If you want to report a JavaScript error, please follow this guideline. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk. Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for five days.
This tends to solve most issues, including improper display of images, user-preferences not loading, and old versions of pages being shown.
No, we will not use JavaScript to set focus on the search box.
This would interfere with usability, accessibility, keyboard navigation and standard forms. See task 3864. There is an accesskey property on it (default to accesskey="f" in English). Logged-in users can enable the "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page" gadget in their preferences.
No, we will not add a spell-checker, or spell-checking bot.
You can use a web browser such as Firefox, which has a spell checker.
If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link.
Alternatively, you can press Tab until the "Save" button is highlighted, and press Enter. Using Mozilla Firefox also seems to solve the problem.
If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page.
If the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too. If it doesn't work, try again before doing anything else. Some ad blockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear.
I've recently tried to search a few things, and noticed that if I press arrow down on the autocomplete results, it selects a random result, rather than the expected outcome of it selecting the first in the list (then going down one if pressed again, etcetera). For example, to test this, I typed in "AS" into the search bar, which displayed "AS", "Association football", "Associated Press", "Assassination of John F. Kennedy", among others. I pressed the arrow down, and it highlighted the last result, "ASEAN". I pressed it again, and it highlighted "Asperger syndrome", which is the 6th result in the list, and 4 results up from "ASEAN". This continues for some time, but it generally jumps through the list at random intervals. I checked that I had safemode on before trying this, and I am on the latest version of 64-bit Chrome, version 131.0.6778.70. EggRoll97(talk) 01:11, 15 November 2024 (UTC)
Me too, Windows 10 version 22H2, Firefox 132.0.2 (recent upgrade), all skins except Vector-2022 and Minerva Neue, logged in and logged out. The main symptom seems to be that in the search box, the functions of the up and down arrows are exchanged. Also affects commons:. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 01:22, 15 November 2024 (UTC)
I'm facing the same issue, on Vivaldi (7.0.3495.11 (64-bit)) on Windows 11 Home 23H2. Are you on Wikipedia's 2010 Vector legacy skin (the old default GUI) by any chance? I have this issue on that skin but not on Wikipedia's new Vector skin. Tube·of·Light11:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)
But here's what happened (all these diffs are sequentially uninterrupted BTW): while WP:HD was under PC protection (LTA disruption), T=00 I reply to a thread. T+02 minutes, PrimeHunterreplies. T+17 minutes, OP replies to my reply, removing PrimeHunter's reply with no edit summary (edit tagged as "2017 wikitext editor"). A bit later, I notice this and enter the source editor within Minerva to restore PrimeHunter's edit without automatically adding my sig. T+44 PrimeHunter restores the edit. T+46 I do too. Despite the edit summary of my immediate self-revert, I was never shown an edit conflict error (these do work in Minerva: I had three recently at heavily trafficked pages, all in ns4).
My interpretation of this sequence is that since FlaggedRevs are "automatically accepted" when the editor permissions allow, checking for edit conflicts is disabled or hampered in some way, at least in some editing interfaces. Can anyone confirm this? Folly Mox (talk) 18:13, 16 November 2024 (UTC)
Well, PrimeHunter restored text above the 2 lines :I think this was [...] and :: I haven't had this [...], while you restored it below those 2 lines, that's why there was no edit conflict. I actually don't know the exact logic, though something is mentioned at mw:Help:Edit conflict#Preventing edit conflicts - I've always assumed that it's the same logic that governs if you can still undo a revision after new revisions have been made (which from experience is when the diff of that revision would not have revealed lines that changed in later revisions). – 2804:F1...C6:3070 (::/32) (talk) 22:46, 16 November 2024 (UTC)
Huh, ok; I thought edit conflicts were partitioned by subheading, but the "same line" implementation makes sense here, while also making sense at the other three edit conflicts I did experience, since other editors and I were adding text to the same (empty) line. Thanks both for the information 🙏🏽 Folly Mox (talk) 13:47, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
Probably has to do with the string replacement on the |change= parameter. Probably the easiest is to create a |change_note= parameter so it doesn't clash with that. Gonnym (talk) 23:27, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
{{Election box candidate with party link}} says {{#invoke:String|replace|source={{{change|}}}|-|−}} to change a hyphen to a minus sign in a negative number. If the parameter has a reference then its strip marker code has four hyphens which are also changed and this breaks the code. I suggest {{#invoke:String|replace|source={{{change|}}}|^-|−|plain=false}} to only change a hyphen if it's the first character. Then the articles don't need a new parameter for a note. Before editing a template used in 29,000 pages, does anyone have objections or a better solution? The bad cell in 1970 Florida Attorney General election#Results uses {{Election box winning candidate with party link}} which would need the same fix. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:08, 18 November 2024 (UTC)
I have a forked version of User:Anomie/lockout.js in my common.js which only blocks editing, not viewing. However, if the edit page is opened by DraftCleaner, the edit page isn't blocked and I can edit as usual, including if other scripts refresh the page. Why does this happen, and is there a way to block the edit page in this case? Suntooooth, it/he (talk/contribs) 03:31, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
Suntooooth, that's because DraftCleaner uses ?action=submit to open the editor, while your lockout script only checks for ?action=edit. You could change the condition of the if-statement to something like !["edit","submit"].includes(mw.config.get("wgAction")). Rummskartoffel21:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
There's a discussion over at Template talk:Tweet#Post template about creating a new social media post template, that would look an act the same as the current {{Tweet}} template but extended for other social sites. A result of this was {{SocialMediaPost}}, but this seems like a very manual solution, liable to breaking and inconsistencies. I was wondering if something could be created which could, given a "website" param, automatically select the correct "site logo", "article Link", "reference format" and "prefix", similar to the way {{Political party}}s or {{Infobox legislation}} are done. Or if I'm other thinking it and the manual method is fine. Cakelot1 ☞️ talk09:50, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
Hi! Sorry for kind of jumping the gun on moving this to the template space. I'm not the best at templates, but I'll definitely take a look at those ones you linked and see if i can do anything to automate the process. It's been a bit since I've actually used Lua, but I'll try. Generating that information off of a 'website' parameter seems doable, and i'll let y'all know if i manage to make progress. Tantomile (talk) 19:41, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
In-line citation tag
Helo! I have spent way too much time trying to find the template which askes for more in-line citations in the sourcing of an article. Wading through page after page hasn't done the trick. Can anyone here please help me find it? SergeWoodzing (talk) 13:09, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
It looks like Lee imported a load of templates and modules from the English wikipedia which are designed to take English language inputs. The "time errors" for example, are because si:Module:YMD to ISO converts English date strings to an ISO formatted date, but you are giving it Sinhala month names (because the output of {{#time: depends upon the language of your wiki). You either need to go through and localise all the templates that were imported, or make new ones for your wiki. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 17:49, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
@VihirLak007 It would probably be amount the same amount of work to start from scratch rather than getting that module to work. The module takes input in the form 19 November 2024 or 19 Nov 2024, i.e. two numbers followed by the month name or abbreviation, followed by four numbers. The output of {{#time: on your wiki seems to be 2 Sinhala numerals (I think? I don't speak Sinhala) followed by the month in Sinhala, and the year. At a minimum you would need to translate the month names, add new logic to convert the Sinhala numerals to Arabic numerals, re-write all the input checks to account for the difference in format, possibly remove the logic for the month name abbreviations ... 86.23.109.101 (talk) 19:02, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
in sinhala, the numerals are same, arabic numerals. i think if i add sinhala month names alongside where it takes english names, it might work? The thing is i've no idea where to edit VihirLak007hmu!/duh.19:05, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
@VihirLak007 In that case you would need to add the Sinhala names alongside the English ones, and also change the pattern matching checks at the bottom (the bit that goes arg1:match('^%d%d%d%d %a%a%a%a?%.?%a?%a?%a?%a?%a?%a? *%d%d?$')) to allow the new date formats. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
The Sinhala names would just replace the English ones in the months_full variable. I'm not sure what you'd need to do to update the pattern matching, sorry. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 19:20, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for pointing out some things I missed, can you link to exactly which article? That further reading link doesn't go anywhere. ~ฅ(ↀωↀ=)neko-channyan16:14, 20 November 2024 (UTC)
Oh, it's still pretty early in my time zone and I misread. Maybe I should get some coffee.
Over at Silk Road (marketplace) where there was a pending changes notice on the history tab, the links in it were all broken with Special:Badtitle being used. Looking at Special:PendingChanges this seems to affect other article titles as well. It seems to be an issue with mw-fr-revision-tag-edit:
<divid="mw-fr-revision-tag-edit"class="cdx-message mw-fr-message-box cdx-message--block cdx-message--notice flaggedrevs_notice plainlinks"><spanclass="cdx-message__icon"></span><divclass="cdx-message__content">The <aclass="external text"href="https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Special:Badtitle/Message&stable=1">latest accepted version</a> was <aclass="external text"href="https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=review&page=Special:Badtitle/Message">reviewed</a> on <i>20 November 2024</i>. There is <aclass="external text"href="https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Special:Badtitle/Message&oldid=1258565930&diff=cur&diffonly=0">1 pending revision</a> awaiting review.</div></div>
It changes Special:Badtitle/Message everywhere (maybe the bug affects other messages) including in the edit window for this section, so don't edit it if you add the fix. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:56, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
I don't see a phabricator ticket. PrimeHunter, do you want to write something up? I'm wondering if this has something to do with * git #016644c4 - Do not pre-parse MessageValue arguments (T380045) by Isabelle Hurbain-Palatin? I did do a quick test to confirm that {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} (or {{FULLPAGENAME}}) are directly producing the Special:Badtitle/Message text, it's not just happening when passed through {{fullurl:}} or when linked.--Ahecht (TALK PAGE)15:06, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
I have made a partial fix [1]. It fixes the third and most important link in the message by omitting the bad title. A title is unnecessary in diff links. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:34, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
code editor
Yep, I know, Thursday. Something has happened to the code editor. When I start typing, the code editor now pops up a window that shows a list of text strings that may match what it is that I'm typing. This list is not constrained to Lua keywords but apparently is a list of all words in the module. How do I turn that off?
You can disable it by pressing Ctrl + , and unticking "Live Autocompletion".
(I was looking to see why the change hadn't been proposed for Tech News, and I see someone has just tagged it yesterday, so it will be included next week.) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:57, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
Thanks both, Ctrl + , worked. I wonder who thought that key combination is intuitive? Wasn't there a Dilbert comic about such shortcuts?
@Quiddity (WMF) That's useless because, even if it were documented somewhere, it doesn't persist. You have to re-set that preference every time you load the editor, even if you just hit the "preview" button. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)15:18, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
Proposed change to tabs on redirect pages
I am proposing in phab:T5324#10347051 that the page tabs on redirect pages (‘Article/Talk’ and ‘View’ depending on the page) get a small improvement: they would link to redirect pages themselves by default. Currently they link to their targets with a possibility of navigating back. The change should improve navigation from other actions, like going from history page for "WOW" redirect to the redirect page itself. This should be especially beneficial for English Wikipedia since this community has a system of redirect templates. You would still be able to navigate to redirect target, just with an additional click.
Please let me know either here or on Phabricator (by awarding a token or leaving a comment there) if you are for, against or indifferent to this potential change. It was previously announced in Tech News in 2020 but no one went on to actually review the change. Hopefully this time would be different. stjn01:24, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
Unsurprisingly, I agree with the change, having reopened the Phabricator task in 2019. I was using this one-liner to mitigate for a while.
The talk page behavior is likely more contentious: essentially this turns talk page redirects into soft redirects when clicking on the 'Talk' tab, which is probably the most common way of accessing them. Numerous closely-related templates use redirects to centralize discussion (example: Template talk:Cite news and related templates). Bot talk pages often redirect to the bot operator's talk page (5/10 of the top 10 active bots by edits do this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Also in Wikipedia namespace you can find cases like AN and ANI that have a merged talk. Retro (talk | contribs) 06:56, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
Those are all cases where a normal page has a redirected talk page. I think the proposed change would only apply to redirects with redirected talk pages. jlwoodwa (talk) 07:32, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
If I understood correctly even in the case of going from a redirected article to a redirected talk page it would go to the target of the redirected talk page. The change as I understood would be:
When going from history, info,... of a redirected article to the article itself it would stay in the redirect
When going from history, info,... of a redirected talk page to the talk itself it would stay in the redirect
Looking at the current version (Patchset 2) of gerrit:r/1094077, your second bullet is not correct. The behavior is simpler:
The talk tab would still follow the redirect, except when the talk tab is the current tab (e.g. you're already on the talk page with &redirect=no, or viewing the talk page history).
The subject tab would always stay in the redirect.
Extra tabs, such as TimedText on Commons or Source on Wikisource, will work similarly: stay on redirect if pointing to a subject namespace or are the current tab, follow redirect if pointing to a talk namespace and non-current.
Personally, I'm not so sure of this behavior change. When I'm already at a &redirect=no, I tend to click on the tab to follow the redirect. Clicking the link in the "soft-redirect" on the redirect=no page has different behavior in some edge cases (e.g. double redirects) and won't show the "redirected from" on the target page. OTOH, it's better than the more-consistent alternative that Retro was concerned about above, which would have made it much more likely for people to start commenting on redirected talk pages. Anomie⚔13:01, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
The current Gerrit patchset is a first attempt at implementing this. It should not be referenced as what I want to achieve. Ideally, only the tabs related to the currently viewed page would have redirect=no added. So TimedText/Source etc. should only be affected when they are the current page and user is viewing something related to the redirect.Currently, there is no way to get to view the redirect page in one click even if you are on edit/history pages. That is more unacceptable than someone being a bit inconvenienced by having to click to the big article name and not the tab. stjn13:23, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
How often do people really need to get to view the redirect page that one click rather than two for this use case outweighs the drawbacks of increasing the inconsistency of the UI and requiring editing the URL to follow the redirect as a reader would? Anomie⚔13:11, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
‘Increasing inconsistency’ is your personal opinion that multiple people already disagreed with. In my opinion, it would decrease the inconsistency, as all the other page tabs relate and point to the current page, and not to the redirect target, so the main ones should, too. Currently people are already required to edit the URL, just in the other direction. stjn14:32, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
The inconsistency I referred to is that, with your proposed change, the tab will sometimes follow the redirect and sometimes not. PS6 seems intended to make it more sometimes-and-sometimes-not. As for URL editing, people don't have to edit the URL to get to the redirect page now, but they do need two clicks: one on the tab, following the redirect, and then one the "Redirected from" under the page title to get to the redirect itself. Anomie⚔23:59, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
When I started on Wikipedia, waaaay back in May 2009, if you clicked on a link for a redirect, the redirection would occur client-side and your browsing history would get two entries: one for the redirect page, and one for where you got redirected to. An effect of this was that you needed to use the browser's "back" feature twice in order to return to where you first came from. A bonus side effect was that if you only used "back" once, you could then work on the redirect page directly - "edit", "history", etc., even "move" if you were that silly. Nowadays the redirection is performed server-side, which in some ways makes it harder. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:31, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
I only mean that if someone is on the redirect talk page, they should be able to navigate to it from ‘Talk’ tab. Otherwise (‘Talk’ page on non-talk pages) there should be no change. stjn12:42, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
My initial thought is that this seems fine, since it'll only affect editors (readers have basically no reason to end up at a redirect page). But overall we should be careful not to focus unduly on our editing needs over their reading needs. Sdkbtalk17:04, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
I'm confused about what is being proposed here, so I'll just say that if the URL of the page I'm viewing includes "redirect=no" then I want that to be preserved when I click the article or talk tabs. When I'm viewing the non-redirected talk page of a redirect and click the article tab I could be wanting either the reidrect or its target, probably the former about two thirds to three quarters of the time, but as someone who does a lot of work with redirects I don't know how typical my workflow is. Thryduulf (talk) 13:55, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Mobile wikipedia images problem
Images on the sides of articles don't show up with Javscript disabled on en.m.wikipedia.org, only their captions. Images in the infobox and the main page load normally. If you don't want to show images in articles to users who disable Javascript in Firefox please remove the captions too so there's no clutter. 31.217.45.191 (talk) 14:34, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
In dealing with an issue, electcom implemented Special:Diff/1258984383 which unfortunately broke the question numbering. I'd appreciate any suggestions on what wikimarkup could be used to keep the hatted text hatted and also preserve the question numbering sequence. RoySmith(talk)00:19, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Is this still a problem? I see the question numbers, including the collapsed one at question 21. If still an issue, please describe the problem a bit more. — xaosfluxTalk00:38, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
{{ACE Question}} is implemented in a way which makes this practically impossible without something in the hatted text looking off if you collapse things. It basically assumes the structure of the container (an ordered list) and then indents the answer with wikitext #:. That is a flaw of that template that cannot be corrected without some non-0 study. Izno (talk) 00:41, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Not only that, but {{hab}} only works if it's added at a new line, which would break the numbering either way.
You could create a wrapper div for the questions after 21 with a special class name, then create a style sheet (using Wikipedia:TemplateStyles) that sets the starting number of the ordered list within that div. isaacl (talk) 01:52, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
More kludgily, since the list would be the second ordered list in the content area, the corresponding style sheet rule could be written to target the second ordered list. That would avoid the need for a wrapper div. isaacl (talk) 02:00, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
The style rule would be something like the following:
From an accessibility point of view, is any other choice other than replacing with text (maybe with a permalink if you want it to be accessible) even good?
The only thing I found that sorta works is wrapping it all in a {{efn|1= ... }}, but then you have to add a notelist somewhere where the question will actually appear (collapse and all). That doesn't break the numbering of the questions afterwards. – 2804:F1...86:EF41 (::/32) (talk) 03:40, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
@RoySmith: To be honest, I don't think it needs a complicated technical response. ARBPIA states that this restriction may be enforced by other methods, including... reverts, and that applies On any page where the restriction is not enforced through ECP. So you can just get rid of it, much easier. SerialNumber5412915:34, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
I didn't mean to be uncivil. I had the answers I needed, that was all. If folks want to continue to chat about this, please feel free to do so. RoySmith(talk)21:15, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Article incorrectly marked as List class
I noticed that the article Femke is wrongly marked as List class on the talk page, where it should have been marked as GA class, like I believe it was previously, but now the class in the banner shell appears to be overridden. I suspect that this is somehow caused by / related to the {{given name}} template, despite the section=y parameter that indicates only one section and not the whole article contains a list of given names. Could this be fixed? – Editør (talk) 09:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
The first sentence of that template says Template:given name is only for use on Wikipedia set index articles. If Femke isn't a set index article, then that template shouldn't be used there. Misusing templates can and usually does, break other things. Remove the template from that page and the banner should work. Gonnym (talk) 14:49, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
