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Agree with TheDJ. Can't hurt to have as a gadget. Regards So Why 07:57, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Done I'm hoping this is OK based on this limited but positive feedback :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 01:45, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: Could you change the HTTP links to HTTPS links? Jc86035 (talk) 11:27, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

All the links are using HTTPS for me, except the links to XTools itself. I'm not sure why our framework isn't returning HTTPS when we're querying the service over HTTPS, but either way phab:T170989 will redirect any non-secure requests to HTTPS. We'll hopefully have that done before too long — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:22, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Template vandalism somewhere

Hey detectives, I know that there's some template vandalism somewhere, but I'm having trouble tracking it down. I was searching for spam links to songsportalhd.tk. There are three articles that contain the links,

The links appear numerous times in various sidebar templates, however I don't see the links in any of those template, so I surmise they're being transcluded from somewhere else. Your help is appreciated. And if you figure it out, I'd appreciate a quick note on how you solved it. Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:43, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I think I figured it out. A page purge seems to have cleared them. The offending party edited Template:Linkexist... Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:51, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

API:Imageinfo returns null for &iiprop=comment

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175443

Lately, I have been getting back null for the comment value when making this (action=query&format=json&prop=imageinfo&titles=File%3AExample.jpg&iiprop=timestamp%7Cuser%7Ccomment) Imageinfo API query on File:Example.jpg. I'm expecting to see "Minor tweak to text placement; diminish image height by 1 pixel.". Could someone help confirm if this is a MediaWiki bug, or if I am doing something wrong? Thanks, FASTILY 23:34, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

That should work...I can replicate the lack of a comment every image I give it. I'm not finding anything in Phabricator about it either, you may well have stumbled onto something here. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 02:23, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi 😂. Thanks for the input; I just opened phab:T175443. Regards, FASTILY 06:00, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Edit conflict options spoiling my edit

I just met an edit conflict. I now have to manage two columns, seven colors, twelve options, and still cannot get it. Right now, a straight F*K YOU is appropriate. -DePiep (talk) 00:38, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

What are you going on about? Edit conflict management is a lot better now. On the right is the current version of the page. On the left in yellow are your changes. I haven't had an edit conflict in a while, but I believe the changes made by the editor who caused the conflict will be highlighted blue. Amaury (talk | contribs) 00:41, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I said: it is NOT better. I see lots of colors, dozens of options, and loads of textual 'helps'. Two columns, five text squares. Fussed texts. Texts talking about "your text" — which is invisible. -DePiep (talk) 00:46, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

It's not even a process (wizard, step-through). -DePiep (talk) 01:05, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Wait, isn't the new edit-conflict interface opt-in-only, under beta features? I agree that the old one was plain awful, and I generally had to resort to going back in my browser to retrieve my edit manually. —Cryptic 02:52, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, it's normally opt-in (at Preferences → Beta features); but if DePiep has "Automatically enable all new beta features" set at the top of that page, it becomes opt-out - but they can't turn off individual beta features without turning off "Automatically enable all new beta features" as well. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:16, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

{{Archive box collapsible}} seems to be broken when using Google Chrome

Template talk:Archive box collapsible

Transcluding issue here for help, please.

UPDATE: I just looked at {{Collapse}} and have the same issue. What should be expandable sections don't display the [show] button. So it's apparently something to do with the way Chrome handles that function. Thanks for any help that can be offered!—D'Ranged 1 | VT^alk : 10:09, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Works for me in Google Chrome 61.0.3163.79 on Windows 10. Try updating Chrome and restarting the computer. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:20, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Most of the time, it means one of your userscripts/gadgets/browser extensions broke. I didn't fully look into your scripts, but at least this from User:D'Ranged_1/vector.js was causing you fatal errors on every page load. Please regularly evaluate what you use, and if it creates errors in your browser's console. See also: Help:Locating broken scripts. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:37, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Proposal: XTools ArticleInfo gadget

Hello! The XTools team is happy to announce the revival of the popular XTools gadget. Before this was offered as a user script (meta:User:Hedonil/XTools), but now we'd like to propose it as a proper gadget here on the English Wikipedia, meaning you could turn it on in your gadget preferences. The gadget will work with all skins. Here's a screenshot:

Documentation can be found at mw:XTools#ArticleInfo gadget. If you'd like to try it out now, add the following to your common.js (or global.js to install for all wikis):

mw.loader.load('//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=XTools/ArticleInfo.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

Thank you for your consideration! — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:44, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

Seems useful, works, no objections from my part. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:07, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Agree with TheDJ. Can't hurt to have as a gadget. Regards So Why 07:57, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Done I'm hoping this is OK based on this limited but positive feedback :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 01:45, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: Could you change the HTTP links to HTTPS links? Jc86035 (talk) 11:27, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

All the links are using HTTPS for me, except the links to XTools itself. I'm not sure why our framework isn't returning HTTPS when we're querying the service over HTTPS, but either way phab:T170989 will redirect any non-secure requests to HTTPS. We'll hopefully have that done before too long — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:22, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Template vandalism somewhere

Hey detectives, I know that there's some template vandalism somewhere, but I'm having trouble tracking it down. I was searching for spam links to songsportalhd.tk. There are three articles that contain the links,

The links appear numerous times in various sidebar templates, however I don't see the links in any of those template, so I surmise they're being transcluded from somewhere else. Your help is appreciated. And if you figure it out, I'd appreciate a quick note on how you solved it. Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:43, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I think I figured it out. A page purge seems to have cleared them. The offending party edited Template:Linkexist... Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:51, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Image in the Zoey Deutsch article

I recently removed a probably copyvio image from the local Zoey Deutch (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article. Checking the links of that image on Commons, I noticed that the Ukrainian version of the article has the same image, but the image is newer than the article. The image was uploaded on 3 September 2017, yet the article version on 14 March 2017 also displays the image. I also checked the infobox of the Ukranian article in edit mode and there is no image link in it. Please see uk:Зої Дойч. How can that happen? The Russian article has similar image-display characteristics. Please see ru:Дойч, Зои. Dr. K. 16:48, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Infoboxes can be configured to automatically display an image based on a Wikidata parameter. My first guess is that is what is happening here. -- Ed (Edgar181) 18:54, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Edgar. In that case, if the image is a copyvio it still gets to be displayed. That's a problem. Dr. K. 18:55, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

The image can be nominated for deletion at Commons and in the meantime, this edit at Wikidata could be reverted. -- Ed (Edgar181) 19:05, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

admicos.cf

I'm about to look into an email sent to Wikimedia that refers to the following page:

//en.wiki.admicos.cf/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial

It certainly looks like Wikipedia but I don't recognize "admicos.cf"

Can someone enlighten me?--S Philbrick (Talk) 20:36, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

"Recent changes" shows it's a live mirror of the English Wikipedia. See meta:Live mirrors. It's not made by the Wikimedia Foundation. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:53, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't know what the email is about but it may apply equally to our own Randomized controlled trial. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:55, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for both comments. I think the email does refer to our own article by the same name, but I was thrown by the URL and wanted to learn more about it before responding.--S Philbrick (Talk) 21:50, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata description editing in the Wikipedia Android app

Wikidata description editing is a feature being rolled out on the Wikipedia app for Android. While this primarily impacts Wikidata, the change also addresses a concern about the mobile versions of Wikipedia. Now the mobile users will be able to directly edit the descriptions shown under the title of the page and in the search results from the Wikipedia app. We began by rolling out this feature months ago to a pilot group of Wikipedias in the beginning (Russian, Hebrew, and Catalan), then to all the others, and have seen very positive results including numerous quality contributions in the form of new and updated descriptions, and a low rate of vandalism. We are now ready for the last phase of rolling out this editing feature, which is to enable it for English in a few weeks.

As always, if you have any concerns, please reach out to us on wiki at the talk page for this project or by email at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks!

Elitre (WMF) (talk) on behalf of-DBrant (WMF), 13:31, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

We have recently removed the Wikidata description from the mobile site, see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 138#Rfc: Remove description taken from Wikidata from mobile view of en-WP, where the reading team agreed to turn this off. Either this description is not visible in the app, in which case this new "feature" will do absolutely nothing here, or it will at the same time make the description again visible, which would be rather surprising and premature. Like I said at the RfC, this is the wrong solution for this problem (but a typical effort in pushing Wikidata instead of looking for the easiest and best solution). Descriptions, being language-dependent, don't belong in Wikidata, which is meant for common things across language versions. Descriptions should be (if we need them at all) stored on local wikis, where changes to them will be much easier and faster spotted by people fluent in the language and actualy watching the article, and then wouldn't require an extra "edit wikidata through this link" on every page.

Please don't rollout this "feature" here.

Oh, and I don't edit Mediawiki, and these discussions should be out in the open, not done by email, so please check concerns here instead. Fram (talk) 14:07, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Fram, I think some clarification will help here, but definitely let us know (I know you will ;)) if you continue to have concerns. Wikidata descriptions have been in the Android and iOS apps for several years now and we are talking about a feature in the Android app that will allow a user to edit what they see. For the apps, this makes the feature more robust, solving a primary concern people have raised about having something appear that previously could not be edited from Wikipedia. We have launched it in all languages except English (English is our last) and the contribution quality and rate has been stunning. The mobile web is a different situation: Wikidata descriptions were launched on the mobile web of en-WP in January of 2017, and the RFC in March was to remove them from mobile web of en-WP, which we did. We are not talking about rolling any new features out onto the mobile web at this time.

As to the overall issue mentioned in the RFC about wikidata description storage in the first place, I agree that descriptions, being language specific, add the least marginal value to being in Wikidata--I think the argument for having them becomes one of simply storing all of the structured data in one place. If we store them instead on each Wiki, it becomes very hard to pull it, as each project uses different rules, etc and Wikidata is expressly designed to store this effectively. But you are right that there are downsides, which the team has acknowledged from the beginining. If we make it so that you can edit it from Wikipedia and you can track it from wikipedia (as though it were an article edit), I think we can get the benefits without the downsides of storing it on Wikidata. This feature is a step in the direction of mitigating an issue that has been there for several years as we progress towards making it even better. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Let me get this straight (as I may misunderstand): when we discovered that Wikidata descriptions were shown in mobile (which most admins and editors, being editors, don't use that often if ever), we got you (WMF) to remove it after some discussion. But no one at your side thought to inform us that the same descriptions, with the exact same serious issues, where also shown in the andoid app (and presumably elsewhere), and that they should have been removed there as well at the same time? That's... staggering.

The feature doesn't make this "more robust", that's like calling two snowflakes more robust than one; it makes it marginally less problematic, while adding a link and siphoning mobile editors to Wikidata, which is problematic (as these editors now will have to learn mutliple editing environments instead of one, with different approaches and policies (or in the case of Wikidata, a severe lack of them)).

Please first remove the Wikidata descriptions from anywhere they are shown on enwiki, and then discuss a) solutions and b) timelines to roll them out. Fram (talk) 15:54, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm glad we can at least agree that the present change (enabling users to edit descriptions in a situation where they already see them, rather than "mak[ing] the description again visible") is a step in the right direction regarding the concerns raised in the context of the RfC, even if we disagree about the step's size ("marginally" - I think it's actually a large and important step; it was listed as blocker back then). Regarding "adding a link and siphoning mobile editors to Wikidata": The new feature is limited to editing descriptions and no other Wikidata content, while keeping the app's full existing Wikipedia editing capability. The feature includes an onboarding experience educating users about what content is appropriate (based on the corresponding content guideline, which does actually exist, despite the insinuation above), plus notifies them if their edit has been reverted. In both aspects, this is ahead of the normal (Wikipedia) editing experience on mobile (web or app).

"when we discovered " - who exactly is "we"? "thought to inform us" - As far as I recall, the fact that the app shows these descriptions had been highlighted and discussed several times on enwiki village pump pages since 2014, both by WMF staff and volunteer editors. And in the context of the withdrawn March/April 2017 RfC, several WMF staff mentioned the app too, e.g. Chris ("They [Wikidata descriptions] are used in the mobile app for searching and in the articles as short descriptions"), and Olga (the product manager of the team responsible for mobile web) who highlighted the exact Android app editing feature that we are talking about now. The need for such a feature was also expressed subsequently in a thread on this very page: "How can I edit the subtitle used in the official (Android) mobile app?".

BTW: '"most admins and editors, being editors, don't use [mobile versions of Wikipedia] that often if ever" - I find that a rather surprising claim. Is there data to back it up? (The fact that most editing happens on desktop does not imply that people make edits are not also using their phones to read Wikipedia in other situations.)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

@Tbayer (WMF): You misunderstood me, I didn't claim that this is "a step in the right direction", I consider it a step in the wrong direction, a band-aid across a festering wound. Please link to the appropriate content guideline which you claim exists. ""when we discovered " - who exactly is "we"?" The enwiki admin and editing community which cares about these things? When I raised this issue for the first time, most editors indicated their surprise (and dismay) about this. ""thought to inform us"" at the RfC, where the WMF indicated that they would remove this from the mobile view. Instead of asking these questions, you could have read the discussion I linked to in my first post, and the discussions linked to from there, like Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive950#Hard_to_detect_mobile_vandalism. Then you would see that this came to many people as a surprise, and that the request was to remove these descriptions from mobile view (without an exception for e.g. the android app). The official communication from the WMF was "Hi all, based on the raised concerns, we have decided to turn the wikidata descriptions feature off for enwiki for the time being." I don't see anything there indicating "but we will keep it on the app, and perhaps on other places as well, haha!". At no time in that RfC was there any indication that this feature was kept alive at the app (and perhaps elsewhere?).

As for that later Village pump discussion; comments include "You can only edit it on what's rapidly becoming my least favorite website, Wikidata", "I will leave it to the community to decide if the spirit of the RFC is being complied with by those results.", "this is not just a problem when viewing a page (which the English Wikipedia community has expressed concerns with) but that this non-enwiki data is also being shown on English Wikipedia search results. Is this being addressed? ". I don't see any enthusiasm for getting that description from Wikidata though. Fram (talk) 06:57, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

So you made an assumption about mobile web and the app being the same thing and now that your assumption is proven wrong you make this someone else's problem ? That doesn't seem entirely fair to me either. I'm sure assumptions were made by multiple people. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:09, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

?? No. I made the assumption that WMF people would be competent and fair. Why I still make that assumption is not clear, I am probably fooled by those that are and forget that usually one encounters the other type (most only lacking one or the other trait, sometimes both). Please indicate how and where at the RfC it was made clear that the app would not be affected by the promised shutdown by the WMF, considering that it was included in the discussion and faced the exact same problems? The RfC was to remove descriptions from mobile view, and one of the ways to get a mobile view of enwiki is through the android app (see List of Wikipedia mobile applications and Help:Mobile access). How you can equate this with "make this someone else's problem" is not really clear. Fram (talk) 09:41, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

We were having an RFC where we directly talked to the mobile WEB team, and hardly ever mentioned the mobile apps (it was clearly in the original complaint, but not so explicit in the RFC). There is also a BIG difference between app development and web development, as releases for the App team are much more involved and rare than for the weekly web releases and they have different product managers and teams. The feature was also already enabled in apps for months, before it was intially brought to mobile web, so I don't think it's illogical for the mobile web product manager to not consider the desired and 'assumed' impact for a totally different team. If you want to be combatitive about something like that, then that is up to you, but I prefer to keep this discussion constructive. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:02, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

No, we were having an RfC where we talked to the WMF, and everyone (bar you) could give a flying fuck what TEAM we were talking with. Furthermore, according to the RfC, our contact at the WMF was someone from the Reading team, not the mobile WEB team or the App team or whatever. I would much like to see some constructive criticism from you here, instead of the obstructive comments you have made so far. When we get a promise from the "WMF reading team" (their words), and when the "Senior Director, Head of Reading" is directly involved as well, I don't think it is really useful or fair to claim that it should have been obvious that we were talking to the mobile web team only, and that they are incapable of contacting other WMF teams to raise our concerns. Fram (talk) 10:11, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm walking away from this 'discussion', as this will not lead to anything good. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:05, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

"Discussion" as in "The DJ tells something wrong, gets corrected, tells something else that's even more incorrect, gets corrected again, and walks away"? No idea why you even bothered to show up. Fram (talk) 11:24, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Before the RfC started, TheDJ actually tried to clarify the issue (in a post you replied to) at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 154#Wikidata description in mobile view on enwiki: "It should be pointed out that the descriptions are used in many more areas (including the mobile app, search results and dozens of downstream tools like https://tools.wmflabs.org/monumental etc). I don't see how turning it off in one place, would move us much forward, and I fear that with reduced visibility of Wikidata labels the problem will become larger instead of smaller." PrimeHunter (talk) 16:11, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Good for him. That doesn't change the mistakes in his above statements, making it seem as if it is our (or my) mistake that this is only turned off in one form of mobile Wikipedia view and not others, because I only talked with the Reading team which obviously only deals with one kind of reading and not others. Urging the WMF to turn the descriptions off in those other areas would be much more useful. Fram (talk) 04:53, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

(Moving and outdenting the following two comments, as they appear to pertain to the original post rather than forming part of the subsequent conversation. --Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:02, 9 September 2017 (UTC))

I can't help but have misgiving about this Having had a rash of image vandalism recently where the vandalism even after purging on the desktop or mobile sites remains visible on the app, we now have the facility to easily vandalise article descriptions that is a) not going to be seen by most people who are in a position to do something about it and b) may remain visible even after the descriptions are corrected on Wikidata. Doesn't sound like the best advert for Wikipedia, and yes I have read the mediawiki page and the protections proposed. Nthep (talk) 21:54, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the logic here. We have seen similar problems with google, apple dictionary and museum websites etc after vandalism. If we don't want to have an open door for vandalism, get pending changes introduced already and stop pretending that we are an open wiki. As long as make things as complicated for ourselves as we do, problems like these are inevitable and you should just file bug reports for them. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:07, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

For the record, the image vandalism was referring to the "In the news" problem reported above, now being investigated at phab:T174993. This looks unrelated to the descriptions (it's a different part of the app and a different data source).

In general, vandalism is of course always a possibility, both on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Enabling users to fix it if it happens (or to make other improvements) is in fact among the benefits of this new editing feature on the app. Conversely, ensuring that contributions via that new button aren't becoming a major new source of vandalism on Wikidata has been very much on the team's mind when developing the feature. (As a reminder, the main (Wikipedia) article content has been editable from the app for a long time.)

At this point, over 60,000 description edits have already been made with this app feature; and we have been monitoring it closely (in particular the revert rate) since February, when it was activated for the first few Wikipedia languages. Nthep, you mentioned that you already looked at feature's documentation page which mentions e.g. the tools that the Wikidata community has made available this year which allow improved monitoring of description edits. There is also a subpage with the results of the data analysis.

When the initial data looked good, the feature was gradually rolled out to more languages. Since July, it has been active on all languages except English. Of course the positive results in the other languages do not offer an absolute guarantee for English, so we're going to monitor the impact of the rollout there as well. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:02, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

There have been plenty of other WMF "improvempents" which have been accepted by all or most other wikis and rejected by enwiki, for whatever reason. Perhaps because we are more critical, perhaps we have more power to actually force the WMF to sometimes accept the negative opinion from here, perhaps beecause the benefit of these new tools and features is much less significant for enwiki than for small language versions (e.g. much of the info on Wikidata comes from four or five big wikis, including enwiki; for small wikis Wikidata may be a source of information, but for enwiki the roles are usually reversed). "In general, vandalism is of course always a possibility, both on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Enabling users to fix it if it happens (or to make other improvements) is in fact among the benefits of this new editing feature on the app." Of course, when you didn't pull this from Wikidata, all vandalism could already be easily monitored and reverted. Removing the Wikidata descriptions from the app, which was what the RfC clearly wanted, would also prevent all description vandalism from reaching enwiki. I really don't care that you are "going to monitor the rollout" when the rollout is not what we want here in the first place. Fram (talk) 07:15, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

This is absolutely unacceptable. This is a governance issue. The WMF has no right whatsoever to interfere with content. The en-WP community made this clear to you people in the RfC that we already had - this also made clear the policy issues with BLP and Verify - these are core policies in en=WP and Wikidata has no such policies. I am stunned to hear that you all interpreted the RfC about mobile in some narrow lawyerly sense. Of course that applies to apps etc.

Do we need to waste the community's time with another RfC?

Again - The WMF has no right to mix and match content among projects. NONE. This is deeply wrong and misguided. Jytdog (talk) 05:16, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Comment - I have the impression that since descriptions are article as well as language-specific so closely bound to articles, a solution may be to provide an optional template allowing to add those at the top of articles (i.e. {{description|1=...}}). Internally it would not matter how those were processed/cached/displayed/stored (including on wikidata), but the source would remain directly as part of the article and managed/patrolled by the same language-specific project editors... —Paleo Neonate – 05:39, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
we said no to this, unambiguously. Jytdog (talk) 05:41, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I have posted about the problem with the Wikidata descriptions at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikidata descriptions still used on enwiki. Fram (talk) 14:38, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Mobile app localization?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175759

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175762

Hello. I'd like to know if and how I can localize the Wikipedia app to show the featured article and picture, in the news, and DYK on the Scots version. --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 17:51, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

@AmaryllisGardener: See mw:Translation of app string resources. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

@AmaryllisGardener: Actually to get the content, which I think is what you mean, you apparently need to configure Featured feeds. We have then on English Wikipedia as well, see https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/MediaWiki:Ffeed —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:45, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: You're right, that was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 16:50, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

@AmaryllisGardener: Once that is done for the featured article please ping me and/or file a Phabricator task with the tag Mobile-Content-Service. Then I'd be happy to test and add the new language to the feed for the apps. Thanks! The other entries are a different: POTD comes from Commons. DYK is not yet included in the feed but it wouldn't hurt to add the appropriate pages to the MediaWiki namespace for it. BSitzmann (WMF) (talk) 16:34, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

@BSitzmann (WMF): I've already done those. Thanks in advance! --AmaryllisGardener ^talk 16:43, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Watchlist fails to report new edits

My watchlist contains roughly 100 items. It's set to show the last thirty days, with nothing hidden, but for a couple of weeks it has only shown "the last 0 changes in the last 720 hours," ie nothing. The pages I watch are hardly Wikipedia's busiest, so I checked to see if, indeed, there might have been no new edits. It turns out there 'have' been new edits all along. Is there something broken, or am I doing something wrong? ARK (talk) 18:04, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 158#Watchlist changes, or if you don't want to search quite so diligently, just above at #Watchlist cuts off at 250 entries. —Cryptic 18:14, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Changing the watchlist preferences did the trick, thanks! ARK (talk) 18:21, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Not sure what to do

Hi there. I'm not sure what to do with this redirect. The article has been deleted here three time. I don't know if the redirect should be reverted or deleted. Thank you. Magnolia677 (talk) 11:20, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

The user that redirected this seems to have been doing lot of redirecting very recently ! Special:Contributions/Zawl. Maybe his account has been hijacked? This needs looking into. Aspro (talk) 17:18, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, maybe an admin should put a block on his account quick, until we find out what's happening. Aspro (talk) 17:22, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Block PDQ. The redirects are still coming ! Aspro (talk) 17:33, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

The account was blocked, but I believe this was the incorrect course of action. Bhad Bhabie was created with substantially more sources than the deleted Danielle Bregoli (personality). Should we not have asked Zawl to explain his thought process before blocking? (he has been unblocked, for the record) 78.26 _{(spin me / revolutions)} 18:59, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-37

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 get a notification when a page you created is connected to a Wikidata item. You can choose to get these notifications in your preferences. Some wikis already had this option. It is now available on all wikis. [6]
The Newsletter extension is now on mediawiki.org. The newsletter extension is for newsletters where you can subscribe by getting a notification when a new issue has been published. It will come to more wikis later. [7]
The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. There is now a new high-priority category: tidy-whitespace-bug. This usually affects templates with horizontal lists. You can read more about using Linter and the Tidy whitespace bug. [8]

Problems

Tech News 2017/36 reported about new filters for edit review coming to watchlists. This was planned to happen last week. It will happen next week instead. [9]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
OOjs UI will be updated. This could affect some icons. You can read more about the changes.

Meetings

You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 13 September 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 12 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can use Electron instead. Most PDFs are already created with Electron. Electron will get missing features before 1 October. You can create books but they will not have all planned features until November or December. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
New filters for edit review are available now on recent changes as a beta feature. Some of those filters and other features will be deployed as default features in the coming weeks. Users will be able to opt out in their preferences. [10]

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

19:15, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Can this 🤔🤔🤔 be prevented?

Technically, is there a simple way of preventing Emojis (or whatever these things are called) being added to articles, leaving articles looking like this ?
If so, where would I ask for such prevention to be implemented? - Arjayay (talk) 17:46, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

This could be done through the use of a rather simple edit filter. Pop over to the requests page -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 17:51, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

As mentioned above, an edit filter would work but I don't see the point, as this wouldn't stop vandalism but would stop instances of the legitimate usage of emoji in articles (which is rare but definitely happens). It would be worth adding a tag for repeating emoji, tho. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:03, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Unwanted emojis in articles seems like a minor issue and not worth stopping with an edit filter, but I think emojis in edit summaries are annoying when they display as color images in watchlists, page histories, user contributions and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:27, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Since this subject came up. Emojis on signatures probably looks cute to the user ... but everytime I see it, I have a knee-jerk reaction that I'm looking at malware popping up with a devilish smile. Maybe Wikipedia should have a policy on displaying emojis, period. I know a lot of online users like these emojis, but I can't help but think Wikipedia has been infested with malware when I see it attached to signatures. — Maile (talk) 18:44, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

There are actually usernames that are emojis. Dr. K. 18:57, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Hehehe 🙃 (more seriously, this would cause huge problems in talkpages). FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 18:54, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

There is already an edit filter for certain unicode emoji ranges added to articles. It gets about 100 hits per day. We filtered these for the same reason we filter people adding "pooop" or "fucker" to articles. No, it won't stop a determined vandal, but experience suggests that a significant fraction of childish vandals give up when a filter objects. Without checking, I would assume that whatever symbol was used isn't part of the ranges that we commonly encounter. Dragons flight (talk) 19:11, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

IMHO, on the basis of damage limitation, if a few editors have to change their fancy signatures, in order to prevent our articles looking like the output of an incontinent fruit machine, they should all be removed, not just from article space, but from all pages. - Arjayay (talk) 19:01, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

A filter for repeating emoji in content namespaces (Article, Template, Category, Module, etc.) would probably be a good idea. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:00, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Finding noindex tag

A reader ticket:2017090610021534 wondered why Giuseppe Mastromatteo has the code:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow”/>

I'm not seeing it, but I also note that a Google search doesn't list this item on the first page so I'm believing it is there. Shouldn't I be able see that tag if I click on edit source?--S Philbrick (Talk) 21:26, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

It's in the html source sent to your browser, not in the wiki source. New articles are noindexed for 90 days unless they are reviewed. See Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing#Indexing of articles ("mainspace"). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:34, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

It'a automatic; the article was created at 17:19, 10 July 2017 so isn't old enough yet. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:36, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. However, I thought unreviewed articles had a tag indicating that they had not yet been reviewed, [Mark this page as patrolled], is my recollection flawed?--S Philbrick (Talk) 21:54, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I see "Curate this article" under Tools in the left pane. If I click that then I get Wikipedia:Page Curation#Curation Toolbar on the right. It includes "Mark this page as reviewed". PrimeHunter (talk) 22:10, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Linking to a result in an on-line database

The GlobIZ website allows me to search for various moth taxa; for instance pasting "Agastophanes" into the search field and clicking on the link gives good information that could be used as a reference. However, that page has the same web address as the search page. Is there a way to link directly to the search result? Is there a way to archive a search result? Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨ 22:07, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Normally I'd say to use their permalink feature, but they don't have a permalink feature. Probably the only option is to cite the page and add a little note saying something like "search for agastophanes to obtain specific data". Nyttend (talk) 22:40, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

You can use the at parameter at Template:Cite web#In-source locations, e.g.:

"GlobIZ search". Global Information System on Pyraloidea. Search on Agastophanes. Retrieved 7 September 2017.

PrimeHunter (talk) 23:29, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the ideas. If there's any other feedback, please ping me as I'm taking this off my watchlist. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 01:54, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Place to contact Wikipedia coders for help

Hi, I was advised that this would be the forum for my request – I was wondering if there was some sort of "centralized location" where editors can place help requests for Wikipedia coders to help them out, if they are unable to do the coding themselves.

There is an issue that I and several other editors who edit articles related to music singles and albums have – the majority of those articles use the {{Single chart}} and {{Album chart}} templates which link to the websites of the chart providers in each country, in order to show the peak chart position that the single/album attained in various countries. Additionally, many articles also use {{Certification Table Entry}} (and its myriad of sub-templates) to link to the certifying body in each country to verify the gold or platinum discs a record has received, and the accompanying implied sales figures.

Because these three templates link to many different sources outside Wikipedia, they tend to be quite dynamic: the websites of chart providers and certifying bodies often get revamped and restructured, frequently leading to a lot of broken links. And because of the necessity to use the archive database of these charts, it's not always as simple as just altering the website address in the template to point to the right place.

The problem is that most of the editors who work on these articles are good at creating content, but unable to modify the templates unless it's a basic fix. And the two editors who created the templates in the first place are no longer active on Wikipedia, so we have to ask for outside help. There are a couple of coders who have very kindly been helping us out as and when they can, but it would be nice if we didn't have to pester the same people over and over again, and just place our requests at a centralized help desk staffed by coders, and whoever has some time available can say, "I'll take a look at it". Thanks for your help. Richard3120 (talk) 13:23, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

There are different types of coding. You can ask for template coding at Wikipedia:Requested templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:28, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Become an English Wikipedia Technical Ambassador today!

Hello fellow wikipedians, I'm writing you as one of the active tech ambassadors for English Wikipedia to ask for help! I would like to encourage you to sign up for a role of Tech Ambassador, you can do so, here and read more on what the role consists of here. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or ask me on my talk page. Ⓩⓟⓟⓘⓧ _Talk 14:23, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Cannot move page that has template-protection for its move protection

Something strange is going on here. The protection levels on move protection for Template:MathSciNet and Template:MR were recently downgraded from "full" (requires an administrator) to "template protection" (must be a template editor). However, when I attempt to move either page, I receive he message "(Green lock) This page is currently protected so that only administrators can move it." with alternatives about how to move these pages. I'm not sure why this is happening: I should be able to move these pages since I am a template editor, and the protection levels for move protection on these pages have been downgraded to template protection. What is going on? Steel1943 (talk) 20:04, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Interesting, you are indeed a template editor, so should be able to move these templates, which as you say have move protection to TE level (and edit protection to semi level). Maybe a recent software change? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:28, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Now I can move both pages. And a template editor has since moved the pages. I suppose there is some lag someplace regarding the protection level change... Steel1943 (talk) 21:18, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I saw (and still see)

WARNING: This page has been protected so that only users with administrative rights can move it.

<log entry>

View full log

I moved it anyway. — JJMC89 (T·C) 22:01, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I removed all protection, made an edit, and restored the TE protection. I don't see the admin-only warning that JJMC89 saw. Could someone with TE rights look at the template now? Nyttend (talk) 22:49, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Nyttend: I still see the same warning. — JJMC89 (T·C) 22:55, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@JJMC89 and Nyttend: Though I am now able to move the page, I also see the warning message JJMC89 referenced above. Steel1943 (talk) 01:17, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

I suppose then the next question is ... what page in the "MediaWiki:" namespace is being called to display the warning message JJMC89 and I see when moving a page with template-protection-level move-protection? Steel1943 (talk) 01:26, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

@Steel1943: It is MediaWiki:protectedpagemovewarning. I think the switch there needs to be on {{PROTECTIONLEVEL:move|{{#titleparts:{{FULLPAGENAME}}||2}}}} instead of {{PROTECTIONLEVEL:move}}. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:19, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

The interface message has been updated. — JJMC89 (T·C) 15:20, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

@Nyttend: In removing all the protection and then re-adding the protection, somehow the edit-level protection was upgraded from confirmed to template editor (without any discussion that I can currently find). I see this request to downgrade the move-level protection from admin/sysop to template editor but I see no discussion of upgrading the edit-protection from confirmed to template editor. Is there a reason for the change and can it be returned to confirmed so confirmed editors can continue editing the template? Thank you. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 09:13, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah, I'm sorry — I see what you mean. When unprotecting and reprotecting, I meant to put things back just as they were; I must have misread the logs, because I thought that the thing had required TE both to edit and to move. [I don't remember ever before seeing TE required to move but autoconfirmed required to edit.] Therefore, when you asked, I thought you were objecting to the very idea of unprotecting and reprotecting, not questioning the reason for the "net upgrade" from semiprotection to TE. Nyttend (talk) 10:47, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate you fixing that as I can now appeal to a larger set of editors to get changes made (more editors can respond to {{edit semi-protected}} than {{edit template-protected}}) and I am sure confirmed editors will appreciate being able to directly edit the template again. Thank you. 50.53.1.33 (talk) 12:09, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

This crashes the database

https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?limit=500&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Flyer22+Reborn&namespace=0&newOnly=1 172.56.3.181 (talk) 01:12, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Oh now it's working. It was failing earlier. 172.56.3.181 (talk) 01:22, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

I doubt that it was "crashing the database". More likely the query was simply timing out. Anomie ⚔ 15:31, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

What Anomie said. There are a few actions that do have the potential to temporarily crash the database, but they're all obscure functions that are at minimum restricted to admins. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Page with wrong latest revision

The revision as of 00:34, 24 July 2010 appears to be the latest revision in the history of User talk:Brendanmccabe/You Lucky Dog (2010 Television Film). However, if you look into the bot's 50 oldest contributions, the revision does not have "(current)" next to it. Also, if you view the 3 user talk pages created by Brendanmccabe, the creation at 18:28, 23 July 2010 has "(current)" next to it. The page's page_latest field in the database was not updated when a new revision was inserted. Finally, the edit summary says "moved", but in fact the page was not actually moved at all. Are there any other pages where the latest revision is wrong? GeoffreyT2000 ^{(talk, contribs)} 01:37, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

The bot tried to move the talk page [11] and associated non-talk page [12] to the same Wikipedia talk page. Only the non-talk page was actually moved. Articles for creation was placed in the Wikipedia talk namespace at the time because IP's could create talk pages but not other pages (the draft namespace is newer). I guess the bot was trying to move the talk page along with the draft in the non-talk page. I don't know what happens today if you select "Move associated talk page" while moving a non-talk page to a talk page. In July 2010 it apparently caused a misleading page history entry in the talk page, at last when a bot did it via the API. I don't know whether there are other cases. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:40, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Can an administrator please fix the problem causing "page_latest" for the above user talk page to be wrong? Try running attachLatest.php on this wiki with "--regenerate-all" set to true, if possible. Otherwise, try deleting and then undeleting the page. GeoffreyT2000 ^{(talk, contribs)} 22:32, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Is there a problem which couldn't be fixed by just making a dummy edit to the page? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:17, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Photography workshop

Resolved sections on this page are not being archived anymore. Could someone please attempt to fix that issue? Thanks. --Leyo 08:25, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

@Leyo: it's because ClueBot III (talk · contribs) is down (again). So it's a problem for the botops, nothing we can do here at VPT. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:54, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

The last archiving was 15 July [13]. ClueBot III has only been down since 25 August. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:16, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, but this disabling of the archiving was not re-enabled until 22:33, 28 August 2017 - after the bot went down. That "temporarily disable autoarchive" on the part of AntiCompositeNumber (talk · contribs) explains the lack of archiving between 15 July and 28 August. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:20, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Oh right. So I wasted a lot of time investigating the situation because Leyo failed to say that archiving had been disabled until two days ago. Sigh. I did look for recent edit summaries mentioning archiving but Leyo didn't say it when enabling it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:39, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

I didn't expect that digging into the history was needed to answer the question. Sorry about that. Let's hope that the issue ClueBot III will get resolved soon. --Leyo 22:13, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

@Leyo: and everyone else, I disabled the archiving because the current configuration will archive every section, as the appears the same as {{resolved}} to ClueBot. The proper way to fix that would be to change the instructions to an edit notice. I started working on one at Template:Graphics Lab/editnotice. Now that I'm back from wikibreak, I'll also be manually archiving the page regularly again, at least until we can get the bot working as intended. --AntiCompositeNumber (Ring me) 01:00, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: I'm having difficulty understanding your phrase "as the appears the same as {{resolved}} to ClueBot". Have you missed something out here? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:23, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Based on the source, AntiCompositeNumber may have tried to display "as the <nowiki/> appears the same as <nowiki>{{resolved}}</nowiki> to ClueBot". I'm not sure what it means but I think I know the archiving problem. The new request link at Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Photography workshop preloads Template:Graphics Lab/new request/preload which includes: . The removed archive instructions [14] said: |archivenow=<nowiki>{{resolved|</nowiki>. See User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis#Optional parameters for archivenow. It causes the bot to archive all sections with the preloaded text because the comment contains the archivenow string.[15]. It was only intended to archive sections where an editor has added {{resolved}}. A possible but inelegant solution would be to complicate the preloaded instructions like: . If a user keeps uppercase {{RESOLVED}} then the template works via a redirect but the bot doesn't archive until an editor changes it to lowercase. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:43, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Exactly. ^{I should really stop using {{subst:CoNo}} and ignoring it in the preview, it seems to cause more trouble than it's worth.} --AntiCompositeNumber (Ring me) 12:12, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Are you aware of the various template-linking templates? The basic one is {{tl}}, but I find {{tlx}} to be more useful, also {{tlxs}}. So in your last comment you could have written {{tlxs|CoNo}} which displays as {{subst:CoNo}}; and earlier on you could have used {{tlx|resolved}} which displays as {{resolved}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:10, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

@Leyo: ClueBot III was restarted at 01:23, 6 September 2017 and archiving of Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Photography workshop occurred at 22:40 the same day. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:33, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, but it's done incorrectly as you can see in the diff you provided. --Leyo 18:53, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

You wanted to know why it wasn't being archived. We explained it. Archiving started again. Why is it now a problem? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:57, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

I explained why it archives too much above and gave a possible but inelegant solution. You have to do something or the same will repeat every day. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:11, 9 September 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: I am not sure if I got your solution right. Could you implement it so that we may see, if it really works? --Leyo 07:41, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Done.[16][17] PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

It worked.[18] Only sections with lowercase {{resolved| were archived. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:55, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Lysteria bot and shadowing

There have been previous discussions about Lysteria bot and non-free images (the most recent one was Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 158#Listeria bot and non-free images) and an attempt to get input from the bot's operator Magnus Manske was made User talk:Magnus Manske#Non-free images being added by Lysteria bot, but the bot still continues to inappropriately add non-free images to pages such as User:Stinglehammer/Gothic writers 3 and User:Jane023/Female novelists in violation of WP:NFCC#9.

The two files it keeps adding this time are File:Stevie Smith.jpg and File:Sylvia Townsend Warner.jpg. Both of these files are/were shadowing Commons files (c:File:Stevie Smith.jpg and c:File:Sylvia Townsend Warner.jpg), but one of the Commons files has already been deleted as a copyvio and the other is nominated for deletion for the same reason. It seems that there should be some way for the bot to distinguish between a freely licensed file or a non-free file; otherwise, any time someone (perhaps in good faith) uploads a copyvio to Commons which has the same name as a local English Wikipedia file, the bot is going to add the local file by mistake.

Files shadowing other files is a problem for sure, and if simply moving the local file is the best solution, then fine; however, moving is kind of pointless when the Commons file is almost surely going to be deleted. In this case, the bot still seems to "think" that the Commons file for Sylvia Townsend still exists, and therefore keeps re-adding what it believe to be a Commons file to the two aforementioned pages. If it simply takes a few days for the bot to get this out of its system, then OK if, however, the bot is going to continue to make the same mistake in perpetuity, then something needs to be tweaked to stop this. I'm sure the bot does lots of good work, but there needs to be some way for it to "realize" to not keep re-adding files which have been removed for WP:NFCCP reasons. Perhaps there's some way to tweak the local file's page (WP:HIDDENCAT or WP:MAGIC) to let the bot know not to re-add the file? -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:08, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

It's because the link to that file wasn't removed from Wikidata yet, see this edit. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:00, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

That's fine and thank you for doing that. The question is then whether the bot can subsequently remove any non-free files it mistakenly adds to pages if the file Commons file being shadowed is deleted and the Wikidata has been edited accordingly or the shadowing local file is subsequently renamed. If it can, then it can self-correct any NFCC#9 problems; if not, then maybe it should be set (if possible) to distingusih between non-free and free to avoid such problems. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:29, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

@Marchjuly: technology can do many things, it just depends how much time you pour into it. If you are asking if it is likely that someone is going to change that specific bot to look for deletions that have been made, then I'd say no. Rather, I think this more points towards the problem that CommonsDelinker currently doesn't remove deleted files from WikiData. This so far has been a minor issue, but i've seen multiple complaints recently, that basically would have been avoided if it did have this capability. I think it is more likely that that bot is adapted and I have left some feedback in the bug system of that project. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:51, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that tweaking another bot might be a way to resolve this, so thank for trying to help sort this out. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:27, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Merging infobox

I was trying to merge {{Infobox Tibetan Buddhist monastery}} with {{Infobox religious building}} but there are too many different parameters. Some of those I am stuck with include |order=, |no._of_monks=, etc. Would anyone like to help? -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 03:01, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

So maybe you shouldn't try to merge them. The same probably is true of {{ infobox XXX church }} and {{ infobox XXX monastery}} (or whatever). What you're trying to do seems to me better done by categorization of the articles involved, and has probably already been done. --Thnidu (talk) 06:00, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Please see the template, then you would know the result of merge discussion. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 12:27, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Bot request

Is it possible to add such cleanup tasks to one f the existing bots or create a bot for such cleanups? These fill up the maintenance cat of unknown parameters unnecessarily. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 12:27, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Even GA level articles has such issues. -- Pankaj Jain Capankajsmilyo (talk · contribs · count) 12:54, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Try Wikipedia:Bot requests. -- GreenC 13:04, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Any problems with nested articles

I have created a nested article, "Reverse surge" which trancludes page "{{:Voltage spike}}" while adding a special top hatnote about others as "...see: Surge". However, I wonder are there problems with bottom categories, or other technical issues to beware with nested articles? -Wikid77 (talk) 22:11, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

It would create almost identical articles and we don't do this [19] at the English Wikipedia. We redirect the page per WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT, and consider placing {{Redirect}} at top of the target if the redirected term is ambiguous. {{Redirect|Reverse surge||Surge}} would produce:

Reverse surge has been redirected to Voltage spike without using {{Redirect}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:11, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Whoops. Done it. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 14:39, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Why searching for # takes me to the main page?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T28766

Hello. I noticed that putting just the # -symbol to the search box takes me to the main page. Adding text after the # -symbol takes me to that section of the main page, say searching for <#Today's featured picture> takes me to Today's featured picture section of the main page. Adding nonsense after the # simply returns the main page. Just wondered why this happens. Voltteri (talk) 19:17, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

This is phab:T28766. See Talk:Main Page/Archive 139#Should we add "For technical reasons, .23 redirects here .5B....5D see number sign" for an old discussion about putting a hatnote on the main page. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:31, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Interesting. Thank you for quick response. Voltteri (talk) 19:41, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Range contributions coming soon

I'm excited to announce that today phab:T163562 was deployed to English Wikipedia, allowing you to query for IPv4 or IPv6 ranges at Special:Contributions. It does not support wildcards, but the gadget many of you use will continue to work. The native contributions list will simply be shown below the gadget's results.

However historical data is not yet available, making this feature not-so-useful. Backfilling this data is proving to be a big challenge for a large wiki like English Wikipedia. In the meantime, new edits from IPs (since deploy time) are being stored, so if you see edits when querying for a range such as Special:Contributions/2601:401:503:62b0::/64, this is why :)

There is also a new interface message shown when you are viewing an IP range: MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon-range (which is empty at the time of writing), as opposed to the normal MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon message you see when viewing a single IP. One more important note is that Special:DeletedContributions does not support IP ranges -- yet!

Just wanted to give you a heads up. You can follow phab:T175105 for progress on backfilling the data. I will write back here once it is resolved. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 03:52, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks! Johnuniq (talk) 06:16, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

ACTRIAL beginning today

Just dropping a note to let folks know that WP:ACTRIAL is beginning today around 23:00–24:00 hours. During this experiement, non-autoconfirmed users will be redirected to Wikipedia:New user landing page whenever they follow a red link or otherwise try to create a new article. They will still be able to create new pages in all namespaces except the main article namespace. We expect this will lead to an increase in submissions to Wikipedia:Articles for creation, so any help with reviewing submissions there would be appreciated during the trial (See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Participants). If you're interested in the research aspect of this experiement, please see meta:Research:ACTRIAL. Kaldari (talk) 19:34, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

This experiment has so many nuisances that it will probably be very hard to quantify. Due to the open nature of wikis, a conspiracy theorist could simply claim that those who want this to succeed (or fail) and know how to game the system will be able to do so.

Also, it might be prudent to avoid the same pitfall as mw:PageTriage, a one trick pony that was only deployed here for apparently the same reasons. All improvements to that extension are certainly very hard to justify because they only help this wiki (or other non-wikimedia wikis that managed to get it working). It might be prudent to deploy this tool at least to mediawiki.org, or possibly ask one non-latin based wiki to opt-in. It could even be deployed with a less strict setting that allows users to create articles as normal, but requires them to go through the landing page first. Such a article creation tool should be a basic tool in any wiki, and may even be welcome by many wikis. Although a disclaimer that this may be removed, or that it might not get any new features or bug fixes might be reasonable before allowing any further deployments.

Deploying the tool in at least one extra wiki will provide an extra data source that would somewhat reduce the researcher bias. 21:21, 14 September 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.82.173 (talk)

That precisely makes nil sense.By the way, whose logged-out version are you?Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 10:10, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm very much looking forward to the results of the research. I'm sure it will be open to many interpretations, but at least we will have data. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:46, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Repeating table header

What is the Wikipedia way of repeating the header of a long complicated table such as ro:Păsările_Republicii_Moldova? so that the reader always knows what is the meaning of the column she/he is reading. Gikü (talk) 07:39, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

There isn't really a methodology for that. You can either repeat the header cells, or create multiple tables. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:40, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Gikü and TheDJ: How about putting the header code into a subpage and transcluding it wherever you want it? Wouldn't that work? Please {{Ping}} me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 23:08, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

@Thnidu: Mainspace doesn't have subpages so it should be a template. It would work. I don't know whether it limits the ability to edit the table with VisualEditor but there should be no problems in the source editor. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:56, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Templates are intended for multiple-page use, so a template for a single table's column-headers is likely to be deleted, although extremely useful templates for thousands of pages tend to get deleted more than hundreds of peculiar one-off templates. Also perhaps use bold-row token "!" on all header rows, to help other editors notice the column-headers are being repeated. Beware repeat headers in sort-able tables, where the extra headers are likely to sort in strange places. You really want a vertical-scroll table region with fixed stationary headers. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:14, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Scroll wide tables for mobile-phone viewing: If the table might get over-wide, then also consider wrapping entire table inside an extra div-section, as an auto-scrolled table to fit smaller handheld devices, by:

  <div style="width:auto; overflow:scroll">
  {|...
  |}</div>

That div section places the entire table in a scrollable region (on narrow screens) and prevents the tabular format from squeezing the page text as tiny-font, half-screen width on some mobile phones. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:14, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

The mobile version of the websites already does this. You shouldn't do it manually. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:51, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

The original post was about the Romanian Wikipedia ro:. They may have other policies or no relevant policies. Here we dislike single-use templates but I'm not sure we are against single-page templates with multiple uses on that page. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:26, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Indigenous territories of Costa Rica

Could you fix image and its description?--Kaiyr (talk) 09:02, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

@Kaiyr: Each Wikipedia language has its own templates like {{legend}}, and parameters are often different. You can usually not copy template calls directly from other languages. I have fixed it.[20] PrimeHunter (talk) 10:53, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Email notifications linking pages with parenthetical disambiguators broken?

I'm not sure if it's just my email provider (yahoo.co.jp), but I noticed some time ago (and have largely been ignoring it) that the diffs of "this change" when someone edits a page on my watchlist that happens to include parentheses in the title are always broken, as the link cuts off mid-title; I have been getting emails saying that

To view this change, see

https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_health_(2nd_nomination)&diff=next&oldid=800898836
which I imagine would be really annoying if the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cultural health (2nd nomination) were more active and I was receiving piles of useless emails with links to the wrong page.

Any idea why this is? Is it a project-wide problem or is it because of the specific email address at which I am receiving the notifications? Sorry if this has come up before, but I couldn't find it on a brief scan of the archives...

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 22:13, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

The mail is sent as plain text saying

https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_health_(2nd_nomination)&diff=next&oldid=800898836

. Mail software (and other software like MediaWiki itself) will often try to convert some text strings to links, e.g. if they start with https://. It's common that they guess a link stops before certain characters like "(" and ".". MediaWiki gets this one right: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_health_(2nd_nomination)&diff=next&oldid=800898836. Help:URL shows percent encoding which could help such software but the link becomes less human readable with encoded characters like %282nd_nomination%29 instead of (2nd_nomination). PrimeHunter (talk) 23:24, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

You can test your mail software by sending this to yourself via Special:EmailUser:

Unencoded plain text:
https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_health_(2nd_nomination)&diff=next&oldid=800898836

Encoded plain text:
https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Cultural_health_%282nd_nomination%29&diff=next&oldid=800898836

Both strings are converted to correct links by my mail service. Sending it with your own mail software may invalidate the test by converting plain text to links before the mail is sent. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:41, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

HELP: Needs Userbox code?

IF Possible - At present, {{User UBX/WikiGlobalEdits}} (or "User:UBX/WikiGlobalEdits" ) on a user page (for example, see userbox below - or - in the middle right column of the "User:Drbogdan" profile) - requires that a specific UserName be manually added to the "Global Edit Counter" ( at https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/ ) - and then - the resulting edit counts needs to be manually added to the template ( for example, {{User:UBX/WikiGlobalEdits|[https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/ 55,002]}} )

This user has made over
55,002 edits on All Wikis.

QUESTION: Is there a way of performing this procedure more automatically - by adding relevant coding?

Thanking you in advance for any help with this - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 21:00, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

You can ask for template help at Wikipedia:Requested templates. I have coded it to automatically make the link based on the page name.[21] Wikitext doesn't have access to edit counts or query results so that part can only be automated if a bot or other tool periodically stores the counts for users of the userbox. They could be stored in a central page like User:UBX/WikiGlobalEdits/counts and automatically be read from there but somebody (not me) would have to code and run the bot. It could be requested at Wikipedia:Bot requests. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:21, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

By the way, the userbox currently says "on Wikipedia" but https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/ includes all Wikimedia wikis, e.g. Commons, Wikidata and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:25, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

There also exists a MediaWiki module to allow a special variable to expand to an edit count but it is not enabled and may never be (it was proposed and challenged, if I remember). There's an optional JS gadget for users to see their count (but that obviously doesn't update it for other editors). —Paleo Neonate – 22:37, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and PaleoNeonate: Thank you *very much* for the *Excellent* comments - and suggestions - they're all *greatly* appreciated - may have to do a bit more homework with this to sort things out - in any case - Thanks again for the help - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 00:19, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Page moves logged twice

If I move a page from name X to page Y, it is logged in the page logs of both pages. OK so far. But as a result, it is also logged twice in my personal contributions list :: is this duplication needed? Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:54, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes. You can't have an action in a page history without it also being an action performed by an individual, and vice versa. Two on one means two on the other; it's like double entry bookkeeping - "for every credit there must be a debit". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:51, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

It may often look redundant in the main user contributions page but it can be filtered by namespace, one of the pages might be deleted so contributions are removed, and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:26, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Infobox font size

As a percentage of the page default, what is the font size for the body of an infobox? For verifiability, where in the code can this be seen? ―Mandruss ☎ 00:17, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

It may depend on the infobox, but the {{Infobox}} template invokes Module:Infobox which source shows a 125% default which also corresponds to the Infobox template documentation (which also shows abovestyle under its CSS section). I hope this helps, —Paleo Neonate – 00:26, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I suspect the question was not about the heading but the fields inside the box. Infoboxes have class="infobox" which sets the size in MediaWiki:Common.css:

.infobox {
...
    font-size: 88%;

PrimeHunter (talk) 00:38, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

"for the body of an infobox" err, yes.

Thanks, —Paleo Neonate – 00:45, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. So, per Template:Small, which says 85%, use of {{small}} within an infobox field produces 74.8% of the page default (0.88 * 0.85), which is below the 85% minimum size specified in the last paragraph at MOS:FONTSIZE. Just wanted to be sure my head is screwed on right about that, and wanted to get the exact numbers. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:00, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Please don't use {{small}} in an infobox; more on a recent similar case at User talk:RexxS#Small caption in infobox. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:49, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

User talk:RexxS#Small caption in infobox says 90% because it is about {{Infobox solar eclipse}} which uses Module:Solar eclipse where the default 88% is overridden with this: ["bodystyle"] = "width:25em; text-align:left; font-size:90%;",. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:12, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Rose, I don't use {{small}} in infoboxes. I wanted to get the exact numbers to support my occasional removals of that. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:32, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-38

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 contributions from an IP range at Special:Contributions. Before you could only see contributions from single IP addresses. Some older contributions from IP ranges could be missing at first because it will take some time to add them. [22][23]
Flow has been re-scoped to become Structured Discussions and the development has restarted. Phabricator projects and repositories have been renamed. [24]

Changes later this week

The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 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 19 September at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 20 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

We are replacing Tidy on Wikimedia wikis. Editors need to fix pages that could break. You can read the simplified instructions for editors. Some wikis have already switched. If your wiki would like to switch to the new format now, you can file a task.

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

15:31, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Commons category not working - links to main page

I have added a commons category template in Sveti Đurađ monastery. Hovering over the created link with my mouse pointer, it links to [25] which seems OK and works fine, when i copypaste the link and use it directly in my browser (in the URL edit field in Firefox). However, when I click the link in the article itself, it leads to [26]. Maybe some kind of conversion problem with the special character in the name or a problem within the template? GermanJoe (talk) 12:47, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

It works for me. The Firefox addon NoScript has done things like this as part of a defense against cross-site scripting in url's.[27] I haven't seen reports for a long time but see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 140#Redirect to Commons on one issue if you have NoScript. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:18, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. Yes, it seems to be the same NoScript problem with parentheses and/or coded characters - disabling NoScript (for a second only) "fixed" the issue (for a second). Oh well, just have to remember it the next time not to bug you again :). GermanJoe (talk) 15:00, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Mysterious random popup

I was at MOS:NBSP and switched to another tab, then switched back; and this popup appeared. I know what a half adder is (have done for 40 years) - my question is, how is it relevant, and where has this come from? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:24, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Oho, it's Thursday! Wacky new features time! --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:29, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I just opened Copenhagen and got 'Would this be useful to someone searching for "List of hospitals in Andorra"'. I'd love to know just who sold the WMF whatever algorithm they're using. ‑ Iridescent 20:33, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Interestingly, we don't even have a list of hospitals in Andorra :-) Nyttend (talk) 22:29, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

But we do have a red link to it in {{List of hospitals in Europe}}. Clicking the link gives an option to search for it. I guess that's how a search got registered and placed in the test, but I have no idea why Copenhagen is suggested. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:42, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

You know what they say about incorrect proclamations. This has nothing to do with Thursday. This wiki is currently still running the prior version of mediawiki. This is likely an A/b test / survey probably to help improve the cirruSearch search engine. 20:38, 7 September 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.89.254 (talk)

You say "A/b test / survey probably to help improve the cirruSearch search engine", I say "yet more fucking about with the interface without consultation or notification". It's probably one of those tricky irregular verbs. ‑ Iridescent 20:45, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

The screenshot includes the string "would they want to read this article". I searched it at Phabricator and got three results: phab:T171740, phab:T171741, phab:T174106. It's an A/B test for Search Relevance. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:15, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, we're currently running a test for Search Relevance (graded by humans); more information can be found in this ticket: phab:T171740 and the most recent test is detailed here: phab:T174106. DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I was reading the Adder (electronics) page when one of these appeared. My thoughts were " — there's a pop-up — how did that get here — it seems to be from Wikiepdia itself — it's asking me a question, I'll try to be helpful — it says 'Would you click on this page ...' — would I ever click on a page? — why might I click on a page? —" and before I could come up with a sensible answer, it vanished again. If this is intended as a way of getting useful feedback from users, it's doomed to failure. Maproom (talk) 17:35, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

This reminds me of the Article Feedback Tool. Yuck. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 19:49, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

The pop-up box is missing an important element - the checkbox or button that says "do not show me this again (ever, on any article)". Mitch Ames (talk) 00:21, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Personally I don't mind cooperating with it. But if it's going to ask tricky qurestions like "Would you click on this page", it ought to be polite enough to hang around until I've figured out what they mean. Maproom (talk) 19:16, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Unexpected popup

While viewing Agarose, a box suddenly appeared in the article, asking "if someone searched for 'red seaweed' would they want to read this article?" I have been unable to find any documentation for this "feature" in Wikipedia, Wikimedia, or Google. The closest I came was an entry in phabricator. Where is the rest of the documentation? What is the extent of this project, in terms of timespan or articles. Comfr (talk) 05:25, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

There is some information at #Mysterious random popup and phab:T174106. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

I was just scrolling down the page of History of Chinese Americans#Arrival_in_the_United_States, and a pop up appeared in the upper right hand side, looking exactly like the screen shot above, except it asked a different question. Obliterated my view of the image of the man with the queue. My first thought was "malware", and then I remembered this thread. Computer users pay for security software that blocks pop ups, and Wikipedia overrides it and makes us look at popups anyway. — Maile (talk) 13:30, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

The wording can vary. I got this on Film producer: "If you searched for 'focal reducer', would this article be relevant?" PrimeHunter (talk) 13:47, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

I got one of these popups, I don't recall where, but as I recall the search term it asked about was exactly the title of the article. I also don't recall what I clicked, there was no button for "whuh?" Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 14:40, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Keep getting asked about search results

Every time I visit the H2S radar page, a pop-up repeatedly appears in the upper right corner of the browser window asking me if this is a suitable article if one is searching for "Lancaster operators". I answer No, trying to be helpful. Then it asks me again. And again. And again. Is this something en.wiki is doing, or is this perhaps a 3rd party plugin? Anyone know what this is? Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:22, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

It's the enwiki test at #Mysterious random popup. Does it repeat if you reload the page? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:29, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I'll check. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:01, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

It does come back after a refresh. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:11, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@Maury Markowitz: there was a bug, where there was a unit conversion problem, causing the popup to think it had been 2 days since the last time it asked you, while actually it had been no more than 172 seconds.. A fix will follow. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:28, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Ok, but why does it ask more than once after I answered? And why only in that article and no others? Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:07, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

I've written a post for the Wikimedia Blog that expands a bit on the reasoning behind the test. As TheDJ pointed out, a bug means you got asked every three minutes instead of every two days. However, I don't think we have anything in place to keep it from asking you on the same article. This is an initial test of the process, so I'll add that to the possible feature list for future versions. Though you are less likely to be on the same article two days later (as opposed to 172 seconds later). As for why that article and no others, the surveys are only on a handful of articles right now, but won't ever be on every article. TJones (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Edit view slow to load

Can anything be done about how slowly the edit view loads and, worst of all, the accompanying jumps as various elements load in succession? It happens too frequently that when I go to click something as edit view is coming up, the page shifts down slightly and I end up clicking on something else. The worst culprits seem to be the bar directly above and below the edit window: "B I ..." and "Insert – — ° ′ ″ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · § ...". Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 01:21, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@Black Falcon: I don't think they can do much about the speed of how it loads, since it's dependent on how fast your computer and network connection are, but you can turn them off in the Gadgets section of preferences. Jc86035 (talk) 03:26, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@Jc86035: I don't think it's my network connection as I can load what should be more resource-intensive pages more quickly. It started, I think, after the edit window acquired its more "modern" look—e.g. the blue "Save changes" button instead of the previous grey version. I'll tinker with my preferences to see if I can improve it. Thanks! -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:34, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Some time ago, I made my edit page loads significantly faster by going to Preferences → Editing and turning off both "⧼tog-showtoolbar⧽" and "Enable the editing toolbar". I also turned on "⧼visualeditor-preference-betatempdisable⧽" (I never use VE apart from trying it in the very early days), just in case the VE javascript is still being sent through when you click "Edit source" - it certainly was at one time. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:06, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@Black Falcon: Which of the many toolbars ? there is a long list. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:18, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I didn't realize there were so many... WikiEditor is the one. It and CharInsert are always the last elements to load. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 14:29, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

@Black Falcon: Can you check your preferences for me ? I suspect you have "Show edit toolbar (requires JavaScript)" disabled... It sounds weird (and it's a bug), but if you enable that, the reflow of at least the toolbar will be less. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 05:22, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: It's enabled; and as far as I recall, it has been. Incidentally, the lag is about 4–5 seconds from when the edit window appears (and I can start typing) to when the WikiEditor toolbar and CharInsert finish loading. Thanks, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:39, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Redrose64, I'll try those tips. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 14:29, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

My Sandbox changed by other editors

Are other editors normally permitted to make changes and deletions in my Sandbox? (cf: User:Dthomsen8/sandbox/Streets/Cherry: Revision history)--Dthomsen8 (talk) 12:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Depends on what the changes are really. Sandbox pages shouldn't appear in categories (unless for short term testing purposes), or contain BLP violations or personal attacks. If the sandbox is intended as a draft/collaborative space, they could also do some copy-editing. I don't consider the redirect as something productive. If the sandbox was derelict (or forbidden per WP:WEBHOST or something), blanking would be more appropriate. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:09, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Or copyright violations, these aren't allowed anywhere. Doug Weller talk 13:16, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

It looks like you copied from the sandbox to the article and not the opposite way but see Wikipedia:User pages#Content copied from mainspace. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:26, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

True, I did, but my concern was that I created the Cherry Street (Philadelphia) article in April, 2015, and liked to have that availabe. In that case, I see that there is a complete history, unlike some other Philadelphhia streets, which were deleted, and returned to me by an Administrator in my Sandbox.--Dthomsen8 (talk) 23:11, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

As you can see, my first edit to that sandbox was to update a category link, before I deleted the old category page. In other cases I have blanked stale user versions of live articles during such cleanup exercises. In this case I could see that the draft had been made live, so I thought a redirect would be marginally more useful, being the same result as if the draft had been moved to article space. WP:STALEDRAFT says Redirects from userspace subpages to mainspace are common and acceptable. However, I apologise if this came across as impolite. I'll change my practice and blank such pages rather than redirecting if people find that preferable. – Fayenatic London 07:33, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia error

Just for documentation, I've gotten this several times today. However, it may not be Wikimedia. my computer is really slow and making a lot of noise. Usually after a few minutes have gone by after I turn it on all of this starting up activity ends. Something else is going on.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:24, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Are you sure its a Wikimedia error? My Computer is running alright without making a lot of noise its virtually quiet. What system are you using? Have you checked for any viruses if using MS Windows? S. Little ^talk 16:58, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

I've had a few messages as well. Aiken D 17:08, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

I absolutely saw the words "Wikimedia error".— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:09, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

It could be a glitch on Wikimedia's-side, though since I haven't experienced this problem have you filed a bug report with a detailed report about this? It could be related to them using a newer version of MediaWiki though I'm not sure. S. Little ^talk 17:51, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

It's just a "high server load" message. They'll know about it, no need for bug report. When you get this message, just use your browser's refresh feature (F5 in Firefox and Opera). You might need to do it two or three times, but don't do it too quickly. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:32, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

And in fact it doesn't necessarily mean the edit failed -- I had this happen earlier today and tried the edit a couple more times, getting the same error each time; I later found out I'd posted three copies of the same new talk page section. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:15, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

Might be phab:T175803 but hard to say without a full error message. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:01, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I sometimes get random errors but these are different than in this ticket. Something like the servers are too busy, please refresh. When it occurs it doesn't last long. An unrelated but more serious problem I lately get is when attempting to fix someone's broken signature, where the server worker thread appears to hang until the browser eventually reponds with a broken https connection (I get no error message from the server then, only from the browser). There might be some buggy edit filter involved... In this latter case, retrying the edit consistently reproduced the bug. —Paleo Neonate – 14:38, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I have gotten the error message starting "Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem" many times in the last days. The message is shown at Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation error but I also get it in other circumstances. Reloading usually works. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:49, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Full text is:

Wikimedia
Error
Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.

See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information.

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request from 87.115.199.145 via cp3040 cp3040, Varnish XID 1030324244
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Wed, 20 Sep 2017 09:08:56 GMT

plus one image. As I noted above, the browser's refresh feature (F5 in Firefox and Opera) clears this and shows the desired page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:12, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

X-Tools not working?

Is X-Tools not working for anyone else? It's not for me, and it wasn't working for me at the beginning of August, either, when I was going to update my edit stats with July on my user page. It's sitting there loading forever this time—the loading circle in the tab isn't even turning blue to indicate the page is about to display, it's just sitting in the state before that forever—but last time I think it threw an error: [28]. Amaury (talk | contribs) 17:32, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

@Amaury: I suggest using the new version (in beta). — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:38, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

@Amaury: We've restarted the xtools web server process. It should be working now.

However, JJMC89 is correct in that we will be using the new version. The new version is significantly more stable. ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Say something · What I've done} 22:16, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

@Matthewrbowker: I already added it as a bookmark and removed the other one after JJMC89's reply.

Thank you both! Amaury (talk | contribs) 22:24, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Good to hear. ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Say something · What I've done} 00:16, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

I hope that the new one will still be improved before replacing the old one officially, as it only shows me the edit summaries at top (all other details currently require scripts and dynamic loading)... —Paleo Neonate – 22:50, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

"Scripts and dynamic loading" are our solution to handling very heavy database queries (it's a large part of what brought the old one down so often). Work is ongoing, see our workboard on Phabricator ~ Matthewrbowker ^{Say something · What I've done} 00:16, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175661

I can understand if someone doesn't trust JavaScript on the web in general, but I can assure you that XTools is safe :) Please consider whitelisting if you are having trouble. You should be seeing more than just edit summaries, though? All the data except the year/month counts, timecard and global edits are served as raw HTML. While I can't promise we can show you charts, we can make some improvements to show the underlying data to users without JavaScript support. For this I've created T175661. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:33, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

For more information on why scripts are currently completely disabled in the browser instance used with Wikipedia: User:PaleoNeonate#Wikipedia_and_Javascript. —Paleo Neonate – 10:49, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia Errors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175803

Is anyone else getting a lot of these? Seems every page I click/edit on gives this at the moment. Text states:

Error

Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.

See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information.

Also, I'm unable to compare diffs in the edit history - the pages don't load. I've tried this in several browsers this morning. Thanks. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 07:56, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Please paste the "error message at the bottom of this page". I think that message includes your IP address (not sure). If it does, change it to x.x.x.x before pasting. Do you mean every page? Apparently WP:VPT worked, how about some short articles? Any particular page giving trouble? Johnuniq (talk) 08:03, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I am getting errors too: "Request from xx.xx.xx.xx via cp3043 cp3043, Varnish XID 782598746 Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Wed, 20 Sep 2017 08:06:28 GM" William Avery (talk) 08:07, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

@Johnuniq: - About 30 minutes ago it was every page, although it's calmed down a bit now. I did have the extra text at the bottom of the error, but it had my IP address, so I didn't post it. It's the same format as William's, above (thanks William). It took about five attempts to post this initial thread too. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 08:26, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Known issue at T175803, which will be intermittent. You should soon be routed to a different datacenter -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 08:08, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I've been seeing the "Our servers are currently under maintenance" error message more than usual as well. I assumed it was a rate-limit issue. power~enwiki (π, ν) 08:09, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I too am finding that approximately every third page I access returns a 503. Looking at the Phabricator ticket it seems this has been going on for a week now. Is there any sign of progress towards a permanent fix? Yunshui ^雲 _水 08:14, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Fixes have been attempted, and some have definitely improved the situation - today has been especially bad, so the operations team have depooled the misbehaving server, and we hopefully won't see any more errors. This is only temporary, but a resolution is in the works

-- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 08:19, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Anyone interested should definitely have a look at the linked task (its the most recent related task), and keep an eye on this dashboard - the spikes which cause these errors are "HTTP 500/503 Responses". On a brighter note, a moment of appreciation for the guys and gals in the operations team, who keep Wikipedia ticking along with over 7 million requests per minute - impressive! -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 08:37, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Without tempting fate, it's been back to normal for the last 10 minutes. Thanks to everyone who looked into it. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 08:32, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

It's happening less often - but I'm still getting those same 503 errors fairly regularly. Yunshui ^雲 _水 10:22, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

@Yunshui: Still getting these fairly regularly at the moment? -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 10:53, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Haven't had one since I posted the above message, actually. Boy, is my face red... Yunshui ^雲 _水 10:57, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

No drama, we should be 503-free for at least a little while

-- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 11:00, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Watchlist: slow load times

Is there a temporary fix for this? Can I somehow disable Javascript only for the watchlist page rather than the entire domain? Thanks.—Cpt.a.haddock (talk) (please ping when replying) 10:19, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Just disable the Beta feature. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:21, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Also see #My watchlist changed: Can't tell which pages are unread above. —DoRD (talk) 11:39, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you both. For anyone else wondering, this can be done within the Beta features tab in Preferences. You'll first want to uncheck Automatically enable all new beta features and then uncheck New filters for edit review.—Cpt.a.haddock (talk) (please ping when replying) 13:10, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Deletions not showing in watchlist

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T176328

And I have logged actions selected as a feature. I'm just trying to see if there is anything I'm missing or if there is already a phabricator task open on this before I create a new one. This is a major issue for me since I'm pretty active in NPP and seeing the status of articles in my watchlist helps me when I go back through to see if speedy templates/PRODs have been removed, etc. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:41, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

The "latest revision" filter seems to remove log entries. I hope that is a bug. —Kusma (t·c) 15:13, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm pinging @Dchen (WMF): on this because I believe she worked on this project and might be able to answer the questions as to whether this is intentional or just a bug. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:41, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: do you have the 'New filters for edit review' beta feature enabled? If so you can you verify the watchlist is working properly if you turn this off? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:52, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

@TonyBallioni: (ping fix) — xaosflux ^Talk 15:52, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi TonyBallioni

Daisy has worked on design research but I'm the point of contact for the new filters system.

Can you share the filter combination you use with me? I'll investigate on this bug.

Thanks, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

@Xaosflux and Trizek (WMF): Yes, turning the beta off fixes the problem. I'd had it enabled a while ago and like the changes other than this small issue. The filters I currently have on are: changes by others, latest revision, page edits, page creations, logged actions. Unfortunately I'll be turning the beta off until there's an easy way for it to only show the latest revision but also show logged actions. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:59, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

TonyBallioni, can you add a recently deleted page to your watchlist and check if it is on your watchlist using the filters? It works for me if I only display logged entries, or when I remove "lastest revisions" filter. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Trizek (WMF), yes, using only that one filter it shows up or removing "latest revisions". The problem is that the current non-beta version of the watchlist allows you to see the logged actions combined with only the latest revisions. If I want to see deletions combined with edits like I'm currently able to do in my watchlist, I should be able to have that as a setting without having to change the filters every time. This is a major step backwards for the watchlist. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:24, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks TonyBallioni. I've reported it and I'll keep you posted. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

My watchlist changed: Can't tell which pages are unread

So none of my pages that have changed since I last visited it are being bolded anymore. I highly rely on that. What happened to it?—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 17:11, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

+1 - As stated at Help Talk:Watchlist the new watchlist takes a good 10 seconds to load after every refresh (The previous took a second if that),

The other issue I have is that if I go to refresh the watchlist and then go on another tab - the watchlist won't load in the background - I have to physically be on the page for it to load,

IMHO this should be reverted back until the issues can be fixed, Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 18:07, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: @Davey2010: Do you have the "New Filters for Edit Review" beta feature enabled? We changed that beta feature today so that it now puts the new filters on the watchlist as well. If you have the beta feature enabled, please try if disabling it fixes your issues. The styling of unread pages on the watchlist has a number of gadgets and other user/community-maintained things interfering with it. I updated the ones that we know about (e.g.), but maybe you're using something that we didn't know about and didn't update. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Roan Kattouw (WMF) you're a life saver! - I disabled that and it's gone back to the old watchlist, I had no idea New Filters was even enabled but yeah that seems to have been the cause for me, Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 19:11, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@Davey2010: Well, we should still fix it :) . I think I found the culprit: your user CSS has a line (the last one, with line-watched) that unbolds changed lines. With the new Watchlist UI disabled, the gadget to bold such lines (which you've probably also enabled) wins out over that, but with the new UI enabled it doesn't. Since you seem to want to have bolding, you may want to remove the line in your user CSS that disables bolding. Cyberpower678 has something similar in their global CSS on meta (.mw-special-Watchlist .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title { font-weight: normal; [...] }). --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Roan Kattouw (WMF) - I've blanked the CSS and re-enabled New Filters - It took 8 seconds to load so still not overly quick, Also it's now bolded my watchlist which I disliked - Doesn't ever bother me at Commons or at Simple but does here, Anyway the loading time for me is 2 seconds quicker so not really a great improvement, Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Davey2010 (talk • contribs) 19:33, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

@Roan Kattouw (WMF): Sorry, but I have all beta features disabled. Something else must have changed. I'd really like to get this function back.—CYBERPOWER (Around) 22:43, 19 September 2017 (UTC)
The performance on this feature is intolerable. I, too, lost my bolding (which was added in my vector.css file). I just want the bolding back. I don't want the giant widgets, nor do I want the insane load time.Jorm (talk) 00:14, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
Fixed it: .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-changeslist-line-inner span.mw-title { font-weight:bold !important; }

You have to put "!important" on it now, I guess. Ugh.--Jorm (talk) 00:22, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
@Jorm: Bolding should work in the beta feature without doing anything special; if it doesn't, that's a bug, or you have user CSS somewhere that overrides it. If you do not have the beta feature, English Wikipedia's confusing stack of gadgets means you have to explicitly enable a gadget to get the bolding, but it was like that before the release too.

The load time issue is known and tracked at phab:T176250, we've got some patches in review for it already. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 02:06, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: I was confused about what was going on in your case, but my teammate MFlaschen (WMF) figured it out. You have CSS in your global CSS on meta that puts the bold in (I was confused because it looks like it removes it, which it does, but then it puts it back a few lines later). That CSS doesn't work any more because of a change in enwiki's WatchlistBase gadget (the gadget that removes the bolding for everyone except people who choose to have it). There are two ways to fix this:
1. Enable the WatchlistChangesBold gadget (Preferences -> Gadgets -> "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold"); or
2. Change your global CSS from .mw-special-Watchlist .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title { to .mw-rcfilters-disabled.mw-special-Watchlist .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title {
Jorm, you may have the same problem (and the same solutions) if you were using user CSS to put the bold in, rather than the gadget that English Wikipedia provides for that purpose. --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for that. But it does concern me that someone just unilaterally decided to have a gadget override my global CSS.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 13:26, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
@Cyberpower678: The goal was not to override user CSS like yours. That was an unintended side effect due to increased CSS specificity. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 01:12, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

+1 on the loading. It's more like five or six seconds for me—not 10—but if that can be fixed to load like the old design, I'd be just fine with that. I have no other issues with this change. Amaury (talk | contribs) 04:53, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I can confirm the bolding of unread results is working fine for me without me having to change anything. I tested the performance a little bit, I found that for me the old version loads in around 2.7 seconds whereas the new version loads in around 4.2 seconds. That's not too bad for a beta version of this feature, especially since there's more performance improvements planned. I find the shifting of the watchlist items after the page is fully quite annoying, but to be fair this already happened to a lesser degree with the old watchlist due to watchlist notices. --Deskana (talk) 09:04, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I created a ticket for that shifting phab:T176300. Note that watchlist notices only do this, if you don't dismiss them. They are hidden by default and then revealed when not yet dismissed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:32, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Email confirmation never arrives "Hotmail"

I asked on the admin boards, they mentioned someone here might help as this has happened in the past with certain email providers. Yes I've checked my spam folder, and requested it be sent several times from here. No luck. Double checked there is no misspelling of the email address and revisited my email preferences. Anything else I should be doing to verify my email address? TIA Peniole (talk) 13:50, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Is it related to Outlook's other current problems? BBC News - Microsoft confirms Outlook issues ? Cabayi (talk) 13:55, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

See Help:Email confirmation for general help. You can try another mail provider or just live without Wikipedia mail. It isn't required and most users rarely or never use it (but be sure not to forget your password). PrimeHunter (talk) 14:13, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Actually signed up last year, no email confirmation then. Tried again this year, same problem. So unrelated to their recent outage. Thanks for the tip. Will see if I can get it sent to a secondary email address since Hotmail servers seem to block incoming from wiki.Peniole (talk) 08:10, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Feature request: filter history by blocked accounts

I would find it useful if someone were to develop a gadget so that a page history could be filtered to show only edits by users who are currently blocked (mostly useful at SPI). There is already User:Ale_jrb/Scripts User History to filter history by one user's contribs, and MediaWiki:Gadget-markblocked.js for highlighting blocked users. Would someone more proficient than me be able to put those two together? Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 18:30, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I just created User:The Voidwalker/histFilter.js. It still needs some work (for example, it only checks the most recent 500 revisions and does things a bit sloppy), but it should work. (only tested in vector) -- The Voidwalker ^Whispers 22:44, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try it out! (I'm using vector anyway) Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 20:01, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Okay so it works great, the only thing is it adds the "show blocked users only" button three times, and only one of them does anything; may have something to do with admin buttons. Can't post a screenshot at the moment, but I'm getting a working button beside "compare selected revisions" on the left, then two that don't work beside "change visibility of selected revisions" and "edit tags of selected revisions" on the right (these are both admin-only buttons AFAIK). But it's not really interfering with anything. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 20:09, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I should have realized that was a possibility. I'll play with the selection statement for adding the button on a testwiki where I have those admin buttons. -- The Voidwalker ^Whispers 20:14, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Template help

Can someone add a "next" and "previous" tag (as in elections and sports templates) to the templates at General Debate of the seventy-second session of the United Nations General Assembly and Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly.Lihaas (talk) 19:48, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

If you mean in the infoboxes then they currently (via redirects) use {{Infobox organization}} and {{Infobox summit meeting}}. The latter has the documented parameters follows and precedes. See 30th G8 summit for an example use. Do you mean you want an option to display it more like "← 2008" and "2016 →" at United States presidential election, 2012? {{Infobox organization}} has no next/previous parameters and they would rarely make sense so I don't think the infobox should be complicated with them. It does have predecessor/successor which make more sense for organizations but would sound wrong for General Debate of the seventy-second session of the United Nations General Assembly. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:43, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Yep I meant like the election article.Lihaas (talk) 00:30, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I have added (not yet documented) a compactnav option to make compact navigation in {{Infobox summit meeting}}. The examples here show how Seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly could look with and without compactnav if the existing parameters follows and precedes are used. With compactnav I placed the date of the current event between the links like in elections. The image is commented out in the examples. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:20, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Cool stuff; I can think of another use or two for that sort thing. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 01:47, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Is content font size too small?

For years I have felt that content size is too small. The font size is set at the Vector skin repo. It cannot be changed without a community consensus, so I started this poll:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7ZzgS46IrkeVEuwsQQeElPH-PddONfE2e4_9pKhApr-fQgQ/viewform (google form).

Golopotw (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 06:45, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I think that an on-Wikipedia RFC may be better. Also, browser features (i.e. ctrl++ on most), browser preferences, or custom CSS (User:Golopotw/common.css) could be used to have text as large as you would like. —Paleo Neonate – 07:28, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

@Golopotw: Please don't make us go outside the Wikimedia Foundation to discuss Wikipedia matters. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:43, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

@Redrose64: It is a polling tool unavailable in WMF softwares. It does not take away discussions from this thread because it does not have a discussing feature.Golopotw (talk) 11:07, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Golopotw, are we not discussing something here? Do you really think that nothing has been discussed or decided on Wikipedia in all the years its been running? How will you verify whether contributors to the google doc are wikipedians? not blocked? not sockpuppets? Wikipedia guarantees the anonymity of wiki-users - how will you preserve that anonymity on google docs? Frankly, I don't see any way that the results of an off-site discussion would be acceptable on Wikipedia. Cabayi (talk) 11:20, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

@Cabayi:It is not google doc, it is a polling app and what is did is complementary to what happens here. You click Yes or No and submit, and get the count, that all it does, no discussion happens there. The people who participate are all Wikipedians seeing this thread. It is possible someone do corrupt things to bend the data, though. Seeing so much discussion diverting from the original question makes me want to remove it now.Golopotw (talk) 11:44, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Any result from an off-wiki poll outside Wikimedia control will almost certainly be ignored when a decision is made so I don't see much reason to keep it open. Users who do participate will just be wasting their time. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:23, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Golopotw, If you're concerned about vote counting you ought to (re-)read Wikipedia:Consensus. Cabayi (talk) 17:33, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Without wanting to be rude, if you are finding that the font size on Wikipedia is too small for you to read comfortably, then you need to either use a physically larger monitor, use reading glasses, or increase the zoom of your browser until the size is comfortable. Wikipedia is by no means the only popular website to use fonts at around 14px size (12.7px for Monobook), so there must be lot of readers for whom the current size is an acceptable compromise between legibility and the amount of text that is in view without scrolling. I doubt you'll be able to disturb the current (silent) consensus just to please folks like me who need glasses to read Wikipedia. --RexxS (talk) 17:07, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

New account creates a new account while logged in

Please see these log entries in UTC time:

(User creation log); 03:02 . . User account Yutaui123 (talk | contribs) was created by Yutaui (talk | contribs) ‎(it won't let me)
(User creation log); 03:00 . . User account Yutaui (talk | contribs) was created ‎

How can that happen? Dr. K. 03:36, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

This is normal. Special:CreateAccount can be used by already logged in users to create another account. I deliberate did it myself when creating alternative accounts.[29] PrimeHunter (talk) 09:33, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you PrimeHunter. I didn't know about that. The thing is, how can a brand-new account know the existence of that link. Dr. K. 11:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe they didn't realize that they were logged in already and tried to register again, were told that it is already registered and then registered an alternative name? Just guessing of course. Have you asked them before labeling them a sockmaster? Regards So Why 11:57, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, after creating the first account and being logged in they may just have used the browser back button to get back to Special:CreateAccount. That is the page logged out users get on "Create account" at the top of any page. Both the accounts edited the same article against Wikipedia:Sock puppetry#Inappropriate uses of alternative accounts but attempted deception is unlikely when the usernames are so similar. It looks like a good faith mistake. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:54, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

They could also be familiar with MediaWiki generally, even if new to enwiki :) FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 17:49, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you both. I had not considered these possibilities. :) Dr. K. 18:25, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Rogue Bot

The Internet Archive Bot has been tagging HathiTrust links as dead links. See Equipollence (geometry) for example. The Talk of the Bot does not recognize a logged in editor, so the "tool" offered is in fact not available. Comments on the Talk are discouraged. — Rgdboer (talk) 20:51, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I reported the false positives using the interface. — JJMC89 (T·C) 21:30, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Nesting collapsible tables without spaces

I am working on User:Ergo Sum/sandbox/Template:Ordination/color chart and am trying to make each religion section collapsible and collapsed by default. I think the way to do this is to nest consecutive collapsible tables, but when I do so, there are large spaces between each table and each table is an irregular size depending on the length of the title. Does anyone know how to nest collapsible tables without having vertical gaps in between the tables? Ergo Sum 22:12, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

A bot able to alert many WikiProjects to an RfC about a policy or guideline matter?

I wasn't sure if I should post this here or at WP:Village pump (idea lab), but it's a query about what Wikipedia might already be able to do. Recently, Newyorkbrad expressed a concern on my talk page about me notifying a number of guideline, policy and WikiProject talk pages to an RfC that affects the Wikipedia community as a whole. I'd rather continue that discussion here or at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment than on my talk page. He wondered if some of the notifications were relevant or appropriate. I noted that, in the case of RfCs that affect the community as a whole, I have been notifying a lot of pages (mainly WikiProjects) for years without incident and that it has helped pull in a lot more participants. I've done this ever since this RfC in 2014, where I contacted WikiProjects based on WP:RfC's "Issues by topic area" categorization format. Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Publicizing an RfC mentions that it is okay to alert the talk pages of policies and guidelines that are closely related, and WikiProjects that are relevant, but I asked Newyorkbrad: "How can we define 'closely related' in this case when the discussion at hand affects all of Wikipedia?" I told Tryptofish the following, "How can we judge which WikiProjects are more relevant to the discussion at hand? We cannot. And the same goes for our policies and guidelines, with the exception of WP:Manual of Style, which I also alerted. None of the WikiProjects are any more deserving of receiving a notification [...] that affects all Wikipedia editors, and I don't see the 'WikiProjects that are involved in setting policies or guidelines [...]. I am aware of WP:CENT. [...] I left a notification at WP:Village pump (policy), but I have found that this is not enough for cases such as these. Such limited notification usually only ends up notifying those who watch that page or are heavily involved in our policy and guideline issues. It leaves out the general Wikipedians. I've seen this complaint -- that there are a limited number of editors shaping our policy and guidelines and not enough general Wikipedians being alerted to the issues -- many times."

So other than WP:CENT, is there a way to alert editors to an RfC that affects the whole community, similar to the MediaWiki message delivery bot? If not, is such an implement worth it? Pinging WhatamIdoing since she commonly has insights into Wikipedia's technical endeavors. Also pinging editors from the latest RfC I advertised in case any of them came to that RfC via one of my alerts: Fyddlestix, Mandruss, Stickee, Johnuniq, Guy Macon, Andrewa, Redrose64, Diego Moya, Bkonrad (older ≠ wiser), NewsAndEventsGuy, North8000, PBS, Masem, Alanscottwalker, RexxS, Kudpung (Kudpung กุดผึ้ง), Moxy, Jytdog, JRSpriggs, Lawrencekhoo (LK), DIYeditor, BrightR (Bright☀), SlimVirgin (SarahSV), Piotrus, Ivanvector, Sizeofint, and Bondegezou. I already know that Doc James and a few others did. And, for the record, if there consensus that I shouldn't be alerting this way, I will abide by it. With the exception of WP:Manual of Style, SMcCandlish (who also took part in the RfC) reverted my notifications to the policy or guideline pages; so I know that he objects, at least on that front. And I know that I went a bit overboard on alerting the policy pages. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:23, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I have used massmessenger on meta. Centralized discussion does a fairly good job. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:27, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

In the RfC that produced this issue, you correctly listed the RfC at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines. You also advertised at WP:VPP. Between the two, you would've reached most editors who care much about changes to the p&g area, certainly enough people to reach a healthy level of participation and the point of diminishing returns (i.e. 150 editors are likely to produce the same conclusion as 50). Me, I don't watch VPP much these days, and I never watch the RfC listing pages. I trust that the editors who do will do things that I can live with. If not, that's on me. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:45, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

What about editors who are not heavily involved in building and/or editing our policies and guidelines, or the ones not involved at all? They care about some of these issues too. Over the years, I've gotten appreciative comments or thank yous via WP:Echo from such editors for my notifications because they would not have known about the issue(s) otherwise. Above, Doc James is one such editor. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:02, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think there's an uncorroborated assumption there. Is it true that 50 random editors are likely to produce the same result as 150 random editors? Sure - the Central Limit Theorem helps smooth it out. But is it true that 50 editors "who care much about changes to the p&g area" will produce the same result as 150 random Wikipedians? I suspect not. I applaud efforts to involve as many editors as possible as that tends to produce a more unbiased cross-section of opinion. Of course, there's no way of guaranteeing that, but the solution to anyone feeling that some notifications are biased is generally to notify more editors, not try to notify fewer by reversion. --RexxS (talk) 01:05, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Flyer22: Well I think I addressed that in my previous comment. If one doesn't watch the two main pages having to do with p&g changes, they can't reasonably complain about the resulting p&g changes. I don't, and I don't. You might as well propose that we advertise all p&g RfCs to all these different pages. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:11, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

But, Mandruss, not all RfCs will affect the whole community. I'm talking about the big ones, like the aforementioned WP:TALK one. As for your point that editors should watch the two big pages, it's a sound point; I just don't think that many do. It seems that only a limited number do -- the ones heavily involved in policy and guideline matters. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:20, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

WP:RFC lists four other topic areas under "Project-wide" topics: Wikipedia style and naming (style), WikiProjects and collaborations (proj), Wikipedia technical issues and templates (tech), and Wikipedia proposals (prop). All of these areas affect the whole community, per "project-wide". So we need to indiscriminately scatter-broadcast those, too, with the same rationale, correct? ―Mandruss ☎ 01:24, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Not sure I get your latest argument. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:44, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

You said, quite correctly, not all RfCs will affect the whole community. But certainly the topic areas listed under "project-wide" do, by definition? As SMcC's comments have implied below, it would be unwise to let the RfC's opener decide how much of the community is affected by it, since that will often be a matter of opinion and perspective. Scatter-broadcasting has to be all or none, and I submit that none is far better than all. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:53, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

"All or none" is obviously not my motto. I subscribe to RexxS's viewpoint above. I would state "many or none." The goal is not to manually alert every WikiProject there is; not only is that a huge task without a bot and some WikiProjects are likely to be overlooked, not every WikiProject needs to be notified. Like I told Newyorkbrad, what is important when alerting a number of WikiProjects to an RfC that affects the whole community is trying to get a wide range of views, the WikiProjects that cover topic areas such as science, medicine, math, culture, sports, women's issues and so on. Aiming for the big WikiProjects is key. The current way things are set up already decides how much of the community is affected by whatever RfC (and by "affected by" in this instance, I mean "alerted to"). If this were not the case, the many people who thank me for being alerted to the RfCs would already know about them without my involvement. All I am doing is pulling in more people. As far as the WikiProjects portion of Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Publicizing an RfC goes, it's useless for policy and guideline issues such as this since there is no way to state "this and this WikiProject is relevant, but not these." Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 02:09, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

If WikiProject Neuroscience needed to be notified about an RfC about a relatively minor aspect of talk page behavior in all talk spaces, and other projects did not, I'm interested to know how you arrived at that decision. Are there projects that don't involve discussion in a talk space? Anyway, a major and controversial change like you are suggesting will not be made without an RfC consensus, so I'll try to watch for that RfC, which should be placed at WP:VPR. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:24, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I stated above that ever since this RfC in 2014, where I compiled a list of WikiProjects based on WP:RfC's "Issues by topic area" categorization format, I've been following that list. A few of those WikiProjects are semi-active, but I contacted them anyway. One is inactive, and I did't contact that one this time. Over the years, I've been contacting other WikiProjects in addition to that list. I should have left WP:Neuroscience off the list since WP:Med covers it well enough (editors watching that WikiProject are usually WP:Med editors). As for a bot, you're right, but I do think further discussion about the Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Publicizing an RfC wording should perhaps take place at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment. I mean, in cases like these, does one alert any WikiProjects or not? Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 02:35, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed with Mandruss. I actually reverted many of those notices myself (after the outcome was already WP:SNOW) to discourage anyone else from thinking that hitting every highly watchlisted Wikipedia-namespace talk page was an RfC notification norm. Our P&G talk pages would become unusable if people started doing this, even in small numbers. And that RfC didn't and won't "affect the whole community"; it was noise about a rare, almost imaginary minor problem; I think I saw a total of 4 cases anyone could point to, all them either noobs who hadn't learned our talk page etiquette yet, or generally disruptive parties headed for long-term blocks for multiple reasons. The comments are an interesting read, a thick pile-on of "don't you dare touch my posts!" WP:OWN chest-beating. That kind of RfC doesn't attract commentary from anyone but people with a weird bone to pick. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 01:29, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

We disagree on the RfC; I think the comments from others there have shown a convincing concern about the issue its tackling. I've had non-newbie editors break up my comments, and my objections were never a WP:OWN violation. I always made it clear that the "breaking up" had confused things or was likely to confuse things. And, for the most part, we do own our comments, which is why others are generally not allowed to touch them. The exceptions are clear at WP:TALK. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 01:44, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

On a side note: Just to reiterate, with the exception of WP:Manual of Style, SMcCandlish reverted my notifications to the policy or guideline pages, not to the WikiProjects. I wouldn't call my notifications to the rule pages "many." Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm reiterating some of the above, but this is what I do rather methodically:

Make important policy discussions be WP:RFCs with |policy; this will ensure that WP:FRS subscribers who subscribe to the policy RfC feed will get drawn in. (This does not happen instantly; I'm not sure what the algorithm is, but there's some kind of randomization, and not everyone immediately gets a note about every RfC in the categories they're watching, even if they're set to get all of them. They get doled out over time.)
Post a pointer at WP:VPPOL (or even host the RfC there). The whole point of VP is that it's where the community members who don't just WP:DGAF come and look for site-wide issues to resolve. If it's of the nature of a proposal for some major change, not just a tweak, it can also be cross-listed on WP:VPPRO.
If I'm sure it's going to be of wide-spread interest, list it on WP:CENT. Once in a while someone may revert a listing if they think the entry is trivial or of too micro-topical interest; most sensible entries seem to stick.

I wouldn't mind a notification system more quick and sure than FRS, or just a change to FRS so that I can tell it "notify me of every policy-categorized RfC, immediately". A lot of editors would rather eat their own feet than subscribe to that, but some of us are keenly interested in long-term policy stability and continuity, yet also flexibility, as WP grudgingly matures into another stage of the organizational life-cycle. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 01:29, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: "there are a limited number of editors shaping our policy and guidelines" – Yes, of course. This is true – and necessarily true – of all human endeavors. WP:Writing policy is hard, and policy analysis is a professional-level skill that is difficult to learn much less excel at. When people who suck at it and/or don't care end up getting affected by policy in ways they don't like they make a lot of noise, and the people who are competent and interested enough to re-balance the policy make some adjustments. This is how our species operates. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 01:33, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

For what is worth, I concluded in a peer review paper that Wikipedia's anti-canvassing / don't spam people POV means that 99% of the community is kept in the dark about important issues, while crucial decisions are being shaped by a small number of people - not intentionally, but just the lucky ones who saw the right notice or were more active in a specific time period. We need a better way to inform people about important stuff everywhere. This is doable, we just need to want to do it. You may find the article interesting ([30], OA mirror). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:29, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Piotrus, thanks for weighing in. WP:Canvassing is a different issue than notifying a number of WikiProjects to a policy or guideline issue. We see that it lists the following as an appropriate form of notification: "The talk page or noticeboard of one or more WikiProjects or other Wikipedia collaborations which may have interest in the topic under discussion." It doesn't give an exact number. And like I noted above, I feel that the issue at hand is not of interest to any one WikiProject, but to all of them. As for contacting all of them, see what I stated above. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 03:41, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I can see why Flyer22 wanted to notify many projects about the interleaving RfC. Most editors would correctly think they should work on articles rather than pay attention to esoteric guidelines. Yet those editors may want to know about an RfC that could affect behavior on the talk pages they use. I can also see why some others do not want widespread notifications—if that became the norm, projects would be overrun with spam. I would not want to see an automated system to spread notifications because that would be overused and would lead to wholesale reverts and/or banner blindness. If considered appropriate, WP:centralized discussion or even WP:watchlist notices could be used—if others felt the issue warranted wide dissemination. Johnuniq (talk) 03:53, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Good point about the overrunning. If we did have a bot for this, I guess we wouldn't always be able to decide which cases it should be used for. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 04:01, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

But then again, Johnuniq, we don't have a lot of policy and guideline RfCs. It's more so occasional. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 05:06, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, but as you know, there are many people with unusual views at Wikipedia and they would be sure to want to maximize publicity for whatever they thought was important. Re policy/guideline RfCs being rare, that might be a good reason to list the RfC at the central or watchlist links I mentioned. Johnuniq (talk) 05:18, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I'll bring WP:AALERTS as a possibility for smaller RFC topical to a small number of projects, or for project to be notified or certain discussions happening on specific venues. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Headbomb. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

In this recent case, I found {{u|Flyer22 Reborn]]'s approach helpful and only came to the RfC because of the note on WikiProject Medicine. Bondegezou (talk) 09:47, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I was pinged above. Flyer, for discussions about policies or guidelines, you could reasonably ping WP:WPMOS and WP:WPPG. You could also list them at related policies and guidelines. For example, some editors watch WP:V and some watch WP:RS and others watch WP:NOR, and if there's an RFC at one, it's reasonable to post links at the other two.

We don't have a way to notify a representative set of active editors. I doubt that the core community truly wants such a thing, since it would mean a greater voice for people with less experience, and therefore mathematically less voice for people like us.

As for the instant case, an interesting thing to do would be to find several recent examples of interleaved comments that did not involve you personally, and ask those editors (the person who wrote the original comment and the person who inserted something) to comment. They are far more likely to have a useful, practical view of the question than editors who've never seen it, and they're the ones whose comments you're proposing to protect (for the original editor) or ban (for the interjecting editor). I recommend posting those examples in the discussion at the RFC (or a note saying that you couldn't find any, because that would also be relevant information in a WP:CREEP-prevention kind of way). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the ping, and thank you for seeking community views about the issue. I agree with Mandruss and SMcCandlish, as well as with what Newyorkbrad originally said at Flyer22's talk page. What drew my attention to the matter was seeing a note at WT:WikiProject Neuroscience – why is talk page interleaving of any special interest to editors who work on neuroscience content, aside from the subjective opinion that the issue is supposedly an important one to everyone at Wikipedia? – after having seen the same note at WT:Conflict of interest – I doubt that editors with COIs interleave their comments more or less than other editors do. Now, that said, I don't see what Flyer22 did as being anything really awful (had it been, it would have been a matter for WP:ANI, and it clearly was not that), but rather, as a matter of subjective judgment. Myself, I would have considered listing at RfC and CENT, along with a VPP note, as being entirely sufficient and appropriate. I do not see any reason to believe that any user felt badly disrupted by the notices, but I think some editors found them a waste of time while others found them helpful. So I think that it comes down to a subjective judgment about the degree to which the benefit of more editors finding out about the RfC balances out the feeling of wasted time experienced by editors who felt that there were too many notices. Don't overestimate the benefit of such wide publication in this case. There is nothing that stops editors from watchlisting RfC notices and checking CENT and VPP from time to time if they want to. And frankly, although the RfC was about talk page guidelines, it really wasn't something that rose to the level of something that required community-wide alerts. It pretty much became a consensus of "yeah, please avoid interleaving, but if you do interleave, it's not the end of the world". Hardly groundshaking, hardly controversial. There's a more subtle issue here as well: should every RfC where the posting editor wants wide participation be so widely announced? If not, is there a problem with some discussions being more widely evaluated than others, whereas if so, how much potential spam will this lead to if everyone does it? Do we really want to make this standard practice? And please don't underestimate the inconvenience of editors who didn't need to see the notices in so many places. Editor time is a valuable commodity. Of course, editors who are not interested can just ignore the notices, but nonetheless that happens after having spent a few moments reading the notice and then deciding not to respond. And the community has something of a consensus against spam – just see what WP:Canvassing#Inappropriate notification says about it. Most interested editors would have found the RfC without so many notices, and even though some editors responded after seeing the WikiProject notices, most editors who watch WikiProjects did not. So, bottom line, it was marginally a net negative. It was bad judgment and probably not a good precedent, but not a high crime or misdemeanor. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:13, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Tryptofish, like I stated above, we can see that Wikipedia:Canvassing#Appropriate notification lists the following as an appropriate form of notification: "The talk page or noticeboard of one or more WikiProjects or other Wikipedia collaborations which may have interest in the topic under discussion." It doesn't give an exact number. So who is to judge how many WikiProjects should be alerted in a case like this? The same goes for Wikipedia:Requests for comment#Publicizing an RfC. You stated, "Don't overestimate the benefit of such wide publication in this case." But, from experience, I've had reason to "overestimate" in cases such as these. You stated, "Most interested editors would have found the RfC without so many notices." But, like Johnuniq stated above, "Most editors would correctly think they should work on articles rather than pay attention to esoteric guidelines. Yet those editors may want to know about an RfC that could affect behavior on the talk pages they use." That has been my experience. I'm trying to involve more than just the same limited number of editors. You've called my mass notifications in this case bad judgment, but I've been doing it for years, without incident (until now), and it has helped bring in many participants. If someone could show that I've actually been disruptive and unhelpful, then I would take the "you were wrong to do this" criticism seriously. That stated, given the recent criticism, I will cease my mass notifications. I will still alert several WikiProjects in the case where it's clear that the RfC is specific to those WikiProjects, but I won't continue with the mass thing. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much for "That stated, given the recent criticism, I will cease my mass notifications." I appreciate that very much, and it is all that I would ever have asked for. For whatever it may be worth (and there is no need for you to rebut this), where you quoted "one or more WikiProjects... which may have interest in the topic under discussion", I think it's important to interpret "one or more" as not meaning "many", and to understand "interest" as being something that is specific to that project, beyond just being of interest to editors in general. And as I've said all along, when I referred to bad judgment, that is far from rising to the level of disruptive or unhelpful – more like a good-faith mistake, and we all (me included!) make those from time to time. Happy editing! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:21, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

I never interpreted it as meaning "many." I was simply pointing out that it lists no exact number. If it so happens that an RfC is likely to be of interest to many WikiProjects, then many it is. I still disagree with you on this matter per what I and those who have agreed with me have stated. I don't view the notifications as bad judgment or a good-faith mistake. And I believe that my ceasing the mass notification will be a loss, not a gain. As for a lot of people from the WikiProjects I contacted not weighing in this time, it is not surprising that editors would feel no need to comment in a WP:SNOW case. If I see many "yes" votes and a few "no" votes, I am unlikely to think that my "yes" is needed or that my "no" will help. In fact, I have not voted in the RfC in question; I knew that I wouldn't need to. The fact that my notifications drew in more people than would have been involved is the point of those notifications. This was never about understanding "interest" to mean something that is specific to whatever project, just like certain bot notifications WikiProjects have gotten are not about that. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:05, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Flyer, thanks for the ping and the only thing that matters to me when there are pings is whether I was pinged as part of a POV based canvassing campaign, which this isn't. Go for it. I have no opinion on the existing or proposed tools other to say thanks to those eds interested in the subject. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:05, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, NewsAndEventsGuy. Given a few criticisms for this particular case, though, it seems that I should probably stop mass alerting in the way that I have been. And so I will. Maybe one day we will have a bot. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 19:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Possible conversion problem?

Discovered with the newly created article "Hereford Arizona Observatory" => (esp the altitude unit ).

Seems that there may be two different results for basic conversions: one result via {{convert|1420|ft|m|disp=flip|abbr=on}} {{{ Edit correction Drbogdan (talk) 12:14, 24 September 2017 (UTC): *should* be => {{convert|4670|ft|m|order=flip|abbr=on}} }}} => 1420 m (4670 ft); and another result, via WikiData ( at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q40787894 ), which is significantly different => 1420 m (4660 ft) instead.

AFAIK ATM - both can't be right; but both could be wrong.

Possible explanations - or solutions - Welcome - in any case - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 00:42, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The problem is that d:Q40787894#P2044 shows that Hereford Arizona Observatory has "elevation above sea level 1,420 metre", whereas the article has "at an altitude of {{convert|4670|ft|m|disp=flip|abbr=on}}".

1,420 m is 4,658.8 ft which convert rounds to 4,660 ft.

4,670 ft is 1,423.4 m which convert rounds to 1,420 m.

The reference should be consulted to see exactly what it says, and the value in the article and the value at Wikidata should be changed to be the same.

By the way, please use |order=flip instead of the deprecated |disp=flip. Also, the convert in the OP ({{convert|1420|ft|m|disp=flip|abbr=on}}) is not used in the article and does not give the result shown in the OP. Johnuniq (talk) 01:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Drbogdan: Well, first of all: {{convert|1420|ft|m|disp=flip|abbr=on}} ? 430 m (1,420 ft) so you've slipped up in the transcription somewhere.

Did you intend to write: {{convert|1420|m|ft|disp=flip|abbr=on}} ? 4,660 ft (1,420 m)

That's what you'd expect since 1420 m is equal to 4659 ft to the nearest foot.

You can find cases where convert seems to give a peculiar result because of having to estimate how many significant figures are appropriate.

One seeming discepancy actually arises if you observe:

{{convert|4650|ft|m|abbr=on}} ? 4,650 ft (1,420 m)

{{convert|4660|ft|m|abbr=on}} ? 4,660 ft (1,420 m)

{{convert|4670|ft|m|abbr=on}} ? 4,670 ft (1,420 m)

so 4660 ft, 4660 ft and 4670 ft all convert to 1420 m. But that's not surprising if the display is being rounded to 3 sig fig (as it is by default because the input has only 3 sig fig).

However:

{{convert|4650|ft|m|abbr=on|sigfig=4}} ? 4,650 ft (1,417 m)

{{convert|4660|ft|m|abbr=on|sigfig=4}} ? 4,660 ft (1,420 m)

{{convert|4670|ft|m|abbr=on|sigfig=4}} ? 4,670 ft (1,423 m)

Does that explain it for you? --RexxS (talk) 01:29, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Johnuniq and RexxS: Thank you for the *very good* comments - seems the problem may be resolved by carefully considering sig-figures and rounding-off nos - a closer look at the original ref may be indicated - Thanks again for the comments - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 01:47, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Template:For nowiki in the Visual Editor

Articles making use of Template:For nowiki (for example via Template:Post-nominals, as in Émile Antoine Verpilleux) don't render properly when edited via the Visual Editor (there's a lot of code displayed). Articles making use of Template:For loop don't show the same issue. I'm not sure whether it's the difference in the use of <includeonly> within the templates themselves or something in the corresponding Lua modules (Module:For nowiki and Module:ForLoop respectively); could someone more tech- and Lua-savvy than me please take a look and fix it? Huon (talk) 15:49, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Pinging creator: @Petr Matas: Ppp ery 15:26, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The simpler {{preprocess|<nowiki>{{1x|2}}</nowiki>}} shows the same problem. Seems like a bug that should be reported on Phabricator and not something that can be fixed here. Ppp ery 15:35, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Or maybe not, because this whole system is a total hack ... Ppp ery 15:36, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

It is quite normal for hacks to behave like hacks. The problem is probably that VE parser internally uses Special:Expandtemplates which has similar output. Expandtemplates is meant to expand ALL wikitext and yet that hack blocks it from doing so. Expandtemplates also doesn't do some cleanup that the default parser does, and that may be the reason it works in the default preview / actual page. Fixing it is probably simple, avoid using that nowiki stuff.

Until there is only one parser (parsoid perhaps), this will remain a game of wack a mole. Lua and the frame.preprocess hack allows users to create an unending number of hacks. This is just one of many. 17:13, 24 September 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.84.247 (talk • contribs)

Avoid using that nowiki stuff. And thereby have templates that contain the same text tens of times. How is that better. Ppp ery 17:45, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Templates are not programming languages. Attempting to mix wikitext and lua in that strange manner is like attempting to mix french and mandarin. Sure some people may understand what the output means, but it also leaves several people dumbfounded like this whenever it fails.

The concrete solution depends on the problem. All this template does is replace all instances of one string with another, e.g. PC -> Queen's_Privy_Council_for_Canada. Simply changing the parameters into a list and running a template or lua function that replaces it would do that easily:

 local input = "buu baa"
output = input:gsub("%S+", {["buu"] = "[[buu2]]", ["baa"] = "[[baa2]]"})

print(output)

It could also be extracted from template subpage or data module or one of hundreds of ways, and such a tool could be reused by a lot of templates, without even thinking about the notion of "loop" or "nowiki". Or a bit of repetition could be added with the switch parser function within a wrapper template and without any lua. Although that parser function tends to be problematic. 18:21, 24 September 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.218.84.247 (talk • contribs)

Templates are not programming languages. Untrue. If {{#if:{{{13|}}} |{{#if:{{{sep|}}}{{{commas|}}}|,}} {{post-nominals/{{{country|CAN}}}|{{{13}}}}}}} isn't code, then what is it? As for the rest of that comment, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say. Module:For nowiki does more than just replace one string with another (that's what Module:String is for). It effectively repeats the same string multiple times with minor variations. If you are trying to say that these templates should be written entirely in lua, then that could be done, but is unnecessary when you can just use one module to abstract out the duplication. Ppp ery 19:55, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Also, please sign your posts (with four tildes rather than five). Ppp ery 19:55, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

> isn't code, then what is it?

Simply markup. Many tools provide constructs like "isdefined" without being programming languages (e.g. spreadsheet software, word processors, etc). You might want to see the definition of programming language (hint, at a minimum it needs a grammar).

> I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say

Passing wikitext along with parserfunctions to lua, and then back, isn't the proper way to use it, and causes issues like these, it sometimes also adds error tracking categories despite not outputting any visible errors. There is a wikitext parsing order that the module interferes with, in a similar way to the hacky {{#tag}} parser function. The bugs related to it in the bug tracker will give you plenty of reasons why it has been a bad idea from the day it was created.

If it only repeated text without parsing it, then it would cause no problems. As far as the exact solution, there are several ways to fix it, as discussed above. It is up to the editors of that template to decide which is best. 197.218.84.247 (talk) 21:04, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Fine, maybe that wasn't a good example. If {{#expr:{{for loop|+|call=EVs|AK|GA|KS|MN|NC|OH|PA|SC}} }} (copied from National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an article, not a template) isn't code, then what is it? How many tools that aren't programming languages have for loops or a sum function? Even if you somehow claim that that isn't code, one can move arbitrary Lua (clearly a programming language) into Wikitext via Module:LuaCall. Passing wikitext along with parserfunctions to lua, and then back, isn't the proper way to use it. Do you have any evidence of that, especially since this bug, if my suspicions are correct, actually has nothing to do with the Wikitext-Lua-Wikitext dance. The beauty of Wikitext is that it can do anything anywhere; you can have wikitext pages that aren't really code, like this discussion, or pages that are code, like I mentioned above, or a mixture of the two. Ppp ery 21:30, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Is this the same bug as phab:T48115? Ppp ery 21:24, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Seems to be a pathological case of that. {{for nowiki|{{make code|<<<1>>>2}}|1|2|3}} seems to work. Ppp ery 21:47, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Template:For nowiki and the andriod app

Just posting a pointer to Template talk:Post-nominals#Broken in the Wikipedia Android app. Does anyone understand why my prune code duplication edit would have broken the app, but worked fine in standard preview? Ppp ery 14:21, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, I seem to have figured out the problem. {{for nowiki}} is broken in Parsoid for some reason I can't understand. Ppp ery 14:57, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Pppery: I think this is related to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Template:For nowiki in the Visual Editor above. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:14, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I should totally have checked for duplicate posts before posting. Ppp ery 15:20, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Improvements coming soon to Recent Changes

Hello

In short: starting on 26 September, New Filters for Edit Review (now in Beta) will become standard on Recent Changes. They provide an array of new tools and an improved interface. If you prefer the current page you will be able to opt out. Learn more about the New Filters.

What is this feature again?

This feature improves Special:RecentChanges and Special:RecentChangesLinked (and soon, Special:Watchlist – see below).

Based on a new design, it adds new features that ease vandalism tracking and support of newcomers:

Filtering - filter recent changes with easy-to-use and powerful filters combinations, including filtering by namespace or tagged edits.
Highlighting - add a colored background to the different changes you are monitoring. It helps quick identification of changes that matter to you.
Bookmarking to keep your favorite configurations of filters ready to be used.
Quality and Intent Filters - those filters use ORES predictions. They identify real vandalism or good faith intent contributions that need help. They are not available on all wikis.

You can know more about this project by visiting the quick tour help page.

Concerning RecentChanges

Starting on 26 September, New Filters for Edit Review will become standard on Recent Changes. We have decided to do this release because of a long and successful Beta test phase, positive feedback from various users and positive user testing.

Some features will remain as Beta features and will be added later. Learn more about those different features.

If your community has specific concerns about this deployment or internal discussion, it can request to have the deployment to their wikis delayed to October 1, if they have sensible, consistent with the project, actionable, realistic feedback to oppose (at the development team's appreciation).

You will also be able to opt-out this change in your preferences.

Concerning Watchlists

Starting on September 19, the Beta feature will have a new option. Watchlists will have all filters available now on the Beta Recent Changes improvements.

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 19.

How to be ready

Please share this announcement!

Do you use Gadgets that change things on your RecentChanges or Watchlist pages, or have you customized them with scripts or CSS? You may have to make some changes to your configuration. Despite the fact that we have tried to take most cases into consideration, some configurations may break. The Beta phase is a great opportunity to have a look at local scripts and gadgets: some of them may be replaced by native features from the Beta feature.

Please ping me if you have questions.

On behalf of the Global Collaboration team, Trizek (WMF) 15:26, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

I suggest we launch the RC change as opt-in for existing users and as opt-out for new users... Otherwise I don't see this ending well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:41, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep, I'm sure there will be some drama if this is opt-out for existing users. Stryn (talk) 17:02, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. I'll report it to the team and we will take a decision. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Trizek, I have at the moment no opposition to this release, I just have serious misgivings about your statement "If your community has specific concerns about this deployment or internal discussion, it can request to have the deployment to their wikis delayed to October 1, if they have sensible, consistent with the project, actionable, realistic feedback to oppose (at the development team's appreciation)." Why?

Why only a delay until 1 October?
Why does it matter if the opposition is sensible, consistent with the project, actionable, realistic feedback to oppose?

If a community (not some individuals, but e.g. a speedy RfC) decides that they don't want to have this enabled, for whatever reason, why can't you just say "fine, we'll leave it as it is for your wiki"? Considering that everyone will be able to opt-out anyway (meaning that there isn't a technical reason that after 1 October, the current system can't remain in place), it shouldn't be too hard to set this to "automatic fixed opt-out for everyone" on that wiki. I totally understand that you do not have to cater to every wish or whim of the communities, and that your team has its say in what comments, wishes, blockers are actionable and realistic and which aren't. I have in principle no problem if you would check the comments and come back with a "no can do, take it or leave it". What I don't get is why you instead say "no can do, you have to take it". This really doesn't send a "we are here for you, we want to work together" message but again the typical "we know better so leave us alone" some of us have come to expect. Fram (talk) 08:35, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF): Fram (talk) 07:59, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay Fram, I was sick these days.

The work on those filters has been done based on user research and user testing, and we have actively took care of all feedback received (which has been overall very positive so far). For us, this justifies a release by default for all users on all wikis, to help people taking care of Recent Changes.

We have set a deadline to move on new improvements (like filter by user or by category) and new projects. Set a different configuration for several wikis is not comfortable for future maintenance work, improvements and operations and requires time to take care of those communities.

Concerning the delay itself, some communities may have issues using the Beta feature we are not aware of (the filters are breaking something completely for instance). That's why we ask those communities to tell us if they need a delay, if necessary and realistic. If the bug is our responsibility, we have until October 1st to fix it, if it matches the project goals. If the bug is the community responsibility (because of a compatibility issue with a local script/gadget for instance), they can ask for a delay to fix it (and we provide assistance if possible) until October 1st. We will of course be working together on those requests. But blockers like "We don't think this tool is useful" or "We don't like the colors" are not eligible for the delay.

We are not forcing everyone with no exception to use the filters. We are providing a way to opt-out for all users who don't want to have them and we think it is a reasonable way to satisfy everyone. We don't say "you have to take it" but "your wiki will have it but you can choose if you want it on your personal interface or not". Maybe the wording for my message was not optimal?

Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Update: the deployment of the filters as default on Recent Changes is delayed until October 3. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:51, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

readapidenied error when attempting to login via PyWikiBot

I am new to PyWikiBot. Wikipedia's docs say, "a bot can make read requests without logging in", so why is the error below occurring?

$ python3 pwb.py login
Password for user Zazpot on wikipedia:en (no characters will be shown): 
Logging in to wikipedia:en as Zazpot
ERROR: Login failed (Failed).
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/zazpot/pywikibot/core/pywikibot/login.py", line 310, in login
    cookiedata = self.getCookie()
  File "/home/zazpot/pywikibot/core/pywikibot/data/api.py", line 3104, in getCookie
    raise APIError(code=login_result['login']['result'], info=info)
pywikibot.data.api.APIError: Failed: The supplied credentials could not be authenticated.

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pwb.py", line 262, in <module>
    if not main():
  File "pwb.py", line 255, in main
    run_python_file(filename, [filename] + args, argvu, file_package)
  File "pwb.py", line 121, in run_python_file
    main_mod.__dict__)
  File "./scripts/login.py", line 190, in <module>
    main()
  File "./scripts/login.py", line 173, in main
    site.login(sysop)
  File "/home/zazpot/pywikibot/core/pywikibot/site.py", line 2091, in login
    if loginMan.login(retry=True):
  File "/home/zazpot/pywikibot/core/pywikibot/login.py", line 326, in login
    '{1}\n.{2}'.format(self.login_name, self.site, e.info))
pywikibot.exceptions.NoUsername: Username "Zazpot" does not have read permissions on wikipedia:en
.The supplied credentials could not be authenticated.
<class 'pywikibot.exceptions.NoUsername'>
CRITICAL: Closing network session.

Please WP:PING me in your reply. Thanks in advance, zazpot (talk) 04:12, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

On closer inspection, it seems that although logging in is failing as above, reading Wikipedia via PyWikiBot actually works fine. Still unsure why attempting to log in produces the error above, though. zazpot (talk) 11:38, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

The "Hodge diamond" template interferes with formats

This section is a bulleted list. Because each paragraph as a whole is indented, "displayed" TeX needs to be indented twice rather than only once, and lines after "displayed" TeX need to be indented by a colon. However, this "Hodge diamond" diagram is not indented, so I put a couple of colons in front of it. But then all sections below it – separate sections – got indented.

Can this be fixed? Michael Hardy (talk) 23:19, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

I have tracked it down to Module:Hodge diamond making a newline in some of the table cells. This works:

Above

Indented table

Below

But if a newline is added in the source right after "Indented table" then "Below" and later text becomes indented when previewing. I didn't save an example because I don't know how to stop the indentation. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:16, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The module is just outputting what it is given, and some of the parameters have a newline. Probably the module should trim each parameter to remove any extraneous spaces or newlines. Frietjes might like to do that. Meanwhile, the following works:

Hence the hodge diamond reads {{Hodge diamond|1|0|0|1|20|1|0|0|1}}

Johnuniq (talk) 00:54, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I made the suggested change in the text until I can figure out why adding trim in the module didn't work. Frietjes (talk) 14:01, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Use mw.text.trim(v) when extracting the args. There are two occurrences of :wikitext(entries[c]) and only one of them was trimmed. Johnuniq (talk) 22:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

thank you, I thought that I tried that, but there must have been another problem since that is working now. Frietjes (talk) 14:32, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Any way to view only 'unvisited' pages in the watchlist?

There doesn't seem to be. Would love to know if there's any I've missed rather than having to scroll through maybe catching the green icon. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:08, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

@Melodia: if you want it to always work like that you can add the following to your personal css page:

.mw-changeslist-watchedseen { display: none; }

— xaosflux ^Talk 13:21, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Naw, I'd just like it to be an option to check now and again. I suppose I could add the CSS thing and keep it commented out normally... ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:57, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Someone can probably turn that in to a userspace gadget/button/etc for you, mw-changeslist-watchedseen is the line id to act on. Randomly poking @Anomie: to see if this is already made possibly? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:32, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I would guess the beta version of the new watch list can either do this by default or could pretty easily be extended to do so. --Izno (talk) 01:19, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Melodia: You can add

$( function() {
	'use strict';
	$( '#mw-watchlist-options' ).append( '<button type="button" id="watchlist-toggle-seen" title="Toggle seen entries">Toggle</button>' );
	$( '#watchlist-toggle-seen' ).click( function() {
		$( '.mw-changeslist-watchedseen' ).toggle();
	} );
} );

to Special:MyPage/common.js. You can then optionally style or position the button any way you want on Special:MyPage/common.css. Example:

#watchlist-toggle-seen {
	float: right;
}

Nirmos (talk) 03:56, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

The new filters beta for watch lists has an "Unseen changes" filter which allows you to do this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:39, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:32, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-39

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

Wikitext syntax highlighting is a beta feature on Wikimedia wikis with text written from left to right. This beta feature is based on CodeMirror. You can now search through the entire article with CTRL+F or cmd+F when you edit. Before it just searched through a part of the article. The developers are also fixing a couple of other bugs. [31][32]
Administrators on wikis that use Structured Discussions as a beta feature or by default can now create and move Structured Discussions boards. Structured Discussions was previously called Flow. [33]

Changes later this week

You 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. For security reasons you will soon get an email by default when someone tries to log in to your account and when someone logs in to your account from a new device or IP address. This can be turned off in your preferences. [34]
Users with extremely old browsers (for example Netscape 2–4, released from 1995–1997) which do not support Unicode will no longer be able to edit. They should try to install a new browser. [35]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September. (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 27 September at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

The Wikimedia Foundation Readers department has proposed changing the mobile website. You can read more on mediawiki.org. This would be a big change.
You can't use OCG to create PDFs after 1 October. This is because of technical problems. You can still create PDFs. Tech News 2017/37 said the function to create PDFs from books would still work. It is now clear it will not work for the next few months. The developers are working on fixing this. You can read more on mediawiki.org.

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

15:59, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Mapping Hiragana and Katakana?

We recently got a suggestion via Phabricator to automatically map between hiragana and katakana when searching on English Wikipedia and other wiki projects. As an always-on feature, this isn't difficult to implement, but major commercial search engines (Google.jp, Bing, Yahoo Japan, DuckDuckGo, Goo) don't do that. They give different results when searching for hiragana/katakana forms (for example, オオカミ / おおかみ "wolf"). They also give different *numbers* of results, seeming to indicate that it's not just re-ordering the same results (say, so that results in the same script are ranked higher). (You can see more details of my tests on Phabricator.)

I want to know what they know that I don't! Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this would be useful (seems that it would) and whether it would cause any problems (it must, or otherwise all the other search engines would do it, right?).

Any idea why it might be different between a Japanese-language wiki and a non-Japanese-language wiki? We often are more aggressive in matching between characters that are not native to a given language--for example, accents on Latin characters are generally ignored on English-language wikis. So it might make sense to merge hiragana and katakana on English-language wikis but not Japanese-language wikis.

Thanks very much for any suggestions or information! TJones (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I have summoned WT:JP and WT:LANG here in case they may have feedback. --Izno (talk) 14:37, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

I am not an expert on this subject, but there are differences in special cases. An example is the case of Naruto (鳴門). Naruto-shi (鳴門市) is a city in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan, and it's Hiragana form (なると) may mean a type of food which is known as Narutomaki (鳴門巻き). In Katakana, it more strictly refers to the anime Naruto (ナルト). A image or regular search will show the slight difference in meaning. Naruto なると (Image search) shows both the anime and the food Narutomaki (fish slice with spiral pattern), but mainly the food. Naruto ナルト (Image search) strictly shows the anime only. 118.240.85.135 (talk) 12:32, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the extra examples! It seems this is another example of the difficulty of balancing false positives and false negatives. There are specific cases in both directions. The best approach is probably to try it in the lab and see what happens. For non-Japanese wikis, it seems that the mapping may do more good than not, since there are many fewer articles overall to be affected. On the Japanese Village Pump, the response is more mixed about whether it's a good idea or not. TJones (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Category:Pages with script errors being flooded with errors

For the last few days Category:Pages with script errors has been populated by hundreds of entries that make no sense. They are all the same: redirects after a page move. They contain a few templates but none of the templates are generating errors, that I can see. Nor are there any recent changes to any of the templates, as that sometimes causes problems if templates are temporarily broken. But such problems, even if they affect hundreds of pages, are temporary, stop when the problem is fixed, and quickly go away.

This though is ongoing and if anything seems to be getting worse, as the rate they are being reported has suddenly accelerated. It now accounts for most of the pages in the category, and still seems to be growing. For the first time today there was an article that needed fixing, but it did not appear in the 'Article namespace' list, presumably as there were too many items for the query. I had to find it in the 'By date' list. --JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 13:42, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Whatever it was seems transitory because a null edit of a listed page removes the page from the category.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:51, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes, they are normal in that way. The problem is they are being continually generated, for no apparent reason. Even if someone had the patience to null edit them all the category would refill quickly with more.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 13:58, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

If anybody wants to use the category with fewer false positives, there is a script that purges each page in a category, so less patience is required. I came across the script recently but can't remember where. For anyone who's interested it's installed at the end of User:RexxS/common.js lines 139 onwards, titled "Refresh Category". When installed it adds an extra tab/button called "refresh" to category pages, which processes the pages one every two seconds. Admins may be able to safely increase the rate. HTH --RexxS (talk) 17:45, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Purging isn’t enough. It helps when a page contains visible errors, due to e.g. a broken template which is now fixed. But these have no visible errors. The only thing that works is a null edit.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 17:52, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Not so. I ran the script on Category:Pages with script errors and it reduced the list from ~900 to ~400 entries. You really ought to try things before you leap to judgement. --RexxS (talk) 19:40, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah, no I had not tried it, apart from manually purging a few and seeing no change. Thanks for doing that, I noticed they were disappearing alphabetically from the category, though it also highlights how rapidly they are being reported now: the category has been repopulated with another 30 or so since, in about an hour and a half.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 20:05, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

It seems to me that the "action: 'purge'" coupled with "forcelinkupdate: 1" is sufficient to give the same effect as a null edit, so the script does its work reasonably well. It does barf on some very large pages because of timeouts, so it's not perfect, but it does seem to be a help in keeping the category pruned. I can just set it off in a different tab and come back to it later. --RexxS (talk) 17:08, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It's recently moved pages containing a redirect and {{R from move}}, e.g. Talk:Clazziquai. If it's previewed unchanged then the category isn't added but if it's previewed without the redirect then {{R from move}} generates both Category:Pages with script errors and Category:Unsynchronized talk page redirects. {{R from move}} causes the page to transclude itself and the associated non-talk page to test their code for redirects. This test can apparently produce a script error if no redirect is found. I guess there is a period during a move where the transclusions don't register the redirect created by the move. That would explain why the category is filling up but null edits solve it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:59, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I should have noted it’s only recent moves, and so newly created redirects. I am still unclear why it’s happening though. The page move, the creation of the redirect(s), in my experience all happen at the same time. There’s virtually no time that they exist in a state which can generate errors. I don’t see how it can be through previewing as I can’t recall there being a preview option for page moves. The redirects are created automatically so with no editor intervention or preview. It’s also been happening at a low level for a while but has only become a problem in the last few days. It seems to have gone from a few a day to a few an hour/hundreds a day. But there’s no pattern to it, just normal page moves by editors.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 17:27, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

The reason for this is that the move of the non-talk page gets executed first, and the contents of the new redirect at the non-talk-page title are parsed, detecting the desync. Then the talk-page move is executed, which fixes the desync, meaning a purge resolves the problem. Why {{R from move}} is causing script errors, though, I have no idea. Ppp ery 23:20, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Natib Qadish - deleted twice by AfD, recreated but I can't find its history

I'm probably missing something simple. I can see the history of the talk page.[36] Shouldn't I be able to see earier versions here? I want to see if there have been substantial changes or if this is still the twice deleted article. Thanks Doug Weller talk 16:48, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

~~The history is at User:Bridgeplayer/Natib Qadish.~~ ~ GB fan 16:50, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

@GB fan: Thanks. Can you do a history merge? I don't think I've ever had to do one. I see I nominated that draft for deletion. Some of the text is identical which is interesting as the editor who recreated it started editing in 2016 and the draft was deleted in 2013. Doug Weller talk 17:56, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

This could be a copyright violation. It seems to be identical to a document on scribd.[37] And either the earlier version was also copyvio from that or vice versa. Doug Weller talk 18:07, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

They are merged together, and all the history is available in the live article. ~ GB fan 18:20, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll look more at the copyvio issue tomorrow. Doug Weller talk 18:24, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Mobile mode

As an iPad user, I just wanted to ask: is there a reason why the mobile version is the default version of Wikipedia for iPad users? Considering how large the iPad screen is, I personally don't see a reason (I'm not a fan of the mobile version, so maybe I'm a little biased) why mobile mode should be preferred to the desktop mode.--Nevé –selbert 15:16, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It is probably because they generally lack a keyboard and have a touch screen? Ruslik_Zero 20:38, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Although once you've selected desktop view from the bottom of the page, you will continue to see desktop as you follow links. See also Wikipedia:Enable mobile version. --RexxS (talk) 21:45, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Fixing abuse of list markup (talk page accessibility, etc.)

Our use of wikimarkup : "indentation" for the purposes of threaded discussions is a gross misuse of the underlying <dd>...</dd> HTML markup, which is for (and only for) the definition or explanation of a term or other entry previously given with <dt>...</dt> (; in wikimarkup). Worse yet, any time there's a blank line inserted, it breaks the surrounding <dl>...</dl> list into a separate list after the line break.

The solution to this is technical and should have been proposed and implemented years ago: convert any : indent into a CSS-indented <div>...</div> when it is not immediately preceded by a ; (or explicit <dt>...</dt>). Our talk pages should not be using <dl>...</dl> structures at all, other than for creation of actual description lists we intentionally want to be formatted as such.

While we're at it, we should also do a similar conversion on any line starting with ; (a <dt> entry), and turn it into a boldfaced div, if it is not immediately followed by : producing a <dd> entry.

Both of these should also suppress the parser's creation of surrounding <dl>...</dl> markup, without any actual <dt> or <dd> items to wrap.

These fixes would also clean up a lot of misused of description list (a.k.a. definition list, association list) markup in articles, where it's being abused for boldface and indentation of non-list material.

Similarly, a line starting with * in absence of any other contiguous line of the same sort should be converted on the fly into an indented line with a bullet, not a "list" with one item. In cases where it's actually desired to use a one-item real list (e.g. to match the formatting of longer lists in the same material), explicit <ul>...</ul> and <li>...</li> markup can be used.

I'm not sure I care whether it's fixed by the devs in the MediaWiki parser, or fixed on-site by JavaScript. The former would be better in the long run, since it would apply the fix to all installations, but the approaches aren't mutually exclusive; the latter could be used in the interim. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 02:13, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Javascript would not be a good solution for this for many reasons; it sounds indeed that you want to have the mediawiki parser changed, so should bring this up at www.mediawiki.org or on phab, since it would not be only for the English Wikipedia. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:20, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: see requests such as phab:T6521 that appear similar. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:22, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Will look into that, and see if that's the right pressure point. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 06:02, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Is this not on WP:PEREN? It should be.... FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 03:26, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't be, because it's not a subjective idea the community keeps rejecting, it's a technical glitch that needs to be fixed because it's causing problems. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 06:02, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

"The community/communities is/are right because they misuse wikitext"? I see. That's definitely a technical glitch. (<- yes, sarcasm). This comes up every once in a while. As I've argued before, the WMF has a replacement for the predominant use case where these elements are misused that the community has rejected. The community should lie in their mess that doesn't so-affect accessibility that Graham pitches a fit (and you know we all rely on Graham--he has previously said that he gets the gist of talk pages from context). For other uses, the correct solution, as with many other things, is to fix the wikitext. (We might reasonably create a lint error when e.g. ; is not followed by a : or another ; in a content space; I would certainly support such a solution.) -Izno (talk) 11:57, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Glad we agree on that much. I think you misunderstood my comment about PEREN, though; "the community is right because they misuse wikitext" is close to the opposite of what I'm saying. We need to either stop misusing wikitext for things it's not intended for (fat chance) or account for misuse in the software so that the output isn't garbage. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 21:37, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

We've mostly fixed this problem socially though, outside of talk space; our guidelines on accessibility already account for it, and when someone is found to be "screwing up" (who is not a newbie), we quickly set that person straight and subsequently clean up the errors we know about (just like with every other guideline or policy). --Izno (talk) 22:38, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

I note that HTML5 defines the contents of <dl> as "Zero or more groups each consisting of one or more dt elements followed by one or more dd elements, optionally intermixed with script-supporting elements." So the suggestion here that every ';' must be immediately followed by a ':' and every ':' must be immediately preceded by a ';' is overly restrictive. Anomie ⚔ 14:19, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, technically you can have two or more DTs followed by two or more DDs (e.g. British and American spellings of a term, with multiple definitions from different fields). What's required is that each group have both a DT and a DD. So, what I've suggested works if you extrapolate a little: the parser shouldn't treat a ;-starting line as a DT unless followed by a DD or another DT, nor treat a :-line as a DD unless preceded by a DT or another DD. We don't appear to have any use case for "optionally intermixed with script-supporting elements", and even if we did, there's no reason for markup so advanced it strains the limits of what MW can handle to be something that has to be supported in ;-and-: basic markup mode, rather that requiring dropping into full-on HTML mode with actual <dl><dt><dd></dd></dt></dl> markup. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 00:21, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Special:WhatLinksHere has link to expired domain

The "External tools: Show redirects only" link on Special:WhatLinksHere takes one to a url in the http://dispenser.homenet.org/ domain, which is a holding page for the namebright.com domain registration service. William Avery (talk) 22:34, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

It works fine for me. Are you sure your computer hasn't picked up some malware somewhere that is making it redirect? ‑ Iridescent 22:37, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

I guess you have en-gb British English as language at Special:Preferences. That's a frequent cause of confusion and problems. I recommend changing to the default en English. MediaWiki:Linkshere is shown for en and has changed the domain per Special:Diff/792761333.[38] MediaWiki:Linkshere/en-gb and MediaWiki:Linkshere/en-ca (Canadian English) still link the broken domain. With en-gb you currently get this warning at Special:Preferences: 'Your language setting of "British English" means that you may miss some local customisations.' I wanted a stronger warning but there was disagreement (see page history [39]). PrimeHunter (talk) 23:10, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Yes. This would seem to be my problem. Thank you. William Avery (talk) 23:57, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Fixed I've synced those other messages to the main content. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:09, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Edit window size, not "remembered"

Greetings, I am using Vector skin & recall that a few years back, when I enlarged the edit window (pull-down arrow box in lower right corner) it was "remembered" at least for each login session. Now the window remains small & I have to enlarge each time. Is there a way to make Edit window size "permanent"? Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk) 01:15, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Try this in your CSS:

textarea {height: 40em;}

PrimeHunter (talk) 09:38, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Done - Thank you so much PrimeHunter - That is a great solution & works perfectly, I could not have ever figured that out in a million years. Cheers! — JoeHebda • (talk) 11:35, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

How to play audio links on ios?

I realize I'm a little late to this party, but I'm trying to understand how to play wikipedia's audio links on an iphone. I understand wikipedia's audio is in ogg vorbis format, and I've read that it uses javascript to present it(?). I've read the media help page (https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_help), which suggests using the separate browser wikipanion (or the $4.99 wikilinks), but given the large market of ios devices, it seems strange that wikipedia has settled on a format that can't be used by so much of the real world. (I understand wikipedia's motivation of free and open source is the motivation). Is there really nothing that enables wikipedia's own ios browser or the mainstream browsers (safari, firefox, chrome, opera) to play them on ios?

P.S. The wikipedia page i'm using as a test is https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Cotton-Eyed_Joe ; interestingly, only the first of the two audio links works in wikipanion... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peterrislin (talk • contribs) 16:18, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

I've had some success playing audio and video files with the VLC media player for iOS. The JavaScript shim ogv.js is disabled on the mobile skin.

MP3 patents expired in April and I've been pushing for the last year for support (see phab:T120288). In hopefully a few months, you'll have no trouble with audio playback on iOS. For video, while MPEG-2 video patents expires in 2018, iOS doesn't support it. — Dispenser 18:21, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Good news, support for MP3 playback on iOS devices (among others) is coming soon. Commons will share an MP3 version of a audio file for devices that don't support other formats. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Article with 201 unverifiable references due to exceeding the 2 MB template include size

If you load Cities and towns during the Syrian Civil War (which is under community sanctions) you are immediately confronted huge and extremely detailed map, a Lua module found at Module:Syrian Civil War detailed map. Unless your experience is very different from mine, you will only see part of it. It's a thing of beauty which can be expanded to show extraordinary detail. Hold the mouse over a place to see its name pop up, and click a link for details. It is a magnificent achievement and is a great resource for those who want that detail. Warning though, it doesn't exactly load quickly.

Once you get the article fully loaded, if you look at the references section you find that there are 348 references, but Chrome's find function shows that 201 of them show no sources but only " Template:Cite web", " Template:Cite news" etc. The technical problem which causes the broken templates is that the 2 MB template include size is exceeded.

I've got several issues with this. The first of course is that all sources must be verifiable, and we have over 200 that can't even be identified in an article under sanctions.

I don't think that the map itself is appropriate for an encyclopedia and in practice can be almost unusable depending on your browser, number of tabs open, bandwidth, etc.

This makes the article almost not fit for purpose if anyone who has ordinary or low bandwidth, which probably includes most of the people who actually are physically in the area of the map.

Any suggestions as to how this can be fixed? Thanks. Doug Weller talk 07:51, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I've made a BOLD suggestion. power~enwiki (π, ν) 08:06, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

I remember that article and previously commented about it on its talk page. There are so many templates that the expansion exceed the allowed server-side processing time limit... The reflist would not show too, until replaced by a tag instead of the template. —Paleo Neonate – 09:22, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. We'll see if having a link to the map template sticks. That's really the only choice I think given that the map gives an include size of 1900092/2097152 bytes leaving no room for most of the other templates. Now that's done, you can see the citations. Doug Weller talk 09:28, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Other choices are harder to implement. The used module produces a huge number of consecutive entries similar to this:

<div style="position:absolute;top:17.143%;left:70.09%"><div style="position:absolute;left:-3px;top:-3px;line-height:0">[[File:Dot yellow ff4.svg|5x5px|[[Tell Nasri]]|link=]]</div><div style="font-size:0%;position:absolute">[[Tell Nasri]]</div></div>

The code could be shortened (I don't want to work on it). PrimeHunter (talk) 09:43, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

@Power~enwiki: thanks for the current solution, —Paleo Neonate – 09:50, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

For people or configurations that prefer/need a less detailed map (smaller size) there is the overview map. You find it on https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Template:Syrian_Civil_War_overview_map.

For all the people for wich the high detailed level is a necessity, there is the https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Template:Syrian_Civil_War_detailed_map

So just use the overview map instead if the detailed is to extended for you're preference or for this specific wikipage/articla.

The article is about cities and towns, so including the overview-map with only towns, cities and strategic places is more fit than including the detailed map in to this article.--Niele~enwiki (talk) 11:48, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Does this solve the loading problem? I've got very fast internet so I can't tell. Doug Weller talk 12:42, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, it seems some people are confusing Wikipedia with an OpenStreetMap layer... Our technology is not optimized to scale for usecases like these. I suggest choosing a different approach. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

It is, however, a pretty awesome map, and as maps are commonly found in encyclopedias, it is strange that we have so few customised clickable maps in Wikipedia. Can we improve our technology for cases like this? —Kusma (t·c) 12:54, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Possibly that a lazy ad-hoc effort would be a bot regularly updating/generating a screenshot of maps designed for it (or placed in a category for it), so the article could use the generated svg or png image instead... I'm not sure if a MediaWiki module doing the equivalent more transparently already exists (if so, enabling it on en-Wikipedia might be another challenge)... —Paleo Neonate – 13:05, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

ON THAT NOTE, let's advertise the better alternative. --Izno (talk) 13:19, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

The detailed map is incredibly important as registers and sources all the developments of the biggest conflict of the 21-century.

It helps wikipedia's goal of providing free independent information and a lot of people around the world rely on it's level of detail to understand what is happening in Syria.

By reducing the fog of war, it also demotivates human right abuses and warcrimes in the conflict.

By splitting the detailed map (large data size, large detail) and the overview map (small data size, low detail) the problem addressed here was already solved. Both templates working fine with me and I'm using a normal computer. People that don't need the level of detail of the detailed map (619,677 + 160,437 bytes) can use the overview map that is only 160,437 bytes. --Niele~enwiki (talk) 21:01, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

A related issue: Template:Middle East conflicts detailed map

Allow me to ping everyone who has commented in this section (Doug Weller, power~enwiki, Paleo, PrimeHunter, Niele~enwiki, TheDJ, Kusma, Izno) to raise a related issue in this sub-section. Please take a look at Template:Middle East conflicts detailed map. If you thought Template:Syrian Civil War detailed map was huge, well this one is even bigger! However, unlike the Syria map, this one is messed-up. It is so huge that for the last 9 months it was not even showing up. A desperate attempt to revive it about a month ago made it show up again. However, as you can see from looking at it, it does not render correctly. It is so huge that the dots end up being shifted. To see what I mean, look at how towns in north Turkey end up in the sea. Look at how towns in south Yemen end up in the sea. Look at how towns in north Syria end up in Turkey. Look at how towns in north Egypt end up in the sea, etc...Also, the map looks mangled and unprofessional (for example see the area of Syria and how the labels are a complete mess).

In addition to the technical issues, the map is flawed on a conceptual level. Why do we need a template for all of the middle-east? The conflicts are not geographically related except for Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. For this we already have Template:Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese insurgencies detailed map. The Yemen conflict is not geographically related to the other conflicts mentioned before, so there is no need to look at them at the same time. Also, the map contains contries like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia… However, there are no civil wars or even insurgencies in these countries. This map is pushing the envelope too far. It is simply unrealistic to have a template for the whole of the middle-east.

If we can get a consensus that this map is a bad idea, then it would be good for someone to nominate the template (and the associated module) for deletion. Lets put this template out of its misery, especially that many people keep spending time and effort to keep it alive. Tradedia^talk 16:19, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

It's unnecessary and as you say conceptually flawed. And technically as you say it's a mess. Doug Weller talk 18:03, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. —Paleo Neonate – 20:14, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

To be very clear - I think these maps, and having maps are a GOOD THING - and we can do a lot of good my making great maps, however placing them directly in to articles in such as way that readers can't read the article is a disservice. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:33, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Archive bot help

Having a little problem with the archive bot on my talk page... it isn't working. It has worked before but has not stopped. Would someone be able to drop in and help? As I have stated before archive functions really should be provided by this website instead of 5,000,000 pages requiring individual edits to establish automatic archiving.--Tom (LT) (talk) 08:27, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

@Tom (LT): Fixed; the user talk page in the archiving code didn't match the page name, thanks to your username change. I've taken the liberty of updating your username in all the places it appeared in your user and talk page, as well as removing an out-dated template. Hope you don't mind. Graham87 09:08, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Graham87, what a silly mistake. --Tom (LT) (talk) 10:16, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

It's a common problem. At User talk:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo#Tracking invalid archive parameters I made a suggestion to alert users about it. The bot operator User:Σ has low activity and hasn't replied. Should we just implement it and see what happens? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:30, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Duplicated deletion in page log

Hi all, out of curiosity how could this happen?

14:31, 27 September 2017 There'sNoTime (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Draft:Guillaume Sutre [...]
14:31, 27 September 2017 There'sNoTime (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Draft:Guillaume Sutre [...]

Doesn't seem to cause any problems, and I haven't seen it before - just seems rather odd -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 13:40, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

(change visibility) 2017-09-27T16:31:53 There'sNoTime (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Draft:Guillaume Sutre [...]
(change visibility) 2017-09-27T16:31:28 There'sNoTime (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Draft:Guillaume Sutre [...]

You removed page, then it was created again, and you removed it second time. Stryn (talk) 13:42, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Ah, so someone saved an edit between :31:28 and :31:53, which re-created the page? o_O -- There'sNoTime ^{(to explain)} 13:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Implementing bots for page movers

Just wondering if page movers could have bots helping out with updating pages that have their categories, templates, or info boxes moved, so page movers don't have to re-add them in every single article accordingly. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 18:40, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Predictive edit summaries

Predictive edit summaries have stopped appearing when I start typing in the edit box; I've had this happen before but I don't remember how to fix it. I haven't changed preferences or added a java blocker to the best of my knowledge. As far as I can see, Twinkle and scripts like easyblock all seem to be fine Jimfbleak - talk to me? 05:57, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I think this is done by your browser, in a similar way to how it autocompletes other things, like when logging in to many sites. All wp does is give the input box a name, so when you use it then re-use it it knows what you have typed there previously, which it can use for autocomplete. Maybe you cleared your browser’s cache, or something else deleted the data it uses for this.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 06:34, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

It varies between browsers. Opera looks for an exact match for the start of the line; Firefox looks for matching text anywhere in the line, but seems to have a maximum line length - it won't consider older edit summaries that are longer than (I think) 128 bytes. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:32, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

JohnBlackburne, Redrose64, thanks. I use Firefox, and the summary doesn't appear to be appearing even for summaries used after the problem started. Is this problem fixable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimfbleak (talk • contribs) 12:16, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Maybe Firefox has changed - I've not "upgraded" recently from FF 51.something, so can't test the current version. Many alleged improvements are not what they claim to be. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:03, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

For no apparent reason, all is well again, thanks anyway Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:41, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Redrose64: You may want to switch to Pale Moon (web browser), an diverging fork of old Firefox with security fixes and features (MSE for YouTube). Coming up for firefox is Firefox 57 "Quantum" (Nov. 14) is the add-ons apocalypse version. They're slowing replacing the single-threaded Gecko engine with components from Servo, a multi-threaded GPU accelerated engine. — Dispenser 16:52, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

AfD log glitch...

Any idea how this entry (which was closed over 2 years back) is present at today's AfD log? One may view User talk:Northamerica1000#AfD.. for the origins of my query.Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 16:26, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

# working oddly

Number sign to create ordered lists seemingly works erratically. Here, for example, it's ok. But here, after reaching 8, it resets to 1, counting onwards from 1. After 8, it once again resets to 1, although wikisyntax looks ok. Cache purging didn't help. A bug? Brandmeister^talk 13:28, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Brandmeister: This is because the ordered list was not continued when those comments by two people were added, which changed the list type from ordered list to definition list. Fixed. --Izno (talk) 13:41, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Brandmeister^talk 14:02, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

A general rule could be:

When replying to a post that is in a list (whether constructed using asterisks, colons or hashes), copy all of the symbols from the start of the post that you are replying to, add one symbol (of any of those three types) to the right-hand end, followed by your reply and signature.

It's a subtle form of the WP:LISTGAP problem: a list is terminated early and another one started immediately afterwards. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:14, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

We really should have some page with that general rule, because I've had to explain it multiple times at this point (including at least one user who thinks he knows what he's doing on the matter). --Izno (talk) 15:22, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I tried to suggest it at WT:TPG (search for "copy the markup") but other people were getting angry, which made me angry, so I backed off. One of them started posting near-as-dammit "cease and desist" notices on my talk page, and I think those of other people too. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:45, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

An essay or a SHORTCUT inclusion at WP:Accessibility would work, even if we skip inclusion at TPG (because I can make this change with WP:TPO regardless). --Izno (talk) 16:28, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

It already exists. Look at WP:LISTGAP, which has color-coded examples of how to indent in talk page discussions. The problem is that WP:Nobody reads the directions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:56, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Tool to count AfD closes

Is there a tool that counts how many AFD closes someone has done. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 18:27, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

SoWhy might have asked about this one at some point. --Izno (talk) 18:50, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@JoJo Eumerus mobile: I created AFDCloses, a tool that displays closes by outcome. As a sideeffect, it also shows the number of AFDs closed. Regards So Why 19:56, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Update to UTC clock gadget

Hello all. Inspired by MusikAnimal's changes to the Twinkle menu, I've made an updated version of the UTC clock gadget that doesn't make the personal toolbar jump to the left when the page is loaded. I'd be grateful if people could have a look at my proposal on mediawiki.org and perhaps give my code a review. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:42, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius: Yes! Thank you! I was going to look into doing this myself but hadn't gotten around to it. Here on enwiki, I think you are safe to implement this. I'm not sure anyone prefers their personal toolbar jumping around :) The CSS code looks good to me, but I have not tested it. — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:17, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Bah, I see now the script sources the MediaWiki version. I will comment there :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:19, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

(c.f. possible problem caused Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Microscopic_fonts_at_p-personal_bar). — xaosflux ^Talk 20:37, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Twinkle menu not showing up

Recently, whenever I'm trying to revert vandalism or warn a user of doing said vandalism on Google Chrome, the Twinkle tab just does not show, nor does the option to do a pageswap. After refreshing the page a few times, however, it suddenly shows. Actually using it is fine, just getting it to show up in the first place is the issue. I'm not sure what's causing this. This appears to only be the case when using Chrome, however, because I haven't had an issue when editing with Microsoft Edge. SkyWarrior 02:01, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

This is typical when another piece of JavaScript you are loading is not correctly declaring its dependencies. Cc user:TheDJ --Izno (talk) 02:54, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Reading and following mw:Help:Locating broken scripts might scale better than pinging TheDJ. :) --Malyacko (talk) 09:21, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I usually ping him because he's really good at finding and fixing these issues. --Izno (talk) 13:15, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Pinging me is fine, but I indeed do not scale :). Made these changes. Seems that User:Fox Wilson/delsort.js by Fox Wilson is not up to date to the current code conventions. I'm considering redirecting it to User:Enterprisey/delsort.js, which is being maintained by Enterprisey. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:40, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Oooh, that's a much-nicer version. I think a simple redirect may surprise initially but I doubt anyone will have any issue with it after The First Time (AUTO COMPLETE!). --Izno (talk) 13:57, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

On an aside, maybe it should be a gadget at this point.... --Izno (talk) 13:58, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks TheDJ. It seems to have been fixed. SkyWarrior 00:29, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Script for stripping down search results to bare list of page names

It's called StripSearch.

I've included a detailed walk-through of the code on its talk page, to help editors take the plunge to learn how to program in JavaScript.

I'd appreciate any comments you might have on this approach and how it could be improved. Or about enhancing the script itself.

I hope you find the script useful. The Transhumanist 09:55, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, that is a very good idea. I'll take a look. (((The Quixotic Potato))) (talk) 11:02, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Seems like you could hide each entire search result and then unhide the element of interest, which is the pagename. --Izno (talk) 13:17, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Izno: Unhide using .not? How would I match the pagename? The Transhumanist 21:27, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, I see this is actually less trivial than expected. Never mind. --Izno (talk) 14:10, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Invisibility of Talk and User page icons

Just became an Autopatroller here 2 days ago, and now my talkpage and userpage have no icons. Also, whenever I edit a page and mark it as minor or add to watchlist the box turns blue when its marked or white when unmarked. From as far as I remember there used to be checkmark which is invisible now. And, I don't see the pages that I suppose to patrol. :( Wondering, do anyone else have those issues?--Biografer (talk) 18:59, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: I just read this discussion. So I guess it have nothing to do with being auto patroller?--Biografer (talk) 18:59, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Biografer: It should not have anything to do with that, I removed you from the group just so you can verify. Please let me know with a ping here, your talk page, or my talk page when you would like it turned back on. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:41, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: You are right. Please turn it back on, although I probably wont be able see the pages that I need to patrol due to technical issue. The reason why I assumed it had to do with me becoming auto patroller, it was because the technical issue happened on the day I became one. But, so far, I see that nothing changed for the better. I'm wondering if changing to Google Chrome will do a difference? As of today, at least the icons are visible during recent changes list and the checkmark thing is visible too. However, once you put that greeting or warning the icons become invisible again. I hope that tomorrow they will finally fix it. :)--Biografer (talk) 00:34, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Done — xaosflux ^Talk 00:35, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Microscopic fonts at p-personal bar

The fonts in my "id=p-personal bar" at the top of each page (links to userpage, notifications, talk, sandbox, etc.) have just been reduced to 75% of their previous size. In Monobook that reduction takes them from 95% of 95% of base font size (11.46px or 90%) to 75% of 95% of 95% of base font size (8.596px or 68%) That's a long way from the minimum acceptable font size for pages (85% or 11px). It's because of the application of "font-size:0.75em;" from https://wiki.riteme.site/w/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.gadget.HideFundraisingNotice%2CTwinkle-pagestyles%2CUTCLiveClock-pagestyles%2CWatchlistBase%2CWatchlistChangesBold%2CWatchlistGreenIndicatorsMono%2Ccharinsert-styles&only=styles&skin=monobook.

Whatever went wrong, can somebody fix it please? --RexxS (talk) 20:21, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius: who worked on possibly related MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.css. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:32, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

(c.f. Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Update_to_UTC_clock_gadget) — xaosflux ^Talk 20:37, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@RexxS: just recreated problem, when adding that clock gadget. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:34, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: so there's something in that gadget. I'll take a look. Interestingly the actual clock display is 120% of the rest of the text in the p-personal bar list elements - I can almost read that! --RexxS (talk) 20:38, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

[Further:] Disabling the clock gadget restores the normal font size; re-enabling it makes the text miniscule again. --RexxS (talk) 20:44, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Found it I think: MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock-pagestyles.css 16:19, 29 September 2017 (new peer gadget for UTCLiveClock - adds space before the clock loads so that the p-personal menu does not jump) by Mr. Stradivarius. Duplicating the definition in that css adds another reduction by 75% to the text. Hopefully Mr.S. will see this and figure out another way to get what he wants. FWIW the the elements in the p-personal bar are actually at 95% of 95% of base font size = 90.25%. HTH --RexxS (talk) 20:55, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

@RexxS: I reverted Mr. S's css inclusion on the gadget, please try purging your caches and see if it is better now. Mr. S, feel free to try again when you have a chance to review. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:03, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Xaosflux. It's back to normal now. That's always a problem with relative font sizes and cascading style sheets: each one can compound with the previous ones. --RexxS (talk) 01:01, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the revert. I'll have a look into what went wrong when I get back home. Could someone revert at mediawiki.org too? Mr. Stradivarius on tour (talk) 02:19, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

I've now fixed the code for Monobook and restored the new version of the UTCLiveClock gadget. Please let me know if you spot anything amiss. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 07:47, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Users and categories

There is a feature whereby a user page on Meta can be copied here. How can one such a page to a category? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:39, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

You cannot, so far as I am aware. --Izno (talk) 02:22, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Such transcluded userpages respect the <includeonly>...</includeonly>, <noinclude>...</noinclude>, and <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> tag pairs. I used these on meta:User:Redrose64. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:15, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata-related watchlist notifications misplaced

My watchlist here en.Wikipedia currently includes an entry that reads:

m D 13:25 User:RexxS‎ (Q1396889) (diff | hist) . . MaksOttoVonStirlitz (talk | contribs) (‎Created claim: Property:P1705: Animal Farm: A Fairy Story)

I saw something similar yesterday but didn't note the details.

Note that the QID, "diff" and "hist" links have nothing to do with RexxS or his user page.

Other Wikidata related edits in my watchlist appear correctly.

In case it's significant, I have the "Add direct unwatch/watch links to watchlist entries (JavaScript required for toggle functionality) " preference checked.

Is anyone else seeing this type of error? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:07, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Probably one of phab:T103676 or phab:T125768. If neither seems like the relevant error, then go ahead and file the task; I saw the same change on RexxS's page. --Izno (talk) 13:48, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

It's because the Animal Farm Wikidata entry is used in his page, see the infobox at User:RexxS#Lua. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:49, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

If you want to see what the P- and Q-numbers actually are, you can install this user-script. - Evad37 [talk] 00:42, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

And if you choose editsource on a page, at the bottom, you can find "Wikidata entities used in this page" which can also be helpful. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:27, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Problem logging into Wikidata and Commons

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T174220

This isn't a Wikipedia question but I don't know where to start. I've just flown across country to visit grandchildren and got an email message stating "Someone (probably you) recently logged in to your account from a new device." What new device? I'd been using this computer all summer. And now I can no longer login to Wikidata or Commons. Once logged into Wikipedia I used to be globally logged into the other sites. Now I'm not and a login attempt returns "There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Go back to the previous page, reload that page and then try again." when I try to login there. I've changed my Wikipedia password, but that doesn't seem to help. Any suggestions? StarryGrandma (talk) 20:16, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma: OK the first warning is just that you have logged in from a new computer/ip range - it is only informative. For your other issue, try to log out, clear your cache AND cookies. Then login again - sometimes it helps to pick a project you have never used, for example the Spanish Wikibooks site. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:38, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Xaosflux, clearing cookies did it. All cookies, WP has endless cookies, so all was easier. Now I have to reset my preferences. I think I will leave login notifications turned off for a while. I it supposed to work this way? StarryGrandma (talk) 21:15, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma: glad to hear you are back up and working! "Login from an unfamiliar device" is a fairly new option - if you use different computers and areas often it may not be very helpful for you. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:19, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Apparently there's a bug with this new functionality, where sometimes these messages are sent unnecessarily. It's being investigated, but is rather rare it seems. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:54, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

MoreMenu is now using peer gadget to prevent jumpiness

Similar to what was recently done for Twinkle and for the UTC clock gadget, I have updated MoreMenu to use peer gadgets which should prevent the menus from jumping around while the page is loading. This should only affect Vector users. Let me know if there are any problems! Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:10, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

archive CSS for Firefox Mobile doubles the vertical space

FF for Android 4.4 Android 7.0 Samsung Galaxy S7

When viewing sections inside {{archive}} blocks, the vertical space is "doubled" that is for the full height of text, there is a preceding equal vertical space without text (but is still purple). Looks like some CSS bug either in FF mobile or in the WP CSS.

Any Android users available to try and reproduce? WP:ITN/C is a good place to test.

--CosmicAdventure (talk) 22:10, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

@CosmicAdventure: Known problem; this is because of the "The following discussion is closed" text being squashed by the adjacent quotebox. In mobile, the quotebox class is given 100% width. This should probably be fixed in MediaWiki:Mobile.css since {{archive top}} might be substituted in some places (not sure though). Jc86035 (talk) 15:13, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-40

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 use preload features in the visual editor. This means you can create links to create new pages and some text will already be in the edit window when someone clicks on it. [40]

Changes later this week

If you have turned on "Automatically enable most beta features" you will now get the 2017 wikitext editor. Before this you had to turn it on manually even though it is a beta feature. [41]
Special:Block and Special:Unblock will get the OOUI look. [42]
The jQuery library will be upgraded to version 3 on all Wiktionary wikis from 2 October. It will be on all non-Wikipedia wikis from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October. [43]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (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 3 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 4 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

A new feature called Reading Lists are coming to the Wikipedia mobile apps. First it will be in the Android version. Reading Lists are a private user preference where you can see lists of articles on multiple devices. You can give feedback on this feature. [44]
The search function has used fallback languages for language analysis. This means a language could be analysed with the grammar of a completely unrelated language to find related words. This will be removed from most wikis the week starting with 9 October. You can read more and give feedback.

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

23:25, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Range contributions has arrived!

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T163562
Resolved

Almost 13 years after it was first requested, MediaWiki now allows you to query for IP ranges, and right at Special:Contributions where you'd expect it to work. This supports IPv4 and IPv6. For example, see Special:Contributions/2601:401:503:62b0::/64. It does not support wildcards (e.g. 192.168.0.*), but the gadget many of you use will continue to function. The native contributions list will simply be shown below the gadget's results.

There is also a new interface message shown when you are viewing an IP range: MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon-range (which is empty at the time of writing), as opposed to the normal MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon message you see when viewing a single IP. One more important note is that Special:DeletedContributions and Special:Log do not support IP ranges -- yet!

If you are a fan of the XTools range contributions tool, which gives you various WHOIS information and sorting by IPs, you may be interested to know there are plans to introduce something similar in MediaWiki. That's probably many moons away from completion, but feel free to follow that task for updates. We also have plans to add a IP range calculator to core. If you have any ideas regarding that (should it be shown at Special:Contribs, or as it's own Special page?) please share your thoughts.

If you notice anything is off with the data, things are slow, other weirdness, don't hesitate to comment at phab:T163562, create a new ticket, or ping someone at Community Tech.

Cheers! — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:46, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Neat. @MusikAnimal: I took a look at your example and it doesn't seem to respect my preference to only display 300 contributions results (at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc). I see just about 400 results when I look at that query. Can you verify? --Izno (talk) 18:54, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Hmm no it appears to work as expected for me. Could you try viewing it in safemode (which removes script and gadgets, but should retain your preference)? Is anyone else experiencing this issue? — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:03, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, I can't repro either; it was just an eyeball. I'll go back to my corner now. --Izno (talk) 19:20, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

That's awesome! Thanks for working on this! − Pintoch (talk) 13:32, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Adding omitted wikilinks automatically?

Hi,

WP:BTW states that "as a rule of thumb editors should only link the term's first occurrence in the text of the article." Is anybody aware of a tool that would take Wikitext and add wikilinks that have been omitted because of this policy? Example:

Input text:

This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]].
The [[BBC]] had commissioned the radio comedy from Adams.

Output text:

This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]].
The [[BBC]] had commissioned the [[radio comedy]] from [[Douglas Adams|Adams]].

Of course the goal is not to perform such edits on Wikipedia (as it goes against the policy) but rather to use these links for entity extraction from wikitext. I am also aware that such a tool could potentially insert wrong wikilinks, and would need to be used with care.

Thanks, − Pintoch (talk) 13:37, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Pintoch: in your example above, what other discriminators are you looking for, for example your output added a wikiklink to radio comedy, but not to book for example. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:24, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Xaosflux:: yes, because "book" has not been wikilinked before… I would expect the tool to only add links to phrases that have been wikilinked before. (I am not looking for a generic Entity Linking solution that would take bare text and add wikilinks based on some machine learning algorithm). This is the reason why I quoted WP:BTW. So, the tool would only propagate existing wikilinks to later mentions. I hope that is clearer? − Pintoch (talk) 17:35, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, thank you..I expect if you tried to do this over the course or entire articles you would run in to issues executing as above, when trying to match the piped label instead of the exact term (as in assuming the second "Adams" is the same target as "Douglas Adams" piped to it above; for more common phrases and unusual linkings the output may not match the intent. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:41, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Watch list

My watch list comes up. empty. It says "Below are the last 0 changes in the last 0 hours" If I switch the display period it works. Any idea what is going on? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:12, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

This is Part 2 of Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 158#Watchlist changes. Commons got it yesterday. You now need to set a positive non-zero value, up to 30 (fractional values are permitted). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:27, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:17, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Just once I'd like the Tech Report to give me a heads up about these sort of changes. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:15, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Error converting HTML to wikitext: docserver-http: HTTP 400

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T154116

Hi. I wonder if I could get some advice on this problem

https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation?title=Special:ContentTranslation&campaign=contributionsmenu&to=eo&page=Taiping+Rebellion&from=en&targettitle=Uzanto%3ADuomillia%2FTaiping+Rebellion&revision=802820900

I am in the middle of translating https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion fron EN to EO. But, when I try to publish I get this mysterious error: Error converting HTML to wikitext: docserver-http: HTTP 400

I would have guessed that this is caused by something in the template at the top of the article, but when I removed in from the translated article I got the same problem.

Any thoughts anyone?

(I'm on Firefox 52.4, Windows Vista)

Duomillia (talk) 20:01, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Duomillia: please see phab:T154116. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

printable version

Activating printable version from the side toolbar only opens the browser's print dialog. This happens for both Chrome and Firefox, logged in or not. All I know is that a genuine, MediaWiki Printable version surprised me by popping up a few days ago at Beilin District, Suihua. Hadn't seen it before or since. — Cpiral§Cpiral 22:44, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

@Cpiral: this is a fairly recent change across all projects (see phab:T24256) - and has some pushback - see phab:T167956. So for right now, this is expected behavior. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:17, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Note, in most cases if you want to display the printable version a workaround is to use the printable version to open in new tab. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:18, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

In Firefox that only works after right-clicking the link and selecting a menu item. The normal method Ctrl+click opens the print dialog. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:37, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Google Ngrams analysis?

Anyone know of a good analysis of Google "Ngrams" (n-grams) corpora? I'm noting frequent discrepancies between the default "English" corpus's results and the "American English" and "British English" ones; I have not been using the "English One Million" corpus (one million what? words? books? pairs of words?).

For example, you can do a search comparing two spellings of a word, with a showing in "English" that one is dominant, then repeat the same search on "British English" and "American English" and find the other spelling dominant in both. This casts serious doubt on the utility of this tool, e.g. in WP:RM discussions, unless it can be identified which corpus is more likely to be statistically valid.

My suspicion is that the British and American corpora are comparatively small subsets, and thus have statistical weaknesses; i.e. that they are not the total English corpus divided into American versus British, with remainders tossed out. There is no "other" English that uses spellings or grammar widely divergent, in written form, from both US or British/Commonwealth English. (The major outlier is Canada, which uses a mixture of US and UK style, not a unique third orthography.) I've also seen British editors say that their search results in the British corpora have brought back results that don't agree with [their perception of] mainstream British usage.

But the opposite assessment could be correct: that the American and British corpora are rich, while the "English" one is just a mish-mash of partial sample data.

The corpora themselves can be downloaded here (and we care about the 2009 corpora, which are the ones the Google Ngram Viewer uses; it has not been updated to use the 2012 corpora). I could use a spreadsheet app or something to do my own analysis of the "total counts" files, but am hoping someone's already been through this work, either here or in a journal or other publication.

This actually has some WP:RS implications. E.g., the changes-in-usage additions in the new (4th, 2016) edition of Garner's Modern English Usage are primarily based on piles of Google Ngram Viewer results, according to the author, which casts doubt on the reliability of his assessments of various usage matters, about which we have articles that may cite this book.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 03:33, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

The one paper I know about the ngram viewer is Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution. The section Google Ngram Viewer#Criticism also has some interesting refs. --Mark viking (talk) 05:05, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Uneditable sections

About once every two weeks or so, I run across a page the sections of which are not directly editable (in Chrome, under MacOS X). Example: Wikipedia:Requests for comment. Anyone else getting this? I thought maybe it was the protection template at the top, but it's not. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 22:44, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

There is probably a __NOEDITSECTION__ in one of the templates on that page. --Izno (talk) 00:06, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, in {{RFC list footer}}. See WP:NOEDITSECTION. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Ah so. I remove it from that template since it serves no legit purpose and is an impediment to regular editing. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 06:48, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, this was the original reason for the special directive: Special:Permalink/308263020 and the template dramatically changed since, not containing any such sections. —Paleo Neonate – 07:19, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

No ping

A fault, in my view, of the noping algorithm is that it does not create a proper wikilink. Eg. {{noping|PDOldenburger}} generates PDOldenburger. This link is blue when it should be red and Special:WhatLinksHere/User:PDOldenburger does not point to this page. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 11:35, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

I documented [45] this at Template:Noping#Consequences. It looks impossible to avoid these consequences with the current software. {{noping|PDOldenburger}} avoids a ping by generating code with an external link: <span class="plainlinks">[//wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User:PDOldenburger PDOldenburger]</span> A wikilink would cause the ping the template is trying to avoid. The automatic red or blue coloring only happens for wikilinks. mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions##ifexist could be used to determine whether the userpage exists but ifexist causes a ping so that doesn't help. I suppose we could make sitewide JavaScript to color the link red after loading if the page doesn't exist but I don't think it's worth the complication and performance cost. If you want to make a real wikilink without pinging then you have to prevent the ping with one of the conditions at mw:Manual:Echo#Technical details, e.g. by not signing in the same edit. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:59, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Lint errors: Paragraph wrapping bug workaround: completely mis-localized

I have been fixing Lint errors: Paragraph wrapping bug workaround. The last several errors have been completely mis-diagnosed and mis-localized. For my last several fixes, the true error was an unclosed HTML tag above the region that the linter claimed for the Paragraph wrapping bug workaround error. In the case of User:Jimbo Wales/guestbook, the linter claimed the error was near the bottom of the article, when the error was actually a missing </small> in Guestbook Signature 42 out of 398, in other words it was about 11% from the top of the article when the linter claimed it was near the end. If nothing else can be done about this, the help page at MW:Help:Extension:Linter/pwrap-bug-workaround should inform users that in many cases this error is the result of an unclosed HTML tag not in the region highlighted by the linter. This is especially likely to be true when the highlighted region ends with the end of the article, i.e., the highlighting, once it starts, goes to the end. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:20, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

User:SSastry (WMF), is this related to the work done last week? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:20, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, when there are multiple errors on a page, unfortunately, it is hard to precisely identify the source of the error right now, i.e. one error causes some fixups to be done in the parser which then interacts with another error. As you noted when there is a formatting tag (like <small> or <strike>, etc.) that is left unclosed to the end of the article, the behavior is quite different in Tidy and HTML5. This can then throw off other error detection. So, we cannot completely eliminate false positives. This is one of the reasons, why we cannot auto-fix the errors on our own. While we continue to make improvements to our lint error detection code, but we still cannot guarantee complete precision here. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 14:51, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Not related, moved to separate thread.

Not sure if this is related somehow, but for the last month or so I've been experiencing a problem (in Chrome, on MacOS X), where if I enter a space character at the end of a displayed "line" (i.e. right before a soft-wrap) in the editing window, a hard linebreak ends up being inserted when I save, often resulting in crap like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna

aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

where the second line, which should not be a real line at all, is treated as <pre>...</pre> text. What's happened is a hard line break was inserted after "magna", causing the "[space]aliqua" to start a new hardcoded line. This most often happens when the displayed "line" in the editing box soft-wraps at something not alphabetical, such as ]] or the like. Driving me nuts. Generally the only way to fix it is to save the broken version and go back in and re-edit it. I get hit by this around 1–5 times per day. Never happened before, in 12 years. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 22:54, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

SmcCandlish: I am sorry for your problem, but I don't think it is related. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

OK, will post it as a separate thread. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 06:45, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Pages with direct links to nonexistent files

Currently pages invoking nonexistent files are automatically aggregated under Category:Pages with missing files, but pages that link directly to the raw files using [[Media:..., usually via a template like {{Audio}}, are not. I'm not sure what happens when a file linked by this method is deleted on Commons or locally, but even if it was automatically delinked, there still needs to be a way of keeping track of red links to nonexistent files because they could be instated by mistake.

So, is it a good idea to implement something like {{#ifexist:Media:{{{1|}}}||[[Category:Pages with links to missing files]]}} into such templates? Or is there a better way to handle them, like letting a bot automatically figure out or tweaking MediaWiki directly? Or, are they being taken care of already? Nardog (talk) 15:40, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Unicode sans-serif font recommendation?

Anyone have a specific recommendation for a replacement for Lucida Sans Unicode, with about equal (or better) coverage of glyphs? I have to ditch this font because a) boldface is barely distinguishable from regular text in it, and b) it's very difficult to tell the difference in it between -, –, and − (at least on my monitor and in Mac OS X). Lucida Grande doesn't have the dash problem, but does have the bold problem. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 02:04, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish:, while far from exhaustive you can compare many of them here: User:Xaosflux/Sandbox35. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:56, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. I ended up settling on Google's Noto font family. They still don't distinguish visually between en dash and minus (and it's lost the distinction between the primes ′ ″ and the straight quotes ' ", except in monospace), but they resolve all the other issues I was having, and are quite readable. I'm surprised how many fonts with good glyph support have no boldface. Kind of weird. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 07:16, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I like Deja-Vu Sans and Bitstream Vera Sans (which are open source fonts) here, but there are symbols which they don't support such as various "emoji" which are starting to be popular as part of user signatures. The Mono type of those fonts are among the good ones for shells and coding (and in my opinion for the edit window). —Paleo Neonate – 07:40, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Right; I use a mono font for the edit window. If anyone isn't, well, I feel sorry for them. :-) As for emoji, they can just die. I was happy with the original Unicode smiley face character, which was simple black and white, but MediaWiki converts it on-the-fly into the colored emoji version, so I retired it from my signature. A funny cat face is probably enough anyway). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 21:41, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

MediaWiki does no such thing. If ☺ (U+263A) and ☻ (U+263B) don't show up as black and white for you, blame your browser and/or OS font subsystem. Anomie ⚔ 16:31, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

InternetArchiveBot notices about nothing but `archive-url` additions

FYI

– Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: WP:Bots/Noticeboard#InternetArchiveBot notices about nothing but archive-url additions

Summary: Proposal to have InternetArchiveBot stop posting one specific kind of notice on article talk pages – namely that it's just added an archive-url to a citation template. The reasoning is that it's a triple-notice (watchlist hit, notice post, and watchlist hit of the notice post) of trivia that doesn't need any human intervention, and clutters talk pages. An opposing view is that all bot notices are useful.

Will not affect InternetArchiveBot notices that may need editor examination, such as problem reports or notices of attempts to repair broken URLs.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ< 22:48, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Pages jumping around while loading

I know that this has been discussed before, but it seems to be getting worse, leading to lots of misclicks. I inadvertently hit rollback twice recently, at least one of which was a page I hadn't even looked at, and today I hit the block button for Purplebackpack89 when I had intended to click on the diff above Purple's post on my watchlist. What needs to happen to get this fixed? SarahSV ^(talk) 15:23, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

The watchlist at Commons is bad for that: there's a box at the top which starts off zero height, then the JavaScript expands it to about two lines high; then it collapses to zero again, all in the space of a second or two. Whilst this box is visible, most of it is blank except for a link "Provide a translation or suggest a new notice" at upper right. But I have made lots of misclicks as a result. This is with Opera 36 in MonoBook skin. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:27, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Pages jumping, happens when we add or hide content. The higher up the page, the more annoying it i. So sitenotices, watchlist notices, geonotices, etc etc. are super high impact for that. To counter it, we either need to start floating them OVER the page (historically disliked by people), or find a completely different spot for them all together. Or we can 10 fold or more our investment in technology, so that we can just serve every single person a page tailored just for them. Specifically for the watchlist however, it is currently rather bad if you are enrolled in the the beta for filters. This is being worked at, but in the mean time, you can disable the beta of course. If you have more specific idea of what content is being hidden, that is causing you grievance, then maybe it can be looked at, sometimes it can be made less terrible, though often not. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:49, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I've now disabled the beta for everything except preview, which is very helpful. I'll see whether that makes a difference. SarahSV ^(talk) 16:09, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Another workround, thoough I expect you've thought of this, would be to use an alternate account without admin or rollback, etc, status. I disabled WikEd, which was such a pest, mainly because of a single icon it slid in and so shifted everything else. Thincat (talk) 18:32, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

That's a good idea, Thincat. I've never been clear about what causes it. So the admin tools do, WikiEd, I've already disabled Twinkle. Is there anything else obvious? Alternatively, if the ultimate cause is the addition or hiding of sitenotices, etc, would it not make sense to deal with those instead? SarahSV ^(talk) 21:37, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Twinkle was fixed two weeks ago btw. Or well.. the dropdown TW menu i should say. Not where it adds all kinds of links to the diff or history page views. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:16, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I started a brief thread about this on wikimedia-l earlier this month, see [46] - there were some useful replies, particularly from @Krinkle: [47] and @Quiddity: [48]. I couldn't think of a useful way to follow up on them, though. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:52, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Mike. Quiddity, can the WMF do anything about this? When checking my watchlist recently, I twice misclicked rollback on pages I hadn't even looked at, [49][50] and didn't realize I had done it. See the bewildered response from one editor. I also misclicked the block button. It didn't lead to a block because that needed another step, but even so it's annoying, SarahSV ^(talk) 00:00, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

I surrendered the rollback right for that reason. Net negative. Of course that particular situation could be fixed by requiring a confirmation click per common software design principles, but that hasn't happened to my knowledge. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:19, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

It has. See User:Zvn/confirmwatchlistrollback.js which you can copy into your own Special:MyPage/common.js. --RexxS (talk) 13:48, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, but I consider that a hack, not a fix. I try to avoid unsupported JS. This needs to be in the core, the same place as the rollback link itself. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:12, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

I was wondering whether the banner issue could be fixed, not rollback, i.e. address the cause. Quiddity, if you're the wrong WMF person to speak to about this, can you direct us to the right one, please? SarahSV ^(talk) 04:18, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

SarahSV, I've filed phab:T176656 which proposes that CentralNotice not be shown on the pages that contain rollback links. I think that would potentially solve most of the problems, if any/all of it is technically feasible. However some users might object to this as it would reduce their chances of seeing any particular banner (e.g. an editor that does most of their browsing via watchlist and diffs, would become unlikely to see a WLM banner).

SarahSV, update: It seems that CentralNotice banners are not shown on Special pages, as of a year ago. Therefor it must be a different type of thing that is appearing. Could you specify which exact thing is appearing? (if you're not sure where it originates, please at least give us some example text to search for). E.g. perhaps you meant MediaWiki:Watchlist-details? Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mandruss: The task phab:T126798 is asking for the rollback-link to have a confirmation step, but some users do object to that proposed change because it makes multi-rollback more complicated. IIUC, there are 3 options: (1) Users who want a confirmation have to use a userscript. (current). (2) Users who don't want a confirmation have to use a userscript. (3) A new mediawiki preference is added, and all users have to deal with a slight delay increase for page-load (every preference adds to the delay) plus all developers have another new variable to maintain and test-against and etc forevermore (see my essay about the pros/cons of preferences for more). There's sadly no easy solution. HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Quiddity, the issue is this. All pages on Wikipedia jump around when I try to load them, including the watchlist. First, they jump horizontally (a slight movement), then they jump vertically (a larger movement). It means that I click on links I didn't intend to click on, including rollback and the block button. It means that when I link to a page subsection, the link ends up going to some other section of the page. This has been going on for years (for example, see 2016 discussion), with different browsers, computers, and operating systems, and it seems to be getting worse. Various things have been blamed, including gadgets, preferences, and banners. My question is: can the WMF work on identifying the cause(s) and fix it or them? SarahSV ^(talk) 21:45, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

SarahSV The simple answer is yes, all devs and most editors are aware of the problems and most of us also suffer from them; the cause in all cases is "all things that load in our browsers after the plain text content arrives" (that can include everything from images appearing, to sections collapsing, to gadget-based links appearing, to advanced-menu-option rows appearing, and more, depending on the variables in each instance); fixing them is not easy and in many cases not possible (because we always want the plain text to be readable as soon as possible, and all the complexity on top of that plain text is never going to be instantaneous), but is always in mind.

If there is a specific thing that you want to workaround or better understand, then we can only help if you give specific details, i.e. 1) what exact page is the problem on (an example page, if it's on many.), 2) what exact content is appearing/disappearing (i.e. causing the individual elements of the page to re-shuffle themselves to fit within the browser window) - we need specific text strings or descriptions that will allow exact understanding of what has appeared/disappeared, 3) what browser/OS combination you are using. We might (depending upon the above) also need to ask (and help you find out) about which gadgets/preferences might be involved. Feel free to continue that tangent at my talkpage, if you'd prefer. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

> Of course that particular situation could be fixed by requiring a confirmation click per common software design principles

Such a thing was implemented and reverted per common human irrationality : https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_147#Rollback_function_has_been_changed

Generally, it is an accurate statement of mediawiki software as a whole. Too many decisions are based on emotions rather than usability or quantifiable research, e.g. wanted pages contains a lot of unwanted pages due to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T43155 (allegedly a feature not a bug).

For this particular issue the solution is pretty dead simple: disable custom user scripts and css on critical maintenance pages. Recent changes is a page to see "recent changes" and watch list a page to looked at selected pages (not random page that someone may be interested in).

Unfortunately, such a simple solution will bump against human irrationality every time.197.218.88.11 (talk) 17:08, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Disappearing icons

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T176884

Good day, it seems that the watchlist star, the notification icons between the user name and "Talk" are all disappearing. Is this another one of the best bad solutions that are spoken of? --Jax 0677 (talk) 21:19, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

And so are those little markers that indicate you're seeing an external link. NewYorkActuary (talk) 22:07, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

I've got them all, except the watchlist star. But then I use MonoBook in Opera 36. Maybe it's thursday? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:24, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

They all still display fine in my case for now, fortunately. —Paleo Neonate – 00:38, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

I think this might be a problem with Internet Explorer 11. With IE11 I see it both on Wikipedia and on another site, while I don't see it with Google Chrome. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 00:51, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

After a reboot the icons are back on the other website but still missing on Wikipedia. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 01:19, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Yep, gone in IE, but there in Firefox. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 06:40, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Currently, the Phabricator guys are working on it. --George Ho (talk) 09:14, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Facing the same problems in Edge.And trying to work on the mobile site in a Win-10 phone from Edge is just brilliant.All the icons on the hamberger menu has disappeared and....Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 09:38, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
I was seeing the problem when I was using Internet Explorer 11. But it went away when I switched to Mozilla Firefox. NewYorkActuary (talk) 11:49, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

The icons are back. Yay! Strawberry4Ever (talk) 12:39, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Actually, they seem to come and go. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 12:44, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

I have Microsoft Edge and I don't see arrows with External links.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:28, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Still not showing in IE. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 06:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Sometimes I see them, sometimes I don't. Strawberry4Ever (talk) 12:52, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Reply - Tell me about it. I see the Watchlist Star" icons here, but not at my own user pages. Does anyone know when this issue will be resolved for Internet Explorer 11.0? --Jax 0677 (talk) 13:37, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Mine had disappeared, too. I was worried that there was a problem with my computer. Thankfully things seem to be back to normal now, as of today, although it took seven days. Johnsmith2116 (talk) 04:41, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Seven days? In which case it definitely was Thursday. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:41, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

User talk:愛耶穌

The user is not blocked but says they can not edit anything except for the talk page because they gen an open proxy block notice. Could someone skilled please have a look (I am sure they would be happy to provide more details). Thanks.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:50, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

The next steps for this (also in Template:Autoblock) have already been provided on that user talk page. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:17, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Tnx.--Ymblanter (talk) 07:53, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

edit links in strike-through style for blocked users?

I noticed that the section edit links for a blocked user's talk page are in strike-through style. Chrome shows the link as having:

a.user-blocked-temp {
   opacity: 0.7;
   text-decoration: line-through;
}

is this intentional? I know we strike-through their user name, but why the edit links on their talk page? -- RoySmith (talk) 13:16, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@RoySmith: You appear to be using a gadget, because I do not see the same. --Izno (talk) 13:27, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Indeed he is. Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets: Under Appearance – Strike out usernames that have been blocked. Also, it strikes anything that links to their pages, edit links and contributions included. Nihlus 13:29, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

You can post a suggestion at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-markblocked.js but it looks OK to me. You can still click the edit links but just get an advance warning that the user is blocked. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:37, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Reference "Jump up" accessibility labels (for "^" links) are half-found by browser Find

For example, on list of generic and genericized trademarks, if I use Chrome's Find feature (command-F/control-F), and type in jump, it says it finds 173 instances of the word on the page (the same number as the number of references), but if I press return repeatedly or hold it down, or repeatedly press the next/previous arrows on the Find box, I can cycle through all 173 without anything appearing on the page (no highlights and no scrolling). This confused me for a while. Actually, while I was writing my post here to ask what was going on, I decided to try Firefox in addition to Chrome, and it turns out Firefox shows the link target URL of things Find finds, which gave me the clue I needed.

They seem to be <span> tags with class cite-accessibility-label, with 1×1 px size and overflow hidden, positioned above the top of the viewport, containing the text "Jump up", inside the <a> tag for each "^" link. If I view the source (not in the inspector, but view-source:) and do the same thing with Find, it only finds 7 instances (which are all visible there, obviously), so I guess these "Jump up" accessibility labels are being added by a script after page load? I don't actually know what piece of software is providing them (MediaWiki or something else), but would there be a way to keep Find from finding them, which confuses people who don't use them or expect them to exist?

– PointyOintment (talk · contribs) 02:23, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

The related patchsets are discussed in this archived thread from 2013. The alternative at the time was "using WAI-ARIA labels, but that behaves inconsistently with screen readers and doesn't work with NVDA." I'm not sure if anything has changed since then. :/ Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:48, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Quiddity: I think it may well have, actually ... screen reader support for ARIA has improved significantly since then, and NVDA itself has improved to the point that it's now a serious competitor to JAWS. I'd be happy to do some more testing if need be. Graham87 15:34, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

And lemme ping the right account. :-) Graham87 15:37, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Hoo man and Matma Rex: Hey, any chance you could take another look into this, or ping someone more appropriate? (cf. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79472/ and the archived thread link above, for reminders on context). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:14, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Thursday happened

Error in marking watchlist as visited

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T171027

Getting this error multiple times today when clicking "Mark all pages as vistited":

A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.[WdbJLgpAMEsAAGVgAZEAAABV] 2017-10-06 00:07:10: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError"

--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 00:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I think this is related to phab:T171027. If so, they're working on it. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:34, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Another Watchlist error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T177440

I tried to update my watchlist to not show bot edits, and 30 seconds or so later this cropped up:

Shows error when I tried to change watchlist settings to hide bot edits.

Is this a me problem or a Meta problem or not a problem at all? I assume it is related to the one above. Thanks, L3X1 (distænt write) 01:48, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

L3X1, do you use the New filters for edit review Beta feature? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:13, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Trizek (WMF) Not at this time. L3X1 (distænt write) 12:49, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Are you using ORES predictions? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:51, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes. I have them turned up to max. L3X1 (distænt write) 13:09, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

There is apparently some significant Watchlist slowdowns due to ORES filters. We are investigating the case and some developments will happen next week.

In the meantime, I encourage you to lower ORES predictions or don't use them. Thank you for the report L3X1, and apologies for that issue. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:34, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I will, thanks for helping me, Trizek. L3X1 (distænt write) 13:46, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Watchlist hanging in Firefox 56 with beta filters

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T177440

FYI, I just filed phab:T177572 because some change made for the beta filters (the problems filters) is causing Firefox 56 to have a conniption. --Izno (talk) 04:15, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Argggh! Firefox on Mac issues

Not sure what's causing the slow-down or conflict, but the error message states: A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete. Script: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/loa…ts&skin=vector&version=0v61to4:106 I am not code savvy so if anyone can help decipher the message and advise as to what I should do, please don't hesitate. ^{Atsme📞📧} 20:33, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Atsme: What page is that occurring on? If it is the watchlist, it might be #Watchlist_hanging_in_Firefox_56_with_beta_filters above. --Izno (talk) 20:40, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure, Izno, but will check to see. ^{Atsme📞📧} 20:45, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Watchlist. ^{Atsme📞📧} 20:46, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

That was it, Izno - I unchecked some of the beta filters, and voila!! Speedy Gonzales, here! Much appreciated! ^{Atsme📞📧} 21:04, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Floating tooltips near right margin activate hor scroll

References tooltip gadget in the latest desktop Chrome on PC goes to the right when reference number (e.g. ^[1]) is near right webpage margin, thus activating horizontal scroll, instead of being displayed on the left. Screenshot.

Also, same thing happens with floating keyboard-settings tooltip window which sometimes (when typing Edit summary) gets displayed in the bottom right corner of standard wikisource editor, thus activating horizontal scroll same as in example above (except that here is until it disappears by itself, and with reference tooltip it is like that until one moves cursor of reference number). --Obsuser (talk) 21:33, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Scrolling boxes adjacent to each other

I greet you again, with this much greeting. Look, on my user page I got a couple of article puffery boxes, one below the other (created, expanded)- I wondered if they could go next to each other instead? If so- how? Apologies if this isn't the right place for such a Q- I equally considered the Help Desk. Thanks in advance clever people! Cheers, — fortunavelut luna 19:28, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

@Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: This might work:

{| style="width:100%;"
|-
|style="width:50%;"|
==Articles created==
<div class="div-col columns column-width" style="{{column-width|15em}} font-size:90%; height: 300px; overflow:auto; border: 1.5px solid #242424; background: transparent; padding: 4px; text-align: left;">
''(list goes here)''
</div>
|style="width:50%;"|
==Articles expanded==
<div class="div-col columns column-width" style="{{column-width|15em}} font-size:90%; height: 300px; overflow:auto; border: 1.5px solid #242424; background: transparent; padding: 4px; text-align: left;">
''(list goes here)''
</div>
|}

Some of the styling (such as the text-align: left;) is superfluous, I copied it from your page. Adjust the two width:50%; and the two {{column-width|15em}} as you see fit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:36, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thanks very much- apologies, I didn't get your ping- I'll try this tommorow and let you know. Cheers! — fortunavelut luna 21:13, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

@Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: Hmmm, I forgot that headings-that-aren't will put the kibosh on a notification. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:27, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Redrose64 headings-that-aren't?! -anyway- if you check my u/p you'll see you plan works- many thakns! Although- it could perhaps do with just a slight tweak- if you've any ideas? Thanks again! — fortunavelut luna 15:47, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

@Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi: Yes, headings-that-aren't. In my code blob above there are two lines that begin with a double equals, this is of course the Wikimarkup for a section heading. They are inside <source>...</source> tags, so are displayed literally and not as headings; but the thing that sends notifications doesn't know this, it assumes that they are real headings, and one of the quirks of the notification system is that the username that you are notifying must be in the same section as your signature. So it thought that my original {{replyto|Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi}} was in a different section, so excluded you from the notification. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:43, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Should we ask for mapframe to be turned on?

Resolved

– There's an un-animous snow consensus to

support the use of this functionality in en.wiki.The ball is now in WMF's court for optional deployment and/or further development. Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 05:56, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175102

Mapframe is an extension that is being developed by the WMF to show small OpenStreetMap maps in articles. Background information is at mw:Help:Extension:Kartographer. It is currently enabled on some Wikipedias that have opted in, and I think it would be useful here as well. Personally, I'm interested in using this in Wikidata-driven infoboxes such as the one at Lovell Telescope to replace {{Location map}} with OSM data, but it also has wider applications. I don't think that it interferes with existing coding here, so it just adds functionality that we can use. I can't spot any previous discussions about this, so I'm starting this discussion here to try to determine consensus. Also see phab:T138057 and phab:T175102 Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 00:29, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Agree I think it would be a major benefit to have proper interactive maps in all Wikipedias, not just the ones that opted in. <mapframe> functionality has not caused any technical issues on any other wikis. Map code is already deployed to all Wikipedias as <maplink>, so enabling it would be as simple as flipping a switch. --Yurik (talk) 00:41, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Support This should've been done waaay sooner. Ladsgroup^overleg 10:58, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Support. Also support T137253 converting Earth coordinates in {{Coord}} to use <maplink> as well. Jc86035 (talk) 11:27, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Support, would be especially useful to have mapframe maps in the infoboxes of road articles. See commons:User:Evad37/sandbox/maps for some examples - Evad37 [talk] 23:48, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Note from the Wikimedia Foundation product team: This is a totally reasonable thing to request as better maps on Wikipedia could improve the user experience and would make a lot of people happy. Previously, we had internally decided on a process to enable mapframe for new Wikipedia projects by request on a batch basis every 6 months. However, the future of maps support from the Wikimedia Foundation is uncertain and at this point I think all new communities considering adding maps should be made aware of it.

The Reading product team has been working to try to figure out how to support the existing maps implementation, and our initial analysis is that maps requires significantly more resources than were assigned to the project at inception. We are currently working on establishing if we can prioritize resources to get maps into a stable, healthy state and will update folks on a plan as soon as we have a draft for comment. It has taken longer than we would have liked to get more clarity, due to organizational changes, but I think we are making progress and should have a clearer answer by the end of September, 2017.

The current situation is that over the last several months the maps project has relied on the goodwill of individual engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation to keep it up and running in addition to individual volunteers contributing support. We also have a contractor, working on a cartographic re-skin as well as dealing with some other maps issues like disputed borders.

I am personally very nervous about having maps on English Wikipedia because we don’t know what kind of support we will be able to offer in the future and I want to minimize the amount of editor effort going into a feature that is at risk. We are frankly concerned that the resources required to maintain and make necessary upgrades to the map service are more than we can commit to.

We’d like to propose that we revisit this question in October when we have more clarity over the path forward for maps. Thoughts? Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Jkatz (WMF): Thank you for the background information on the development work. I think that there are two different issues here that can be handled in two separate stages. First, do we want to have this functionality available on enwp? That is what this discussion will hopefully decide. Second, is WMF ready to support the deployment? That is something that the WMF has to decide, and if the answer to the first question is 'yes' then the timing of the deployment is up to the WMF; if it is 'no' then the WMF is off the hook. ;-) I think that delaying this until next month doesn't help with either question, so it's still worth asking & answering the first question now. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 01:06, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: I think that is a totally reasonable approach. Am I correctly interpreting your intent when you say "if it is 'no' then the WMF is off the hook." to mean that if the Wikimedia Foundation is not ready to support the deployment, we will have a discussion and that you wouldn't deploy until we were? This interpretation seems like a great way to break down and approach this problem (thank you!). If, instead you mean you would deploy without our support, it makes me very uncomfortable, as it would mean deploying map infrastructure we are responsible for supporting and maintaining at a time when we are suggesting we might not be able to support and maintain it. Can you confirm that I am reading your intent correctly? Thanks. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 03:18, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Jkatz (WMF): My understanding was that someone at the WMF would have to flip the switch to deploy this. Even if that's not the case, I don't think it makes sense to deploy it until the WMF is ready to support and maintain it. So let's answer the first question here (do we want it here), and then we can move over to phabricator and the WMF/devs can determine when to deploy it. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 12:15, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: Makes perfect sense. Thanks for clarifying! I'll probably add my note with our concerns to the phab ticket too, just so it's in the relevant places. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi all, quick update - Jkatz (WMF) is on family leave for a bit and we plan to provide an update next week. --ABaso (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 29 September 2017 (UTC)

Hello. We’ve been discussing this over the past weeks and are sharing an update as promised last week. Post edit - just wanted to make it clear! First of all, thank you for this RFC - we appreciate it. We acknowledge the decision and are working on a plan to enable map support on English Wikipedia.

As mentioned above, we thought we would have an answer about long-term maintenance by now, but it turns out we can only provide a partial answer at this time.

First, we’re committed to maintenance of the map service consumption experience as is.

Currently, our work continues to be on a best-effort basis—a maintenance effort from a handful of employees and volunteers.

We understand the desire to add <mapframe> functionality on English Wikipedia, and are encouraged by the support here - thank you for expressing the desired direction. <mapframe> seems like an opportunity to make the encyclopedia experience better. However, we believe a deployment in the near term would entail resourcing risks, potentially compounding the risk associated with the holiday deployment freeze and major online fundraising efforts. Consequently, we aren't activating this right now.

However, we are exploring alternatives concerning both the maps consumption experience and maps contributions (editing) to identify a more sustainable path forward. More specifically, we are looking to see if there are other organizations or efforts with whom a maps partnership would make sense and would align with our tightly held values around open source, open knowledge, privacy, and neutrality.

It will take some time to explore these alternatives, and we plan to provide monthly updates along the way. We know this has been a very long process with more uncertainty than anyone would like. We are really trying to do our due diligence before making further resourcing or product decisions that will have multi-year consequences. --ABaso (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

I'll support.. I've been playing a bit with maps, and it could really use and benefit from some more exposure and feedback by a bigger audience. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:00, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! Is anyone else interested in commenting on this? 6 supports (including mine) and no opposers gives an answer, but a weak consensus, so more opinions would be good. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 23:38, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

Support. Interactive maps are such an ubiquitous feature all over the web that it's surprising that we still don't have it, especially given that a really large number of articles are about places. I imagine that such maps can be turned on across the board (without the need for editor input in individual articles) for all articles that have explicitly set coordinates. – Uanfala 11:48, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Support. Maps are a traditional feature of encyclopedias, and these days, we should provide the best maps we can within our articles. Better interactivity / better integration with what the editing community needs (e.g. for data display) sounds like a useful feature to put WMF developer time into. —Kusma (t·c) 13:48, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Support per the above. See also WP:VPTECH#Article with 201 unverifiable references due to exceeding the 2 MB template include size – hard-coded interactive maps can cause serious problems. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 16:54, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
I'm amazed by growing number of "support" votes here. Right now, the feature is used by less than 200 users (but slowly growing). --George Ho (talk) 00:44, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
- @George Ho: It's currently used by 0 users, since the functionality isn't turned on here. ;-) Not sure where you're seeing less than 200 users? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:00, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
  - Oh... I was just reading that stats about gadget preferences, Mike Peel. George Ho (talk) 17:09, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
    - I think that's about MediaWiki:Gadget-MobileMaps, which is not related to this. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 17:15, 23 September 2017 (UTC)
Comment: Some food for thought: if this requires client-side loading resources from off-Wikimedia sites without user consent, this can have privacy implications (not an issue if done server-side). If pins come from WikiData, this may be less controversial than for article descriptions, but there is also an ongoing debate about WikiData integration on en-Wikipedia. If the feature requires scripts, it will not work for everyone (the current maps, although suboptimally implemented, work for everyone, without outsourcing information except from commons for images). —PaleoNeonate – 20:34, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
- @PaleoNeonate: The OSM data that is displayed is stored on Wikimedia servers as far as I am aware, so there is no loading of content from non-WMF-operated sites (hence no privacy concerns). It is built into the Mediawiki software, see the documentation, so no scripts are required. Pins from Wikidata may be a concern (as info from Wikidata generally seems to be a concern to some community members), but they are working fairly well in the cases I've been working with so far (see {{Wikidata location map}} and transclusions), and they are not required by this extension (it's an extra layer on top that we can code by using templates here, if we want). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 23:01, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Support - and thanks to Mike Peel for the information. Location pins are rarely controversial, the detection of WikiData items changes and vandalism from en-Wikipedia remains an ongoing challenge that is likely to continue to be addressed at a more general scale. —PaleoNeonate – 23:18, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
- PaleoNeonate, I don't think the RFC or the response you got provided an accurate picture. The Wikidata integration goes waaaay beyond location pins. The page explaining the extension[51] shows an example map built from a Wikidata database query pulling in an arbitrary batch of Wikidata items. This appears to ramp up the wikidata controversy to a whole new level. Alsee (talk) 21:49, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Support This would be a great step forwards. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:53, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Support, that would be great! − Pintoch (talk) 13:26, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Strong Support -- waiting for this feature. User:Naveenpf/sandbox -- few usages with maplink. -- naveenpf (talk) 10:47, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Why was this proposal on VillagePumpTechnical rather than posted on VillagePumpProposals? And is that related to the unrepresentatively high percentage of participants with financial or explicit-advocacy connection to Wikidata? I'm sure I'm not the only the only Proposal-watcher who would be surprised that we didn't get to review this before closure. I'm still trying to get more complete understanding of Kartographer, but the major wikidata integration is clearly neglected or misrepresented in the discussion above. Mapframe integrates what appears to be wikidata database query language for building map from arbitrary batches of wikidata results. If wikidata is vandalized, approximately zero-point-zero-zero percent of editors would be able to decipher the example at Kartographer#GeoShapes_via_Wikidata_Query to find the wikidata edit(s) to revert. Alsee (talk) 21:26, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

@Alsee: This is a technical request, so this page seemed to be the obvious place to ask this question. Looking at the VP proposal page, it says "Proposed software changes should be filed at Phabricator (configuration changes should have gained a consensus)." Just filing this on Phabricator (as also suggested above on this page) didn't seem to be sufficient in this case, and the linked page at m:Requesting wiki configuration changes doesn't specify where that consensus needs to happen. The time to say that this is the wrong page to seek that consensus was a month ago. This does not have anything to do with Wikidata directly - you can use the extension without any Wikidata connection (although as I said at the start, I am interested in using this in conjuction with Wikidata information). With "financial or explicit-advocacy connection to Wikidata" - you need to back up that accusation with references, as I can't see this connection. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 23:22, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

@Alsee: Expanding on what Mike said above on the other uses of mapframe, it (and also maplink) can be used with

a Data: page from Commons e.g. c:Data:Neighbourhoods/New York City.map (Maplink example)
GeoJSON embedded on the page within <mapframe>...</mapframe> tags (Maplink example)
Specific OpenStreetMap features which have been tagged with a Wikidata ID e.g. Relation: Great Eastern Highway Bypass eastbound (6889698) on OSM (Maplink example)

And it should be possible to make templates like {{Coord}} display a <mapframe>, using the embedded GeoJSON method. - Evad37 [talk] 02:15, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Small grey rectangle in Template:Infobox river

Hi. Can anyone help identify what is causing that grey rectangle to appear (on the top-right) in the above template page please? Thanks in advance. Reh man 10:42, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I am currently looking into the issue but it is probably a formatting issue. I have cleaned it up with autoFormatter and that didn't work. I am going to perform some tests on this template. Pkbwcgs (talk) 10:53, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

@Rehman: The same problem is going on in Template:Infobox Film but I don't know what it could be. Pkbwcgs (talk) 10:56, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

@Rehman and Pkbwcgs: That's just an empty infobox generated by the code of the template not being wrapped in includeonly tags. Nihlus 10:57, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks @Pkbwcgs: and @Nihlus:. It makes sense, but any idea why this is starting to show only now? I can confirm this wasn't there before, as I have been working on this template for a while... Reh man 11:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Update: It's probably due to some MediaWiki update. Noticed that it is now showing in other templates too (example: {{Infobox power station}}). Reh man 11:03, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I see it in Google Chrome but not in Firefox. They apparently treat empty tables differently. It produces the code <table class="infobox vevent" style="width:22em;font-size:90%;"></table>. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:03, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Nice spotting! I did change my browser from Firefox to Chrome. That explains the recent appearance of this horrifying grey thing. Cheers! Reh man 11:05, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

It only happens with class="infobox" so I guess it adds some styling which forces some browsers to display an empty box. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:14, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

VE and preloaded content

The AFC draft templates have a "submit your draft for a review" or "resubmit" button that adds a section with a preloaded {{subst:submit}}. This works fine in the source editor, but in VE there's no new section with preloaded content. This has led to several questions from new editors who wondered why the instructions don't work. Is there a way to preload content when using VE? As an alternative, adding &veswitched=0 to the URL forces the source editor even against the editor's preferences, but that seems a less preferable workaround. Huon (talk) 14:01, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Preload is soon to work. :) --Izno (talk) 14:26, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

How to propose change in general statistics page

The page https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/wiki.riteme.site has just changed its content. It now seems to confuse deletion of sandbox with reverted edits (29% of my edits were not deleted!). Where do I propose a change in this statistic (or alternately learn how they arrive at this very misleading statistic)? Maybe reversions should be carried as a separate statistic. Jzsj (talk) 12:24, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this completely answers your question, but if I remember deleted edits are not reverted edits but the ones which exist(ed) on now-deleted pages (also explaining why non-administrators get a permission denied error when trying to see their details). —Paleo Neonate – 12:35, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the tool is correct. Deleted edits are edits to deleted pages (or rarely individual edits deleted from public view by administrators). User:Jzsj/sandbox was deleted in August [52] and has 6,099 deleted edits, nearly all of them by you. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:24, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

Glad we figured it out, and that it was correct! I guess the old one wasn't ;) For future reference, you can use the "Report an issue" link in the footer to create a ticket on Phabricator, using your Wikimedia account. If you are not comfortable with Phabricator, you can write here at VPT and ping one of the maintainers, or comment at mw:Talk:XTools. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:06, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I should also mention that having a high number of deleted edits is not by itself a bad thing. For instance, this is often the case for new page patrollers because they tag pages for speedy deletion. — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:10, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-41

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

Recent changes

The number of active users listed by {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} and on Special:Statistics will now only include Wikidata edits as activity on Wikidata and not on other wikis too. [53]
Previously you could create wiki links starting with two colons. Now you need to use one colon. [[::File:X.jpg]] now has to be [[:File:X.jpg]]. There is now a new Linter category. You can see a list on Special:Linterrors/multi-colon-escape. The Linter extension helps you find technical errors in articles. You can read more about using Linter. [54]

Problems

You will not be able to edit or upload files to Commons for around 30 minutes on 11 October. This will start at 06:00 UTC. This is because of work to let Commons show 3D models. [55]

Changes later this week

The font in the edit window is monospace by default. Today you can change preferences to another font family or use "the browser default" instead of monospace. Switching to the browser default has only changed the font on Macs. The option to use browser default will be removed this week. [56]
If you want to print a page or make a PDF of a page you can do so in the side menu. The way the pages look when you do this will change. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (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 10 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 11 October at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

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

14:20, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Obscene image inexplicably appearing in William III of England

In the William III of England's family tree section I found a nasty pornographic image (this image from Commons, be careful if you want click, it is super NSFW). When I edit the page, I just found innocent-looking templates (such as {{centre}} and {{familytree}} none of these should cause the image to be there). In fact, the image disappear when I click "preview" on the editor without editing anything, or when I log out of my account. I can see it in Chrome and Firefox, even when using another computer. Do others see it to, and wondering what prank is this caused by? HaEr48 (talk) 06:20, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Probably related to this. The offending template has been fixed and I have purged that article's page to eliminate the grotesque. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:30, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Ah thanks Mandruss. Looking at "related changes" link on William III of England, I think this edit on {{centre}} is responsible ({{redirect-multi}} reported in that incident isn't used in this article. {{centre}} template is used by 1397 pages. Is there an automated way to purge all of them? HaEr48 (talk) 06:42, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

If there is, I'm not aware of it. It sure would come in handy in the rare cases like this. ―Mandruss ☎ 06:51, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

I have started a purge of all pages using {{centre}}. It should be done in under an hour from this time stamp. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:42, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Warning: Leaving Wikimedia

I just got this when I clicked on the dabsolver tools link:

Leaving Wikimedia

Wikimedia requires notification of when leaving the Foundation's sphere of influence.

Huh? Doug Weller talk 11:18, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

This is either a Toolforge thing or something that Dispenser setup. — JJMC89 (T·C) 15:49, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

[17:11:13] <Coren> Dispenser: Dude, you can't just redirect from to Tool Labs tool to a server you own without an intersitial explaining that by proceeding forward users are giving you their IP and browser info. [57]

Its a stupid requirement since IP addresses can be from the MediaWiki's API (and formerly geoiplookup.wikimedia.org) and detailed browser information can be obtained via navigator. Shop.wikimedia.org doesn't use an interstitial, but WMF specifically exempted it.

For the record, I didn't even have logging turned on for the first two years until I noticed ~15 gigabytes transferred out (5-15x normal). — Dispenser 18:46, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: "Huh?" is a pretty vague question but I suspect you are not looking for the above discussion. Dispenser lost access to his old domain http://dispenser.homenet.org. See User talk:Dispenser (he may want to update some pages at insource:homenet prefix:User:Dispenser). For some time his website only had an IP Address and I don't know whether the current https://dispenser.info.tm is permanent. Many links to his tools were modified to point to redirects under https://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser, e.g. https://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser/view/Dab_solver, so there would be a central place to update links later if his site gets a permanent domain. Wikimedia policy requires a warning to users before they are redirected to websites not controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation. The wording "Wikimedia requires notification of when leaving the Foundation's sphere of influence" is odd though. It could sound like it's asking users to notify the Wikimedia Foundation. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:43, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: sorry, that was vague, but it was literally my reaction when I saw that. I don’t remember seeing it before, and I certainly didn’t think it meant Wikimedia needed to notify me, I thought it was notifying Wikipedia, which made no sense. It really should be changed. Doug Weller talk 20:05, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Nowrap template not working

I have noticed that Template:Nowrap has stopped working in the past hour or so. A lot of articles that I edit use this, particularly in complex tables, to aid mobile and tablet users. Is there a reason for this? Prisonermonkeys (talk) 08:12, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Can you provide examples? And is it not working on mobile or at all? Mobile is discussed above. Nihlus 13:23, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

TheDJ, is this related to your recent edits to MediaWiki:Mobile.css? Jc86035 (talk) 13:56, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh sorry yeah, i had a mistake in there for a bit. Should have been fixed a couple of hours ago though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:43, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

@Nihlus — it has been fixed. I didn't realise that someone else had already posted the issue above. Prisonermonkeys (talk) 02:32, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Creating an introduction and guide for using Wikidata data in other Wikimedia projects

Hi all

I've started a first draft of an document on Wikidata explaining how and why Wikidata data can be used on other Wikimedia projects e.g as a way to organise work on a subject, or in infoboxes. Please can you take a look and add any thoughts to the talk page. I very much want to get the perspectives of both Wikidata contributors and people who are unfamiliar with Wikidata.

Many thanks

John Cummings (talk) 09:02, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

@John Cummings: Bad timing. According to a WMF database admin, because of the use of Wikidata in infoboxes " we are close of running out of space on several main database servers, breaking all of Wikipedia" (emphasis mine), and already caused huge problems in projects which used such infoboxes much more than enwiki (e.g. Commons, rowiki, itwiki, dawiki). Especially watchlists and recent changes suffered badly, insofar that Wikidata changes have been excluded from the watchlist in some of the most urgent projects already and are set to be excluded on all projects very soon, until the problems are eventually sorted out (not expected to be very soon). See my comments on this page, where two other editors linked the two relevant phabricator tickets and I added some quotes from them. The linked page is a place where people are trying to write an enwiki RfC on the use of Wikidata in infoboxes.

Oh, and you may not be aware that an example you give on that page, infobox world heritage site, seems poised to become non-Wikidata based again based on an ongoing RfC there.

In any case, the page as written is very optimistic. Fram (talk) 09:17, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

@Fram:, can you point to where the WMF database admin said this? I've never heard this before. When you say "set to be excluded on all projects very soon", what do you mean? I know there are several language Wikipedias that use Wikidata extensively including article placeholders and in infoxboxes. Thanks, John Cummings (talk) 09:23, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

[58] The Wikidata changes will be excluded from watchlists and recent changes (and are already excluded on some of the projects which use Wikidata infoboxes most extensivley). Please don't get me started on Article PLaceholders, which should be abolished in general and will never be accepted on enwiki in any case. Fram (talk) 09:27, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Message in that ticket from yesterday: "Notification for users: We are going to disable wikidata recentchanges (meaning, changes on pages on other wikis coming from changes done on wikidata; the recentchanges at wikidata is not a problem) due to performance concerns. Once those have been fixed, the functionality could be enabled again.". I thought this also meant Watchlists, but perhaps I misread that part. Fram (talk) 09:28, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

A link to the "running out of space" post by the database admin is phab:T171027#3667090 (hover the mouse over the date in the first row of a post to see the section link). Johnuniq (talk) 10:09, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes there are problems, yes they are serious, no this isn't an easy fix, no this doesn't happen often, yes this is not the first time we have issues as serious as these. Engineering will take care of what needs to be taken care of and will do so with as minimal impact as possible. When the impact is determined, you will hear what it will be (though it might be short notice). No point in speculation / FUD here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:55, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Any point to this post, apart from the gratuitous "FUD" insertion? You may have missed the part which were actual quotes, not my comments. "Notification for users: We are going to disable wikidata recentchanges" is not FUD, but is the actual short notice notification presented by engineering. Where is the problems the most serious? At projects which have enabled the most Wikidata)driven infoboxes. That you don't like this message doesn't mean that you should pretend that repeating it is FUD or speculation. Not that your reply comes as a surprise. Fram (talk) 10:10, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm not denying the problem, I'm just saying that there is no reason for you to speculate on the impact, the people in the ticket are perfectly capable of determining actual impact and the communicating this impact when and where needed. But you feel the need to pile on to that and use it as another weapon in your arsenal to further your personal agenda. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:32, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

What speculation on the impact? Where have I indicated that the "people in the ticket" are not capable of determining the impact? The only one to have raised that issue (before you did so here) was apparently the dba who was surprised not to be informed about some changes that had been made earlier and which seriously impacted his (our) database and caused the current problems. So it seems as if there was a serious problem with people in that ticket not able to determine the actual impact, and not internally communicating the impact; and it seems as if most people on enwiki and Wikidata were not aware of these issues either.I guess that's more FUD as well? My "need to pile on": all I did was reply to sections about infoboxes and Wikidata started by others, with information not yet shared by others. Or do you believe that this is not relevant for the post by John Cummings? So, no piling on, just news you don't like. Anyway, let's leave personal agenda's out of this, shall we? If I post factual errors, feel free to point them out. Otherwise, don't bother pointing out that my posts include my opinion, never mind framing my opinion or my apparently correct reporting of the facts is FUD just because you don't like problems with the WMF and/or Wikidata being pointed out. Fram (talk) 12:46, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

that document should more clear that it is technical/how-to. The question of whether and how Wikidata should be used in other projects is dependent on the policies and guidelines of those other projects. I have started a draft for that in WP here: WP:Use of Wikidata in Wikipedia (again that is just a start and still just an essay)Jytdog (talk) 11:39, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata Primary Sources gadget

By the way, what's wrong with Wikidata? When you scroll down a page, you get in the left hand column an annoying "Browse Primary Sources ▲ back to top ▲" which follows you down. What the? This happens on every page, and the "Browse Primary Sources" can't be clicked anywhere. Rather intrusive for such a useless feature. Fram (talk) 12:54, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Fram, It's this gadget. --Pipetricker (talk) 13:06, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, but that's a) not working and b) enabled by default anyway. Something that doesn't work shouldn't be enabled by default (and probably shouldn't be included in gadgets full stop. Fram (talk) 13:12, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

It's not default (no "default" at d:MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) and it wasn't enabled for me. It does seem to work but only some items have relevant content. When the gadget is enabled, click "Random Primary Sources item" to see examples, e.g. Light + Shade (Q1091553). PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Weird, I can't remember having enabled this (I never edit Wikidata and have thus no use for such preferences). On that page it indeed works (though it still is an annoying eyesore), on other pages it is just a piece of useless nothing. Now disabled again. Fram (talk) 14:36, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Navbox templates / hlist issue?

I'm seeing in both Chrome and Edge on my PC, as well as Chrome on my Android device, that navbox templates with lists using second level bullet items are displaying odd. First noticed it on {{Diablo}} which was edited today. Then while trying to figure out what was happening, I noticed other navbox templates doing the same. I don't see any changes to {{Navbox}}, but I'm not sure what else to check, stylesheet?. What I see is that the second level items of the list start their grouping correctly with a (, but there is no closing ) and instead there is an extra bullet. -- ferret (talk) 19:26, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

This edit by Jon (WMF) seems to be the culprit. Nihlus 19:43, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Undone for now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:02, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Back to normal now. -- ferret (talk) 20:04, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

{{nowrap}} broken on mobile

About the above topic heading: Please don't use templates (such as {{tl}}, or any other) in topic headings. It breaks the handy section link at the edit summary, because templates are never interpreted in that link. I fixed this heading so it doesn't use a template, but I suggest just writing Template:Template instead of {{template}} if you need to mention and link to a template in a heading. --Pipetricker (talk) 09:16, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

As I have tried and apparently failed to explain several times on its talk page, this template does literally nothing on mobile. As far as I can tell, the nowrap class doesn't exist on the mobile stylesheet. I've been resorting to <span style="white-space:nowrap">...</span> to fix wrapping problems. Hairy Dude (talk) 21:26, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I think the reasoning is that since mobile devices might be very narrow, using nowrap may cause a phrase to become longer than the available space. So using nowrap is not necessarily useful. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:51, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but especially the overuse inside infoboxes (and even some wrapping of entire sentences!!) of this class was breaking the mobile view left and right. I therefor decided to disable it there. But I've now partially re enabled it, and it is now only ignored when used inside tables. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:55, 9 October 2017 (UTC)�

The problem is that some table need nowraps—especially those with sortable functions—because nowraps keep everything on one line. Without them, cells become out of alignment, making them almost impossible to read. For example this table now incorrectly lists Swedish racing driver Marcus Ericsson as British, British driver Will Stevens as Japanese, and Japanese driver Kamui Kobayashi as German. It's also incorrectly listing which rounds they contested. How many table are experiencing similar problems?

I seem to recall you making this very same change about a year ago, but it had to be undone because it was creating these very same issues. Prisonermonkeys (talk) 08:34, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

It would be nice if there was a way not to apply it on mobile, though. Look at the IPA notation at Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis on mobile, for example. Nardog (talk) 04:49, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Maintenance banner linking to example page

I'm probably not the first to report this, but there's a banner currently showing that says "Technical maintenance will be performed soon", with a "Read More" button, which links to an example page on Meta with no further information (and a magnet for vandalism, apparently). I'm using the latest version of Firefox (macOS) and in San Francisco if it makes a difference. Funcrunch (talk) 05:17, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Funcrunch: I think it has been fixed already (clear the cache), as the example link has been commented out (see m:Genericmaintenancenotice). Alex Shih ^Talk 05:26, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Yep, the link in the banner was removed about a minute after I posted here. Vandals are still having fun with that meta page though; someone might want to protect it... Funcrunch (talk) 05:30, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Now I see the correct target for the link,~~but if it affects Commons, why am I getting the banner notice on en:wp?~~ (no longer seeing the banner here, nevermind) Funcrunch (talk) 05:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Unable to lift autoblocks

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T177952

From this discussion over on WP:ANI. Eruditescholar (talk · contribs) is asking that an autoblock be lifted. In this particular case, it appears appropriate to lift the autoblock. Only... I can't. DoRD notes they are unable to lift the autoblock, too, stating, "the error is that the autoblock number isn't a valid username or IP address. This sounds like a bug related to the recent conversion of the block and unblock interfaces to OOUI." Xaosflux asks if the autoblock number, which is 7892601, appears on Special:AutoblockList. It does. --Yamla (talk) 13:29, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This has been traced to a recent software update. A bug report has been filed and is being worked on. —DoRD (talk) 15:19, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Pagecounts-ez hasn't generated since OCT-06

@Erik Zachte: The analytics files here seem to have hit a processing snag. This happened once in the last couple of months and I think it was tied to the decommissioning of a stats server or the following rsync process. I use these to generate the WP:5000 from which the popular WP:Top25Report is derived. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 03:03, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Done -- And now it has! Whether someone did something or by magic, thank you! West.andrew.g (talk) 13:38, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

@West.andrew.g: Yes, I did. Scripts have been adapted to new stats server with different layout. Sorry I forgot to report it here. Erik Zachte (talk) 15:52, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Discussion notifications

Many editors use Twinkle for notifications about content issues. With the current system of notification, that means an editor could get multiple copies of the exact same template for a blanket issue with all the files - see here for a recent example.

With new users, it's easy to see how they could be overwhelmed by receiving a large number of notifications that their content is going to be deleted. An hour ago, this user received multiple notifications for an issue that could have been grouped into one template. Here's another example of a user who received around 80 individual notifications with content issues. Redundant notifications is really only alienating our users from participating in the project.

For experienced users, being "templated" is found to be really impersonal and does not get conversations started on the right foot. Currently, there isn't balance between respectful, courteous notification and the use of tools such as Twinkle. I see a few options for improving editor interaction regarding content issues :

Option A: Import VisualFileChange from Commons

This has an easy-to-use user interface that allows editors to "group" notifications for an issue covering multiple files.
Producing notifications like this would be possible with this tool.
Could also be modified to provide a custom message instead of a template.

Option B : Modify Twinkle

Add a feature to Twinkle to add a personalized note in place of a template. Chances are editors will respond better to a note such as:

"Hey RandomUser123, I noticed that a few of your file are missing X - would you mind adding the missing information to them? Thanks"

A drawback from using only Twinkle is that it would probably would take a major rewrite to be able to tag batches of files. VisualFileChange can already do this, and modifying it to fit the English Wikipedia's needs may be easier. Implementing both of these would provide for the most flexibility and most exposure to the tools that are out there.

Notifications bots could also be modified to group notifications given in a short period of time. If a particular user is set to receive 6 notifications for the file issue on a given day, it's probably best to have one singular notification encompassing all files instead of six redundant ones. Jon Kolbert (talk) 18:34, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Revdel for delete and redirect?

I recently closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Integrated fluorometer as delete and redirect, which I implemented by redirecting, then changing the visibility of all the previous verions, using WP:REVDEL. I've never actually done that before, so posting here to make sure I used the right process. -- RoySmith (talk) 04:51, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@RoySmith: This isn't really a VPT matter - have you asked at WP:AN, or perhaps WT:AFD? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:53, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

The normal way of doing this is to delete the article then recreate it as a redirect. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 08:41, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Failing to enrol in course

I have been getting an error when I try to enroll a student in a course.

I am trying to add user:Tamjwh to Education Program:University of Hong Kong/Regional Geology (Fall Semester 2017) using the "Add students to this course" buttons.

However I get this error:

While adding students, the following error occurred: $1.internal_api_error_DBQueryError

Can any one add Tamjwh into this course? What has gone wrong? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:54, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Looks like phab:T156502. ~~There was an old bug that would cause issues when editor gender was not set in preferences with this extension - have the student try setting that in Special:Preferences~~. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:07, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Or phab:T166109, the log actually shows this was done:

2017-09-13T04:50:24 Tamjwh (talk | contribs | block) enrolled in course Regional Geology (Fall Semester 2017)

.

— xaosflux ^Talk 12:10, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Linked in from Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard#Enrollment_Bugs. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:13, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@Graeme Bartlett: While I don't have an explanation for why this is happening, as an aside: have you played much with the Programs & Events Dashboard? I believe development and official support of the course page extension ended a while ago (which is not to say it shouldn't be used if it's useful). The Dashboard is still actively developed and what, I think, most are using for education projects now (see, for example, the training modules built in). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:03, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

TemplateData update

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T135667

If you're interested in how templates get placed on a page, then please see mw:Help:TemplateData#Custom formats. It's now possible to tell Parsoid that {{unref}} and similar tags belong on separate lines. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Something weird's happening in Ningxia

When I try to load the article, I get the page title and no further text, and it appears that the page is repeatedly attempting to load and not capable of doing so. I don't have the technical language to describe this any more precisely. I suspect some kind of shenanigans with the markup by a vandal, but I can't get enough of the page to load to be able to open an editing screen.

This is the first time I've reported anything here (after 3 years!) and so if I did this incorrectly, my apologies. Thanks for the help! - Julietdeltalima (talk) 21:10, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@Julietdeltalima: I'm not experiencing any issues with that page. I've purged the cache, so let me know if you can see it now. Nihlus 21:18, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@Nihlus: That did the trick—thanks much! - Julietdeltalima (talk) 21:29, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

get_all_pages_in_category

Trying to do a get_all_pages_in_category call but it is only returning 500 entries. Any ideas how to set it up to something more reasonable? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 07:17, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: If it suits what you're doing you could try using PetScan. Jc86035 (talk) 08:21, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. That might work. One disturbing thing: Petscan says that Category:FA-Class military history articles has 1,007 members, but the category says that it has only 1,002. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 08:52, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Bug. It erroneously reported subcategories. Still three erroneous elements. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:51, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Damn! It doesn't work. It just gives me back a lot of HTML. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:21, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I can't help for the general case but I have a script I can run to get the pages in a category. It found 1005 pages, see my sandbox (permalink). I think WP:AWB also has a mechanism to make a list of pages from a category. The numbers shown such as "out of approximately 1,002 total" at the category page are estimates. I think the only way to know for sure is to generate a list and even that is subject to peculiarities because, for example, one bad edit to a template or module can create an error that adds (or removes) hundreds of pages to a category, and even if the bad edit is immediately reverted the system may take weeks to clean itself because that is done at a low priority. Johnuniq (talk) 22:16, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I got the same result; the category page says 1,002, while PetScan says 1,005. I will run a script over the output and check them all. I really prefer an API I can call from a script; I don't going through tools like PetScan. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:59, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

mw:API:Query#Continuing_queries —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:00, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That might work. I'll give it a try. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:04, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Category page counts on category pages themselves are notoriously inaccurate and have been for a long time. That's why we added "out of approximately" before the count. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:38, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That's not so good.

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:04, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

The situation is that if there's a bug where some page addition/removal doesn't update the count or if the job to update things somehow gets lost, there's no way to know that the count has become inaccurate and needs updating. It'll get updated if the stored count goes negative (since that's obviously wrong), or if the total number of pages is less than 200 (i.e. no paging on the Category page), or if a slow maintenance script is run on the server to recalculate all the counts from scratch. Anomie ⚔ 17:58, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

I believe that this is tracked as T18036, but I am wrong nearly every day. This could be one of those days. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:31, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Editing through protection

Background info: WP:AN#The Rambling Man

Is it technically possible for a system to be set in place that would allow an editor to edit a protected page (template/navbox/whatever) when said editor would normally be prohibited from editing that page by the protection in place?

A specific scenario is to allow The Rambling Man (talk · contribs) to edit {{In the news}} and other templates that make up the Main Page. These are protected at Admin level and also cascade protected. Apparently it is not possible to downgrade these templates to allow template editors to edit them due to the cascading protection. What I have in mind is a system which would permit admins to name editors who would be allowed to edit. This could either be done through the system in place to protect the page or by adding a template to the protected page which would allow named people to bypass the protection.

Conversely, if the above is possible, might it also be possible to disallow named editors from editing certain pages where they would normally be allowed to edit. This could be a useful alternative to locking a page in the case of an edit war, stopping the fighters from editing whilst allowing other editors to carry on editing. Mjroots (talk) 18:13, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: has proposed a "block from specific page" function, for the record. Also, given how cascade protection works being able to edit cascade protected pages will always by default entail the ability to lift and impose cascade protection. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:19, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Theoretically, possible. Realistically, very difficult and unlikely to gain support. Blocking or exempting from a specific page would be technically difficult and result in a lot of administrative overhead. Instead, we have edit requests. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 18:22, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Good to hear that it might be theoretically possible. What I had in mind was that adding a template to a protected article would probably be best. It could be called {{alloweditor}} and would work by piping allowed editors names after the template (e.g. {{alloweditor|Joe Bloggs}}). The one with the opposite effect could be called "disalloweditor". Obviously there would need to be a safeguard to stop editors not at admin level or higher from adding and removing these templates. This could be done by similar software to that which prevents adding links to blacklisted urls, i.e. it would check on saving that the editor has administrative privileges or higher before allowing the edit to save. Mjroots (talk) 18:41, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This implementation would not be possible without substantially reworking the software. Templates aren't connected to user rights/blocks in any way, nor can they easily be made to be. The closest thing to your implementation would be a magic word, but even that would have serious issues because we have no infrastructure in place to connect a magic word with user rights nor for user rights to block from only certain pages. Not to mention we'd need an expensive (bordering on impossibly expensive) edit filter to prevent non-admins from adding the template or magic word to an article to bypass protection for another editor. This is technically possible in the sense that rewriting Wikipedia from scratch is technically possible; it would be a massive undertaking bordering on a complete rewrite of the code handling blocks. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 20:19, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Agree here - this is not something that exist - yes anything could be made in theory but a use case of making individual user<->page access lists is unlikely to attract much development time, or WMF adoption. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:11, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

No, this isn't possible without major reworking of how the protection system currently works. I think the easiest solution here is to have the editor in question apply to be an administrator. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 04:34, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

That is not an option. Mjroots (talk) 05:11, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

The "block from page" proposal is a different idea to this, it's to stop having to deal a complete block to users who are only disrupting one page (eg: from edit-warring) and should keep the drama at ANI down (eg: "The Brilliant Content Contributor was blocked for going over 1RR on an article with Discretionary sanctions! He was in the middle of my FAC review! The blocking admin is an idiot - desysop him!") Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 18:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Ritchie333: - see my comments above. I think we're both aiming at the same target. Mjroots (talk) 18:44, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

An admin-bot could always copy a page-version by approved-user from unprotected-page-A to fully-protected-page-B. In this instance page-A could even be template protected, as a convenient redundant layer. It seems like such a bot might have other uses as well, assuming it doesn't already exist. Alsee (talk) 19:05, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Alsee: - that would work in the specific case I mentioned, "Main Page/TE" (or the relevant templates subpaged /TE)for those with template editor privileges, and an admin level bot to check every x minutes and make the necessary changes. Mjroots (talk) 19:13, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This would need a full RfC, probably listed at CENT. It's essentially allowing non-admins to edit through full protection via bot. That has the potential to be controversial. Keep in mind that if we do this, it would not be only for one editor; many editors (who may know nothing about DYK or the main page) will gain access. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:36, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Technically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult to set it up so that the bot looks at a (full-protected) page listing users and the pages they have access to. —DoRD (talk) 09:56, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Of course it will need a full RFC. The purpose of my original post was to work out whether or not there was a technical solution to the problem, which it looks like there may be. Also appreciate that it will allow a number of editors access to editing the Main Page which they do not now have. Mjroots (talk) 16:37, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: would WP:VPP be the most suitable venue to propose the /TE idea? Mjroots (talk) 09:35, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

It's at least the venue we previously discussed it at (without any outcome though). I had also made the same proposal Alsee mentions above back then without traction. Possibly this might be more successful as an RfC with CENT. Regards So Why 09:43, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

RFC posted at WP:VPP#RFC: Proposal to allow Template Editors the ability to indirectly edit the Main Page and listed on CENT. Mjroots (talk) 13:08, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

A gadget for categorizing the items in a list or in a gallery

I have a list of images that I would like to add in a certain category. The list also exists in a form of a gallery. I noticed that the gadget Cat-a-lot can't categorize the items from a gallery - it only works for the images in a category or for those returned by a search. I can categorize those items in the list using AWB (if I get the bot flag) but is there any gadget capable to do that? Fructibus (talk) 00:42, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This isn't easy. What makes this so difficult is that categories are still intermingled with the rest of the wikitext, and MediaWiki allows for a lot of flexibility in how categories are entered. To begin with, categories are usually entered like this:

[[Category:A]]
[[Category:B]]

However, this works just as well:

[[Category:A]][[Category:B]]

so the basic assumption that each category starts on its own line goes right out the window. To make things worse, both Categoría and Category are allowed on eswiki, but on enwiki, only Category is allowed. And as if that wasn't bad enough, categories do not have to be specified in the page at all. They can be transcluded. Via templates. There are plans to move things like categoies out of the wikitext, which would make writing scripts like these trivial. You can read about this at mw:Requests for comment/Multi-Content Revisions or at phab:T107595. Nirmos (talk) 14:44, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

@Nirmos: - I understand it's not easy, but in the same time, all those problems also exist for the images displayed in a category, and the gadget Cat-a-lot can handle them. I dont' see where is the difference between a gallery shown in a category and a gallery shown using the <gallery> tag, for the Cat-a-lot perspective. The gadget only gets a list of image links, in both cases. And sorry for the late reply - Fructibus (talk) 18:54, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

No notifications when reverted

I don't seem to be receiving alerts and emails anymore when being reverted, at least when it's "undo," which I find especially useful when dealing with vandals or other disruptive users. Don't know if it's the same for reversions with tools. My preferences haven't changed and the "edit revert" radio boxes under Notifications are still checked. I think it was working last week. Amaury (talk | contribs) 14:00, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Not_receiving_pings. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:01, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

For me, it wasn't working for more half a year, but maybe its because I don't get reverted a whole lot. Try to revert this edit (as a test) that I just made on this page, so I can see what's going on.--Biografer (talk) 22:40, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Just an update. Mentions are working again, but still no notifications when reverted. Amaury (talk | contribs) 14:01, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

What changed with Template:Rfd categorization?

Has there been a recent change in the way {{rfd}} codes a redirect as being listed for deletion? This never used to happen at all, but the uncategorized pages tools now pick up RFD-listed redirects as uncategorized "articles" — I just had to run through an AWB batch of about 230 redirects, adding them to Category:Temporary maintenance holdings to get the list cleared. I've never had to do this before, and I definitely don't want to ever have to do it again — could somebody figure out why this is happening and fix it? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 04:17, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't know, but I've just added an invocation of Category:Temporary maintenance holdings within the RFD template's includeonly tags. Nyttend (talk) 05:34, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. For the record, there was also a post to Wikipedia talk:Redirects for discussion yesterday by somebody else, noting that nominated redirects are also now getting picked up as new "articles" that need to be reviewed by WP:NPP — which is also something that never happened before and shouldn't be happening now, and most likely has the same root cause as the categorization-queue problem. Bearcat (talk) 14:05, 14 October 2017 (UTC)