Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142

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

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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

Blank spaces left when second-level headings follow floating boxes redux

Resolved

is it just me, or is this bug back again? Frietjes (talk) 19:50, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yep, def. back again. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:51, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
that sucks, just added my hack back to my common.js to fix it until someone fixes it elsewhere. Frietjes (talk) 19:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
can TheDJ or someone else file a bug report? Frietjes (talk) 20:00, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Blank spaces under level 2 headings

This was reported a week ago, and it's back. I just saw it come back for some reason, on the 2015 Saint-Denis raid. It also appeared on some of the cached articles that I had, where previously, there had been no whitespace. epic genius (talk) 19:52, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, it's definitely back again. I've spotchecked a batch of articles mentioned in the previous discussion and every one of them now displays large expanses of blank space. What problem is this change intended to fix, because it really looks like the "cure" is consistently worse than the disease? The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) (talk) 20:08, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

phab:T118475 again. We're deploying the fix right now, sorry about this, it's ridiculous. Legoktm (talk) 20:12, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

I notice that at the very same moment that this bug returned (19:49 as near as I can make out), the little notification/talk message counters got smaller and paler. In monobook, anyway. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:14, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, this is under "Changes this week" at #Tech News: 2015-47. http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log says:
  • 19:24 logmsgbot: twentyafterfour@tin rebuilt wikiversions.php and synchronized wikiversions files: wikipedia wikis to 1.27.0-wmf.7
The bug return was also due to the new version. Thanks for the fast fix. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

+1 - I hope this bug isn't here to stay!. –Davey2010Talk 20:17, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Stupid bug you go squish now! Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Patch has been deployed, and the bug should be gone (may take ~5min to propagate). Legoktm (talk) 20:26, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yep, gone. Nice one! Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:36, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Seconded. epic genius (talk) 20:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanx. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) (talk) 21:39, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Page curation

Articles, such as September, 1914, that were edited redirects or moved from another namespace stop showing the page curation toolbar and the "Curate this article" link on the left side shortly after they were reviewed. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:48, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, that's how the page curation software works. Marked as patrolled + more than 60 days old = not displayed in Special:NewPagesFeed. This fact is documented in Wikipedia:Page Curation/Help: "The New Pages Feed instead has an unlimited listing for unpatrolled pages, and a 60 day listing for patrolled pages". It is actually unrelated to redirects, page moves, or any other actions, although some of those actions may cause a page that was previously marked as patrolled to become 'unpatrolled', and thus re-appear in the list until very shortly after they get marked as patrolled again.
The situation has not changed since the last time you posted this information on this page on 4 November. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
The page should be shown 60 days from the day a redirect was turned into a non-redirect, a page not in the article namespace was moved to the article namespace, or a reviewed article was marked as unreviewed, rather than only for a short amount of time. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:35, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi there. Could someone help me with this, please? Thanks in advance! Rehman 14:01, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Solved. Rehman 05:28, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Looking for testers

Hello folks! I've just added two new features to the test version of reFill, a tool that can semi-automatically expand bare references (more information here):

  1. The tool can now generate localized templates for Wikipedias in other languages (like this on frwiki). While this shouldn't affect enwiki, I want to make sure that nothing goes wrong as some core parts of the code have been changed. If you edit other Wikipedias and want reFill work there, please let me know!
  2. The tool now has the ability to expand New York Times references, by leveraging its API.

If you use reFill and have time to try out the new features, please help test the experimental version. Thanks a lot for your help! Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 12:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

By the way, I want to thank User:SyntaxTerror, User:Victor Lopes, User:Frank Geerlings, and all others who have translated the tool into other languages. You guys rock! Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 12:53, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Much prefer this version that using the script via my css.js (or whatever the correct page is). Just used it on this edit and looks good. Will find a few more bare url refs and give them a try. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:51, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Did this edit that filled in eight bare URLs. Takes a bit of time (approx. 2 minutes), but does the job. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:38, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Telugu Language

Can anyone help in answering Template_talk:Infobox_Hindu_temple#Telugu?--Vin09 (talk) 04:44, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist changes

Instead of the links for differemt periods (1 hour, 2 hours, etc.) there is now a drop-down selecion list. That's OK I suppose, but if you use it, your URL gets extra crud in the query string besides ?days=0.5 - why, for example, is &action=submit required? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Probably something to leave at phab:T50615 which implemented the change. Or possibly @Matma Rex: for comment. --Izno (talk) 00:30, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure the "string" expansion was always talking place IF you ticked on either button on the Watchlist page regardless of changing any of the parameters or not in the interim.

I believe the only way a "clean" string comes up for that page is if you open your Watchlist page using the corresponding link for it in your Personal tool-Bar (above the search box on the top right in Vector). I'm pretty sure your WatchList's hours/days setting in your User: preferences needs to be the same as your last (now) drop down menu selection too. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:42, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Disabled checkboxes

The three checkboxes in [1] are disabled. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:33, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Well, go ask User:Σ about it, then. — This, that and the other (talk) 04:36, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Image purge

Can someone please purge the image File:Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg in the article Isometric graphics in video games and pixel art? For me at least the graphic is still showing a much earlier version. It is important because the image takes measurements and they are not correct when the image is squished like it is for me now. Thanks. SharkD  Talk  00:17, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

See section above. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:19, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
I am using Chrome, and have been trying to bypass the cache by pressing CTRL+F5. I've also tried purging the page using ?action=purge after the URL in the address bar. Is the image showing correctly for you? SharkD  Talk  00:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Your three latest versions at File:Perspective isometrique cube gris.svg#filehistory look identical to me so it's hard to see which one of them is displayed. At Isometric graphics in video games and pixel art#Overview I see a square display of http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png. For me it is a 150×150 image with a green 30° to the lower left outside the cube. What do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:01, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
The "latest" .svg on Commons has a 'more narrow' left and right margins (whitespace?, transparent?) than the previous versions have. And on the WP article itself, I doubt I'm seeing a 150×150 rendering (would be square); more like 150×167 here (a rectangle). Can this be more about the use of the dual image template and/or its settings than about chaching? -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:16, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
You describe the 540×600 version uploaded by AnonMoos after my post. There is indeed something wrong now. The article currently displays a 150×150 scaling at http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png, presumably of the most recent of the 713 × 713 versions by SharkD, but it's stretched to 150×167 in the article. That's the dimensions it should be scaled to if the current 540×600 version had correctly been used to make the scaled version. I have tried all methods at commons:Help:Purge except renaming the file. The generated html of the article says: <img alt="" src="//up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png" width="150" height="167" srcset="//up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/225px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png 1.5x, //up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/300px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="540" data-file-height="600" />. So MediaWiki knows what dimensions the image should have, and asks the user's browser to display it with those dimensions. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: What section? -- Veggies (talk) 12:07, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
#FLL Logo. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:43, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm having problems myself. Thumbnails are not updating even after hard-refreshes, manual-purges, and cache-clears. -- Veggies (talk) 12:07, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe SVG images are immune to purges? SharkD  Talk  02:29, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Beats me. I swapped out the {{Double image}} template for {{Multiple Image}} just in case since it's status is deprecated anyway but I don't see any difference in behavior between the two.

I also tried a "full purge" per the API options available - specifically:

... but I'm still seeing the "wrong" rendering regardless (though I beginning to wonder why a 'true' cube viewed dead center on the z axis is anything but equal in height and width; are we sure the base image is was a good one to begin with here?). -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:32, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

It is working properly for me now. I see the correct image in the article. SharkD  Talk  14:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

New template

Hey, in WikiProject Equine we kept coming up against the issue of not having an infobox specifically for horse shows and events. So I decided I'd create one. I have it in my sandbox right now (you can view it here) but I've never written a template before and would like somebody to check it out. It's likely not finished, as I'm waiting for some other WPEQ members to check it out and give feedback, but I'd like to know if it's a good start and if it would produce the correct template when moved to mainspace. Thanks. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 17:44, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

If you mean the current wiki source of User:White Arabian Filly/sandbox#Infobox:Equestrian event then it has nothing to do with source code of a template. You only have code to call a template. Similar code is usually displayed on infobox pages but it is transcluded from a documentation page and not part of the actual template. Click the "Edit" or "View source" tab on an infobox to get an idea how the source code looks. And see Help:Designing infoboxes. Also, infoboxes are not placed in mainspace but in template space, but if you had working code in a user sandbox then it could also be called there by just giving the full name including namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:49, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, PrimeHunter. I have moved it to its own subpage, User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event and have added most of the source code. I know I have to add more and do some more work before it's ready to launch, but it's closer now. By my count, there are at least 15 articles the template can be used on once it's complete. This is my first time creating an infobox, so it's a learning process for me. Thanks again. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 22:52, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Creating a new infobox is ambitious when you haven't made any template before. I have helped you get the some of the basics right [2] so you can now call it with {{User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event|...}} to test it. A tip: You can test code changes without saving by placing test calls inside <noinclude>...</noinclude> of the page itself and previewing. The previewed version and not the saved version will be used for rendering your test call. Note how labeln and datan for each integer n are a pair in {{infobox}}, with label usually being a constant string displayed on the left half of the infobox, and data is a parameter set by the caller and displayed to the right of label. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:21, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you again, I am going to test it on Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration, which I created and mostly wrote, so if I mess it up nobody will get mad--I can just revert. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 23:52, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

You are not combining label and data in a meaningful way. I really suggest you read up on {{infobox}} and make tests by previewing directly on User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event as described in my tip. Otherwise you may get a really long cycle of saving template changes and then testing them. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:01, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

.ogg files fail with javascript error

All page that contain an .ogg file, even file description pages (and currently also the Main Page!) fail with the message Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'insertRule' of undefined in Chrome. The error appears after Chrome's native player disappears. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:26, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

It works for me. Chrome 46.0.2490.86 on Windows Vista. A search of your error message shows phab:T118792. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:27, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Widescreen, default text size, picture madness

I think we can all agree that the wild west days of Wikipedia happened from 2001 to 2006. That's when they shot out the skeletal which became the core then we starting asking questions about quality and format and exactly what Wikipedia should be. Well, most of that was before 16:9 widescreen became the standard. I'm guessing Wikipedia renders at a specified pixel size per text that works well with an old 4:3 VGA monitor (50< pixels per inch (PPI) ), but this is way too small for your standard 16:9 1080p widescreen monitor, and I'm sure is even worse on smaller WQHD (~100ppi) and 4K monitors (28" = 150ppi). Before anyone says that the fault is on monitors have such high resolutions without being scalably larger screen sizes, understand that the pixel density is much too low on primitive tech, not too high on new tech (In fact even 300+ppi "Retina displays" do not even meet visual limits, a field that is plagued by non-science marketing misconceptions and doesn't seem to understand the distinction between being able to "count pixels" and be able to perceive a difference). I have had my browser set for Wikipedia to display at 175% for over a year and do not even think about it anymore. It just looks right. I picked it because at smaller sizes there seem to be scaling issues and any larger pictures look bad and it would be too much anyway. Sometimes, when there are lots of pictures in articles especially when they are pushing sections down, I reduce to 100% just to check it out, and it's often awful. Not only do the pictures push way beyond their sections, but the text is not comfortable to read.

Here is a screenshot at 100% and 175%, notice how the pictures are in the section they should be in, in fact that left picture that looked all by itself in the 100% view majically popped down to the section it was supposed to be in, and that leads to the collapsed garage photo actually being in the collapsed section

480px for closest scaling, but best to view full size

At the very least I am requesting an ability to be able to change your own default text size in your Preferences, though this only benefits users that know about it, much less the general public. Thank you. B137 (talk) 07:11, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

@B137: While waiting for an official fix, you can workaround it by adding some custom styling to your common.css:
#content {
    max-width: 800px;
    font-size: larger;
}
This will limit the width to 800px and make the text slightly larger. Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 08:47, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@Zhaofeng Li: Thank you. Wow that's even more obscure than going to Preferences. It helps but is a little clunky, I made it a little wider than that but is there any other keyword than "larger" for the text, perhaps something where you specify the px for vertical text resolution, or maybe just another word? larger1, larger2, largest..etc? B137 (talk) 09:02, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@B137: For font-size you can specify px directly, or use small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large, etc. See MDN for details. Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 09:08, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Or, even better, use percentages, say, 125% or 140%. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:15, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. That once again addresses the issue somewhat for me, but not for the general viewer. B137 (talk) 09:25, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
The 'general viewer' has no account and therefor has no preferences. And the idea of a cookie-based fontsize widget has been explored but not found feasable. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:58, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
You say that like they don't matter. And this issue is not something I'm making up. It's already a talking point for HD and ultra HD monitors, and many sites and operating systems are responding. Also, what I meant by "more obscure than preferences" was that even the average wiki user wouldn't be able to utilize that unless it was so pressing that they researched it. You can lead a horse to water and it might not drink, but it's more likely than if you left it altogether. B137 (talk) 12:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Actual hardware viewing dimensions for the "general", anonymous or logged-in User: do not seem to be polled or tracked in an formal manner so setting the display/viewport [skin] "defaults" also do not seem to be based in any rational or statistical based formulations either (more like subjective 'beliefs' instead).

In other terms: If all you ever work on is a 17 inch laptop display panel; you're positive your optimal "display" settings are the norm. But if all you ever work on is a 26 inch desktop monitor; you're positive your optimal "display" setting are the norm. And if all you ever work on is done via a Miracast to your 55 inch smart TV; you're positive your "display" setting are the norm too. To round out the illustration, the "higher-ups" setting the current defaults in question seem to fall mainly into one of the three groups rather than be spread across all three groups; thus the "slanted" or "jaded" take frequently voiced regarding this issue.

Lacking the hard data needed to quell such bias, things are not likely to change I'm afraid but good luck if you make the effort. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:39, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Actually, the ideal solution would be to adopt responsive web design strategies, with the layout adapting to different screen sizes/resolutions automatically. Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 08:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Agreed (though that developmental front is also currently "stalled"). Can't do much about that while the 'content area' is constantly encroached upon by the typical site-logo and side-bar designs. And I don't know why the Winter prototype approach was dropped either - it seemed to be the logical next step after the Vector "refresh". I so hope they didn't drop it just because of a few .css "mistakes" :( ---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by George Orwell III (talk • contribs) 10:31, 22 November 2015
Making a site responsive, especially user authored and edited content with 15 years of history to it, is not simple. Many of these problems are on the radar of multiple teams inside the WMF and of individual volunteer developers. We talk about it all the time. But they are difficult problems to solve correctly. Especially the infrastructure challenge for responsive images is rather daunting, as is the fact that our content allows free usage of CSS to every single editor.
And Winter is not totally scrapped. Winter was a prototype, an experiment and many of its ideas and strategies are used in current development. More of it will trickle down eventually. More of the mobile Minerva skin will merge into Vector and core, more of OOjs UI will become visible in the general interface. And one day, all will be the same, yet totally different... Do keep asking for those improvements however. It's important to make your voice heard. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:11, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes I use old wiki please don't ever make the new mobile style mandatory
I was slightly facetious when I said the css change solved it "good enough for me at least." When I had it set to just "large", the alignment wasn't bad enough to worry about, but that is still much smaller than when I zoom to 175%, and without scrunching the width (which means I am not getting full use of my screen) the images still push down too much. So I changed it to "x-large" and now the alignment is pretty significant: B137 (talk) 03:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Unexpected background color around thumb images due to LIGHT BLUE in Monobook

User:Liangent/lightblue and Special:Permalink/691743758 contain a demo: view it in Vector and it shows Wiki.png on pink background; view it in Monobook and some unexpected white/blue area is shown.

We copied those styles to zhwiki and this issue was reported on zhwiki VPT by some other user today; upstreaming it here. Make sure to test both pages (article and non-article) because different styles are used. Liangent (talk) 22:30, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Here is a simplified example:
Vector versus MonoBook shows the difference in rendering. Something apparently happens when Wikipedia:Extended image syntax#none is used in a div with padding. Can you just avoid doing that? PrimeHunter (talk) 23:46, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Monobook.css mistakenly thinks all instances concerning the div.thumb class are always part of a gallery-type of image display when of course that is not always the case. It seems the universally {common] defined background-color: transparent; is being overridden to 'sky-blue' by
div#content, div#p-cactions li a:hover, div#p-cactions li.selected a, div#content div.thumb {
    background-color: #f8fcff;
}
... by design but never gets around to "reverting" back to the "default" for some reason. Basically, the gallery-type instances need more specific selectors in order to differentiate it from the NoN gallery type of image display cases. User:Edokter? -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:58, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Fwiw... I think the above needs to be split into...
div#content, div#p-cactions li a:hover, div#p-cactions li.selected a {
    background-color: #f8fcff;
}
div#content div.thumb {
    background-color: inherit;
}
... but that entire 'sky-blue' section in the .css has caveats defined for certain namespaces/selections/etc. so it would need some vetting first to be sure the changes aren't making things worse elsewhere. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:18, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Are there any real cases where this is a problem, or is this a glitch you stumbled upon? As PrimeHunter said: do you need to use padding? I'm not inclined to fix non-existing problems. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:29, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
It was found in {{Location map|caption=x|border=none}} used in some infoboxes with background. I noticed that it was due to class="thumb" in Location map and Location map was just trying to mimic thumb images, so I used thumb image to reproduce the issue here because it looks simpler. Liangent (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

X!'s tools for Neelix

On [3], many numbers are wrong. They display zero when they should actually be nonzero. For example, it says that Neelix

  • does not have any deleted edits
  • has not moved any pages
  • has not deleted any pages
  • has not protected any pages
  • has not blocked any users
  • has not uploaded any files
  • did not thank any users
  • did not review any pending changes
  • did not patrol any edits

when in fact, none of the listed statements are true. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:08, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Just taken a look at the link and it currently says 12,904 deleted edits, 8,428 pages moved, 1,153 deleted pages, 73 protected pages, 9 users blocked, 914 files uploaded, 197 thanked users, 33,534 patrolled edits.Blethering Scot 20:54, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I can confirm it said no deleted edits earlier but now I also see 12,904 so I guess the issue is fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

CSS broken on en Watchlist ?

Is anybody else seeing this ?

Formatting for Special:Watchlist recently seems to have broken, at least using the monobook skin.

Has the CSS recently been changed or something? It seems, at least with monobook, that no CSS at all is being applied? Jheald (talk) 12:30, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Nothing has changed. How is it broken? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:35, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm seeing my watchlist page simply as 1990s-style vanilla HTML, with no CSS applied. It seems only to be the watchlist page, no other pages affected. Jheald (talk) 15:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
... and now it's fixed. So I don't know what that was about. Jheald (talk) 16:01, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Dusty articles

The dusty articles list has not been updated since June. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

It's transcluded from Wikipedia:Dusty articles/List which according to its history is built by SvickBOT (talk · contribs). Have you informed the bot operator, Svick (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:02, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

image tidy-up

I got into a pickle with File:Men of Men - bookcover.jpg, can someone remove the last two updates ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 17:03, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Which is the correct version, GrahamHardy?Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
the 2nd one up, 3rd one down, can the last two updates just be removed ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 17:09, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
I've requested the removal. I assume that the current image is the correct one.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:54, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Done. Nyttend (talk) 21:00, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Misleading expiry time for protection

Follow-up to Category talk:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates#Bot automation on it's way

This does not affect users who have set their local time zone to UTC.

If you protect a page, and instead of selecting a duration you select "other time" and enter a date and time, that is taken as UTC. But if you revisit the "change protection" for that page, and look at the "Expires" item, it says "Existing expiry time" with a date and time that are in your local time zone. If you wish to extend a current protection by, say, 24 hours, you need to be careful how you do it.

Assume a user in New York (UTC-5), they might see "Existing expiry time: 16:00, November 22, 2015". If in the "Other time" box, they enter "16:00, November 23, 2015" and Confirm it, then they revisit the "change protection" for that page, it says "Existing expiry time: 11:00, November 23, 2015" so they actually extended it by 19 hours, not 24. To get a 24-hour extension on the original expiry, they actually need to set "Other time" to "21:00, November 23, 2015". --Redrose64 (talk) 14:55, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64:This should be reported at Phabricator - see Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests. I see no reason to discuss this here. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:17, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I know that it's ultimately a phab: thing, but searching phab for existing tickets is a pain. Many people post here initially even when it's a MedaiWiki software issue, since they know that at some point one of the phab regulars will come along and say "ah, that's ticket T987654 which has been open for three years". Saves filing a redundant ticket only to get it closed as "resolved, duplicate" which doesn't help much. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:16, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
More details, Redrose64. I've always had my time set to UTC, but just now I changed it to a random Australian time zone (how did Currie, Tasmania, population 746, end up as the reference point for a time zone area?) and protected a userspace page until 2015-12-15, 23:12. I then unprotected it, changed my time to America/Denver, and added the same protection, and the expiry time was the same. However, the protection log appears differently on the protection page — when I was in Tasmania, the latest log entry was

(change visibility) 07:44, 24 November 2015 Nyttend (talk | contribs | block) protected User:Nyttend/ZIP [Edit=Allow only administrators] (expires 10:12, 16 December 2015) [Move=Allow only administrators] (expires 10:12, 16 December 2015) (Protecting until 2015-12-15, 23:12 with time zone set as America/Denver) (hist | change)

Now that I'm in Colorado, the same line reads

(change visibility) 13:44, 23 November 2015 Nyttend (talk | contribs | block) protected User:Nyttend/ZIP [Edit=Allow only administrators] (expires 16:12, 15 December 2015) [Move=Allow only administrators] (expires 16:12, 15 December 2015) (Protecting until 2015-12-15, 23:12 with time zone set as America/Denver) (hist | change)

If you view the section of my contributions that includes those entries, you'll see the same dates and times regardless of whether your time zone is Dar es Salaam or Yap (I just checked), but the protection log changes with your time zone. This shouldn't be the case, especially given its effect on protection time changes: all the logs should be in UTC, so that everyone sees the same thing in all cases, and so that protection times aren't accidentally changed. Nyttend (talk) 20:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

TOC right

Resolved

{{TOC right}} doesn't seem to be working for me. @Funandtrvl: looks like they have tried to fix it recently? I'm on Chrome in case it's a browser issue. GiantSnowman 20:41, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

On which article(s)? In what way is it not working? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:51, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Well it's not displaying. GiantSnowman 12:44, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
E1
E2
E3

E4

  • E5 E6
It works for me, for example on Alien, both logged in and out, Vector skin, Chrome 46.0.2490.86 on Windows Vista. Please provide the same details. I see a box to the right of this section with E1 above the box and E2 E3 E4 E5 E6 inside the box. Which of this do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:16, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
It's working for me now, but I'm on a different computer/browser. I'll check again when I'm back at home. GiantSnowman 13:22, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm back home and it's displaying fine. Whatever bug it was has been fixed. GiantSnowman 17:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T104797

Got a bit of a surprise just now. When I searched Michael Katovich "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" Volume 33 in google, the seventh of 185 results was the sandbox I'm working in, User:JG66/sandbox White Album reception (where Katovich's article appears as a source). I'm all for transparency on Wikipedia, but – boy, I just didn't expect a sandbox to come up! Is it quite normal, for these to appear in a google search? JG66 (talk) 04:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

This isn't new, back in the old days if a page could not stand deletionists I would keep working on the subpage version ha-ha. It takes more for non-main space stuff to show up though. B137 (talk) 05:01, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
There is an outstanding request to change this in the configuration. In the mean time. {{userspace draft}}, that's one of the reasons we have that template. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:12, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
JG66, it's quite normal, and you can meet the nicest people that way The {{NOINDEX}} and {{NOINDEX|visible=yes}} templates work nicely too. The visible parameter lets other editors know the page is probably not going to be indexed. These templates are not guaranteed to be effective. PS: Pinging TheDJ too. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:41, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks to you all for the replies, especially those options, TheDJ and Checkingfax. Still can't get over the shock I got seeing "User:JG66/sandbox …" come up in google – scared the bloomin' life out of me! JG66 (talk) 07:15, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I use {{user sandbox}}, which sets __NOINDEX__ as default; if you want the sandbox page to be indexed, you can override that with |noindex=no --Redrose64 (talk) 10:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, Redrose64. {{userspace draft}} seems to work, actually. Fingers crossed. JG66 (talk) 11:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The configuration change was finally deployed as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:59, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Excluding bot edits from watchlist

Help! I am desperately trying to exclude bot edits from my watchlist, which is being flooded with notifications of delivery of a mass message about the Arbcom election. I check the "hide bots" box and click "Go" on the next line, but next time I look the box is unchecked again, and the flood of mass-message notifications continues. It isn't a caching issue, I have tried purging the page. JohnCD (talk) 17:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

You can permanently remove bot edits from your watchlist by going into your Preferences, then the Watchlist tab. Look under "Advanced Options". Resolute 18:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! It seems that checking the boxes in the "Watchlist options" box on the watch-list only affects the search you immediately do by clicking "Go". I found that confusing: perhaps there should be a note there to say "To permanently change these options, see Watchlist under Preferences". JohnCD (talk) 18:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps off-subject here, but I don't think Search is effected in any way by Special:EditWatchlist. — CpiralCpiral 20:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-48

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

  • A new Pageview API has been announced. Feedback is requested to help decide which data to add to it next.

Changes this week

  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • From 1 December, the MediaWiki API will no longer support the dbg, txt, and yaml output formats. [4]

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

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Usage of template parameters (Tracking)

Is there a (simple) way to track articles by number of used parameters in a transcluded template? For example I have a template like this: 

{{Template Alpha
|parameter1 = 
|parameter2 = 
|parameter3 =
|parameter4 = 
|parameter5 = 
...
|parameter20 = 
}}

How to track articles in categories, by number of used parameters of this template (how many parameters of this template have some values)? --XXN, 22:11, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@XXN: Probably the easiest way would be to use a tracking category and change the sort key depending on the number of parameters. Some sample code:
[[Category:My tracking category|{{#expr: {{#if:{{{parameter1|}}}|1|0}} + {{#if:{{{parameter2|}}}|1|0}} + ... + {{#if:{{{parameter20|}}}|1|0}} }}]]
I haven't tested the above yet, but I've seen other code like it in various templates. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Actually, ignore that - after testing, it doesn't seem to work. The following will, but you need to create as many different categories as there are template parameters.
[[Category:My template transclusions with {{#expr: {{#if:{{{parameter1|}}}|1|0}} + {{#if:{{{parameter2|}}}|1|0}} + ... + {{#if:{{{parameter20|}}}|1|0}} }} parameters]]
Best — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Your test code does work when it's actually used.[5] PrimeHunter (talk) 01:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Aha, that explains it - thanks for the fix. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for idea, Mr. Stradivarius. I also thought about this, but it's a bit tiresome to write such a function for a template with 20-30 different parameteres +with the same number of aliases for main parameteres names. --XXN, 01:03, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
@XXN: In that case, how about doing it in Lua? There are three ways that I can think of using Lua to do this. The first would be to count the number of all the parameters specified, including ones that the template doesn't recognise. The second would be to make a list of all the valid parameters and count how many of those are specified. And the third would be to use Lua patterns to specify groups of parameters - for example, if you specified the pattern ^parameter%d+$, you would count all the parameters that were specified that consist of the word "parameter" followed by one or more digits. Something similar is already done in Module:Check for unknown parameters. I'll try and write a module that does all three of these so you can choose which one is the most appropriate. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
@XXN: I've now written Module:ParameterCount which should make this process easier. Take a look at the documentation and see what you think. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 06:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you so much Mr. Stradivarius! Nice job!:) This module works very well. --XXN, 12:49, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Browsing

I wonder if the developers of wikipedia would consider a turn book page option for articles instead of just the standard one page scrolling downwards. Like this at archive.org I actually find it easier to read and browse with a simple click between pages horizontally without having to keep scrolling downwards, especially for big articles. If we had a "Reader" function on wikipedia which converts articles to a book format, perhaps with two columns on each page I think I'd find it much more reader friendly and usable.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:00, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

If you browse through the magazines on archive.org you'll notice that browsing content puts much less strain on your fingers with a simple click and is actually a more convenient way of reading for the reader. You don't have to keep moving it down, but you work across and it's all in one place, page by page. I also think that as it is an encyclopedia, customizing it to resemble an old encyclopedia with pages would be a more attractive way to read content and consolidate knowledge. I think even for mobiles and iPads it would be a far easier way to browse to simply tap between pages. To allow room for the double page book format there could be the option to have a hidden sidebar which only appears when you hover over it to maximize reading space and appearance. Another feature I think, the option to browse articles by subject. Like you could browse a category alphabetically in a book format, going from article to article, or click on a letter at the bottom to find surnames or articles with that letter in a given category or section of the project.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:04, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
That archive.org page is a collection of scans of old magazines, rather than html, so doesn't have the formatting issues one would have trying to display Wikitext articles in that format across multiple devices of varying shapes and sizes. I agree with what you're saying about reading ease on mobile devices, but it won't be a simple matter. If you've ever tried to read a heavily-footnoted and illustrated book on the Kindle, iBooks or Google Play Books apps (which use the turn-the-page format) you'll know how hard it is to handle embedded images and internal footnoting and section links in this format, even with the full might of the world's three leading content-delivery companies working on it, and the markup of some Wikipedia articles is far more complicated than that of most books; I imagine it would lead to illustrations and tables regularly becoming separated from their accompanying text. That's not to say it's a bad idea, but if Apple can't handle it I'm not sure WMF Ops would be up to the task. ‑ iridescent 12:22, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Stray </noinclude>

Just noticed that at Talk:Destruction_of_cultural_heritage_by_ISIL there's a stray standalone </noinclude> tag in a white row between WikiProject Africa and WikiProject Arab world. Editing wikisyntax doesn't reveal anything, looks like something went wrong elsewhere. Could someone check? Brandmeistertalk 22:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Libya}} had an incorrect edit yesterday. I think it has the intended content now. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:54, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

"maintenance" in the upper left corner of this page

Just curious. I'm starting to notice the unbolded and unlinked lowercase word "maintenance" in the upper left hand corner of new articles. And I just noticed it at the top of this VPump page. Is this new? And what does it mean? — Maile (talk) 22:47, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't see it here or in any of the examined new articles. Please post an example article. Do you see it when you are logged out? What is your skin? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:58, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, this was strange. I use Modern skin. "maintenance" appeared, besides on this VPump page, in the upper left hand corner of any new article I looked at on Newpages. I changed to Monobook, and that went away. So, I came back to Modern skin, and the phenomenon is completely gone from all articles I'd seen it on. Just one of those momentary flukes, I guess. — Maile (talk) 23:21, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Uw-voablock

When editing Template:Uw-voablock, "No matching items in log." is shown in the top area. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:36, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

uselang=qqx shows it displays MediaWiki:Logempty. I don't know why. translatewiki:MediaWiki:Logempty/qqq says: "Used as warning when there are no items to show." The message is displayed in the actual log page [6] as expected. A random template with no logs Template:Uw-ublock-double also displays it in the actual log [7] but not in the edit page. The page history of Template:Uw-voablock shows a 2007 move [8] over a redirect at that title. Could MediaWiki be expecting a log entry for that and try to retrieve it but report that it didn't find anything? PrimeHunter (talk) 03:07, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Since this page is protected the edit page will show the protection log entry. This page was protected under its old name {{vandalblock}}, which it was renamed from in 2007. I believe that at that time log entries, including the protection log, were not moved with pages. However, protection status was. The page is protected, but there is no log entry to be found, thus the message. Nothing to worry about – I do not recommend trying to 'fix' it. Prodego talk 04:16, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
The "missing" protection log is here. It's still the case that log entries are not moved when a page is moved. But if a page under a protection at the time of its move, an entry is added to the log for the new page name, see WP:MOVE#How to move a page item 4. This entry is of the form "moved protection settings from Foo to Bar (Foo moved to Bar)". Apparently that additional entry was not generated when the page was last moved, 21:24, 2 December 2007, and is probably a newer feature. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I should have been more clear that this "moved protection settings" log was the "moved with pages" feature I was referring too. The log isn't simply moved – a new, different entry is added to the destination page, and the originals never move. "Logs don't move" generally holds for all logs. Prodego talk 13:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I fixed this specific page; note, however, that this only fixed the one page - you would need to do it separately for each page which has this problem. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:48, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I have mentioned the issue at MediaWiki talk:Logempty, with the message quoted to help find it in searches. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:33, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

2 articles with the same name ?

I've just come across List of deceased hip hop artists and List оf dесеаsеd hiр hор аrtists - They have the same title yet the content's somewhat different (The talkpages for both are completely different) so are the names somehow different as I can't spot any differences between the 2... Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 04:31, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

The second version has many Cyrillic letters instead of Latin letters. You can for example copy-paste the name to the "Characters" field at http://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:52, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I marked the second one for speedy deletion using a rationale that seemed reasonable to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:03, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
PrimeHunter - Bloody hell how on earth did you know that!?, I spent about 5 minutes clicking between the tabs like an idiot trying to figure what on earth I was missing! ,
Jonesey95 - Ah thanks I was gonna tag it after but wanted to find out the issue first,
Well least it's not a bug! :), Thanks for both of your helps, –Davey2010Talk 05:10, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
If you look at the source of this discussion, you may see a difference in how the characters render. Some fonts will show them as the same, and some will show them as different. Mine uses a monospace font of some sort, which shows the Cyrillic letters as smaller and "thinner", as if they are underfed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:17, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Ah yes the other one has all letters & stuff - I had never even gave it a thought about the Latin stuff, I'm still using the prev 'pedia font so that could be why there wasn't a noticable difference, Ah well thanks for your help :), –Davey2010Talk 06:05, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

There were also pages in the main namespace that had the same title as a non-main namespace page due to T87645. All such pages were already deleted by Topbanana. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Not the same issue at all. T87645 concerned pages in mainspace which should have been in another namespace, but where the namespace value had been set to zero and instead the namespace name formed part of the page name. This thread concerns pagenames that are in the correct namespace, whose page names are composed of characters which resemble each other but are different. In the redlink above, the page name is "List оf dесеаsеd hiр hор аrtists"; and the characters that I've underlined are the Cyrillic letters а (U+0430), е (U+0435), о (U+043E), р (U+0440), с (U+0441). --Redrose64 (talk) 12:49, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Peer review bot down - please help!

Hi technically aware Wikipedia village pump (Technical) denizens, I'm one of the regular peer review mop (non administrator) handlers. We have a crisis brewing... the bot that closes old reviews (PeerReviewBot) has stopped working, last edit June 19. This is a very time-consuming and labourious task to be done manually that was previously easily automated. The bot is owned by CBM who is mostly retired.

Is it possible to either get the bot started again, or create a similar bot that does the same thing? Yours very gratefully, --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:09, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

It might be worth asking at WP:BOTREQ. I notice that the bot's userpage says the code is available on Toolserver SVN, which no longer exists - I wonder if it was backed up somewhere. — This, that and the other (talk) 23:11, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I am retired from running bots. The bot's source code is available on wikimedia tool labs from anyone who has access to the VeblenBot project, i.e. Ruhrfisch and possibly me. Unfortunately, although I have made several public requests for someone to take over the bot, nobody stepped up to take over. If anyone is interested, I can see if I can still log in to email them the bot code. It is not a difficult project to code from scratch, in any case. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:22, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@Fhocutt (WMF): I know you got Citation bot up and running--is there scope for you to poke at this bot also? --Izno (talk) 05:47, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
If there's no one to take over CBM's code, I'll have a go at this. I don't use Perl, so I won't re-use that code, but it's a fairly simple set of tasks. Relentlessly (talk) 17:20, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks very much Relentlessly, this is much appreciated by me and the many other users who use peer review. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:12, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Is Labs down?

Doesn't matter which browser I use. The tabs are missing things. Under what would normally be Page/History (and other selections), we only get History. You can't find your Userspace at the moment via User/Userspace. — Maile (talk) 16:48, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

toollabs: has lots of tools and many of them are working. Please be more specific if you have problems with one of the tools. The XTools (those starting with tools.wmflabs.org/xtools) have been down a lot the last year and are currently down for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:09, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, how about this error message that just came up when on Loyal Valley, Texas, from Page/History, I chose Revision history statistics:

Four hundred and four!

The URI you have requested, /xtools/wikihistory/wh.php?page_title=Loyal_Valley,_Texas, doesn't seem to actually exist. If you have reached this page from somewhere else...

This URI is managed by the xtools tool, maintained by MusikAnimal, APPER, Tparis, Cyberpower678, Tools.xtools-articleinfo, Elee, Technical 13, Lixxx235, Tools.xtools-ec, and Nakon.

Perhaps its files are on vacation, or the link you've followed doesn't actually lead somewhere useful?

You might want to looks at the list of tools to find what you were looking for, or one of the links on the sidebar to the left. If you're pretty sure this shouldn't be an error, you may wish to notify the tool's maintainers (above) about the error and how you ended up here.

Also, I had tried just the usual Page views options earlier, and sometimes it says "connecting" forever without ever doing anything. And once, it actually provided the stats. I think Labs might be working on something. — Maile (talk) 17:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

As shown by your quoted text, that is one of the XTools. This page has had lots of discussions about down XTools in the last year. It doesn't imply a general problem at Labs. As mentioned, lots of other tools at Labs are working. Labs is a host for a large number of independent tools, often made by volunteer editors. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Maile66, MusikAnimal may have fixed the issue: User_talk:MusikAnimal#Please_kick_the_Xtools_server. --NeilN talk to me 03:38, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

This looks like a good excuse to let people know about Labs labs labs and Beta beta beta. There are a lot of things that are called "Labs" or "Beta". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:59, 27 November 2015 (UTC)


Autoconfirmed checker?

Is there anything that makes it quick and easy to check whether a user is autoconfirmed, or how close they are to becoming autoconfirmed? Thanks. Samsara 22:22, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@Samsara: User:PleaseStand/User info 106.0.176.61 (talk) 22:45, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. :) Samsara 23:04, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
You can also get info about a user if you have WP:POPUPS enabled and hover over a link to their user or talk pages. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:46, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Page information

On some pages such as Barbershop 3, the page information shows the wrong number of edits. For that page, it says that there are 146 edits when there are actually only 7. The remaining 139 edits were merged into Barbershop: The Next Cut. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:28, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

The page had not been edited since the revisions were merged. A null edit updated the counts at http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Barbershop_3&action=info. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:45, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

File reuploading

When uploading a new version of a file, the edit is not marked as a minor edit, as it is when protecting or moving pages. For example, this edit to File:Saule - Dusty Men (feat. Charlie Winston) official cover.jpg is not marked as a minor edit. Note that this is the opposite of Tryptofish's problem at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Page moves marked as minor edits. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 05:53, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Sounds about right to me; uploading a new version of a file is a pretty major edit to that file. Why page moves, in particular, are marked as minor is not at all clear to me. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:15, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
GeoffreyT2000, thank you for reminding me of that. I agree that it would be good for the community to reevaluate how certain actions are or are not labeled as minor. I've been busy with other things lately, but I do agree that this ought to be pursued further. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:29, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Unwatch from watchlist?

Hey folks, is there a way to "un-watch" pages from the watchlist? Seems to me like that would be an exceptionally handy feature, so much so that I'm sure it's been proposed before, but I can't find it. Cheers! Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:43, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Special:EditWatchlist Reedy (talk) 15:44, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
I use WP:POPUPS to do this. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:08, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: mw:Snippets/Unwatch from watchlist 106.0.176.61 (talk) 16:32, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! I just recommended popups in a thread above, I don't think I knew it could be used that way. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 16:39, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
@Ivanvector: I use User:Anomie/unwatch.js for this. It gives you a handy "unw" link on the watchlist itself, next to the "diff" and "hist" links. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 21:55, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Another Festivus miracle! Thanks, that's perfect. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Notification look change

I'm not sure if this is good or other, at this point. But mentioning it. I have Modern skin. That you-can't-miss-it red notifications now just very subtly changes from a white 0 to white numbers when there are notifications. It's so subtle you don't notice it unless you are looking for it. Maybe that's not all bad. It might have something to do with the latest Tech News mention, "Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme." — Maile (talk) 23:52, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

It needs to be a lot brighter. I'm sure there's an WP:ACCESS issue having it so pale. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:46, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I also use Modern skin. I actually acquired five new notifications yesteday at different times without noticing any of them. To me this is bad. I consider my notifications a vital part of my day, since some require response or action, or retaliation. (sigh...this constant tinkering..). Fylbecatulous talk 16:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
See WT:Echo#Notification icon colours. The techniques there are only tested in MonoBook, but may work in Modern. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:11, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Yep, that works. Thanks. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:51, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you all. Yes this works for me with the Modern skin. Excellent. ツ Fylbecatulous talk 12:39, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
The Modern skin is only supported by volunteers. But since there are no volunteers that actually maintain it, in reality, especially when it comes to integrating with other extensions, it's simply not supported. I therefor wouldn't advise anyone to use it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:19, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
I really am not complaining and have given my gratitude for this fix. Some years ago I had LASIK which was a delight, but it did leave me glare sensitive. I have my television brightness and contrast toned way down or I see a haze for hours after viewing. The Modern skin is easiest for my eyes. If it became too quirky or deprecated I would switch. Thanks again. ツ Fylbecatulous talk 22:01, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

I've been experiencing this for a few months now. Anytime I follow a link to a section I am taken a ways below it. For example, the third link on this page (currently) is Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#Image purge. If I navigate to that link I end up so that the top of my screen is just above the next section header. As far as I know, other than keeping my browser up to date, I have made no changes. No deal breaker but a bit annoying. I use Firefox on a Mac and Monobook. Is it on my end and any ideas?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:12, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

P.S. I thought maybe it was a cache issue, so I dumped everything just now, then logged in and tried the same link – same result. However, I then logged off, dumped everything and tried it without logging in. The issue went away. So I'm guessing it does have something to do with my settings, or my use of Monobook, or some combination of those, plus some change to the software here.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Known issue with collapsed content and some browsers (Firefox at least). Too lazy to look up the phab ticket. --Izno (talk) 00:59, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
@Fuhghettaboutit: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_141#Firefox_and_anchors --NeilN talk to me 15:54, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Arbcom elections

On vote.wikimedia.org, I am attempting to submit different votes, discarding my earlier votes, and being told I need to log in to vote, when this wiki states on the main page that registration is not required and it is only meant for a limited number of accounts. When I go to vote, it says "Welcome, Rubbish computer", so I have no idea whether or not I am logged in. Please advise. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 23:19, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

If it welcomes you by name, you're logged in. The rules say:
An editor is eligible to vote who:
  1. (i) has registered an account before Wednesday 00:00, 28 October 2015
    (ii) has made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday 00:00, 1 November 2015 and,
    (iii) is not blocked from the English Wikipedia at the time of their vote.
I'm not sure where you are when it's greeting you by name, but if you're on the voting site for "2015 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election", you're on the Wikimedia server. I've never tried changing my vote, so don't know how that works.— Maile (talk) 23:28, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: Okay, thanks. I knew I was eligible when I recieved the Wikimedia message, and my vote is registered from earlier, but I don't know hoe to change it: it says to just fill it out again, which it won't let me do. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 23:33, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
You cannot log in at vote.wikimedia.org but if you are logged in at the English Wikipedia and click a vote button such as the one at Special:SecurePoll/vote/398 then you should be taken to vote.wikimedia.org without being logged in there but in a way where the software knows who you are and lets you vote. Is this not working for you? If so, please be more specific about which page you are on when something goes wrong, and exactly how it goes wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:45, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Rubbish computer, are you running NoScript or other browser extensions? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:03, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: I'm not sure, but I use AWB, if that affects it. I voted on mobile earlier, and tried to revote on my computer. Thanks, Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 01:20, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Please try to describe what actually goes wrong, especially at what point you are told you need to log in. For example: "I reach http://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/560 which says 'Welcome, Rubbish computer'. I can select radio buttons to vote but when I click 'Submit vote', I'm told I have to be logged in." PrimeHunter (talk) 02:02, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: After I've picked my votes and pressed the "Vote" button: sorry if I was unclear about any of this. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 10:57, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Someone else has answered this elsewhere, but thanks anyway. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 11:02, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

How to stop automated messages appearing on my talk page?

Is there some code I can put on the page, or something to tick in preferences? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:26, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Cheers. — Earwig talk 07:24, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Unable to log in to use AWB

I am currently unable to log in using AWB because it is stated that the acccount "Rubbish computer" already exists. I am using the correct password and I have tried closing and reloading the tab. Please advise. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 13:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

It appears to be working when I don't click "Save account", so never mind. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 15:06, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Date header

The "November 23" header in Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion is not shown, but the discussions from Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2015 November 23 are shown. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:26, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Fixed with this edit -- John of Reading (talk) 15:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Could we NOINDEX File: namespace pages that have non-free images?

Previous discussion from 2008 (no consensus): Template talk:Non-free media#Adding NOINDEX

In light of the above discussion about NOINDEX, I'd like to present an idea I've had. Currently, Google Images and other image searches search all images hosted on Wikipedia and create thumbnails for them. This is not always the desired behavior on our part, because we host non-free files as non-free precisely not to make them reusable. Our non-free license templates warn the user that: "Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement" (emphasis added). While the end user has the ultimate responsibility if they chose to reuse these images outside Wikipedia, we should not promote reuse by letting search engines index our non-free files. It serves neither the copyright holder nor Wikipedia's purposes.

The technical aspect of it is to add the NOINDEX switch to all non-free license templates (similarly to how it's used in sandbox templates; see above discussion). I'm not technical minded enough to understand what the (dis)advantages would be from that point of view, so I'd like the Village pump to consider those first, before we start thinking about if this is a good candidate for a new policy. Some questions that come to my mind are:

  1. There are legitimate reasons for accessing the file page through an external search engine (finding information about why a file is used on Wikipedia; as a principle Wikipedia is mostly open; etc.) and this would be blocked. Then again, some pages are deliberately NOINDEX because of concerns about illegitimate outside use (eg. BLP talk pages)
  2. I don't know how image thumbnails on search engines are indexed. Are they derived from the article pages where the images are displayed or from the image description pages, or both? (From both, according to the previous discussion. Opinions as to whether the user should be pointed to image description page that displays the license, or to the article it's used in (which is the result of NOINDEXING) differed. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 12:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC))
  3. None of us know how search engines' algorithms work, so it's not easy to come up with 'negative' search engine optimization (SEO) to hide our images to the best of our ability. If I google "site:en.wiki.x.io/ +bigcompanyname +logo", I'll find the image I want for my hypothetical illegitimate reuse, but I don't know why it was returned in search results.

My understanding is that this is not implemented already simply because no one ever thought of it, not because it would be a bad idea (policy-wise, usability-wise, technically). Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 11:32, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Seems to be totally unnecessary. Google will index any image, presumably under fair use. What they do is up to them. Wikipedia does not have to attempt to control reuse of material, apart from stating that it is not free. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply, Graeme Bartlett. To emphasize: I'm not worried about reuse by Google per se (there are court cases that say Google's reuse of images as thumbnails is okay), but of reuse by people who find our hosted non-free images with Google search. "Wikipedia does not have to attempt to control reuse of material", yet for text materials we do. BLP talk pages, drafts and sandboxes are hidden from search engines, even though our license allows the reuse of those materials. As for non-free files, our license does not allow reuse, so I am confused as to why should we make it technically easy. This could also be a legal protection (out of our fair-use claims many are admittedly invalid); compare this with the obvious protection against legal threats concerning libel material that our noindexing of BLP talk pages offers. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 11:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
You're overthinking this. People constantly improperly fork and reuse the actual article content here repeatedly and without a thought as to the copyright violation. Images are just another example and not something that requires extra work to protect. Google books has entire "ebooks" that are literally nothing more than improper Wikipedia quoting which makes it a mess to figure out whether a fact is true or not when people go into circular sourcing. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 11:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
The difference is that non-free content we host is not "our content" whereas Wikipedia articles are. If someone illegitimately reuses non-free content they got off Wikipedia they are violating the copyright holder's right and we are 'complicit' in that. If someone reuses Wikipedia article text without proper attributing they are breaching the terms of our CC BY-SA 3.0 license, which is not quite the same thing. It's misguided to think that images are not different; they are and that's why we have the non-free content criteria for files that are different from the non-free content criteria in general (text quotations are fair-use, but we deliberately treat them with less scrutiny, see WP:NFC#Text). Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 12:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

If we take the whole site out of Google, we probably don't have a vandalism problem anymore either ! Google indexing is NOT the way to solve problems. If we are so concerned about Fair use images, we should just totally remove them. It's the only way to actually solve the problem of secondary reuse of non-free content. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:09, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

We NOINDEX pages not to prevent their reuse, but to make them less visible. We don't need people being attracted from the outside to "legal threats concerning libel material" (the reason for NOINDEXing the BLP talk pages). If some fair use claim is incorrect, we want the issue noticed and brought to our attention. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
I don't see the problem here. Wikipedia/WMF doesn't pick up liability for copyright infringement by a 3rd party, and has no obligation to take any steps to prevent or limit 3rd parties from infringing copyright, beyond making sure that the copyright status is correctly reflected when the image is viewed on WP itself (i.e. on the image's own page). NOINDEX makes perfect sense for sandbox pages and BLP talk pages, but I strongly oppose any use of it for primary content as being wildly inappropriate and overall harmful. The idea of a non-searchable or less than fully searchable encyclopaedia is frankly laughable, and that includes all images now that the world has image searching technology. --Murph9000 (talk) 10:47, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Not seeing a problem here either. I also wonder whether the NOINDEXing would also work; policy demands that non-free images be used in articles, so the file would be indexed anyway by way of the article it's posted on. I also fail to see why the lack of reusability is a problem that needs removal from Google's indexes. Google indexes a lot of images that are non-free. And non-free status does not prevent always reuse, too.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:59, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I support this proposal. NFCC dictates that Wikipedia may only use non-free materials in articles (not disambiguation pages), and only in article namespace, subject to exemptions. There is no exemption for our display of non-free content outside of Wikipedia, hence it is technically in violation based on a broad interpretation of the policy. ViperSnake151  Talk  00:49, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Re your phrase "our display of non-free content outside of Wikipedia" - there is no such concept. Either we display it - in which case it's not outside of Wikipedia - or somebody else displays it - in which case it's not our display. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:47, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Section-specific notifications

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T2738

Does a tool exist that will ping me only when content is added to a particular section of a page? - Dank (push to talk) 13:50, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm not aware of one, but I'd love to be able to do that with some talk pages and noticeboards. The last time I followed it, however, my understanding is that Flow will have this capability built in. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:31, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Not yet, see phab:T2738. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:22, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Right. I smell two red herrings. First, it's irrelevant how hard it is for a bot to search for "==" on a talk page (although I suspect it's not that hard) ... it would work perfectly fine for my purposes to insert two hidden comments and have a bot check the diff regularly between one comment and the next to see if the diff has changed. Second, I'm not asking for permission. This is a simple task, anyone can code it if they feel like it, and I'm asking if anyone who reads this page feels like doing it. - Dank (push to talk) 16:55, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
P.S. I meant red herrings in the Phab thread, not here :) - Dank (push to talk) 17:16, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Bot request is at WP:BOTREQ#Pinging when a "task" section is edited. - Dank (push to talk) 17:15, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Search for "Mm³"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T119806

Is there a way to find uses of "Mm³" in the encyclopedia. Note that the "³" is the Unicode character rather than a superscripted "3". I've found some by searching for "mm" and increasing the number of search results to 5000 then using find to look for "Mm³" and paging through the results, but I don't think that gets them all. Thanks,  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Google is quite helpful here. — Earwig talk 07:27, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Google's 120 results also include finding m<sup>3 (and that's m not mm) at Spremberg Dam, (from an infobox template's MCM).
I think this is just because Google's index hadn't updated since you had changed the page. It no longer appears in the results. Anyway, WP:DUMPS are the way to go (as Johnuniq says) if you want to be completely sure you've caught everything. — Earwig talk 06:50, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
"mm3" gives 140 results. CirrusSearch seems to be ignoring the unicode ³ but it is supposed to be "normalized" to 3, just as the various forms of quotation marks are all normalized to ASCII quotes on our keyboards (T41501). Also, regex are supposed to find exact strings, even with with unicode . So I've opened T119806.
Normally, non-alphanumeric characters are ignored like that, but in this case, they should definitely not be ignored. THis means you'd have to evaluate all "mm" terms. WP:AWB might work for you @SchreiberBike:. — CpiralCpiral 21:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
See phab:T95849 106.0.176.61 (talk) 22:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
@SchreiberBike: This sort of search can be done using WP:DUMPS. Unfortunately my most recent download is from April 2015 and so is out of date, but I put a list of article titles in my sandbox (permalink). I searched for "mm²" or "mm³" but in retrospect I should have searched for "m²" or "m³" or possibly just any superscripted number. Some caution about correcting would be needed because there might be special cases where substituting html superscript would break the wikitext; example:
  • {{convert|100|m²|abbr=on}} → 100 m2 (1,100 sq ft)
  • {{convert|100|m<sup>2</sup>|abbr=on}} → 100 m2[convert: unknown unit]
Johnuniq (talk) 03:27, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Logging output of Special:PrefIndex

Hi,

is there a tool that I could use to fetch output of Special:PrefIndex query and log it in a text file? I am familiar with pywikibot and I am guessing there will be a way to do this through mediawiki API, but right now I dont know any better way than manual copypasting. Thank you kindly for your advice. --Wesalius (talk) 05:30, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

If you have pywikibot installed and have used it and so are logged in, the following example works:
python ../scripts/listpages.py -family:wikipedia -prefixindex
What page names are you looking for? Shakespeare
There are options to format the results and to write the output to a file, but the above is my first run of a script so I haven't tried them. Johnuniq (talk) 07:06, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you very very much. This is just great! If you want a nice output, you dont have to bother with the script functions, it is easily obtained with
...listpages.py -prefixindex > file.txt
One more question, do you know if I can somehow filter out redirect pages? I did not find that possibility in the script documentation, but maybe there is a workaround (using a different tool?). Thanks so far! --Wesalius (talk) 07:33, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Inspecting pagegenerators.py makes it appear that redirects are never included. I also noticed that listpages.py has comments at the top which specify how -format can be used to control how the output appears. Johnuniq (talk) 09:22, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, I used listpages.py to generate this list and it does contain redirects. The special page gives redirects as well, so it makes sense that its output contains them. --Wesalius (talk) 11:19, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
@Wesalius: there is option to hide redirects in Special:Prefixindex, if you missed that ;) Anyway, if you're familiar with SQL, you can use quarry:, there you can filter out redirects. If you're not familiar with SQL, you tell me, what exactly you want to get and I most probably could help you. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:38, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
I did not miss that, thank you though :-) What I need is quite simple: All pages at cs.wikisource that start with "Ottův" and are not redirects. Thank you. --Wesalius (talk) 11:46, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done, see here. At the bottom of page, there are pages in other namespaces. In case you need numbers: 56 in non-article namespace, 14064 in article namespace. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:42, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you Edgars2007! Could you please post at some subpage at wikisource the quarry query you used to generate the list, so I can re-run when needed without bothering you? --Wesalius (talk) 12:50, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:30, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

How to fix the sitenotice?

I just noticed the big banner for the first time. How does one edit it, or even request edits to it? The banner reads "The Wikipedia Asian Month is ending soon, please report your contributions before it ends." Note the comma splice, which of course is an easy fix for anyone able to edit the notice. I thought perhaps it was MediaWiki:Sitenotice, but that hasn't been used since June. Nyttend (talk) 21:39, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: mw:Help:CentralNotice 106.0.176.61 (talk) 21:45, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Where do you post bot source code?

If someone has written a bot to make very useful edits that would come in handy for technologically sophisticated wikipedians, where should he or she post the source code for it? How should he or she licence it so that it cannot be deleted in the future? 81.101.142.111 (talk) 01:45, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

He/She can either choose to host the source code on MediaWiki's Gerrit code review platform, or go with other commercial platforms like GitHub and Bitbucket. There isn't any license that will prevent the software from being deleted, but any OSI-approved license should give the author enough protection against liability, while encouraging collaboration and distribution. It will also allow the software to run on WMF's Tool Labs platform. Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 02:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Side-by-side view image is disappeared for some index file in Wikisource

Sorry if it is invalid place for this.

I posted followed issue in English Wikisource Scriptorium.

There is index file in Ukrainian Wikisources (but it looks like it is common problem). When I trying create / edit any page I do not see page thumbnail. Div that should containing it just empty (I looked code). It's very strange because thumbnail is existing in another tab. I've tried purge according file, purge index, purge page, uploaded updated version of file (with OCR) but div still did not have image. Also I see thumbnails in other indexes. What it could be?

From other user answers we have:

  • it's interlanguage issue (UK/EN Wikisources at least)
  • it's not PDF issue (DjVu also affected)
  • it's not browser/OS issue (there is no image in page HTML code, it's not rendering or client scripts issue)

Next steps? Artem.komisarenko (talk) 08:10, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I suspect this is partly because the scripting in s:uk:MediaWiki:Common.js. The english wikisource had to do a lot of cleaning up on their scripts lately as well, so it might be that similar problems are hitting uk wikisource. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Solution found in Scriptorium. Field Scan resolution in edit mode on Index page (edit mode) should be blank, not zero (it's integer field, so users often set in zero). Artem.komisarenko (talk) 11:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

{{in title}}: OR not working

The template {{in title}} seems not to be behaving as described in its documentation: "OR" logic is not working. See Template_talk:In_title#OR_malfunctioning.3F. Can anyone shed any light, please? PamD 13:42, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-49

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

The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [9]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [10]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [11][12]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [13]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [14]

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

16:17, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Citation bot: gauging interest in/prerequisites for the automated citation fixing function

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110774

I'm asking for input on whether there's interest in automated citation fixing from Citation bot, and what it would take to get the bot to the place that was possible. Please join in on the Citation bot talk page with opinions or answers, particularly if you might be interested in taking up maintainership. Thank you. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 22:41, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Hiding multiple revisions at once

How is an administrator able to hide or unhide multiple file revisions at once?[15] I can only figure out how to do them one at a time, or how to undo another administrator's actions. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 23:28, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Have you asked Ronhjones (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The log summary suggests that he used User:Legoktm/rescaled.js for hiding the revisions. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:44, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
There isn't an interface for it (there probably should be), but you can construct a url to do it if for some reason you really don't want two log entries, or you're writing a script and don't want to go through the API. Handy example: File:BBGM_Logo_2014_rgb.jpg currently has two old revisions. The links to hide them individually are [16] and [17]. To do both at once, combine their ids fields, separated by commas, to get [18]. —Cryptic 17:46, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

Hi everyone!

We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.

Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.

The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!

/Johan (WMF) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Confusing title in patrol log

The page Multiple Treatments was moved to Multiple treatments. When clicking on the review button in the page curation toolbar on the latter page, the patrol log confusingly shows the former page. In general, when a page is created as "A" and was later moved to "B" and then you patrol "B", the patrol log will show page "A". The log should instead show the current title at the time of patrolling, "B". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Slow saving edits

Anyone else noted that across the last few hours? Really slow in saving any edits (doesn't matter what size article). Everything else seems to be at normal speed though. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:30, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Have created an updated version of WP:NOTIFS in user-space

Hello all, I have created and edited an updated version of the WP:NOTIFS page to reflect the change to a two-alerts system (I don't know what the technical name is). I am curious to see if I have missed anything that needs updating, and if the page is ready to replace the current WP:NOTIFS article. Here's the link: User:Drcrazy102/sandbox/Update to WP:Notifications. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 07:52, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I would pay less attention to "the history of notifications" and "it replaced...". Things like that can be very confusing and should probably be split into a /history page. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Hey TheDJ, Quiddity (WMF) did a tune-up of the article. Just want to check if that has fixed your concerns or if more tweaks are needed. Still seeking some more eyes on the page to have a fine-tooth review. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 10:47, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to find/generate a list of articles that don't have any interlanguage links in the left hand column? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 15:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

As in, don't have a Wikidata item/not assigned to a Wikidata item, or as in, don't have any other links at the item to which they are assigned? The former is Special:UnconnectedPages and the latter is Special:WithoutInterwiki. --Izno (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Unconnected pages is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much! ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 16:06, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Not exact, but roughly
insource:/\[\[[^:wW1-9].:|\[\[wa:|\[\[wo:/ prefix:MATH are the MATH's that have two-letter links.
-insource:/\[\[[^:wW1-9].:|\[\[wa:|\[\[wo:/ prefix:MATH are the MATH's that do not.
The regexp takes heed of unwanted [[wp: and [[:s and links to numbers.
It misses the three-or-more wp:interlanguage link names, but using the pattern there for wa and wo any such list could become exact, and a maintained search link if needed.
I only used prefix to limit the search domain here. — CpiralCpiral 23:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Investigating main/sub-article relationship

Dear Wikipedians,

I am a computer science PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. We are working on a project focusing on understanding and identifying the main article and sub article relationship in a purpose of better serving the Wikipedia article structure. You can find the detail of the project description here. We invite you to go to that page and review our questions. If you are interested in this question and want to know the results, please don't hesitate to take the survey (link in the previous page) and sign up the watch list as we will post our results to that Meta page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheetah90 (talk • contribs) 17:07, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

User:127.0.0.1

After a 2-year hiatus, edits have resumed from this IP, and it was reported to WP:AIV. I see User:127.0.0.1, which says "It generally cannot be used by normal users." Anyone know what's happening? Best, SpencerT♦C 00:47, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Reaper Eternal seems to have already (has recently) blocked the User:127.0.0.1 on WP:AIV. 67.189.126.119 (talk) 00:52, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It's a server misconfiguration. Edits are being attributed to the loopback address. I've softblocked the IP to stop the ridiculous amount of vandalism (i.e. registered users it's affecting will still be able to edit, but the vandals won't). Anybody can unblock it once the misconfiguration is corrected. Cheers! Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:55, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
The server misconfiguration is corrected, this shouldn't be happening anymore. Sorry! BBlack (WMF) (talk) 00:59, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
No testing in prod! </joke> So what was the issue? Free Bullets (talk) 01:02, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
This gerrit commit changed one of the addresses in our internal X-Forwarded-For headers from a WMF-internal 10.0.0.0/8 IP to 127.0.0.1, and somehow this broke MediaWiki's parsing of the header and it decided that 127.0.0.1 was the client IP rather than digging further through the list like it usually would. BBlack (WMF) (talk) 01:07, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

API query blank when it shouldn't be

Can anyone explain to me why when I query the API for the categories of Talk:Barney L. Elias House, it comes up empty? Like it finds the page ID and everything, but it does not include any categories despite the fact that the page is clearly categorized. Is this some kind of bug, or am I doing something wrong? Compare to the query for Talk:Threefoot Building here, which does show categories as expected.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 02:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I made a null edit of Talk:Barney L. Elias House and the query showed the categories a minute later, but not a few seconds later. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
For the record, this is how the query page looked before::
-<api batchcomplete="">
  -<query>
    -<pages>
       <page _idx="48534455" pageid="48534455" ns="1" title="Talk:Barney L. Elias House"/>
     </pages>
   </query>
   <limits categories="5000"/>
 </api>
PrimeHunter (talk) 03:25, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Category membership issues. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:19, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Donation message disappears when logged in

Why does the donation message disappear when logged in, on Firefox 42.0, but this probably happens on other browsers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mocker7guy (talk • contribs) 15:50, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Go to Preferences -> Gadgets and untick "Suppress display of fundraiser banners" and it should show up again. Sarah-Jane (talk) 15:53, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi @Mocker7guy: This is a deliberate decision: we know that many of the people with accounts are generously giving their time by editing, which is at least as valuable as monetary donations! And a secondary reason is that it saves us a lot of hassle testing the banners with all the different skins and gadgets available to logged in users. If you do still wish to donate money, you can always click the "Donate to Wikipedia" link in the sidebar, or visit http://donate.wikimedia.org. Thanks! Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 16:17, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Problem with the page subpage counter

Noticed this one a while ago; sometimes the ?action=info page doesn't count the number of subpages correctly. For example, counts 14 subpages but the list has only 13.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:42, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Cerro Guacha and User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Cerro Chascon-Runtu Jarita complex were deleted three days ago. Maybe one of them is still counted. See the similar Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Category membership issues. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:33, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Editing comment text accompanying uploaded image files

I've been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 12 years and can get around pretty comfortably. Yet aspects of image uploads still have me stymied. I accidentally pasted some raw Wiki markup into the Comment field when uploading a new image. When I saw the result, I realized I had made a mistake. The markup was still markup, and had not, in that place, been rendered properly. Thinking that, as with most other Wikipedia edits, I could just go in and fix my mistake, I attempted that, and found out I was wrong! What I had intended to place in that Comment field was what an uploader of a similar image had put there, "fair use reduce". So how does this get fixed? The image page is: File:City-of-bothell-new-logo.photograph2.jpg I want to do the right thing, yet here I find my hands are tied. Any help appreciated. --Alan W (talk) 04:24, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

The "fair use reduce" is a template that tags an image for a bot or admin to reduce the image size to make it meet non-free image use requirements. As it is a template, it has to be enclosed in double curly braces like: {{ }} . I have got ahead and done this for you on that image. --MASEM (t) 05:16, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, thanks. I guess the user who uploaded the previous version of this logo image didn't know about the curly braces, and I assumed, when I should not have, that it was done correctly and I could just follow that example. I was not aware that the image size needed to be reduced further, either. (I knew it would automatically be reduced when fitted into the infobox where it is being used, but I guess that is considered not enough.) As others have no doubt said, uploading images to Wikipedia is still much too convoluted and confusing a process for most Wikipedians. I have something of a technical background, and my head is still spinning from all this. Anyhow, this situation is not your fault, and I appreciate the help. --Alan W (talk) 06:39, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@Alan W: When you don't use the File Upload Wizard, and you are the first person to upload an image under a particular name, as you were with File:City-of-bothell-new-logo.photograph2.jpg, the comment in the upload log and the edit summary in the page history are both set to the first 255 bytes of the wikitext for the file description page. In those entries, only Wikilinks are expanded, the rest appears as raw markup - this has been the case for many years, and it can't be altered. If you try to "fix" it by altering the wikitext, as you did here, all you do is alter the appearance of the file description page - log entries cannot be amended. But if your intention was to upload an image and immediately add {{non-free reduce}} to it, why not simply reduce the resolution yourself before uploading? There are several programs/applications/packages which will do this. Reduce it on your computer to whatever size is necessary, then upload that in the normal way. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:10, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
With the usual 20/20 hindsight, I see that I should have used the File Upload Wizard. I was thrown off by thinking that I would not need that as I am an "experienced user". What I didn't consider is that when it comes to uploading image files, I am really not such an experienced user. :-) As for reducing the image size myself, I could have done that with tools I already possess and can use; but, as I said to Masem above I didn't think it necessary, as I knew the size would be reduced on the page I intended to use the image on, automatically, to be squeezed into the Infobox. Anyway, all's well that ends well, and I appreciate all the feedback and assistance by you and Masem, RedRose64. I still say, though, that—not criticizing anyone in particular—uploading images on Wikipedia is much too hard for an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit". You have to be a combination graphic artist, lawyer, and computer programmer, and even then you could miss some requirement or unexpected behavior. --Alan W (talk) 19:11, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
You have to be a combination graphic artist, lawyer, and computer programmer is probably the best description of the file upload situation that I've yet seen. Thanks, I may quote you on that in the future.  — Scott • talk 11:22, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Renamed user ea641...

Who or what is "User:Renamed user ea6416fc"? And why can someone hide after f*king me around? -DePiep (talk) 01:49, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

It's poor form to ask a question you know the answer to. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:29, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
BF. -DePiep (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Care to explain your "BF" shorthand? My urban dictionary suggests some interpretations may not be very kind. If you intended an unkind meaning, perhaps you should strike or replace it in the interests of promoting a more collegial editing environment; if you do, please feel free to remove this comment afterward. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
DePiep It's not too hard to see who it is, but I don't see any interaction between you and they in December at all, so you'll want to explain what you mean . KoshVorlon 16:59, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
I know who it was too, and that user didn't interact with anybody in December - but we shouldn't speculate upon who they were, what they did, or why. See WP:RTV. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:35, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Then their name would be "Vanished user ###### " :) KoshVorlon 21:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
This should not be a right to vanish case, since it was under a bit of a cloud. Perhaps that is why the user name is not "vanished user...". I think everyone has the right to stop editing though. So @DePiep:, is there any template mess that still needs cleaning up? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
By what policy then did this happen? Especially, how can the former name be found but are people here secretive about that? (and er, writing 'I don't see any interaction ...in December at all' on December 2nd is funny, sort of). -DePiep (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
The person concerned has made no edits since 19 November 2015, and certainly none on 2 December 2015. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

DePiep, is there a semi-valid reason why you are pursuing this? If you click on the original user name, it takes you to a page that shows the time and date of the user's renaming. There are no "secrets" here, the renaming was properly requested and executed, and there are no issues of which I am aware. The user decided to request an account renaming and then called it a day. I suggest that you respect that. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Hey. Is there a way to do this? For instance, if I click on an image, instead of taking me to the enwiki dummy image page (which is technically non-existant), is there a setting which would take me directly to the Commons file page instead? Thanks, Rehman 23:45, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Number of displayed revisions resets to 50

[19] shows 500 revisions. When setting the month and year to November 2015 and clicking the go botton, the resulting page [20] resets the number of displayed revisions to the default 50. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:13, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

You get 500 because it was specifically selected – either by pressing the 500 button or by the URL. When you change a selection it should reset to your default. What setting do you have in the "Number of edits to show..." field of the Recent Changes tab of your preferences? Prodego talk 03:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
It is 50. Clicking the go button should preserve the number of displayed revisions rather than resetting it to 50 or whatever number you have in your preferences. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:32, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
The current behavior is the intended behavior. The number of revisions to be displayed is set on the output of the search, and isn't a property of the search itself. You may wish to add a feature request to MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) to change this behavior. You can do that at [21]. Prodego talk 03:45, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
This problem also occurs with logs, but not with user contributions. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:34, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Last section on Users Talk Page will not allow properly rendered new sections below it

Unable to add a properly rendered new section to this User talk page. Any new sections added below this section render as plain text, and this section becomes plain text too. Even the signatures revert back to tildes, replies do not work, nor do pings go out with replies. See the bottom of the section for some recent action. This has been going on for 2 days now. Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 09:29, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Checkingfax: There was a stray <nowiki>, which disabled the formatting of everything that followed. I've fixed that and tried to tidy up. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:51, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
John of Reading, thanks. Those nowiki's are slippery, hard to spot, and dangerous! Good job. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 10:24, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
Preferences → Gadgets → Editing → Syntax highlighter — CpiralCpiral 08:49, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Can't decline Draft:Daniel Clitnovici

There is something wrong with Draft:Daniel Clitnovici and the way that it interacts with the Articles for Creation Help Script. The subject does not meet association football notability guidelines because he has not played in a fully professional league, and is an assistant coach, not a head coach, in a fully professional league. However, if I try to decline it, the decline process hangs. It says DECLINING and then locks up. I have tried doing the decline at least three times using Google Chrome and once using Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer says that Wikipedia is not responding due to a long-running script, and asks if it should stop the script. Stopping the script leaves the page unchanged. I also tried Commenting using the AFCH script, which also hangs. There may be something peculiar about the history of the page, with references to previous OTRS tickets. Can someone please look at why this page hangs when being declined? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

To answer the above, what I was expecting was for the draft to go into a declined status. What happens is that it stays in a pending status. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Being dealt with at PAFC Helper Script help page. Problem with specific page, which was bad punctuation, dealt with. Have requested to have script corrected so that missing end brace doesn't hang script. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:12, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Files not shown

Information icon4.svg
File:Information icon4.svg

On some pages such as Template:ANI-notice, some files are not shown. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:58, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Which files? I don't see any problems there. Try to clear your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:06, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Specifically, the two instances of File:Information icon4.svg, one that is included in substitution, and the other in {{Subst only}} in {{Documentation}}. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:09, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
commons:File:Information icon4.svg is a redirect to commons:File:Information icon4.svg. I see the image both times at Template:ANI-notice. I wonder whether something prevents Commons redirects from working for you. I see the image for both names to the right. What do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 04:30, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Aleigha Paige Dry

The page Aleigha Paige Dry was patrolled and marked for speedy deletion by Σ, but has an empty deletion log because perhaps it might have been oversighted. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:03, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, there is some oversight going on. I don't know whether it's normal to have no deletion log. I'm an admin but not an oversighter. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:15, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
It doesn't happen often that a deleted page has no deletion log, but I've encountered it before. I don't think the suppression would've had anything to do with it. Graham87 07:02, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:Article request workshop

Wikipedia:Article request workshop, a page which created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Article request workshop and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:Article request workshop during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Alsee (talk) 11:36, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

What the hell?? How did this get posted HERE? I used Twinkle to nominate an abandoned and improperly created Flow page for deletion. Did Village_Pump_(technical) somehow get listed as the page creator? Alsee (talk) 23:31, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It must be because User talk:Flow talk page manager redirects here. The three Twinkle edits are here. Wikipedia talk:Twinkle/Archive 34#Future of Twinkle indicates Twinkle isn't expected to work with Flow. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:33, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
You're probably right about the redirect. But I'm not sure how you concluded from that discussion that Twinkle isn't expected to work with Flow. What we were saying is that Twinkle will be able to handle Flow boards at such time as they become more widespread. Flow boards require slightly different methods of interaction via the MediaWiki API, as it does not make sense to, say, fetch or edit the content of an entire Flow board. At this time I'm not inclined to make any changes to Twinkle, given that we only have 6 Flow boards on this site at the moment, but it can be done down the line if needed. — This, that and the other (talk) 10:08, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
I meant it isn't expected to be working now, so it shouldn't surprise if issues arise when trying to use Twinkle on a Flow page now. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
This, that said: we only have 6 Flow boards. I could only come up with five, one of which is gone and three are being discussed for removal. Did I miss any?
  1. Wikipedia_Talk:WikiProject_Hampshire - No posts in over a month, and no Hampshire activity in over 3 months.
  2. Wikipedia_Talk:WikiProject_Breakfast - No Breakfast activity in fourteen months. RFC in progress to end trial.
  3. Wikipedia:Article request workshop - Abandoned after three days. Miscellany For Deletion in progress.
  4. Wikipedia_Talk:Article request workshop - Paired with above.
  5. Wikipedia_Talk:Flow/Developer_test_page - Gone. I think it was lost and never restored when admin tools were tested on it. Alsee (talk) 13:21, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
The full list based on database:

Could somebody give me CSS rules to get bigger font-size in search box for Monobook skin? Font-size in general is fine, but in search box I would like to have it bigger. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:29, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

#searchInput {font-size:110%;} seems to work. Since the width of the search box is in em by default, and thus dependent on the font size, you may want to set the width: property too. SiBr4 (talk) 13:41, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:55, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Why the thumb and preview of this image is very broken?

Link: File:2015 San Bernardino shooting map location of mass shooting.png and check the right thumb. Notice the weird space on the right (and the aspect ratio of the image is also messed up because of that). The original image doesn't have this problem --fireattack (talk) 11:07, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

An old version of the image is stuck in the cache. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:15, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit filter problem

I have been seeing edits tagged with "speedy deletion template removed" where the speedy deletion template has not, in fact, been removed. I note this edit in particular (which may well be lost by the time anyone reads this as the article will not last long). This appears to be a bug in the edit filter functionality. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 15:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

This is strange. The filter (firstly) checks that in removed_lines - that is the yellow highlighted area - there is a speedy deletion template, and it shouldn't tag if there isn't, but in this and a couple of other examples I found it's tagged. This implies a bug in the extension to me, but I don't know what would have caused it. I could be reading things wrong though. Pinging @MusikAnimal and Dragons flight: who might have a better answer. Sam Walton (talk) 15:24, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Well, what's really weird is Axmedclahi tripped the filter here, yet using batch testing nothing shows up when I run the filter against that user — MusikAnimal talk 15:35, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Special:AbuseLog/13857578 and Special:AbuseLog/13857437 shows the edit filter worked on a wrong diff. It was VE edits so looks like cases of phab:T73947. Another thing: Doruk bor was deleted but the edit filter log can still display the deleted wikitext to non-admins. Has this been discussed? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The visible edit filter log for deleted pages is phab:T44734. I'm surprised this has been known for three years with no work to change it. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Ah, great find. It's a shame this has been known about for so long, I'm wishing I managed to get the AbuseFilter into the community wishlist survey now... Sam Walton (talk) 19:59, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
An other example, verifyable by any admin: this diff doesn't have the speedy tag removed; it was tagged as such anyway. The edit filter log for the edit shows the removal of the speedy tag. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:59, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Media player not loading properly

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T118792

I'm not really sure why, but the media player to play song clip is not loading properly in some pages, for example Alejandro (song), but works in other pages. I've tried it in different browsers, and they appear to behave differently - in Chrome, the player does not appear at first go, but appears when the page is refreshed (or when you return to the page later), in IE it does not appear even when refreshed, but it works right away in Firefox. In Chrome (but not IE or Firefox) it also appears to affect the collapsible function in a table, for example at You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' (that fault only appears after the sound clip was added), but appears fine when refreshed. Hzh (talk) 15:22, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hzh: I tried with Alejandro (song) and it works with Firefox 42 on Linux. Are there any error messages in the "Console" of your browser's developer tools? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:07, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): Yes, Chrome in Windows gives an error message - "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'insertRule' of undefined", it goes away when the page is refreshed and the player loads properly. On IE, it does not give an error message, but has three warnings - 2 "Unmatched end tag", and "visited and :link styles can only differ by colour. Some styles were not applied to :visited." I don't have problem on Firefox either, only on Chrome and IE (IE appears to be worse because the problem does not go away when refreshed - it gives an extra message "The code on this page disabled back and forward caching"). Hzh (talk) 13:26, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
@Hzh: Once the software fix for the bug report in phab:T118792 has been merged into the code base and deployed on Wikimedia servers, this problem should be gone. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Excellent! thank you. Hzh (talk) 20:07, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Seems to be working only intermittently. Hzh (talk) 12:10, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Signupstart

I made a proposal in the WMF's 2015 Community Wishlist Survey for more information on the sign-up page - see "Tell prospective users what Wikipedia is not for" near the bottom of this page. One commenter said that this requires no development because the facility to add a message is already available at the page MediaWiki:Signupstart which can be edited by any admin.

The page does not seem ever to have had any content, I have not dared to experiment, and clearly an RFC would be necessary to decide what message if any to add, but can anyone confirm that this page would do the proposed job? Would content placed there appear only on the en:wp sign-up page? If so, I will withdraw the proposal from the WMF's list. JohnCD (talk) 22:49, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

?uselang=qqx or &uselang=qqx (when there already is a ?) in a url shows the used MediaWiki messages and their placement. http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page&type=signup&uselang=qqx says "(signupstart)" below the main heading. This confirms that MediaWiki:signupstart is displayed there. It's hard to determine whether it's displayed elsewhere but considering the name, I assume it's only used there. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:08, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
I guess you meant whether the page is used outside the English Wikipedia. No it's not. Each MediaWiki wiki has its own pages in the MediaWiki namespace and only uses those in the interface. If they don't have a given page then a default in the MediaWiki software is displayed. This MediaWiki default cannot be set at the English Wikipedia. We can only replace it locally. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:31, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
So (to make sure I have got this right) anything added to MediaWiki:Signupstart would appear on the sign-on page that a not-logged-in user of en:wp sees after clicking "Create account"? JohnCD (talk) 11:28, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
It's true. However, I would advise you to take heed of the comments left by the oppose voters at the Meta poll. Any negatively-toned message is likely to discourage many bona fide individuals from creating an account, even if the message is not specifically directed at them. After all, it's hardly very welcoming to say "Hello! If you are X, Y, Z, or ABC, we don't want you here". I would advise you to read through outreach:Account Creation Improvement Project and its associated pages before proposing any changes to the account creation screen. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:38, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I have asked for the proposal to be withdrawn from the wishlist survey, as it is not something that is competing for development resources. Any use of the page would certainly need considerable discussion and an RfC, but I think it should be possible to devise wording which is welcoming to people interested in contributing to an encyclopedia, while saving wasted time and embarrassment for those who thought Wikipedia was another social-networking site or a place to advertise. JohnCD (talk) 14:53, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Case sensitivity of "linksto:"

The "linksto" keyword in searches does not work when there is a lowercase letter after the colon. For example, Special:Search/linksto:mathematics does not return any result. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:20, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: Could you (in general) please explicitly describe why you brought this up? Do you implicitly consider this wrong behavior? Do you implicitly ask for a hint how you can fix the code? Currently unclear... --Malyacko (talk) 12:02, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
It really should, to be standard; hastemplate is standard in the usual way of ignoring the first letter, but not linksto. Ya gotta get capitalization exactly as the title line except when the first letter is lowercase. linksto:IPad. It also should report redirects like WhatLinksHere, but no, only wikilinks, and so only to that page title given, not to the content itself.— CpiralCpiral 12:50, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Emojis not showing up in edit bar

Used to have an emoji console in the edit bar, but that's gone now. Any idea what happened to foul the following script? 

// sMirC Emoticons-bar for the WikiEditor
mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Perhelion/WikiEditorEmoticons.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&maxage=86400&smaxage=86400&bcache=1');

Atsme📞📧 17:42, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Why on earth would you want to use such silly things on Wikipedia? See WP:NOTSOCIAL. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:51, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Emojis are a universal language. Atsme📞📧 20:18, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
As it's meta:User:Perhelion/WikiEditorEmoticons.js, have you asked Perhelion (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:14, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64, after a quick review of their UP and TP, they don't appear to be active. I vaguely remember something about a small group of techs getting angry about something, and they may have reacted by disabling scripts they've written. Not sure but was hoping someone else might know. Atsme📞📧 00:57, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Their last edit was eight days ago, but I wouldn't say they were inactive as such. The "small group of techs getting angry" presumably refers to some writers of user scripts refusing to port their scripts to Labs (following the loss of Toolserver), either because it was too difficult, or they objected to the requirement for open source. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:53, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Hello and thanks for ping. I can't see any malfunction, I see only you have removed this script local on 28 Nov, so I guess you have some script-blocker or you have high security-settings.[22]
@Dodger67 this is a very bad argument, alone that the substantial examples on MetaWiki are smilie buttons (from the techs himself).
Have a good start into the week → User: Perhelion 13:29, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64, thank you for the update and for pinging. I'm relieved to know you're still active, Perhelion. I am one of many editors who sincerely appreciate what techs contribute to this project, and extend a sincere thank you for all you do! I removed the script a few days ago but put it back today. I initially removed it because it has not worked in Safari for quite some time. I'm a Mac user (El Capitan) and my primary browser is Safari 9.0.1 but I also use FireFox, Chrome and Maxthon on occasion. The script runs ok in Firefox and Chrome but it doesn't work in Safari or Maxthon. Any idea on what settings in Safari might be blocking the script and are they changeable? Atsme📞📧 15:46, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
"SyntaxError: Unexpected keyword 'const'. Const declarations are not supported in strict mode." I get an error as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:22, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done Oh* removed, thanks! ●^_^● → User: Perhelion  01:48, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@Perhelion: see your TP. Atsme📞📧 15:36, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

sfn and AV media?

I hope this is a "just works" answer, but I'm editing offline so I don't know... I'm quoting an interview published as a podcast. I use it throughout the text, so I would like to use sfn to refer to it. How do I do this and point to minutes/seconds? And do I need a first/last in order to get a HARV with a name? The template page suggests using people= so I did that. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:30, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

For citing a podcast, there is {{cite podcast}}. To refer to a particular time perhaps use {{sfn|Last|loc=0:15}}[1]

References

  1. ^ Last, 0:15.
  • {{cite podcast |last=Last |first=First |title=Title |url=//example.com |ref=harv}}
    • Last, First. "Title" (Podcast). {{cite podcast}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:54, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
If you don't have a suitable Last, you can use {{sfn|Title|Year|loc=min:sec}} and in the {{cite podcast}} make sure that you have a matching |ref={{sfnref|Title|Year}}. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:51, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Most useful everyone. BTW RR, is that "4=" a typo? Maury Markowitz (talk) 22:13, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
No, it's there because {{tlx}} takes only positional parameters and I needed the loc=min:sec to be visible. If the 4= is omitted, it looks like this: {{sfn|Title|Year}} --Redrose64 (talk) 00:31, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
See also the first bullet at Help:Template#Usage hints and workarounds. {{tlx|sfn|Title|Year|loc{{=}}min:sec}} would also have worked: {{sfn|Title|Year|loc=min:sec}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:40, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Image thumbnail not purging

Default size thumbnail (220px unless you changed the preference)
219px thumbnail

I updated commons:File:Top Oil Producing Countries.png and List of countries by oil production and my browser cache, but the article is still displaying the old version of the image thumbnail. Many thanks if someone can force it to update promptly? —Patrug (talk) 01:12, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Lately there have been several reports of thumbnails not updating when a new version is uploaded, and none of the methods at commons:Help:Purge work. The only working method I know for an article is to force another size which isn't already cached, but this breaks user ability to choose thumbnail size at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. It seems to usually update within a few days so don't force a size unless it's important. If you do force a size then please check for an update of the default size and change it back then. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:33, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick advice. From a Help search, I see that variations of this problem have been plaguing WP for years, not just lately. Seems nobody has come up with a good way to improve the system? —Patrug (talk) 01:47, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
The reports have been more frequent lately. The thumbnail discussed here was updated within the last 10 hours. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

"No wiki" formatting in {{citation}} paramaters causing CS1 error

Does anyone have a workaround for this? I'm using the quote parameter in a citation template for a quote that contains a URL. I don't want to link to the URL, so I'm using the no wiki formatting (i.e. <nowiki></nowiki>). However, doing so causes a CS1 error. Below are examples.

Without the no wiki formatting:

"Uniform Resource Locator", Wikipedia, 17 November 2015, retrieved 7 December 2015, A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html). {{citation}}: External link in |quote= (help)

With the no wiki formatting:

"Uniform Resource Locator", Wikipedia, 17 November 2015, retrieved 7 December 2015, A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html).

– Zntrip 01:50, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

The general issue is discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 10#Null character error message appearing in citations. Your case could for example replace the colon by {{colon}} to avoid producing a link. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:00, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: {{Colon}} is a good workaround while the error messages are worked out. Many thanks! – Zntrip 02:12, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Image purge is really slow

I see at least one other report here in regards to the slow purge ("Image thumbnail not purging"). And on New Zealand flag debate I've counted at least 4+ hours since the New Zealand flag was vandalised (one of the two image versions are correct). Currently these are different: 164px-Flag_of_New_Zealand.svg.png vs 164px-Flag_of_New_Zealand.svg.png?action=purge. Why doesn't ?action=purge immediately purge the vandalised version? +mt 06:21, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Because there is a very complicated system behind ever single image view, and something in that system is currently broken and no one truly understands how and why. It's proving to be very frustrating for the engineers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:03, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Is there a Phabricator task tracking this? — This, that and the other (talk) 23:35, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-50

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

  • Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [23]

Problems

  • Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [24]

Changes this week

  • You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [25]
  • IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [26]
  • You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [27]
  • It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [28]
  • You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [29]
  • UploadWizard will look a bit different. [30]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).
  • New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [31]

Meetings

Future changes

  • A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [32]

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

17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Can someone write me a regex (or something) to find all instances of [[Imaj: at the Haitian Wikipedia? They all need to be changed to the actual name for the File: namespace (or to "File:", since English wikicode works in all languages), and searching insource:imaj gives me too many false positives (almost 2,000 too many ;-). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

I searched a dump of the htwiki articles. See my sandbox (permalink). It would be interesting to compare that with the results of doing a wiki search. The dump will not include any changes in the last week. Johnuniq (talk) 07:39, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Regex: insource:/\[\[imaj\:/i, which currently gives 1428 results. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:01, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
I shouldn't be surprised, but that search gives an excellent agreement with the search of the dump. I put a note about the differences at the top of my sandbox. Johnuniq (talk) 09:42, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Answer to your question in sandbox is yes - WhatamIdoing fixed. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:26, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Right, and you can also escape single characters using backslashes, and you can escape strings with double-quotes delimiters. For a basic, exact-string search, quoting can't hurt. See mw:Help:CirrusSearch#Metacharacters — CpiralCpiral 20:13, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Those false-positives are your friends. insource:"[[imag:" insource:/"[[Imag:"/. A bare regexp, unaccompanied by any other search term, would otherwise crawl every page, and would not be an indexed-search at all.— CpiralCpiral 20:13, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all. I appreciate it. It appears that disabling "Imaj:" might have been an accident. It's being discussed at phab:T120702. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

HELP - Code for 4-images (1tall/3short) in 2-Columns?

IF Possible - would like help in presenting 4-images: 1 very tall vertical image in vertical column-1 and 3 related short images in an associated vertical column-2.

Seems the following "Template:Multiple image" code (see below) doesn't seem to work with vertical columns? - seems there's no "|percol= " option? - but maybe some other workaround? (nonetheless, horizontal rows seem to work ok - see example at => "Aromatum Chaos#Gallery") - my best efforts with this so far is at the following => "Sputnik Planum#Gallery" - in any case - Thanking you in advance for help with this - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 21:48, 6 December 2015 (UTC) 

{{multiple image |perrow= |caption_align=center |align=left |width=200 |direction=vertical
|image1=PIA20201-Pluto-ManyDifferentTerrains-20150714.jpg
|caption1=test1
|width1=
|image2=PIA20200-Pluto-BurneyBasin-CratersPlains-20150714.jpg
|caption2=test2
|width2=
|image3=PIA20199-Pluto-Mountains-NearSputnikPlanum-20150714.jpg
|caption3=test3
|width3=
|image4=PIA20198-Pluto-SputnikPlanum-Mountains-20150714.jpg
|caption4=test4
|width4=
}}
Per WP:MULTI, please discuss at Template talk:Multiple image/Archive 2#HELP - Code for 4-images (1tall/3short) in 2-Columns? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:27, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thank you for your comment - and suggestion - yes - *entirely* agree - Thanks again - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 01:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Blank edit summary prompt

I have always had "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" checked in Preferences - but this does not work when reverting more than one edit - e.g. comparing and undoing the last three edits from the page history. I am sure it used to work - can this be reinstated? (Win 7, IE11, Vector, without AWB or other tools)- Arjayay (talk) 09:10, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

What function buttons do you use to trigger it ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:15, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
I select the version immediately before the suspect edits, and the revision of the last suspect edit, typically 3 or 4 revisions, from the article history. I click "Compare selected revisions", check that the revisions were vandalism, and click undo. If I accidentally do not enter an edit summary at that point, it will save the edit without a prompt. I checked this out at User:Arjayay/sandbox before starting this post, to make sure I was not mistaken. - Arjayay (talk) 14:02, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
If you undo revisions, a copy of what revisions are being undone is placed in the edit summary box -- thus, the box is thus not empty/blank, and thus the "blank edit summary" check will not trigger. -- 143.85.169.19 (talk) 16:12, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Only if you undo a single revision. This gives an edit summary of "Undid revision 123456789 by [[Special:Contributions/Username|Username]] ([[User talk:Username|talk]])", but not if you undo several at once - as I have explained above - this gives a blank edit summary box. - Arjayay (talk) 16:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Cite template says valid URL is invalid

At Bill Dooley (basketball), the citation template is yelling at the URL [33]. (It says "Check |url= value (help)".) It looks valid to me and works if I click on it. Any ideas? --B (talk) 12:56, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

This is Help talk:CS1#Spurious check URL value. --Izno (talk) 13:09, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Ref help

I'm getting a "check url= value" error in a ref on James Sears, although the URL looks to me to be 100% valid and the link works. Can someone take a look, and if you find a problem maybe let me know what it is? The ref is (currently) #5, "Toronto city council candidate James Sears promotes online ‘spanking’ game against female rival". The link is to a story about it, not to the game itself (gross). Thanks for having a look. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:08, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

A url with a single letter before the first period currently produces this error message. Just ignore it. It's discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Spurious 'Check .7Curl= value' error? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:14, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Search error

[34] gives a search error. It gives the pages having a mobile url for the url parameter (see the section above). GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 16:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: Escaping the forward slashes with backslashes fixes the problem: [35]. But it seems as though it ought to work with forward slashes, so something's wrong. As you have been told before, bug reports are better placed in Phabricator. — This, that and the other (talk) 23:42, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
To me, as long as the documentation is lacking at Help:Search or at MW:Help:CirrusSearch, here or mw:help talk:CirrusSearch or some IRC channel seems more appropriate than phabricator, and talk:CirrusSearch seems best. Some topics are just so complicated or in such flux that documentation is missing. I like answering these questions because it helps me document search.— CpiralCpiral 05:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
[36] also gives the error. It works with 20 results, but not with 500 results in both cases. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:13, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with the insource:"url = http://m" query itself. And it runs without modification from the search results page, (7477 results), even though the error msg says An error has occurred while searching: We could not complete your search due to a temporary problem. Please try again later. But the problem seems to be with the URL. I can urlencode it or search link it. For comparison:

  1. //en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=insource%3A%22url+%3D+http%3A%2F%2Fm%22 (the original)
  2. //en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=insource:"url+=+http://m"&ns0=1&fulltext=Search (search link URL)
  3. //en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Special:Search/insource:%22url_%3D_http://m%22   (fullurl urlencoded)

— CpiralCpiral 05:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Images overlapping with bullet lists; image placement on page doesn't always correspond with placement in code

The following is copied from my original post in the Teahouse, with some additional information; hopefully I've brought this to the correct place this time.

I've noticed (first) that bullet lists and images don't always play nice together (I've seen this on a number of pages; for a current example, see http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Indian_spotted_eagle; I had to click "Random Page" a few times to find that one), and (second) that when I looked at the page code (in this case for Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Vladimir_the_Great), the placement of the code for the image within the page did not seem to correspond at all with the placement of the image on the page as viewed (see the version of the page that predates my changes).

My attempts to fix this were somewhat trial-and-error, and I was helped out by another user (Laszlo Panaflex) who pointed me toward the style guidelines, which have been helpful but not particularly for the specific point in question--unless my search-fu is weak. This is getting long, so I'll get to the point. My big question is: Why is the code for images not always present in the section the images appear in? This seems to be at odds with the goal of having images placed in the sections of the article that are relevant to the image in question.

My browser is Internet Explorer 11.0.25, just in case it's a browser issue (with IE, one never knows :-).

Many thanks for your assistance. I have some experience as a Web page designer (about ten years ago, all working directly with HTML and JavaScript), so I have some experience with how tricky images can be to put where one wants them.

Jakk42 (talk) 00:12, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, both are intricacies of how HTML and CSS work. For lists next to floating content we have a 'workaround' in the form of the {{flowlist}} template. For the positioning of images. For images. Well we only have two "bars" on the side. Left and right. So if you put two huge infoboxes that will push images down. There is not really a workaround for that unfortunately. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:40, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Ombudsman is not displaying Interlanguage links. Why? Its Wikidata entry is ombudsman (Q169180). Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:09, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Most often this happens when an data item is merged with another on Wikidata. I didn't look into this specific instance. Purging the page fixed the problem. --Izno (talk) 19:48, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, will purge next time. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Deprecated parameters search tool?

Does a tool exist for checking articles by creator name, in which deprecated parameters exist in citations? I've created several hundred articles, so I don't check them all regularly. When I find one with deprecated parameters error messages in the citations, I like to make corrections. Is there a tool that will allow me to search through all articles I created for the deprecated parameters? — Maile (talk) 16:39, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I've made this database query for you which should answer your question when it finishes running (assuming that I haven't made any coding errors). — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:11, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: It appears that I did indeed make a coding error, and the query has come up with zero results. However, after some tinkering with pywikibot, I've found that you are currently the author of three articles with deprecated cite parameters: Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, Film career of Audie Murphy, and Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. I'll have a look later into what went wrong with my database query (if no-one points it out to me first) so that you will be able to run it again in the future. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
You have to replace spaces with underscores in all page titles, in this case Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:48, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Anyway, it would be wrong. Improved query (tested for different wiki and different category):
USE enwiki_p;
SELECT p.page_namespace, p.page_title
FROM page AS p
INNER JOIN categorylinks AS cl
	ON p.page_id = cl.cl_from
INNER JOIN revision AS r1
    ON p.page_id = r1.rev_page
WHERE cl.cl_to = 'Pages_containing_cite_templates_with_deprecated_parameters' and r1.rev_user=3102801 and r1.rev_parent_id=0
ORDER BY p.page_namespace, p.page_title;
rev_user is the same rev_user_text, but this is user ID (I suppose, this should be better) and rev_parent_id=0 means, that it is page creation. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:02, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
rev_parent_id is a good trick, thanks! I'll remember that for the future. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:14, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: The query is now fixed thanks to Edgars2007, and you should be able to run it again in the future to find more pages if you need to. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: Thanks. — Maile (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Template:Bar chart

Re: {{Bar chart}}

Briefly (details at eleven), I was working with this template to try to get the bars of the chart to render well in mobile view. The bars would go off the chart and outside the border on the right. I tested the template on my own Android phone, and the problem could also be seen in the first test case on the /testcases page after clicking the "Mobile view" link at the bottom of the page. We were getting close to a solution when, all of a sudden, the bars completely disappeared in mobile view, which left only the other items and data. I'd like to find out what happened. Was this a software "fix"? If so, then where is the discussion that resulted in this fix? I think it's a mistake to eliminate the bars of this chart, because they have purpose and should not be taken out. Rather, they should be rendered well, even on mobile devices, and that is probably doable. Thoughts? Happy holidays! Paine  18:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth: The bar display in mobile was disabled in this edit by Jdlrobson. I assume that removing the "nomobile" class would restore the bars, but instead, I think the best move would be to convert the template to use mw:Extension:Graph via Lua. That extension uses dedicated visualisation software and is (presumably) designed to work well on mobile, whereas the template attempts to render the output using custom divs, which were likely not designed with mobile in mind. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:05, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, Mr. S! That is a good idea to use mw:Extension:Graph via Lua. The bars of the chart do, in my humble opinion, have purpose and meaning and should be rendered as intended on mobile devices, not just flatly eliminated from view. That is why I worked so hard on a solution (that also rendered the bars well, by the way). Any idea how long before mEG can be implemented?  Paine  20:19, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Default size for screenshot not working

Wikipedia
A white sphere made of large jigsaw pieces, with letters from several alphabets shown on the pieces
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems, for the letter W or sounds "wi", "wo" or "wa"
Screenshot
Main page of the English Wikipedia
Main Page of the English Wikipedia
URLwikipedia.org

How to fix show/hide feature i.e. default size not working? It is probably caused by wrapping inside {{Begin hidden}} template because it is working for logo above. --Obsuser (talk) 02:52, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Add "frameless" or any pixel value (did it in this example). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:30, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Obsuser: You already posted exactly the same q at Template talk:Infobox website#Default size for screenshot not working. Please observe WP:MULTI, and replace one of them with a direction to the other. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:18, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

IRC office hour with the WMF's new Vice President of Product

This was announced on some mailing lists, but people who don't subscribe might also be interested:

Wes Moran is the new(ish) Vice President of Product for the WMF. Previously, he was the head of mw:Wikimedia Discovery. On Thursday at 20:00 UTC/12 noon PST (in a little less than 27 hours) he'll be on IRC for an open office hours session. Everyone is welcome to drop by, say hello, pitch your favorite idea for a feature or bug fix (also: five days left to vote at m:2015 Community Wishlist Survey!), or ask questions.

See m:IRC office hours for information on how to join. If you are unable to attend, then you can leave a note on my user talk page with questions. I'll check my talk page here at the English Wikipedia an hour or two before the event (not necessarily during it) to see if anyone has any questions they'd like to have asked. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Are we still having category bugs?

Is there still an open glitch with files showing up in categories? On 30 November I added quite a few files to Category:Wikipedia files missing permission as of 30 November 2015. I've now been finding out that quite a few of them didn't actually show up in that category and as a result weren't deleted. An example would be File:Rudolph douglas raiford, 1943 (2).jpg. Kelly hi! 18:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Is subst broken, or is it just me?

Why did I have to make this edit by hand? Shouldn't WP:SUBST happen automatically when I save the page? --NYKevin 04:18, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Some things don't work inside ref tags. The lead of WP:SUBST says: Note that ref-tags refuse to run "subst:" unless temporarily renamed as "<xref name=xx>" or similar. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Use {{safesubst:#tag:ref|{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh802690%28v=vs.85%29.aspx|title=Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS|author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.-->|access-date={{subst:TODAY}}|website=[[Microsoft Developer Network]]}}}} instead of <ref>{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh802690%28v=vs.85%29.aspx|title=Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS|author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.-->|access-date={{:subst:{{TODAY}}}}|website=[[Microsoft Developer Network]]}}</ref>. It is due to Help:Substitution#Limitation. --Obsuser (talk) 04:43, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
The link is Help:Substitution#Limitation. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:48, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Pages with parser function time errors

Pages with parser function time errors: I don't see a way to edit the banner on this page to the fix the error: File:O.J. Simpson 1990 · DN-ST-91-03444 crop.JPEG Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 14:12, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

"Edit local description" or just "History" and revert. done. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:58, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
@Checkingfax: missed that pingback request, so here it is. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:57, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Tip-of-the-Day template bug

Hi, over in the Wikipedia Tip of the day (TOTD) department we are having trouble with two of our tip display templates after we rolled out a new {{clickable button 2}} format for the previous/next tips. The error issue was big red letters saying there was a TIME issue. The issue only presented itself on two tip display templates: {{totd-random}} and {{totd-tomorrow}}. You can see three of the TOTD display templates on my userpage here: User:Checkingfax#Tip-of-the-day. However here and here are the workarounds we have attempted in the meantime. Now the totd-tomorrow template displays the tip link only (instead of displaying the whole tip). We have not implemented any workarounds on the totd-random display template. If you click on the "another" link on totd-random repeatedly you will land on a tip that has the new "clickable button 2" format (we have only implemented it on about 45 of 366 tips).

Here is what the error looks like:

[[Wikipedia:Tip of the day/Error: Invalid time.|Prior tip]] - [[Wikipedia:Tip of the day/Error: Invalid time.|Next tip]]

Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

It's because at Template:Totd-tomorrow {{SUBPAGENAME}} (which is used at Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 10, that is used for {{totd-tomorrow}}) is Totd-tomorrow, which doesn't look like a valid time for me ;) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:42, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Hi Edgars2007, can you please edit those two templates so they function? I put a new template on my User page called {{totd-static}} for testing specific tip dates. Thank you. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 14:03, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Currently I don't have some good solution. That's why I didn't ping you, as you asked. My comment was more like a comment to someone, who has, that the person don't have to investigate, what's wrong. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:54, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The problem is that the 366 daily pages like Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 10 use {{SUBPAGENAME}} to derive the date from the page name. It works fine on the page itself but if the page is transcluded on page A then the name A is used as the basis for {{SUBPAGENAME}}. Until recently [37] this was handled by the daily pages using includeonly and noinclude to process different code on transclusions and direct views. On transclusions the date was not available so "Prior" and "Next" were based on the current date. Recent changes tries to always use {{SUBPAGENAME}} but this fails on transclusions. I have created a new template {{Totd nav}} to make the navigation links to the prior and next day. It accepts the date as an optional unnamed parameter. If no parameter is given then it uses the current date. I suggest {{Totd nav}} is called on the 366 daliy pages with the date as a hard coded parameter, for example {{Totd nav|December 9}} on Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 9.[38] Advantages: Prior and next always use the actual date of the displayed tip, and the navigation code is maintained in a single place instead of being spread on 366 pages which must each be updated if the design or something else is changed. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:56, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: You mean, the daily pages include Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 29 ("leap day"), right? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:06, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:09, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T120937

See List_of_Wikipedias article. Azb, lrc and gom languages links are red. Why? Is it possible to fix it? --ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 12:52, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I see you also reported it at meta:Talk:List of Wikipedias#Red links. The interlanguage prefixes azb:, lrc:, gom: are currently not recognized so they are just interpreted as local page names (please don't create pages with them while it's possible). The Wikipedias seem to be working http://azb.wiki.x.io, http://lrc.wiki.x.io, http://gom.wiki.x.io. The error is outside Wikipedia. The only fix we can make here is to use url's instead of prefixes until the error is fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:18, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
I have reported it at phab:T120937. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:29, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
These three Wikipedia editions were all recently created, so I expect that either (a) the interwiki map either hasn't been updated recently, or (b) the script that updates the map is using an outdated list of wikis. I have asked Alex Monk to look into it. — This, that and the other (talk) 13:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150729112343/http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias shows all three worked 29 July 2015. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:38, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
If you specify w:azb: (that's "Wikipedia:Azerbaijani", rather than "Aerbaijani, and the default is Wikipedia"), then it should work now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The previously broken azb:, lrc:, gom: also work now, after the interwiki cache update which was posted at phab:T120937. Pages still displaying red links must be purged. I have fixed List of Wikipedias and meta:List of Wikipedias with purges. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Broken again. Pinging Krenair (I'll reopen the task as well). — This, that and the other (talk) 23:15, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
It should stay fixed this time. --Krenair (talk • contribs) 23:27, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist email notifications

Are there problems today with emails triggered when an article on your watchlist is edited? JMHamo (talk) 17:17, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Could you elaborate what you mean by "problem" exactly? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 05:37, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Special:Gadgets

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121047

Why all the redlinks (double MediaWiki prefix) at Special:Gadgets? --Lam-ang (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Because it says "MediaWiki:MediaWiki:" instead of "MediaWiki:" and the former is not a namespace.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:14, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Move log

When you visit the redlink Well, at least I know I'll be getting the last page move in on this, ever, now that the editing and moving protection expiries can be set seperately now. Prove me wrong!, the only log entry that it says is that it was moved to Barney & Friends by Mr.Z-man. That move apparently did not leave a redirect but it does not say "without leaving a redirect". The same problem also occurs with other moves by that user such as I fapped to her just there. She's really enthusiastic when she fux and gives secks. to Roxy Reynolds, as well as some moves by Lar such as Zweibrüder Optoelectronics to User:Steschke\Zweibrüder Optoelectronics. The earliest entry in the move log that says "without leaving a redirect" is the move of Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chernobyl disaster to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chernobyl disaster/archive1 by GimmeBot. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:29, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that it's because these pages weren't moved without leaving a redirect. In the first case, the user still has a deleted edit for the talk page, representing the redirect left from the move; in the second case, both for the article and the talk page. I suspect that Oversight may have removed some of these logs. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:55, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Centering an unordered list

I must be losing it, because I can't figure out for the life of me how to properly horizontally center an unordered (with bullets) wiki-list. The way it's currently being done at the page I just linked to is (on Google Chrome 47.0, anyway) giving centered text but non-centered (left-aligned) bullets, leaving a huge gap between the bullets and text. No combination of divs, spans, tables, style=, and align= is working for me. What am I missing? - dcljr (talk) 19:51, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Did I fix it with style="text-align: center;"? --Izno (talk) 20:35, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Nope, present in Chrome 46 also, with above style. And in IE 11. In Firefox 42.0 this renders fine. --Izno (talk) 20:38, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Try using list-style-position: inside; as well. That seems to work in Chrome. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:46, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm glad it wasn't just me! [grin] Thanks, everyone. - dcljr (talk) 18:43, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit start date conflict

When I hold the mouse over my user name, the pop-up says I started editing on 26 Jan 2002. But according to my contribution log my first update was 24 Sept 2001. I'm a bit puzzled by this disagreement. Cheers Manning (talk) 01:57, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Which local script or gadget do you have activated? I don't have such a pop-up here. --Malyacko (talk) 06:01, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Whichever script it is, it's probably based on the user_registration field of the user table, which is also displayed when you use Special:Listusers]. The problem is that for accounts that were created before the new user log was implemented, the date of the account creation had to be estimated based on the date of the first edit. In your case, Manning, back when the user_registration field was being populated, your "Manning Bartlett" account would have only had edits that went back to 26 February 2002. However, the edits by the account "ManningBartlett" were subsequently merged with your current account by Tim Starling (I can't find a link for that, but I know it happened), so the "Manning Bartlett" account has contributions from 2001. Graham87 13:27, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Good proxy for article importance?

What is a reasonable and easily usable API-based proxy for subjective article "importance"? The best candidate for this would be page views, but while some sort of work is being done now in this area, the only way to use this data comfortably AFAIK is via the stats.grok.se API, which is highly rate-limited and only allows something on the order of ten requests per minute.

I thought perhaps the length of a page's editing history, but this brings up controversial topics moreso than important ones. ResMar 15:20, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I linked this earlier today elsewhere, but there is a (the official) PageView API just released; see phab:T44259#1747860. --Izno (talk) 15:59, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Number of incoming links, maybe? —Cryptic 22:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Do you mean importance as in the |importance= parameter of many WikiProject banner templates? If so, both page views and incoming links are poor ways of assessing it. Each WikiProject has its own scheme, and if you don't understand the scheme of a given WikiProject, don't attempt to automate it. A page that is "Low" importance to one WikiProject may well be "High" or even "Top" importance to another; but the page views and incoming links will be exactly the same. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:32, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Basically title, it seems like linking to an article subsection like this doesn't seem to consistency work anymore on google chrome. A few months ago I recall that it did.--Prisencolin (talk) 23:20, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Prisencolin: That link correctly links to the History subsection when I try it in the latest version of Chrome. Was it that link in particular that wasn't working for you, or another one? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
@Prisencolin and Mr. Stradivarius: I have that same issue sometimes with the Google Chrome web browser. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:30, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Might be collapsible content above the section being rendered before the target section is located by the browser and then collapsed immediately afterwards. When the content is collapsed, the text below it (including that in target section) all moves upwards, but the browser window doesn't compensate for that, leaving the wrong text showing in the window. (I hope people understand that description!) This happens in Firefox, as well. - dcljr (talk) 19:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
[Oops, I guess that can't be what's happening in your example! - dcljr (talk) 19:01, 9 December 2015 (UTC)]
It also seems to happen to me occasionally when using other browsers, but it seems like its worst with chrome.--Prisencolin (talk) 06:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
These are browser problems which we can do nothing about. The solution is for the browser to defer processing of the URL fragment until after all scripts which affect the page layout have finished. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
In that case, does anyone know if there are bugs with each of the browsers tracking this? Because this is my number one irritation with WP right now. It makes my watchlist unusable when tracking conversations in heavily-trafficked talk pages. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 08:35, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
But what has changed? This had not been a problem until relatively recently. Was there some change that precipitated this? older ≠ wiser 18:02, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

FWIW - noticed this concern (Google Chrome browser - current ver 47.0.2526.80 m & earlier vers?) with several Wikipedia subsections - including the following => http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Global_warming#oil_companies_knew_that_burning_oil_and_gas_could_cause_global_warming_since_the_1970s... - link seems to "slip" down to another subsection lower on the page? - maybe the subsection title is too long (or equiv) in this instance - not sure - but a Chrome browser problem seems to exist atm - iac - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 13:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Truncating my edit summary.

I moved Concentration inequalities to Concentration inequality, and wrote this summary:

This page gives several _examples_ of concentration inequalities, but it is not about a system of such inequalities in the way in which, for example, "Maxwell's equations" is about a system of equations.

In the edit history, my summary was truncated after "for example".

I wrote the summary for the PURPOSE of being understood. Does it exceed all current technology to notify the person writing the summary that end of the length limit has arrived, or that it is near? This deception is at best very rude. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:09, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Michael Hardy: Edit summaries cannot exceed 255 bytes in length; and this includes those relating to a page move, which have a kind of standard header inserted at the start - in this case it's "Michael Hardy moved page Concentration inequalities to Concentration inequality over redirect: ", which is 103 bytes, so there was only 152 bytes left; of those, a further three bytes are taken up by the mandatory ellipsis which always appears when an edit summary is truncated, leaving 149 bytes in which to squeeze the first part of your 202-byte reason.
Page log entries are also restricted, but to 200 bytes; this apparent reduction of 55 bytes is more than balanced by the omission of the "header" information from the start, so there is somewhat more room for explanation. If you look at the logs for Concentration inequalities, you will see that your reasoning was truncated at a later point - "equations." became "equation", so only two characters were lost. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:01, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: But that doesn't appear when you look at the edit history. And I was given no warning that either of those truncations would happen. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:31, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
What is your browser? There is code to prevent typing more than 200 bytes in the move summary field, but some browsers may not recognize it. It's annoying that log summaries up to 200 bytes can be shortened when they are displayed as edits with edit summaries and the 255-byte total limit is broken. That issue affects everybody. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:51, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Michael Hardy: If you go to the history of the page, e.g. that for Concentration inequalities, there's a link at the top, View logs for this page. Click that. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I have been well aware of that link for years. So what? If I want my summary to be seen by people who are not interested in finding out whether they've seen the whole of my summary, how does my awareness of the existence of that link help? Michael Hardy (talk) 00:05, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

In the reference section of this version of Promise ring there is an internal link, [[sector001:Promise Rings|Promise Rings]]. This link actually takes you to an external link, http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings This does not look like a desired function. -- GB fan 10:54, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

There are many such interwiki prefixes pointing to non-WMF websites. meta:Interwiki map lists all of them. SiBr4 (talk) 11:11, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks that helped, but according to that table sector001 is supposed to go to http://gagadesigns.net/wiki/startrek/index.php?title=$1 but sector001:Promise Rings goes to http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings -- GB fan 12:28, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
$1 is replaced by url encoding of the part after the colon so sector001:Promise Rings goes to http://gagadesigns.net/wiki/startrek/index.php?title=Promise_Rings. This is currently a redirect to http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:51, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, that makes sense. -- GB fan 13:33, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
This really doesn't look like a useful interwiki. I'll propose its removal. — Earwig talk 00:47, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
meta:Talk:Interwiki map#Sector001 — Earwig talk 00:54, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

TNA-image template

Could someone look how to fix the dead link in the TNA-image template inside file description of File:INF3-271 Anti-rumour and careless talk You forget - but she remembers.jpg? The working URL source is http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/prop/home_front/INF3_0271.htm. I tried, but to no avail. Brandmeistertalk 16:36, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

The link should be changed here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:44, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Twinkle not working?

It's checked in my Preferences, and was just working a few minutes ago, now the options are gone. Chrome and Version47.0.2526.80 m I just noticed it loads for the initial load on my phone or another computer, but then the Twinkle Menu disappears once I navigate to another page. --Giooo95 (talk) 23:53, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Giooo95: Thanks for providing your browser version. If you don't mind, could you follow the steps outlined at WP:JSERROR and reply here with your findings? You appear to only have Igloo installed as a user script, which shouldn't have any conflicts with Twinkle. — MusikAnimal talk 00:13, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=%2Ba17lhsh:156 Use of "wgUserGroups" is deprecated. Use mw.config instead.

Pretty much the Twinkle menus will not show up all the time. When they do, the links will not work within the drop down menus. Chrome, Windows 7, Version47.0.2526.80 m Browser has been cleared. --Giooo95 (talk) 00:17, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Using redr with moved pages

There is currently a discussion at MediaWiki talk:Move-redirect-text#Redr about whether to use the {{redr}} template automatically on pages that are moved. If any editors here are interested, please consider commenting over there. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:31, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

JS and CSS redirects

JS and CSS redirects are not listed in Special:WhatLinksHere. For example, User:Wildthing61476/monobook.js is not listed in Special:WhatLinksHere/User:RickKJr/monobook.js, nor is User:Wildthing61476/huggle.css in Special:WhatLinksHere/User:RickKJr/huggle.css. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:33, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

WLH and the search parameter linksto don't track (index) URL-style internal wikilinks. The most efficient way to list URL-style internal wikilinks to a given fullpagename takes up to eighteen searches. Seriously, tracking URL-style links should be a feature request. T121379 I mean, the rest of the info on those pages is indexed for searches. We can index every pdf file in media, but we cannot track URL-style internal wikilinks or track cross-namespace redirects. I don't know, but it seems to me the single solution to both of these issues is to give redirects there own index and search parameter. — CpiralCpiral 08:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Can someone link to an external tool, or provide an SQL query, to find all URL-styled internal wikilinks to a given fullpagename? I don't think there is a table to query for it. — CpiralCpiral 08:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
At least in articles there is Checkwiki for internal link written as an external link, which scans Wikipedia each day. If that's what Cpiral talked about. If somebody is interested, here is the list of all JS and CSS redirects in user, Wikipedia, Mediawiki namespace (OK, they are only in user namespace) - 3385 pages. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

GIF resized animations are awful

Looks pretty bad.

I especially used quality settings when generating my GIF at 512x512px and I am happy with the image at that resolution. But the thumbnails and smaller sizes all look pretty awful. Is there anything I can do on my end to improve the quality? SharkD  Talk  08:05, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

The thumbnail to the right looks great to me. Usually these issues are related to OS/browser combinations. --Izno (talk) 14:31, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
There are "streaks" left over around the bottom roof line when the house expands. Compare to the original which is smooth. SharkD  Talk  05:48, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Looks the same as the original to me (Win7/FF 42). Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 06:29, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Looks pretty fine to me as well. Though it should be said that GIF is notoriously bad at scaling. Use either a movie, or render it at the resolution you will use it at, if the quality is your concern. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:45, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
I see what he's talking about, and it is most certainly not my browser. There are shadow images left behind when the viewing angle of the house changes. It looks horrible.—cyberpowerMerry Christmas:Unknown 18:12, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Well clearly it's not happening to everyone. If you're confident that it's not your browser, then what do you suppose it is causing it for some and not for others? OS image libs maybe? Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 23:15, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
I've verified it in GIF Movie Gear. Compare the thumbnail vs the original. You'll see a residual of the far wall from the first frame and the horizon sticking. My guess, an issue with dithering (each frame has a separate 255 palette in the resize) and optimizing (transparency). As for solutions? Browser have been switching to bi-linear scaling, so maybe we should skip server side scaling? — Dispenser 01:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Now I see it too. But not scaling is not a solution, as that could result in very large file downloads. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:55, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Or smaller (Examples are actually worse after 5 years). IIRC, The devs said scaling is to increase fidelity (back when browsers used nearest-neighbor scaling), not to decrease file size. I played with the source example in GMV its actually smaller if I remove the inter-frame transparency (less grid pattern to overdraw) and our scalers actually did a good job of knocking down file size. I also have a database report of various GIF breakage. — Dispenser 13:56, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Redirect to section bugged

On some browsers, redirect to sections don't seem to work any more. E.g. WP:BIO1E redirects to Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#People_notable_for_only_one_event, but clicking on the redirect brings me to the top of Wikipedia:Notability (people). Interestingly, clicking on the hashtagged section link works fine. I'm using Google Chrome version 47.0.2526.73 m on Windows. Where can I log this as a MediaWiki bug?  Sandstein  09:30, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

You don't, because it isn't a MediaWiki bug. It works fine in Firefox, therefore it's a problem with Chrome; and it may be related to #Google Chrome unable to link directly to section? above. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:10, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
I currently have the same issue in Firefox. For instance, when I put http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:In_the_news/Candidates#Angkor_Wat into URL bar, I'm initially redirected to the Douglas Tompkins section. When I edit and save a particular section, I'm also redirected elsewhere after saving. However, sections work fine upon clicking. Brandmeistertalk 16:43, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Using Safari, this issue happens intermittently to me too.—cyberpowerMerry Christmas:Unknown 18:16, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Does this script contain malicious content capable of compromising your account?

Does the following script contain malicious content capable of compromising your account? importScript('User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js');Monopoly31121993 (talk) 10:28, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

@Monopoly31121993: No, it doesn't. Zhaofeng Li [talk ♦ contribs] 10:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@Zhaofeng Li:, would you please explain your response? Thank you.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 10:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Jswarning is a standard warning always displayed on your js pages, also when they are empty. The only thing User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js does is load code from the MediaWiki namespace at Commons. This namespace can only be edited by Commons administrators so commons:MediaWiki:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js has no edit link for others. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter:, Thank you for this. I've tried to add this but I can't figure out how to add this. Would you mind adding it for me and/or explaining to me what I'm doing wrong? Thank you.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 20:29, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@Monopoly31121993: User:Monopoly31121993/common.js is correct. Do you not see "Cat-a-lot" in the lower right corner of category pages and search pages? It requires JavaScript in your browser. Do you have a [show]/[hide] link in the table of contents on this page? That indicates you have JavaScript enabled. Try to bypass your cache. ⋅PrimeHunter (talk) 21:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Lua error message on ISBN book search page

When I click on an ISBN in a citation, I get taken to the book search page but there is big red text on said page reading

"Lua error: invalid expiry date ("--"). Lua error: invalid expiry date ("--")."

This is not only happening with several ISBNs I just copied into cites from places like Amazon or ABEbooks (as i normally do) but also with old ISBNs that I put in cites months ago and at that time worked without triggering an error. I presume this has to do with the parsing of the ISBN but not sure if this relates to (a) the Lua problem already discussed above and/or (b) a number of bug reports that seem to already exist re ISBNs. TheBlinkster (talk) 18:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC) P.S. This is happening in both Firefox 42.0 and Chrome 47.0.2526.80 m , I'm using Win 7 . TheBlinkster (talk) 18:46, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I have posted it to Module talk:Protection banner#Magic word for protection expiry. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:13, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Wayback machine

Yesterday a important sports website that I use, changed all of his url formats, therefore creating probably over a thousand dead links. Is their a way to save all the references of a page at wayback? does a bot do it or there's a tool for that? I've tried to fish out some snapshots of 8 December 2015 but wayback kept giving http 302 response at crawl time, why is that?--Threeohsix (talk) 21:29, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

It might be better to convert the broken links directly into working ones pointing to the live site, if there is a logic to them. This can be achieved by WP:AWB. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 08:40, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
That's I've a done, thankfully most were just moved. I'm asking how I save all of the references in wayback without going one by one?--Threeohsix (talk) 12:03, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

I've got a spreadsheet with a list of wikilinks that I need to convert to valid Windows file names. What is a good method of doing this? I am using LibreOffice, but do not plan on using regex in calculations. Thanks. 71.46.106.61 (talk) 03:47, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Have you saved the pages from Wikipedia to windows files? One issue you may encounter is uppercase versus lowercase. On Wikipedia they differ, but will be the same file name on Windows. Another issue I came across was when I saved some named under Linux with unicode characters in them, and then Windows XP could not open them. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:22, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
I haven't saved them yet. I want to prepare first. SharkD  Talk  23:13, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Math rendering suddenly very slow

Rendering of mathematics using the "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback" preference option has become very slow today, to the point where I cannot view simple articles such as Centroid — after a long delay I instead get a Wikimedia Error page. If I switch to the default "PNG images" preference option for mathematics, rendering is fast. Anyone know what is going on and when it will be fixed? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:20, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: Thanks for reporting this. I cannot reproduce the problem with the same setting in Firefox 42. Which browser is this about? Anything suspicious in the browser's developer tools? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Chrome, OS X. What is the browser likely to show? I was getting no response for a minute or so and then the Wikimedia error page. It seems to be improved now, to the point where centroid only takes ~5 seconds to render, still slow but fast enough not to time out. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:12, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
If there is some "Wikimedia Error page" please tell us the error that you get (and remove your personal IP from the data, in case it is included). Thanks. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:02, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-51

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

Changes this week

  • Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [39]
  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 17 December. (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

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

17:42, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Problem on navigating Wikipedia

Sometimes I use Wikipedia on my iPhone 5S updated to iOS 9.2 and since few days I must touch 2 times the wikilink for enter in... with various other sites I don't have this problem, it is sufficient to touch 1 times the link, but only on Wikipedia I have this problem... what can I do to solve? --Marce79 (talk) 20:35, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Filtering curation from my watch list

For pages on my watch list I am interested in only the latest edit, deletion, or move. Recently, however, my watch list is getting clogged with page curation and deletion tag entries—often multiples for the same file. I don't mind giving that info to those who find it useful, but is there a way to configure my watch list to suppress it? —teb728 t c 05:43, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Odd lines on my article watchlist

When I filter just for article and article talk pages, I get lines like the one below:

(→‎History===========================================================================================================================================)

They don't appear to demarcate anything. Doug Weller (talk) 12:38, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

I cannot reproduce this. Do you mean you select "Article" and "Associated namespace"? Please give this info:
  1. A diff with the behaviour
  2. Skin
  3. Browser
  4. Setting of "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc
  5. Setting of "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist
  6. Whether it happens in the Modern skin (you can add &useskin=modern or ?useskin=modern to the url).
PrimeHunter (talk) 13:44, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. Yes to your first question, but I can't reproduce it right now. If it happens again I'll provide the information above. Doug Weller (talk) 16:51, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Something is wrong with a user-warning template

"subst:uw-longterm" isn't working in Twinkle and is also showing up as a redlink at The Missing Manual. Shearonink (talk) 18:18, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Template:uw-longterm shows it was deleted at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2015 November 23#Template:Uw-longterm. It can just be removed where it no longer belongs. It was reported at Wikipedia talk:Twinkle#uw-longterm. I have posted there. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:36, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Removed, thanks! — MusikAnimal talk 19:01, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I was going crazy trying to find it. It's gone from Twinkle now, right? Shearonink (talk) 19:34, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
It is no more! — MusikAnimal talk 19:41, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

No recent edits are being shown on any Wikipedia pages when I use my phone or ipod

Please check why on my phone and ipod it does not show recent edits it just says the last edit on most pages was 2 or 3 days ago. This is the case for all pages and yet it does show that edits have taken place. Incredibly, on my large laptop the recent, Daily edits are indeed noshown and the text is completely up to date. Please explain because we need to have the up to date wikipedians on All of our computers etc Thanks so much — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.189.56.6 (talk) 10:12, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

In my experience mobile edits have never been up to date. Ottawahitech (talk) 10:21, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

en.m.wiki.x.io stuck

The mobile wikipedia page has been stuck on Mawson's antarctic expedition for several days. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.56.40.179 (talk) 20:47, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

https://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Mawson's_antarctic_expedition says "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." What are steps to reproduce the problem? What does "stuck" mean? Which browser is this about? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Do you mean you still see Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 12, 2015 at https://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Main_Page? I see Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 14, 2015. There are similar reports about mobile at #No recent edits are being shown on any Wikipedia pages when I use my phone or ipod and Wikipedia:Help desk#A general question please. I see the current page versions at en.m.wiki.x.io. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:41, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I've tested this on an IPad and the main page is indeed sometimes stuck to December 12 (in mobile view, not desktop view), at other times to Dec 14 (with Toledo War as TFA). Cenarium (talk) 13:36, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia pages and their edits are "out of date" on mobile and other devices

On my mobile and ipad, the most recent edits done on many Wikipedia pages are not shown. You can see form the "history" list that the edits have taken place, yet down the bottom, it will say "last edit 4 days ago by .....", rather than the correct "last edit 9 hours ago"

Interestingly, the various Wikipedia pages and their edits are shown as completely up-to-date on my laptop.

It is annoying because when we are showing pages at a lecture (connected via the mobile) we cannot see the last 3 or 4 pages of edits ie the most RECENT version. Please explain.

Thanks Srbernadette (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Srbernadette. I don't use an iPad, so I am guessing here, but to me this sounds like a caching problem. Does it happen only with pages you've previously viewed recently?—Anne Delong (talk) 11:27, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Reading further back on this noticeboard it seems that several people have had this problem lately, so perhaps it's something more systemic.—Anne Delong (talk) 11:53, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Some functions have slowed

In the past 24 hours some functions have been performing slowly at times. I did a "Show changes" a little while ago and it took 40 seconds. (There were no changes to show - as I was just testing - and it was a 26,000 byte article.) I have experienced the slowness on two PCs using different ISPs. I will do a tracert later. Wondering whether anyone else is experiencing the same. Nurg (talk) 03:10, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

I have no solutions Nurg, just wanted to chime in and say Watchlist is also not working very well. Shearonink (talk) 15:47, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Attaching a sound file to an image.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121617

After participating at the British Library editathon, where we celebrated the uploading of 100 sound files of European birdsong by attaching the files to the infoboxes of 50 or so Wikipedias, we got rather good at the process.

European pied flycatcher
Adult male in Scotland
The song of a male Pied Flycatcher, recorded at Yarner Wood, Devon, England
Scientific classification
Binomial name
Ficedula hypoleuca

The sound files are found at commons:Category:Wildlife Sounds in the British Library. A description of the method is found in the Dropbox link on User:ClemRutter/training.

A wikilink is placed in the image_caption field in the infobox.

| image_caption = Adult male in Scotland

becomes

| image_caption = Adult male in Scotland [[File:Pied Flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) (W1CDR0001423 BD1).ogg|center |thumb |The song of a male Pied Flycatcher, recorded at Yarner Wood, Devon, England]]

This is from English Pied flycatcher: on Welsh Wikipedia cy:Gwybedog Brith the critical code is

| delwedd = Trauerschnäpper auf Esche cutted.jpg
| maint_delwedd = 200px
| neges_delwedd = Ceiliog Gwybedog Brith [[File:Pied Flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) (W1CDR0001423 BD1).ogg|center |thumb]]

Though it would be better if the Taxobox had separate field for sound, sound caption, this method is reliable, so we can live with that.

There are also two documented templates :- the one takes you off the page and leaves you there, and the other uses a massive message box - neither suitable for discrete work.

{{audio}} Birdsongⓘ
{{Listen}}
Birdsong

My granddaughter discovered that you can click numerous arrows- and have a whole chorus of birds singing at the same time. (That is clever software.) But then the four-year-old presented the challenge- why do we have to click the arrow beneath the bird to make it sing. Why can't we just click the picture of the bird and hear it sing. Of course we can I said- its just that I don't know how to do it.

Can anyone help her? What is the syntax that one uses to do a link from the picture to activate the .ogg file, while staying on the page? Do we have to call in a lua bunny to code up a new template for us- or am I missing something? If you can tell me how to do it, we can have 15 songbirds singing on January 15- and it make a really useful bedtime story page on the Wikipedia Android app. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 02:34, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

I would recommend against trying to do this per the principle of least astonishment. Readers expect clicking on an image to pull up the description page, so if it played a sound then they would be very confused. We need to keep a link back to the image description anyway for attribution reasons. Could move the attribution somewhere else, but that'd just be stranger. I guess this might be technically possible with clever CSS trickery, but I'm afraid to try it. — Earwig talk 08:11, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, you argue principle of least astonishment over that of a 4 year old ? :) I wouldn't dare... Anyway, there is not really a way to do this right now from wikitext I suspect. I'll take it into account with my player rework that I have planned for next year, because it does seem like a nice idea. phab:T121617 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:46, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Haha, all right, maybe I'm too harsh. I can see some applications when you phrase it as a poster image. I'm still wary of using it in taxoboxes, though. — Earwig talk 09:26, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Example of this idea for Chrome. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:03, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
It looks very nice. I thought it was worth mentioning as the BL upload does offer unexplored possibilities and potential. For the example I gave that would solve the problem. We were working within taxoboxes in multiple languages and also in the main text, and the solutions we used had to be applicable to each of 50 or so languages, and the syntax usable by relative newbies.
The principle of least astonishment appied to the trainers as well as the trainees- I am left with the question of is whether the File:sound.ogg should be an an attribute of File:image.jpg or is it the other way round.
Do we go for wikitext syntax of [[:File:image.jpg|thumb|360px|Caption of image|alt=description|embed=File:sound.ogg|embed_style=hidden]] which would be easy to explain,
or allow [[:File:sound.ogg|hidebar]] and [[:File:image.jpg|thumb|360px|Caption of image|alt= description|embed=[[:File:sound.ogg|hidebar]] ]] . Any rate thanks for listening- and producing such a nice effect.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 15:56, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh, this is glorious! What fun - to put the song with the songbird. Thx for posting about how to do this - I guess I don't really edit bird articles, but it's such a wonderful thing to know how to do & to maybe be able to do it for other boxes. Cheers, Shearonink (talk) 15:46, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

In both User:Wcquidditch/wikideletiontoday and Wikipedia:XfD today, there is a redlink to Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2015 December 16 under the "Files for deletion" section. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 05:59, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

I might have fixed it with this edit. I accidentally pressed Enter while trying to type an edit summary. I wanted to say that the template being used appears to have been changed from "...deletion" to "...discussion". I have to go shortly but might get a chance later to look for other cases, and whether anything else needs fixing. That would be better done by someone familiar with WP:XFDT. Johnuniq (talk) 07:04, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Your fix is right but maybe the heading should also say "discussion". I fixed User:Wcquidditch/wikideletiontoday with that.[42] PrimeHunter (talk) 12:29, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Tool labs down again?

So, is WMF Tool Labs down again? I can't seem to get anything up, so it's not just XTools this time. And who can we complain to over at WMF about this in order to get this fixed, rather than coming to VPT every time this happens? Thanks in advance... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 07:47, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Labs is down and has been for several hours. There is an NFS problem and they are working on it. Bgwhite (talk) 07:59, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
OK. But Tool Labs has been going down often enough over the past several months that it's starting to get ridiculous. It's obvious that a more permanent solution is needed to this problem: Labs is effectively unreliable these days. And I know several of us want to light a fire under WMF about fixing this. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 08:12, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Seems to be resolved. — Earwig talk 09:09, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Hardware problems, according to the mailing list. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:13, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

broken parameter in {{SLBY}}

According to the template documentation, {{SLBY}} has a _nocat parameter which if set to True will prevent the page on which the template is used being added to several categories. Except it doesn't seem to work. Nthep (talk) 13:17, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

The template in the current form does not accept this parameter. Ruslik_Zero 13:48, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Testcases creation missing braces

Creating template testcases is missing some closing braces. — CpiralCpiral 19:25, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Please give an example of the problem or steps to reproduce it. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:40, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
OK, add {{documentation}} to {{x5}}, save, and created testcases. I was going by the syntax highlighter. Although when I add the missing braces, they are too many. Thanks. — CpiralCpiral 00:08, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I cannot reproduce a problem. By "created testcases", do you mean create Template:X5/testcases? That page already exists. If {{documentation}} is previewed on {{x5}} then there is no create link for Template:X5/testcases but just a wikilink and a normal edit link. If {{documentation}} is previewed on {{x4}} instead then there is a create link [43] for Template:X4/testcases. It preloads Template:Documentation/preload-testcases and I don't see a problem. How did you create [44] with the unbalanced code {{ {{TEMPLATENAME|testcases}}/sandbox}} }}? The preloaded page has the balanced code {{{{TEMPLATENAME|testcases}}/sandbox}}. If you used a "create" link which would have been on Template:In title at the time (when the /testcases page didn't exist yet), then it looks like you edited the preloaded code and added two spaces and an unbalanced }} before saving the first time. Which syntax highlighter are you referring to and did you use it before saving the page or to make the fix in the next edit [45]? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I have a guess at what went wrong: You have enabled "Syntax highlighter" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. mw:User:Remember the dot/Syntax highlighter#Colors shows it highlights triple curly brackets in orange as assumed parameters (in this case there was four {{{{ which meant a tranclusion inside another). You thought orange meant an error and tried to get rid of the color. First you added }} after the code with no effect. Then you added a space to split the four {{{{ into two pairs {{ {{. That removed the orange and you saved without removing the }} you had added after the code. Was that it? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:17, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Exactly right! Then I ignored syntax highlighter, counted correct braces, and now apologize for hasty judgement. Thought I was helping for a minute. :-) Thanks PrimeHunter. — CpiralCpiral 01:25, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Something changed on the heading? Or on math tags?

For a long time I have a heading on my user page which is:

== <math>\nabla</math> ==

It may not be the most common use of math notation, but for obvious reasons it makes some sense in my user page. And it used to work fine. I had a heading with a nabla symbol: .

Today I notice it is broken. Let's try it here:

What I see is 2 nabla symbols followed by the text "{\displaystyle \nabla }", I'll try to mimic it within a nowiki tag:

∇∇ {\displaystyle \nabla }

Math preferences: "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback". The error does _not_ happen if the preference is "PNG images". Nor with "TeX source" which works as expected, but that is probably irrelevant here.

Browser: Vivaldi, on Linux. (it is a beta, so it may be a bug in the latest distribution)

Anyone know if anything changed? Browser's fault? Thanks! - Nabla (talk) 21:42, 11 December 2015 (UTC) (who else would notice a nabla related error? :-)

It looks fine in FireFox, so perhaps it is your browser.—Anne Delong (talk) 10:31, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Firefox uses MathML by default, which does not show the error, Chrome and all other do. The problem goes away when you remove the heading markup. But when inside the heading, something (Tidy?) is duplicating the content of the annotation tag inside the math markup to outside the hidden math tags. This is the parser tripping over something. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:26, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll see what to do next... - Nabla (talk) 22:07, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Replacing non-substituted by substituted template during page saving

Is it possible to replace some template by another substituted template during page saving? I.e. I save page with wikicode "{{template1}}", this expression turns into "{{subst:template2}}" and substitution occurs, cause template1 has code "<includeonly>{{subst:template2}}</includeonly>" or something similar? I try to do this and it doesn't work. Sorry for bad English. MaxBioHazard (talk) 07:35, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

No, otherwise we would be able to greatly simplify the use of templates like {{subst:prod}}, {{subst:uw-vandalism1}} etc. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:35, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
It doesn't work on save but the English Wikipedia has Category:Wikipedia templates to be automatically substituted for bot processing. I don't know whether the Russian Wikipedia has bots doing such work. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:07, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

2 suggestions

I have 2 suggestions in Village pump (technical) today. The first one is I would like to know the date of enable Flow function because I opened the beta page, but I can't find it.

The second one is I would like to suggest Wikipedia can notify creators or uploaders that article (or template, file etc.) has been deleted or kept by administrator after the article for deletion discussion (or template for discussion, files for discussion etc.) is closed. Please propose your ideas and views under the line, thank you.--Shwangtianyuan (talk) 08:04, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

The link you gave mentions delays and per-page requests for Flow. As for the deletion notifications, please see wp:Village pump (proposals). Thanks. — CpiralCpiral 10:04, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

What IdeaLab campaigns do you want to see?

Hey folks. I’m seeking your help to decide on topics for new IdeaLab campaigns that could be run starting next year. These campaigns are designed to attract proposals from Wikimedia project contributors that address a broad gap or area of need in Wikimedia projects.

Here’s how to participate:

With thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 23:02, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Badly coloured bar graph in Wikipedia article

Forwarding an edit request from Talk:Wikipedia, in which new user Safibn has suggested changing the background colours used in the {{Largest Wikipedias/graph}} bar graph transcluded on the page. The template calls another template, {{ListBgColor1}}, which I think tries to make a gradient dependent on the article count, but anyway the result is a graph which quite horribly violates the WP:COLOR accessibility guidelines. I would correct this myself but it's a bit over my head. Safibn suggested changing all of the backgrounds to light green, which is a bit better, but I also wonder if it wouldn't just be better to write the text beside the bar instead of over it. Cheers. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 21:23, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

See also my comment regarding what accessibility in MOS has to say about this. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 12:50, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Oh never mind, I figured out how to change the colour, and with things like User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js in use there aren't any colours that are suitable, so I just changed it all to light gray. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:49, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Visual garbage in images

I've noticed that most of the images in articles I visit have some sort of visual garbage in thumbnails. This appears to have appeared recently, and seems to be primarily limited to black and white images (but most of the articles I look at are about the 1960s so that might just be sample size). It is a small strip, perhaps 5 pixels wide, on the right side. It almost looks like greeked text, but not always, and it sometimes changes on a refresh. Anyone else seeing this? Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:03, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Any example link? Any screenshot of the particular problem? Which browser is used? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Sure, I noticed it both in the GL Mk. I radar and Nike-X articles. Using Safari, but I seem to recall it on Chrome/Windows as well (don't hold me on the later). Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:48, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Search: Completion Suggester

Search box as-is
Completion suggester

In the continued quest to make the search bar a better tool, the Wikimedia Foundation's Discovery department is putting a completion suggester into Beta Features. The tool functions with search-as-you-type, with a small tolerance for typos and spacing in finding results. Possible matches are then displayed as you type in a drop down menu, hopefully eliminating the need to perform a fulltext search with landing page and all. You can read more details at mediawiki.org and use the talk page for now for feedback.

The tool is now available and will only be enabled for the article namespace for now, and will progress into full production at some point hopefully in early 2016, depending on feedback. At this time the use-case for completion suggester is highly geared towards simplicity for all users and as a regular editor myself I am aware of the limitations of only having the search work in the article space. Because of this, it's going to be important to get feedback from regular contributors who use search to make sure that any of the basic feature requests for searching the main space can at least be addressed while in Beta Features.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to your feedback. Keegan (WMF) (talk) 00:47, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Nice! — Earwig talk 08:07, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
This is awesome ! Hope to soon see it in production. (But also nice that is is a Beta first). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:43, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
I agree with both of theDJ's comments. Nice.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:34, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Get involved in Wikipedia 15!

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As many of you know, January 15 is Wikipedia’s 15th Birthday!

People around the world are getting involved in the celebration and have started adding their events on Meta Page. While we are celebrating Wikipedia's birthday, we hope that all projects and affiliates will be able to utilize this celebration to raise awareness of our community's efforts.

Haven’t started planning? Don’t worry, there’s lots of ways to get involved. Here are some ideas:

Everything is linked on the Wikipedia 15 Meta page. You’ll find a set of ten data visualization works that you can show at your events, and a list of all the Wikipedia 15 logos that community members have already designed.

If you have any questions, please contact Zachary McCune or Joe Sutherland.

Thanks and Happy nearly Wikipedia 15!
-The Wikimedia Foundation Communications team

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery, 20:58, 18 December 2015 (UTC) • Please help translate to other languages. • Help

Searching for http://en.wiki.x.io in Special:LinkSearch is restricted to pages in the Topic namespace. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:14, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

phab:T21637 removed selflinks from LinkSearch. The Topic namespace has separate code for some things and it's probably not intentional that its behaviour is different here. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Transcluding special pages for another example with WhatLinksHere which was fixed at phab:T109814. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:39, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Also phab:T74185 where I was fobbed off. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:58, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Templates

Could someone tell me where is ", " as the separator and "and" as the linking word at the end defined for templates such as {{see also}}, {{main}}, {{further}} etc. They neither in the module files for those templates nor in the Module:Hatnote... --Obsuser (talk) 14:55, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Obsuser: Those are generated with the Scribunto function mw.text.listToText. Quoting from the documentation: "The default separator is taken from MediaWiki:comma-separator in the wiki's content language, and the default conjuction is MediaWiki:and concatenated with MediaWiki:word-separator." — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:59, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Probably in mw.text.listToText()
—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:01, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, do you know how to change it to latin i instead of cyrillic и (i.e. how to modify creating list of links in the module you can check here)? /Serbian wikipedia uses both latin and cyrillic script so everything must be created twice, with each script. Now we have combination of latin translation for "Main:", for example, and cyrillic "и" (letter "i") as conjuction./ --Obsuser (talk) 15:40, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
@Obsuser: Yes, you need to specify the second and third parameters to mw.text.listToText. Try replacing links = mw.text.listToText(links) with links = mw.text.listToText(links, nil, ' i '). — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:49, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: Thank you. I’ve implemented it to see also template/module and it works!
@Trappist the monk: Thank you also for your time with citation modules; I haven’t checked your changes for date validation module yet because I’m editing these templates right now, but when I find time these days I will go back to CS1 to enable it. --Obsuser (talk) 16:04, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

One moment the article had 142 citations; a moment after, 127 (without alteration to the article itself)

I encountered the anomaly yesterday on the article Life Is Strange and don't know why the citation count went down. I also noticed that the structure of the Reception section was different. If there is something I can do, I need to know what exactly went wrong. Cognissonance (talk) 22:35, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Cognissonance: Per a consensus at WT:VG, gamerankings was removed from Module:Video game series reviews, you probably saw the page updating to remove the 15 (142-127) gamerankings references which can still be found in the markup but are now not displayed in the article. Sam Walton (talk) 22:45, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
See [46] for an archived version from 8 November with a "GameRankings" column with 20 references, and 136 in total. The current version of templates are used when old versions are rendered here at Wikipedia so the same version here [47] omits the column and has 116 references. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:52, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Hovercards not working

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121777

On my Beta preferences page, Hovercards are enabled. But it appears they don't work anymore, for me at least. Is it because I use Mozilla Firefox as a browser, or is it expected as a beta feature to fluctuate between "functional" and "not functional"? Cognissonance (talk) 23:52, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately they are broken currently - see the bug report at phab:T121777. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 01:30, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
As a substitute, Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups are working. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 01:36, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

My "Watchlist" isn't working

I can get in to any other page on Wikipedia very easily but my Watchlist - http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Special:Watchlist - takes forever to come up and, then, when it does (IF it does!) I don't actually get my Watchlist, I get the previous Internet-site I was viewing on my laptop at that Tab. I deleted my WP-cookies, logged-out and logged back in, turned my computer off and on... so, what's the deal? Thx, Shearonink (talk) 23:17, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist acting up again...(similar to the next thread/post) either loading slowly or not loading at all. Shearonink (talk) 15:40, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, try going to the watchlist again, and count the seconds it takes for it to load. If it takes longer then 2 hours (7200 seconds) for it to load, check your common.css subpage if you have one and the .css subpage you have that matches your current skin if you have a non .css subpage. It may be something wrong with a .css subpage. If nothing is wrong with your .css subpage(s), I'd say you might have to just get used to it. Also I don't know if a .js subpage could cause that problem because I'm not advanced with scripts and I do have a common.js subpage but actually have no scripts on it. Lemondoge (talk) 01:03, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

User pages deindexed?

Did Google start deindexing user pages a few weeks ago for English Wikipedia? Only subpages are appearing in search now. Is it possible that this is from Wikipedia's end and not Google's? Mark Schierbecker (talk) 21:10, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

@Mark Schierbecker: This was gerrit:237330 and Phab:T104797. Sub-pages should also hopefully be caught! Mdann52 (talk) 21:19, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, that consensus driving seems a little light for such a big change, and only for enwiki - not sure I'd rather have people searching "USERNAME wikipedia" ending up on OTHER Language pages that editors just happen to use sporadically. — xaosflux Talk 21:42, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
Indexing can be enabled with {{INDEX}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:43, 16 December 2015 (UTC)
I didn't think you could override the whole-of-namespace noindexing using magic words.... — This, that and the other (talk) 01:05, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
You cannot override in mainspace but you can in userspace, at least at the English Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:24, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
@This, that and the other: Only a system configuration change can override for a whole namespace. You can choose to override on a per-page basis, and the {{INDEX}} template does this by using __INDEX__: the template is added to the specific page that you wish to be indexed. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:32, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Ah, I see: looking at the MediaWiki configuration files, we can override the per-page default on all pages except those in the article, Draft: and Draft talk: namespaces. In these namespaces, NOINDEXing is forced, with no way to override on a per-page basis (for what I hope are obvious reasons). — This, that and the other (talk) 11:50, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
No, the default for article space is to index them, and this cannot be overridden even with __NOINDEX__. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

For such a big change, there doesn't seem to have been sufficient concensus at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_126#Userpage_drafts_shown_in_search_engines . The conversation should have been an RFC; pinging the closing admin: @AlbinoFerret: this kind of infrastructure change has some real negative consequences for our community. Wikipedia has increasingly become a professional activity for GLAM folk and educators. The user pages are the only way to validate their participation in these -- often tying the work with their real names. In academic fields, where professional service requires proof of participation, you need to create a publically visible resume. We already have problems with volunteers falling out of the community: if those volunteers that are motivated by recognition, can't be easily recognized when, say, an employer or peer searches for their name or username in association with Wikipedia to validate their participation, it seems absurd. I get why some individuals would want additional privacy to their user pages, and they are free to add the noindex magic word, but forcing our editors to choose inclusion seems a bit too high of a barrier -- especially for new expert editors, one of those communities we are really trying to retain. I also understand not indexing user subpages, to get rid of the WP:WEBHOST argument. Sadads (talk) 14:16, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

To clarify that close, there was WP:SNOW support, only one oppose. By the way, I am a NAC. AlbinoFerret 14:48, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
@AlbinoFerret: The reason it was a SNOW close, is because of who was brought to the conversation: people who watch VP Technical. This is much more than a "technical" problem, its a social one that effects most of our outreach and new contributor efforts. This ought to have been subject to an RFC and/wider discussion that included notification of relevant communities. Sadads (talk) 14:48, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an annex to people's resumes. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 14:57, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Editors can still add their accomplishments to their userpage (and link to them from everywhere), but Wikipedia is WP:NOTFACEBOOK. Also, userspace pages have been, and still are, misused by thousands of freelancers, SEOs, "PR consultants" and other "entrepeneurs" to offer their services off- and on-Wiki. I completely agree with that SNOW close. GermanJoe (talk) 15:39, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
As to the misuse of user information: actually, by deindexing all user pages, we might be encouraging even more targeted SEO/PR misuse of user pages, without our good faith contributors being able to benefit from our platform --- PR professionals are more likely to be deliberate about getting pages indexed, and are more likely to self investigate and discover the magic word -> we are creating an environment that favors the malicious deliberate use, rather than the good faith accidental advantage. Remember, WP:AGF is a core value to the community: we shouldn't be creating blanket policies based on a few bad actors.
The value of user pages as a Resume for new contributors, is a real issue that we can't just blow off: Wikipedia is the product of a community and communities need social recognition systems that validate contribution to the community that are visible to both community members and to the peer groups of the contributor --- otherwise there are no incentives or motivations for remaining in the community. We wonder why so many academics and other new volunteers don't feel included here -- from my outreach experience, I can say that one of the main reasons is a lack of recognition. And its not just validation, sometimes its about being easy to contact: we have dozens of program leaders, who become the public face for our community in WP:GLAM, WP:WEP, WP:TWL, and dozens of other programs. By removing the indexing feature of user pages, we are removing a vital tool to some of our most valuable communicators of the movement and how to contribute to our community. Sadads (talk) 14:48, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
I have mixed feelings about this, but anyhow, the userspace (noindex option) and guideline need updating with this reality. Widefox; talk 19:28, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Batch deletion

Sometime recently, a template was deprecated and, after all of its functionality was transferred elsewhere proposed for deletion as a CSD G6.

I carried out the deletion and then deleted the handful of sub pages.

Shortly after that the editor who proposed the first template requested that I delete {{cite pmid}}. (As background see this discussion which links to two RFC's, which concluded that two template should be deprecated and their usage substituted. Once the substitution is complete, which I believe it is, the template and sub pages can be deleted.)

This seemed pretty routine. @AManWithNoPlan: helpfully provided a link to all of them the special page doesn't provide the count. When I began deleting them I realize there were quite a few. I had never use the batch delete option in twinkle and thought this might be a good time to try it. However I didn't see how to make it work with that link.

I checked with AManWithNoPlan who confirmed I could use Category:Cite pmid templates.

I started that process but it timed out. I also wasn't happy about doing thousands in one shot and would prefer to do them in smaller batches but did not see how to do that with the twinkle batch option. I am looking for advice on how to complete the deletion of the sub pages. Is this something that can be done in AWB? Should I be filling out a bot request? Should I just go ahead and do the batch delete on the category?Is there a better option?--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:31, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't know about Twinkle batch delete option (i'm not an admin here), but I really enjoy this script at my home Wikipedia :) After installing to your javascript page just go to Special:Massdelete and delete something :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:18, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
Whoa! It's been a while since I've seen a deleted template with no log message. Sphilbrick, could you annotate that deletion to give some info for passers-by? It still has a ton of backlinks, so I suspect it may accumulate confused folk over the years as some people are unfamiliar to the deprecation process; a quick explanation and pointer to the RfC should be sufficient. — Earwig talk 00:34, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
After further consideration, I'm not fully convinced the main template should have been deleted yet. Why not keep it marked historical like {{cite doi}}? See the relevant TfD. — Earwig talk 00:42, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Well, I note that the Cite DOI template discussion was almost unanimously keep, while the cite pmid fully supported a complete deprecation. I suppose that it could be argued that complete deprecation, does not preclude the use of leaving it and marking it historical. If that's what people want I'm fine with that, although I note that the option doesn't seem to be discussed. I'd be happy to restore it if that's what make sense. That still leaves open the question of whether all of the thousands of sub pages should be deleted and what's the best mechanism for doing so if the answer is yes.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:45, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: As it stands, I'd rather leave the historical note around for at least a few months after we've finished deprecating and fully deleting the subpages. (I now see you've done that—thanks!) To be honest: a bot might be a good idea for this; there are over 37,000 subpages at the moment. As for why that number is so much larger than the size of category, I believe it's because many of the subpages are redirects. — Earwig talk 07:35, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
To add on to this, there are over 60,000 subpages of {{cite doi}}, so in total that makes nearly 100,000 deletions. I don't recommend running this all on your own. A bot can safely check that each template is indeed unused and avoid flooding the deletion log. We don't need to rush this. Can we get a sanity check that this is what we really want to do? — Earwig talk 07:49, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm fine with that, but not prepared to take the lead on it.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:48, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
So, what's the answer to the original question? A few weeks ago I came across an unrelated template with around 10,000 subpages needing deletion, but forgot to follow up on finding the best way to do it. Awhile back I used D-batch on a list of about 800 and got a (brief, harmless, but still a little startling) database lock for my trouble. Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:33, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
My opinion is not to worry about database locks. It's up to the WMF Operations team to make sure the servers don't break under high load, regardless of what is done by end-users like yourself. If you do cause a database lock, well, don't feel bad about it; although Jaime might come knocking at your door (so to speak), he will surely realise that there is something on the server end that needs to be tightened up. Indeed, the WMF staff might realise that some kind of server-side mass deletion tool would be very handy in cases like this. — This, that and the other (talk) 03:25, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
+1. Don't worry about performance. It is my job so you do not have to. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 09:44, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Table error message ?

I have been tidying up an article which is mostly a very long table in List of recipients of the Silver Antelope Award‎and the text "1. Value!" consistently appears at the top of the table. This is probably something very simple that I have done , but I can't see it. Any help welcomed. Thanks  Velella  Velella Talk   23:31, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I have removed a stray string "#VALUE!" one of your edits added inside the table code. It was not part of a cell in the table syntax so it was displayed outside the table. "#" starts a numbered list which here had a single item. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:11, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
Many thanks. It wasn't my data and it was late at night and seeing things like that was beyond my few remaining brain cells.  Velella  Velella Talk   13:25, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

bot for signing comments

Is thee some problem with the bot that is intended to sign talk p. comments of people who forget to sign, or don't know to sign? It doesn't seem to have been working for the last few days. DGG ( talk ) 04:47, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Sinebot appears to still be running. — xaosflux Talk 04:50, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
If you report a possible problem then please give an example, in this case an edit you think the bot should have signed. There are many circumstances where it's not supposed to sign. If you think of [48] then User:DGG is in Category:Wikipedians who have opted out of automatic signing, and you also have over 800 edits per User:SineBot#Opting back in for experienced editors. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:07, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Lack of notification of TimedText pages when doing actions on files

I discovered that there is no notification that there are subtitles in the TimedText namespace when doing actions in the file namespace:

  • A number of files had been deleted (usually as orphaned non-free files, sometimes following a request at WP:FFD, and sometimes for other reasons), but the subtitles were still present in the TimedText namespace. I tagged the subtitles as dependent on deleted files, and they have since been deleted.
  • Two files had been moved to Commons and deleted locally, but the user who deleted the local files had not ensured that the subtitles were moved to Commons, and the subtitles were still hosted locally.
  • One file had been moved, but the subtitles (TimedText:Deja Vu (Beyoncé song - sample).ogg.en.srt) had not been moved. I solved this by moving the subtitles, but as the original file was moved more than a year and a half before the subtitles were moved, and the song has therefore been without subtitles for a long time.

If you wish to move a page which has a talk page, there is a checkbox for automatically moving the talk page in addition to the subject page. However, there is no checkbox for automatically moving subtitles (see Special:MovePage/File:Deja_Vu_(Beyoncé_song_-_sample).ogg), and the user performing the move is not informed that there are subtitles in the first place, so this is easily overlooked. Also, users who delete subject pages typically spot talk pages so that the talk page can be deleted, but the deleting users are possibly unaware of subtitles. Is it possible to add warnings about TimedText templates to templates and special pages related to page moves and deletions so that errors like this occur in the future?

Also, what is supposed to happen when a file with subtitles is moved to Commons? Should the local subtitles be deleted after the subtitles have been copied over to Commons? --Stefan2 (talk) 10:00, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes it is one of many problems with subtitles. Unfortunately, there has been no active development of this area in over 3 years. I'm trying to clean it up a bit right now, to bring it into this decade, but as I don't have much time, it's is a very slow process. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:32, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Adding citations now easier

How to use the new URL autofill feature. This example shows it in the web citation interface, but you can use it for any type of citation supported by RefToolbar.

You can now automatically generate citations in the WikiText editor with just a URL (similar to the Cite feature in VisualEditor). To do this, open the WikiText editor, go to the Cite menu in the toolbar, choose the citation template you want to use, enter a URL in the URL field, and click the magnifying glass icon next to it. This will automatically fill in the rest of the citation data via the Citoid API. It works for books, newspapers, journals, websites, etc. Note that this only works on English Wikipedia currently, as the feature was added to the RefToolbar default gadget (although it could be ported to any other wikis that are using RefToolbar). Also note that you must have "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" and the RefToolbar gadget turned on in your preferences. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh heck. More mashed-up refs. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:07, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Would you care to elaborate? Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
People of little experience will believe that automated tools are either the right way to do it, or the only way. They will also believe that the results are always correct; so this makes work for others, in checking their work every time. In order for an automated tool to be used effectively, you should first understand how to do it correctly without automation. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:33, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Personally, I would expect this to actually reduce workload. People with little experience often create references consisting of nothing but a URL. The references then have to be expanded into real citations by someone else. Unlike the VisualEditor version, you can immediately correct any information in this interface (since it's simply autofilling a form). I think this should lead to fewer cases of people submitting incorrect information from Zotero (compared with VisualEditor). If you have any suggestions for improving this feature further, let me know. If you and others believe it is truly a bad idea, we can always revert it. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
I think it's good. There will be some more difficulty has half-completed incorrect citations will have be worked on but I'd rather have that than the vast dead bare urls that really frustrate me today. That's assuming that people even know this feature exists. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 06:43, 15 December 2015 (UTC)
Can you use this to edit existing citations? SharkD  Talk  13:07, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately, no. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Can't make it work. I paste in the URL, click the icon, and nothing happens. Both pref options are enabled and have been for years. Two URLs I've tried: [49][50]. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:35, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
It worked a few days ago but is also broken for me now, both in the source editor and the similar tool in VisualEditor. It has been reported at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#Difficulty adding reference. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:42, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
@Mandruss: Should be working now. Looks like there was an outage of the Citoid API service. Thanks for the report. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
@Ryan Kaldari (WMF): Thanks. A problem with the first URL I tried. This is probably as straightforward as they come, but it reversed the authors' first and last names. Same here, different site. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:13, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
@Mandruss: Should be fixed now. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Thank you ―Mandruss ☎ 19:48, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Protection log that isn't

The log for Wikipedia:General disclaimer has four entries; if you filter it down to Protection log, it's empty. Yet the page has an indefinite full protection, presumably that was set by Jackmcbarn (talk · contribs), but why is there so much information missing? --Redrose64 (talk) 12:44, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

If you compare to the page history [51] then all four entries correspond to "Changed visibility of the article feedback tool". Log entries are generated each time they are viewed, using a combination of data stored at the time and the current version of the software for the type of log. When software is disabled like the article feedback tool, the log entries may degrade. Edit summaries like those in page histories are only generated once at the time of the edit so they don't degrade. I don't know the origin of the protection but it's an old page from 2003. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:23, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
It's in archive 1 of the old protection log. Graham87 10:47, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
do not know if this is the case here, but such a thing can also be a result of page move: when a page is moved, the page-id moves with it (if a redirect is created, the redirect page with the original name has a brand-new page-id, and the moved page with a new name remains with the original id). the move operations, the "edit" operations and i believe the "protect" operation still show in the page history, but the protection log still point to the original name. so, if some page was created in 2008, protected in 2009, and moved (with redirect) in 2015, you will see a protected page, whose history goes back to 2008, and no entry in the protection log that explains who protected it, when, or why. with it, you will also see a redirect page, whose history begins at 2015, with a protection-log entry from 2009. see phabricator:T40123. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:49, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
A page move was the first thing I thought of. This is definitely not the case here: page moves leave evidence in the edit history, and there isn't any. I am aware of what log entries are created when pages are moved: item 4 at WP:MOVE#How to move a page has been carefully edited by myself and checked by Graham87 (talk · contribs) who knows more than most people on matters like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:24, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
As Graham87 showed, it was the age of the protection. Wikipedia:Protection log says the log system changed 23 December 2004. The oldest entries in the current log are from there.[52] PrimeHunter (talk) 01:37, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Bot to check redirects to section

Thinking out loud here: I think it would be a good idea for a bot to check pages under Category:Redirects to sections to check that the redirects actually go to a valid section name. Quite often sections get renamed, breaking all of the incoming redirects to that section, or pages get reorganized and then the redirects don't make sense, and editors often don't think to check for this. I don't know if it would make sense (or be possible) for the bot to correct the links, but it could notify interested users, or the last user to edit the target page, or WikiProject Redirect or something. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:14, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there was a bot doing just that. Though I can't recall the name of it. --Izno (talk) 15:36, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
That was WildBot, owned by Josh Parris. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:56, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, WildBot leaves a message box at the top of the target article's talk page. I've fixed a lot of those usually just by adding an appropriate anchor to the targeted section and using {{subst:anchor note}}. Happy holidays! Paine  21:20, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
Does WildBot put those articles in some category, or merely tag the talk page?
For what it's worth, redirects are the only incoming links to sections that I know how to find. For any page select "What links here"; then "Show redirects only". This tool displays error messages with some bright red color for redirects to unavailable section names. There is nothing similar for articles that link here, afaik. --P64 (talk) 00:12, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
For the cats see Category:Articles tagged by WildBot. It appears that the bot is inactive for now. Happy holidays! Paine  07:09, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, unfortunately WildBot is inactive, and so is Josh Parris from the looks of it. I also don't know of any way to check incoming links to a section. The external tool ("show redirects only" from our what links here) will sort incoming redirects by section targets, but I don't think it's possible to do it for wikilinks. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 18:37, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Can I transclude a permalink?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T70399

I tried {{special:permalink/oldid}} and {{:special:permalink/oldid}}, but neither seems to work. I was wanting to present previous versions of a template for discussion

current version
Alternate versions
Special:Permalink/692312801 Special:Permalink/692311873

Any ideas? YBG (talk) 23:17, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Old revisions cannot be transcluded. You must either copy the old code or only make a link. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:20, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
That's too bad. An understandable decision for transcluding into article space, but it would be really useful for transcluding into talk space. Thanks for the prompt response. YBG (talk) 01:23, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
@YBG: You might want to watch phab:T70399. Helder 18:29, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Large category white space

I've been using Category:Articles with a promotional tone and am wondering why there's such a big white gap between the category headings and the list itself, any ideas? I can't see anything obvious on the templates used there. Sam Walton (talk) 16:28, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Ah, tracked down to this issue in Template:Progress box. Does anyone know if this can be fixed? Sam Walton (talk) 16:30, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
It's browser-dependent, and so it is the responsibility of your browser's writers to fix. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:26, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
I assume, this is a closely related (or the same from technical point of view) problem. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:38, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-52

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

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
  • The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
  • The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

  • There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

  • Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
  • No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.

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

18:29, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey results

Hi everyone,

The 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is over, and now the Community Tech team's work begins on the top 10 features and fixes.

In November and December 2015, we invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for what they would like the Community Tech team to work on, for the purpose of improving or producing curation and moderation tools for active contributors.

634 people participated in the survey, where they proposed, discussed and voted on 107 ideas. There was a two-week period in November to submit and endorse proposals, followed by two weeks of voting. The top 10 proposals with the most support votes now become the Community Tech team's backlog of projects to evaluate and address.

You can see the whole list with links to all the proposals and Phabricator tickets on this page: 2015 Community Wishlist Survey.

For everybody who proposed, endorsed, discussed, debated and voted in the survey, as well as everyone who said nice things to us recently: thank you very much for coming out and supporting live feature development. We're excited about the work ahead of us. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:12, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit Toolbar issues.

In the last 24 hours or so I've noticed that the 'insert citation' button ({{}}) on the editing toolbar isn't accessible on any pages I've tried to edit. All there is is the 'reference' button (<ref> </ref>) but not the detailed 'drop-down citation' option . However, saying that - I've come on here to ask what may be wrong, and I find it's working on this page. Is there something I've clicked possibly unintentionally that's changed this, or is there a problem with the editing toolbar at the moment? Nath1991 (talk) 21:39, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

From your description I assume you use RefToolbar 2.0a at Wikipedia:RefToolbar#Versions. It works for me here but its cite icon {{}} is also missing for me in articles. I normally use RefToolbar 2.0b where Cite still works in articles. I have Vector and Firefox. You can try 2.0b (the default) with "Enable wizards for inserting links, tables as well as the search and replace function" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:16, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Have done as you suggested, and all is working well. Thankyou. :)Nath1991 (talk) 16:16, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

There seems to be widespread abuse/neglect of non-existent links (using double-square brackets where there is no article). To avoid having all this red show up prominently in articles, I suggest that the color for a false link be green rather than red, so that it will be less tempting to place or maintain such links.Jzsj (talk) 18:05, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

@Jzsj: You can configure this for yourself, using CSS. 
a.new, #p-personal a.new {
  color: #008000; /* change colour of unvisited "red" links to green */
}
a.new:visited, #p-personal a.new:visited {
  color: #008060; /* change colour of visited "red" links to cyan */
}
This should be placed in Special:MyPage/common.css. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:30, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Please clarify for me what you are proposing. I have not the time or interest to get into all the technicalities you mention here, but in making more than 5000 copy edits in the past 10 months I am disappointed at the widespread neglect of false links, and determined use of them at times to credit people who can never reach prominence.Jzsj (talk) 18:47, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
You can make this change for yourself. Copy the stuff inside the box that Redrose posted. Click Special:Mypage/common.css. Click the edit button. Paste the stuff that was inside the box into the page content. Click save. Then do the things at WP:BYC. Now your links are green rather than red.

Let me advise that you will be unlikely to find consensus for the position that the color of these links, for everybody, should change. --Izno (talk) 19:14, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Jzsj, please see Wikipedia:Red link, if you haven't already.
I don't think Redrose64's suggestion addresses Jzsj's concern. --Pipetricker (talk) 19:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
The point of a redlink is to advise other editors that an article needs to be created. As a member of a project that specifically works on turning red links into articles this suggestion does not further the aims of the encyclopedia in any meaningful way that I can discern. It is not a "false link" if the link is red. It is an alert that someone needs to participate and either determine that the person is not notable, i.e. delink, or that they are and create an article. SusunW (talk) 19:30, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
@Jzsj: from your comment here, and the use of the phrase "false links", i suspect you do not fully understand the purpose of redlinks. a peek in your contributions confirms this: e.g. this edit, (with the summary "remove red"), aswell as this one. those are a harmful edits, though i have no doubt they were made in good faith. please read Wikipedia:Red link, and please, please stop mutilating articles by those "remove red" harmful edits. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:21, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I have read the suggested article and agree that the link suggestions should remain, but please recognize the other side of the coin, that making these links green or some less prominent color would discourage misuse of this option. People would still be encouraged to complete articles on those who actually have prominence or sufficient reference articles to get them into wikipedia. Red, of its nature, stands out above all the other text in the articles.Jzsj (talk) 21:01, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
@Jzsj:You can apply {{cleanup red links}} where needed for a little bit of satisfaction. Moreover you can use User:Cpiral/relink.pl on those overlinked pages; very satisfying. (I've done 20-30 pages with it.) See some of the ones at Category:Wikipedia red link cleanup! You could probably improve the help page at wp:redlinks to say how they should be used. Thanks. — CpiralCpiral 21:32, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I get no satisfaction out of putting admonitions on wiki pages, and I understand now that the red is to encourage someone to write up an article on the link, but I still see all the red as distracting and unsightly in Wiki articles and I have heard no reason why we can't use a more subdued color.Jzsj (talk) 21:57, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Surely that is the point. Red stands out, so someone sees it as a page that merits creation but does not yet exist and may be spurred to do something about that, thereby changing the in your face red to the less obtrusive blue. Make the red links a more understated colour and they get overlooked. Nthep (talk) 22:01, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I see no reason to think that red makes people create more links than if they were green. I would guess the opposite: Some people dislike the high visibility of the red color and remove or omit the link. They are less likely to do that for green. Changing to green also goes against common color associations like red = off/broken/warning, green = on/working/OK. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Any major interface change, if done for all users, needs a widespread discussion, probably an RFC listed at CENT. Any individual user who wants that setting for him/herself can easily do it using the code above. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:48, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm suggesting that those who look at Wikipedia with "fresh eyes", not as long-standing editors, see a problem here and sooner or later it needs to be addressed.Jzsj (talk) 02:27, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

This is a terrible idea. As stated above by multiple editors, the red links are supposed to stand out as something that needs to be corrected (hence, red) either by writing the article if it satisfies the guidelines or de-linking if no article is feasible. On another note, as somebody with one of the forms of red-green colorblindness, I can tell you both green and purple would not work at all. A significant proportion of the population is affected by some form of color blindness so this is no small issue. Some shades of green would be indistinguishable from regular text, other shades of green would look too close to blue while purple would be completely indistinguishable from regular blue wikilinks. Red is by far the most appropriate color for these would-be links and you would not find a consensus to change it. The local solution suggested above is your best bet.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 05:39, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

If the other reasons not to do this aren't enough, the term redlink is used in countless places that would have to change, and communication would suffer significantly until the vocabulary conversion were complete. Greenlinked? What's that? We could paint the White House black to reduce heating cost in the winter, and that would make about as much sense. Consider the total picture when making proposals. (By the way, proposals of this kind are made at WP:VPR, not here.) ―Mandruss ☎ 15:14, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Now at WP:VPR#Make red links green to obviate widespread abuse. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:38, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Note: That ls now closed there and the discussion continues here. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 20:47, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Oppose Changing red to green. This standard was set 15 years ago, not worth any effort to change for simple aesthetics. I personally like the red. They bug me enough to write the article when I have time. Regards, GenQuest "Talk to Me" 20:47, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

It's to Wikipedia's credit that so very many people use it. But the vast majority will never be moved to do an edit, and will find it unsightly to have red jumping out at them for no apparent reason. So many articles will remain messy, when cyan would create less of a mess. Sooner or later this issue will need to be addressed.Jzsj (talk) 16:04, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

What evidence do you have (beyond your personal experience) that demonstrates that the color of the link is "an issue" that "needs to be addressed"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:18, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

WYSIWYG ref errors

Could we make an edit filter to catch the text "<ref></ref>" being inserted into articles? I've spent the past couple days patrolling Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting and I've noticed that nearly all of the errors caught by that category are caused by inserting that text into an article, seemingly inadvertently. As it happens, that is the text that is inserted if you click on the blue text to the right of Cite your sources: in the edit window, and so it gets inadvertently inserted a lot.

It wouldn't really be a problem if not for the giant red warning notice generated inline by the ref code when the tags are placed incorrectly. Most of the time these are done in articles where the prose is lacking anyway (law of averages, I suppose) but occasionally you have a section of decent length which is otherwise of good quality, and another user will come along and be editing some other part of the article when their cursor just happens to be over the longer section, and then they click the button and Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page). now you have a section of decent length that has a giant red warning notice pasted into the middle of it. And since the editor was working on some other part of the article, or they don't know to check, they don't fix the error. So you're left with good articles with giant red warnings in them.

The other version of this is clear vandalism, when someone just hammers on the button and you get Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).</ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref></ref>

So, can we do something about it? Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 20:54, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Instead of an edit filter a bot can b e created to just remove them. Ruslik_Zero 13:44, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
Sure, that would work too. ReferenceBot already notifies users when they make an edit that generates reference errors, could it be modified? Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:35, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
Will ping A930913 to find it out. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:19, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
If a bot does this, please build in at least a six-hour delay. It's very irritating to find an article on your watchlist where some IP or throw-away account has done some test edits, then a silly bot has done a trivial "fix" which entirely missed the point that the whole thing needed to be reverted. It's easier to just revert the junk edits without dealing with the bot. Also, if the bot has a bot flag, those editors who don't include such edits in their watchlist won't see the article, while those editors who do include bots might be less inclined to click the history to see the whole picture. Johnuniq (talk) 22:52, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
Ivanvector In thoery, Checkwiki error 85 will catch "<ref></ref>", but not "</ref></ref>". If there is one more <ref> than </ref> in the article or visa versa, Checkwiki error 94 will catch it. Checkwiki runs once a day at 0z. The errors are found and are usually corrected the same day. It is not always caused by vandalism as Visual Editor will do the same thing. Visual editor will also add <nowiki> around the refs, such as <ref><nowiki>...</nowiki></ref> or <ref><nowiki>...</ref></nowiki> Bgwhite (talk) 01:02, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor should not be adding <ref></ref> (unless a user directly types or pastes those characters into the page, e.g., if you're writing a help page on how to insert a footnote in wikitext). If you've got recent diffs showing empty ref tags in VisualEditor, then I need to go dig up that bug and re-open it as a regression. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Is there a reason that an evolving template of projects posted on a talk page cannot be anchored to the bottom of the page as other templates are anchored there on article pages? Rosiestep created a template for our editathons, but it keeps moving around on the page and has to be repeatedly moved back to the bottom. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women/Women in Red#Please do not post below this template post above it Thanks! SusunW (talk) 20:38, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

@SusunW: is referring specifically to navbox {Women in Red |state=expanded}}. — Maile (talk) 20:49, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
@SusunW: Yes, it's because if someone clicks on "New section" when they write a new post, that section will always be added to the very bottom of the page. There is no editable page footer in the MediaWiki software - all the content is considered part of the main page. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:20, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
The nearest I can get to it a solution is to pit it in a bottom-aligned div:
<div style="position:absolute; bottom:0">{{Women in Red}}</div>
but it overlaps the bottom content! Perhaps someone will see a way to fix that. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:51, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
T.Shafee, what happens if you add the equivalent of {{-}} as well? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:22, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Article link notifications

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121780

Have been noticing recently that article link notifications for aritcles I've created haven't been working for some of the older ones. Specifically Buckshot Hoffner, Gene Ready, and Enoch Thorsgard's links to the Deaths in 2015 page. Is there some kind of date cutoff now? I've always found it useful to be notified of the links to the deaths page in order to update them. Thanks. Connormah (talk) 02:46, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Do you have "Web" enabled at "Page link" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo? Have you gotten other link notifications in the period? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:46, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: - Yes and yes. Connormah (talk) 16:13, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
This was broken, and patched on Monday (phab:T121780). IIUC the patch will go live with the next standard deployments train (so January 14). Sorry about this. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 03:47, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Notepad++ syntax highlighting?

Has anyone had any luck with these MediaWiki UDLs for Notepad++? They seem to break when they encounter self-closing ref tags and I don't know how to fix them. Thanks. SharkD  Talk  05:46, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

I was able to edit the UDL. It is much more simple, but no longer breaks. I can post it here if anyone is interested. SharkD  Talk  07:53, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
I wonder whether this sort of thing ought to be permanently documented on a relevant page (maybe at mediawiki.org?). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:28, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Global RFC at meta for password strength requirements for all Wikimedia wikis

Hi everyone.

As many of you may be aware, there was recently a successful RFC here about password strength requirements for certain users with advanced rights. I've started an additional RFC on meta about having password strength requirements for admin and higher users on all Wikimedia wikis. Please voice your opinion meta:Requests for comment/Password policy for users with certain advanced permissions.

Thanks, BWolff (WMF) (talk) 07:33, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

p.s. I hope this is on topic for VPT and that this is the most correct forum. I'm not all that familiar with the various discussion forums on Wikipedia. If its not on topic here, I apologize. 07:33, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Coors rendering

Just noticed that Slovenia's coordinates 46°07′N 14°49′E / 46.117°N 14.817°E / 46.117; 14.817 are rendered weirdly both in the Wikiatlas and in the Google Maps. The former shows some tiny red area inside Slovenia (with no country selection in red, as it's usually rendered), the latter is also focused on some spot inside the country, with no border outlook. This is despite the fact that sources like Index Mundi say they're indeed 46 07 N, 14 49 E. Other countries' title coordinates, such as Brazil, are rendered correctly in the Wikiatlas. Is it just my browser? Brandmeistertalk 17:44, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't know where WikiMiniAtlas gets data from but I doubt we can do anything at the English Wikipedia. It works the same when the countries are viewed at other languages with meta:WikiMiniAtlas enabled. Slovenia and Brazil behave similarly for me in Google Maps. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:31, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Article crashing Google Chrome

When I try to edit this article by copying and pasting text into the editor window, the browser tab crashes and I get an error. Not sure what is going on. Version 47.0.2526.80 m. SharkD  Talk  19:16, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm getting the same issue on Talk:Territorial_evolution_of_the_United_States/rewrite. --Golbez (talk) 06:14, 17 December 2015 (UTC)
Are you on dev channel? I've had this happen elsewhere too. ViperSnake151  Talk  02:18, 21 December 2015 (UTC)
Also having this happen randomly. Every so often Wikipedia will begin crashing whenever I attempt to paste. I have not figured out a pattern to it yet. Other sites aren't doing it that I can tell. Closing Chrome all the way seems to usually fix it. Windows 10, if that matters. -- ferret (talk) 19:23, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, this is also an issue when i attempted to re-organize some info. Not only does Wikipedia crash, but all my other tabs crash aswell. I reported it to google chrome and didn't think much of it. Lucia Black (talk) 20:11, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
I recently created User:RadioKAOS/Sandbox/Misc/Alaska Financial Institutions by copying and pasting information from a Federal Reserve website. Upon completing the main list (with zero difficulty) and going back to tweak things, I had the exact same problem every time I edited the list as a whole and tried to copy and paste anything. I don't experience this problem when I copy and paste in a section edit, nor have I experienced it anywhere else, whether on Wikipedia or any other website. Running Chrome, the about tab shows version 47.0.2526.106 m. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 08:02, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Should template In title have noprint?

Shouldn't Template:Intitle have the "noprint" attribute? Why does it have the "selfreference" attribute instead? Template:intitle is often used on dab pages, and is technically a search link operating "in article space". {{Search link}} itself won't even preview on a dab page, yet it's no more or less a "selfreference" than intitle.

I don't see anything at Self references to avoid "in article space" concerning search, so I'd like to allow for {{search link}} to be permitted to display at List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names ‎ with the noprint attribute. As the talk page there will show, I'm worried about WP:NOT, but should I be if "noprint" is applied judiciously? Then could I remove the forbidding template from search link, and promote it to dab-page work?

What about "selfreference" too? I'm also asking for technical answers to exactly what article-space mirror sites do with "selfreference" spans. Are they only for Wikipedia to mark what must always point to Wikipedia, like {{srlink}} says? Or are they only for mirrors to make sure any "selfreference" span is taken upon there own self? And it seems it would matter whether the mirror was a Wikimedia wiki, or just HTML. — CpiralCpiral 03:36, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

If "selfreference" is defined for a span of HTML as "doesn't make sense when not on this site", then a search link would not be a "selfreference" if the mirror ran Mediawiki software. They could, couldn't they? That makes "selfreference" an if-then, doesn't it?

The many dab pages that use {{intitle}} are definitely print-worthy, (some are highly entertaining) but the output of {{intitle}} is not print-worthy (because it makes no sense there). For example, Stemmer is a dab page, and you can do a print preview on it.

So we've {{noprint}}, no {{selfreference}} for {{selfref}} and no {{noprint-selfreference}} for {{Unprintworthy inline}}.

That last one is the canonical name for the redirect {{nomirror}} (created at the same time by SMcCandlish). Template "nomirror" (the one I'd call noprint-selfreferences) adds attributes "noprint" and "selfreference". No mirror meaning exactly what in terms of printing and referencing a certain self? (Which self?) @SMcCandlish: said template Nomirror was "so we don't have to keep using {{selfref|...|inline}} for non-selfreferential unprintworthy content". But it uses "selfreference" tags, so that makes the purpose being "for non-selfreferential" seem confusing. I'd just create redirects named for {{mirror}}... if only I was more sure.

I've got a new version of {{intitle}} in the sandbox. It uses "noprint". I don't know why it uses "selfreference". It's just a search link, and could be used for Mediawiki-powered mirrors if mirrors are wikitext. — CpiralCpiral 08:15, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Apparently, mirror sites do run MediaWiki, but only to convert wikitext to HTML: from wp:mirrors and forks#Remote loading

The appropriate way to run a mirror is to download a dump of the compressed 'pages-article' file and the images from http://download.wikimedia.org/, and then use a modified instance of MediaWiki to generate the required HTML, along with above mentioned copyrights information.

So this means Mirror/fork can run a search, and {{intitle}} should not be a "selfreference", since the search link runs just fine on there own MediaWiki Search extension? — CpiralCpiral 08:29, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

Wowsers. The only thing that matters is the actual class(es) outputted by the templates.
self reference
This is for elements in articles that refer to other parts of Wikipedia instead of being 'proper' content. They are stripped from 'some' re-uses of content.
metadata
These are parts of the content that refer to the article, but only have meaning in the context of Wikipedia as an ecosystem. Maintenance templates are among these for instance. These are also sometimes stripped from re-use of content. In print for instance and in "extracts" they are removed, but not (anymore) in mobile.
noprint
These elements should not be printed, because they don't make sense in the medium print. A button or other elements that require interactive actions in order to be useful often use this for instance.
nomobile
Hides things explicitly from mobile medium.
And there's a few more...
The noprint and nomobile classes are rather crude convenience classes for two very specific mediums that we ourselves output, but for mirrors and forks you need much finer control.
"exactly what article-space mirror sites do with "selfreference" spans".
Nothing most likely. A mirror is a mirror and thus acts the same, unless you instruct it otherwise. It's more about forks and reusers. Apple's dictionary app or WikiWand could give them a different visual style for instance. Our own excerpts can filter these elements out and so could a printed book, if desired. Or our own search engine could recognize the element and change the relevance of it for search queries. etc etc. etc.
All in all, the point is, we don't try to figure out how people reuse content and base decisions on that. Instead, we tell reusers what the content is (semanticly) and then let THEM decide if something should be included or not. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:18, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, TheDJ. Putting it that way,
I have no objections to rethinking the whole thing and making some sense out of it, and don't have a particular viewpoint to advance other than the following: 1) WP content can be reused in multiple ways, and most WP selfrefs are not useful in any of them, whether they are mirrors in the strict sense, MediaWiki-based dumps and re-uses (e.g. some Fringe-o-pedia that takes all of our science article and runs a "competing" MW-based encyclopedia that includes all the fringe "science" as if it were factual), copy-pastes of text, conversions to HTML and re-use in other websites without MW templating, etc., etc. 2) Some things that are technically self-refs, mostly references from one article to another, are useful is some reuses of WP content but not others, and they need to be distinguishable. 3) References within the same piece of content (e.g. "See [[#Section name|below]]") are usually relevant to most reuses of our content, and also need to be distinguishable. 4) Not everything that is unprintworthy is a self-ref, or vice versa. Often unprintworthy things are interface elements that don't pertain to printed versions of the content or, by extension, to non-paper use that doesn't share the same interface (e.g. reuse on some other website).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:19, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
Sounds to me like externally, a lot happens, but whatever happens MediaWiki provides the CSS classes we need. By rethinking the whole thing, I'm pretty sure you mean how each template classes its output, and how they are chosen by end users by how they are named, and what HTML classes they might better apply to themselves. (By distinquishable I guess you mean that they have to distinguish based on text patterns and their own text processing, rather than relying on Wikipedia selfreference tags very much.)

Templates like intitle (are a mess because they show in print), and even if they did not, they leave a stray bullet. — CpiralCpiral 08:20, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

For much-more printer-friendly Wikipedia

Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

For paper-saving
 1. Line-spacing and paragraph-spacing should be decreased in print. 

 2.	As a new option, the user could choice larger text-size but smaller line-spacing. Fonts like Franklin Gothic medium and Arial-narrow may-be useful to get more-readable printout. 

 3.Things coming as a list, could be compacted in a paragraph. As a separator between 2 points, bullets or numbering could be used.

Rajarshi Rit 09:13, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

For better black-&-white printout.

Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC) 

   1.	To distinguish colored texts from black, separate shade of grey could be used. 

   2.	Colored pictures , especially diagrams, where the separate colors could produce same-shade of darkness in grey, and that could vanish the labeling and lines. So, as an option, automatic alteration of darkness at portions of image, should be done. 

   3.	Contrast of images should be adjusted automatically,.
For better size of image in printout.
   1.	 Image-size in print, could be enlarged much-more, so-that small-texts on the labeling of diagrams, become readable. Labeling is the most important. 

   2.	Instead of wrapping  surround-of the image with text, in printout, the text should be distributed only at top-and bottom of the text, and the remaining space should-be filled-up by enlargement of image. (except images lacking technical details)

Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 09:11, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

In case of animated files.
   1.	Please give more-than-one clippings from the animated-file in the print.
To show quality control
   1.	Please use separate box or mark etc. to indicate
       i.   Recently edited by user(s) , & may be deleted or edited very soon. 

       ii.  Contents edited by user(s) , is on notice of wikipedia-officials, yet not drastically reviewed. 

       iii. Contents edited by user(s) , but drastically reviewed by Wikipedia-officials. 

       iv.  Contents originally published in Wikipedia.

Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:05, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:07, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 08:13, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 08:13, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

RIT RAJARSHI Have you tried the "Printable version" option first? Some of your points are done there I think. Second, I really doubt that a lot of time is going to be spent on formatting images for the minutia use of how to deal with printable version of images, especially for the printable version of animated images and I have no idea what your "quality control" section is about: there are no "Wikipedia officials" and no way to know what is about to be deleted. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:25, 24 December 2015 (UTC)


Rajarshi Rit 09:09, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Ricky81682 Thank you very-much for your response. I previously tried the "print page" option, and not the "printable version" so sorry for that.

In case of animated pictures, I wanted to tell that, if , instead of one clipping of the animation, few (2 or 3 or 4) non-animated clippings if printed, the reader could get an assumption about what "animated" thing was there (may be wave-motion or protein-structure,whatever). I requested for image-adjustment so that all-the labeling could be read in the printout ( without processing in Word-document, Paint etc.)-just as a suggestion. I removed those specifications you objected. Rajarshi Rit 09:09, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Thanks and best regardsRajarshi Rit 09:09, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 09:09, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

For friendlier Wikibook-making
  1.Please prevent deletion of an article from wikibook on accidental click to the pages showing “remove from book” button. 

  2.On each “add to my book” pop-up, please show the name and copy-info of the book  on-which the link will be added. 

  3.Please Prevent generating many copies of the same book. Synchronize all the changes to only 1 book at 1 specific location. 

  4.Please automatically save the recent additions to the book and special page.
  5.Please show the recent additions without reload the special page.
  6.Please add a side-palette where the new-additions will be appeared (and saved) , instead dragging them over oher links and chapters. 

  7.Please allow option to group a chapter with its sub-chapters and contents together, and stick them on particular place of the book.

Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC) All the best wishes for Wikipedia , and best regards. Rajarshi Rit 07:35, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 07:40, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 07:51, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 07:51, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:02, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:08, 24 December 2015 (UTC) Rajarshi Rit 08:17, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:19, 24 December 2015 (UTC)Rajarshi Rit 08:25, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

EL blacklist question

At WP:AN, someone's noted that a heavily used website is susceptible to malware: apparently it gets taken over periodically, the owner regains control, and the cycle repeats. Suggestions are made that the site be blacklisted and that the website itself be used via archive.org citations. Would both options work concurrently? If we blacklist example.com, will we still be able to link to https://web.archive.org/web/20151224003535/http://example.com? Nyttend (talk) 04:37, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

My impression is that blacklisting a link also blacklists archive pages of that website, because of the URL element and also to prevent circumvention.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:41, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Could somebody take a look? Dilone61 isn't seeing any "edit" links anywhere. Also at unprotected articles. He's using Safari on IOS and he says that he previously had seen them ("source"). Feel free to respond at his talkpage. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:21, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

If this editor is on the mobile website, then the "Edit" link is an icon (a gray pencil in the upper right), rather than a word. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit counter for MediaWiki

When visiting the edit counter with project=mediawiki in the URL such as in [53], it says "wt::getUserInfo is not a valid wiki". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:24, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

x-tools bugs can be reported here. — xaosflux Talk 01:15, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Table display issues...

I know I've seen this happen elsewhere on other articles, but on Cicely Tyson, if I scroll down to her roles section, there is no separator between her 2005 and 2006 roles as Myrtle in two different Tyler Perry films. So, I went to go fix it by editing the section. However, there is no formatting error present in the markup, and the section preview displays the table separated properly. Running FF 43.0.2, Win10, and the Modern skin on WP. Any ideas? MSJapan (talk) 00:09, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

I see no problem. Probably a caching issue. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 00:17, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
Sounds more like a browser rendering issue to me. Do you have zoom level below 100%? That can cause missing table borders in some browsers. I guess that if a 1-pixel border is zoomed down to 90% then it sometimes disappears. It cannot be displayed at 0.9 pixel, and 1 out of 10 pixels which would be displayed at 100% may be removed to get down to 90%. It sounds like a bad idea to remove a pixel from a 1-pixel border but Firefox apparently doesn't think of that. If you preview then pixels may be removed from other places. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:32, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

interwiki bug?

I stumbled at Interference (wave propagation), and the interwiki is missing even though the article is on wikidata:

--Glenn (talk) 11:40, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

I see both "Wikidata item" and 56 interlanguage links. What do you mean by "interwiki"? What is your skin and browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:57, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Fixed font transitions don't space correctly

If there are two spaces in wikitext, one is rendered. If the two spaces occur around a font tag, one is still rendered, and it's always the wrong one, or was this intentional:

.nospace. chosen-spacing . wanted-spacing . chosen-spacing .nospace.
∈ chosen-spacing <samp><code>.</code> wanted-spacing <code>.</code> </samp>chosen-spacing

It shows one space outside the <samp>...</samp>, and one inside. No matter where the spaces are they're always either chosen or converted to the same narrow space.

Is it just me that prefers the version

That has  for things and stuff to cut and paste  the space template?
∈ That has {{space}}<samp>for things and stuff to cut and paste{{space}}</samp>the space template? — CpiralCpiral 19:42, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
@Cpiral: Multiple spaces always collapse to a single space. That is how all browsers have always worked. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:53, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
'Twould be nice if it didn't convert the wide space to a narrow one. — CpiralCpiral 21:26, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Empty bullets

In articles such as Căile Ferate Române that have an expand language template within multiple issues, there are empty bullets when you click on "show". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:48, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

I see all bullets in that article (Win XP, latest Firefox). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:14, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
It looks normal to me in Firefox. "show" produces five entries with a bullet and initial words "View", "Google's", "Do", "After", "For". Do you mean you see lines with a bullet and no other content? What is before and after those lines? What is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:34, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
Using the latest edition of IE, I see the following:
  •  
  • View a machine-translated version of the French article
  •  
  • Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
  •  
  • Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
  •  
  • After translating, {{Translated|fr|Căile Ferate Române}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance.
  •  
  • For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.
Nyttend (talk) 15:10, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
I also see the problem in IE 9.0. It occurs for {{Multiple issues|{{Expand French}}}} but not for {{Expand French}} alone. Maybe there is an issue with nested classes. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:44, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
Seems the bullets are rendered twice. In Chrome and other, they overlap, but in IE they seems to be forced apart. It happens because there are real list itmes inside fake list itmes, and both try to render the bullets. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:17, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Some search results counts with 0 words

See http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=20&offset=20&ns10=1&search=christmas for example. Some templates with many words counts on the search result page with '0 words', which is incorrect. --RezonansowyakaRezy (talk | contribs) 14:27, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

I'd assume it has something to do with only counting words that aren't in templates, but I'm not sure. Sam Walton (talk) 14:36, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
But this search page (above) prints only results from Template pages. I think the problem is that words inside tables/boxes are not counted. --RezonansowyakaRezy (talk | contribs) 15:11, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
That's what I mean; text on the template page that's in another template. Though a couple of other examples contradict that, so I have no idea. Sam Walton (talk) 16:06, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
It's a bug, but I don't know where yet. --RezonansowyakaRezy (talk | contribs) 18:49, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
WP:SIZERULE explains why zero words is correct for that wp:list article — CpiralCpiral 21:16, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Should we change ten thousand articles to implement a "noprint"?

Request for comments on the plan proposed at Template_talk:In_title#How_to_alter_this_template_and_its_wiki_landscaping.

I'm asserting that

  • the 9703 pages that use intitle or lookfrom templates must be changed by AWB or other bot to remove a stray bullet from a print preview.
  • "noprint" code fix in the intitle sandbox is the same one needed for the lookfrom code
  • Search links have not been allowed in article space (wp:elno rule 9), and so the missing guideline was only just written for this occasion.
  • Search links should be allowed in article space, but only if they follow "the missing guideline".

It's all clearly spelled out there (and at its predecessor talk-posting). Please comment. Thank you. — CpiralCpiral 07:46, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Cite web problem

A note in the article Regula fidei contains the following error message: "line feed character in |quote= at position 1641". What does it mean and how can we correct it? --Jonund (talk) 13:29, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

@Jonund: Line feeds are newlines. The |quote= parameter is intended for short quotations, not two whole paragraphs; hence, they should not contain paragraph breaks, which Wikipedia normally forms using two newlines. I've removed those and replaced them with a <p> tag, but I strongly suggest trimming that |quote= parameter right down to the essentials. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:48, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

No new RfBs

There have been no new Requests for Bureaucratship since January 2014. The last one was Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Acalamari 2. That means that 2015 is the first year without any new RfBs. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 16:03, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: This isn't really the place for this; WP:RfA or WP:VPM would be better. Sam Walton (talk) 16:12, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

issues with images

Sometimes images load fine but browsing here and there then the images will crash. I click on them and instantly says they can't load or there was an error. Lucia Black (talk) 21:34, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Lucia Black, how long has this been going on (hours/days/weeks?)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
since I've returned to Wikipedia which is around 1 week. Lucia Black (talk) 23:12, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
Might be phab:T115563? Help is welcome as it's still hard for the developers to track down the underlying issue. :( --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
Well it only happens with Wikipedia. In other websites, all images load faster. Sometimes they crash, but only because they are too big, but Wikipedia seems to crash them imediately without trying to load (if that makes sense) Lucia Black (talk) 19:22, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Substitution in comments

(I was directed here from Wikipedia:Help desk#Substitution in comments.) Under Help:Substitution#Documenting substitution, it states: "Thus a comment can be used to mention the template. It can even contain the values of the parameters, because substitution of parameters works even in comments." I believe this to be wrong, as User:AlexTheWhovian/Upcoming substitutes the provided parameter into the un-commented version of {{{1}}}, but not the occurrences of {{{1}}} that are inside the comment, as seen at User:AlexTheWhovian/sandbox#DNI substitution. How do I fix this? Alex|The|Whovian 03:31, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

@AlexTheWhovian: You can use something like <!<noinclude />-- {{{1}}} -->. I found this trick in {{Do not archive until}}. – nyuszika7h (talk) 20:48, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
@Nyuszika7H: Thanks! Worked! Alex|The|Whovian 23:37, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Hello !

On Mingrelian language article, I don't see interlanguage links whereas this article is correctly linked with Wikidata item. I suppose it is same as user:Glenn's message above. But I see Interference (wave propagation) interlanguage links without problem (like every other articles).

Does anybody see same as me ?

Sorry for my bad English. --Pols12 (talk) 11:30, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

WP:Null edit usually helps in such cases. I "fixed" that article. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:49, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

Special:LinkSearch

Special:LinkSearch will no longer display results past 10,000. See sample search. Any idea what's going on with this? Nikkimaria (talk) 14:27, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

This limitation was added in gerrit:250877, due to phab:T107265. Anomie⚔ 23:48, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
@Anomie: This seems like it might be a bug introduced by that change. More specifically, the issue is that you can't click "Next 5,000", though changing the URL directly to the next 5000 works fine. Sam Walton (talk) 00:04, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmm. You're right, I see two bugs now that I actually look at that change. Added code review comments there. Anomie⚔ 02:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Title

How to make title italicized without preventing transliteration if one Wikipedia uses it? Example (not working with DISPLAYTITLE nor -{t:...}- syntax): sr.wiki.x.io --Obsuser (talk) 02:12, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

{{Искошен наслов}} worked just fine in preview. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:07, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, but it is not working because after you save the page and try to change between cyrillic/latin script it stays cyrillic (if root pagename is cyrillic) or latin (if root pagename is latin). Shortly, transliteration is not possible that way. What to use to type formatted text for title (italicized) without "locking" that text to itself what {{DISPLAYTITLE}} or {{Italic title}} do? --Obsuser (talk) 18:41, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Anyone? --Obsuser (talk) 16:16, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Can anyone help? Still not resolved... --Obsuser (talk) 22:34, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

@Obsuser: This isn't resolved either because either (a) none of us knows the answer (b) none of us (myself included) understands the question or (c) it's not English Wikipedia, so no concern of ours. Apparently there is a problem at sr:Соно џој: but exactly what is the problem, what are you trying to do, what have you tried so far?
Also: sr:Соно џој is a redirect to sr:Соно џои, so there is a further difficulty: which of the two do you mean? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:26, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Question is how to make title italicized (like its done on .en Wikipedia using "DISPLAYTITLE" or "Italic title" templates, what does not work on .sr Wikipedia).
Serbian Wikipedia uses two scripts (uses transliteration, option next to the "Разговор" i.e. dropdown menu "ћир/lat"). If I simply put "DISPLAYTITLE" or "Italic title" template in the article and save it — title get "locked" to Cyrillic or Latin script depending on which one was used when creating article at the very beginning (when it had not existed; if you type "Википедија" to create article that does not exist, it will "carry Cyrillic rootname"; if you type "Vikipedija", it is Latin).
After you save it with "DISPLAYTITLE" or "Italic title" template it get’s locked — transliteration is disabled, and if you try to change script — title remains as it is (either Cyrillic or Latin), while article’s text get’s transliterated as usually.
I’m referring to sr:Соно џои (current article, not redirect obviously).
Is there a way to display (wiki-)formatted text as article’s name by typing it somewhere in article (for example, to type as a wikitext <u>Title</u> i.e. in my case I would use <i>Title</i> or ''Title'' so title gets underlined or what I need — italicized)? --Obsuser (talk) 00:50, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The example page was moved after the original question.[54] I investigated it December 10 but couldn't find a solution and suspect there isn't one. At the Serbian Wikipedia sr:Special:Preferences you can choose between two writing systems sr-EC (Cyrillic) and sr-EL (Latin) in a box below the normal language choice box. See mw:Writing systems#LanguageConverter. It's possible an automatic choice is made for IP's depending on geolocation (I think the Chinese Wikipedia does this). The selection affects normal page content and not just the interface. uselang=sr-ec and uselang=sr-el display the same page differently, including the title. I cannot find a way to use a DISPLAYTITLE such that an italicized page title still displays differently for the two writing systems. Among other things, I examined interlanguage links of Template:Italic title for some languages with variants but couldn't find any that implemented a solution. 01:01, 29 December 2015 (UTC)PrimeHunter (talk)

Protection did not transfer when page was moved

Template:Main was protected in May 2014 by Mr. Stradivarius (see log) and today I moved it to Template:Main article (see log). Although it says "moved protection settings from Template:Main to Template:Main article" this did not appear to happen and Template:Main article was left unprotected for a couple of hours. Can anyone explain what happened? Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:53, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

@MSGJ: See Category talk:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates#Page moves. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 22:56, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I have posted a comment there. Seems to be an ongoing issue — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:22, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Page image

Can somebody explain me, what are the criteria for picking "page image" to database, that is included as "Page image" at page information and "page_image" (for pp_propname) in page_props table? More importantly - what kind of images are not picked? Here are two examples with different results (where I would expect only one result) - Ashville, Alabama (there is "page image") and Alamo, Tennessee (there isn't "page image"). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

The code comes from mw:Extension:PageImages. From the description page: "[The extension's] aim is to return the single most appropriate thumbnail associated with an article, attempting to return only meaningful images, e.g. not those from maintenance templates, stubs or flag icons. Currently it uses the first non-meaningless image used in the page." Glancing through the code, I see that images are given a score based on their size and whether they are blacklisted. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 10:14, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:12, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

idea to improve wikipedia

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

dear wikipedia organisation,

as a regular user of your webpage I have a suggetsion to add to the articles.


I, and im sure many other reader as well, would be thankful if there was a automatic readers voice that could read the article to the user.


>this would help ppl who want to learn the language (I myself regularly use wikipeda to practise languages im not fluent in by reading the articles in both the foreighn and my native language) and are struggling with pronouncing certain words. >it would help blind or old people who cant read (well) >it would help ppl with a low concentration capacity to not always get lost in the articles and get distracted.

i hope you take my suggestion into concideration and i hope ii send this to the right department. I simply couldnt find another place to submit it — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.189.196.12 (talk) 11:05, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Closing per WP:MULTI; also posted to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#idea to improve wikipedia. – nyuszika7h (talk) 11:43, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Emailing issue

I've been trying to send emails to other editors for an interview and my email keeps getting unsubscribed due to "multiple message delivery failures". I have no clue how to fix this as every time I subscribe my email, when I email someone again, I get unsubscribed once more. GamerPro64 17:21, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

You will have a better result if you post the above question to our help desk. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Why? This seems like a technical issue; they'd probably be sent straight back here. Sam Walton (talk) 12:32, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
@GamerPro64: Could you give the exact error returned (minus any identifying information) - you may wish to paste it to a sub-page of yours or use a secure pastebin -- samtar whisper 12:37, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
GamerPro already posted to Wikipedia:Help desk#Emailing issue as suggested, and got a good reply about the Yahoo DMARC issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:17, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
No worries, thanks for letting me know PrimeHunter -- samtar whisper 15:31, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Cyclic redirects: Avoid misleading the reader

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T122292

A common problem on Wikipedia are redirects that direct back to where they come from. Example: Olympic winners of the Stadion race has a link for each athlete. Some of these are redlinks, some are blue. Unfortunately, many of the blue links are misleading: For Anticles of Messenia, Menus of Megara and many others, there is no article, just a redirect to the Olympic winners article itself. This is just frustrating for any reader who clicks on that link to get more information about a particular athlete.

One idea that would at least reduce the problem would be to color all links to redirects in another color; say orange. That would have the additional advantage that it would also alert editors that they could use a piped link instead. Of course, not all links to redirects are bad, so this may be misleading, too. Also, I'm not sure how this would be implemented.

Does anyone have a better idea to mitigate this problem? — Sebastian 07:21, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

To mark all redirects to green, you can put this into your CSS page:
.mw-redirect, .mw-redirect:visited {
  color: green;
}
--Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:33, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
@Edgars2007: The question asks how to make it better for "any reader", not just himself. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:39, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't starting my reply with "Solution to this is..." :) Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:44, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Redirects have the same class="mw-redirect". A Phabricator request could be made to give an additional class to redirects going back to the page they are on. Then they could be treated differently. I haven't found an existing request and don't know the server cost of implementing it. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:59, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
How about links that redirect back to the current page simply render the same as a redlink? If someone does click that link then apply redirect=false so they stay on the redirect page? That's basically the expected behavior for clicking on a redlink. Getting bounced back to the source page is pointless. Alsee (talk) 19:52, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Creating a redirect was probably a wrong method of solving a wp:redlink. Until the fixes mentioned were implemented, bot's might do them: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Check_Wikipedia, /List of errors, #106, "Redirect link from=to" — CpiralCpiral 03:23, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
No, it's a perfectly legitimate situation, as in Alsee's example below: It is natural for the article on Acme to have a link to Bob, and it's natural that as long as we don't have an article on Bob, that will be a redirect to Acme. — Sebastian 02:45, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Actually, Cpiral is right about the example I picked: Anticles of Messenia, Menus of Megara should probably have better remained redlinks. — Sebastian 18:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

I opened it on Phabricator, including this: 

Once possible solution:
 In article [[Acme]], can the software render [[Bob]] as a redlink? (Or maybe orange-red.) This correctly indicates that the article doesn't exist and that clicking the link is normally pointless. Also: if someone does click that link then apply Redirect=false. This is the expected behavior for clicking a redlink, and getting bounced back would be pointless anyway.

Do people support that idea or see problems with it? Any alternatives? Alsee (talk) 13:38, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

I support the idea. The bug you opened was T122292. It was falsely closed as "invalid", but I reopened it. — Sebastian 02:45, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Self-links are rendered in bold, so perhaps they should be displayed that way instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:38, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
Bold and without link. Are you suggesting to remove the links altogether, or are you suggesting for them to just appear black and without underlines, while keeping the link functionality? — Sebastian 02:45, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure that there is a perfect solution, but if you want them to look just like a redirect to that page, then it should be bold, with no link or link-style formatting. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I could see a benefit for the cyclical link to look just like a self-redirect, but only if there was an unambiguous formatting standard for those. Plain-colored bold is not such a standard, since it is primarily used for other purposes. I am sure it was never intended as such and that it was just an ad-hoc idea someone came up with. Highlighting alternative names in bold may make sense if a reader came to the article through that redirect; there is a chance that the formatting makes it easier for the reader to find what they are really interested in. That becomes less likely for non-self-redirects. More importantly, it will become confusing for readers who access the "Acme" article directly: "Bob" is not an alternative name for "Acme", so readers will scratch their heads why "Bob" is bold. — Sebastian 18:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
i am not sure everyone here, and on the phabricator ticket, took all cases into account. specifically, i refer to the case where the redirect is a "section/anchor redirect", i.e., when the redirect has #. in the example above, imagine the "Bob" redirects to "Acme#Management". in this case, displaying it differently from "normal" internal link will be inconsistent: in effect, using [[Bob]] from inside the Acme article, is equivalent to [[#Management | Bob]], i.e., same-page anchor link. since the 2nd case is displayed like any other internal link, displaying the 1st case differently will be inconsistent. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 15:25, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Good catch. If there's a #section link, redirecting to a different section should ideally be blue and redirecting to the same section should be red/orange-red/whatever. That could result in the "odd" situation of having a blue [Bob] and a red [Bob] in the same article. Anyone who notices it and clicks out of curiosity will get reasonable behavior for both. Alsee (talk) 10:15, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015

Read this in another language • Subscription list

Did you know?

A new, simpler system for editing will offer a single Edit button. Once the page has opened, you can switch back and forth between visual and wikitext editing.

Screenshot showing a pop-up dialog for switching from the wikitext editor to VisualEditor
If you prefer having separate edit buttons, then you can set that option in your preferences, either in a pop-up dialog the next time you open the visual editor, or by going to Special:Preferences and choosing the setting that you want:
Screenshot showing a drop-down menu in Special:Preferences

The current plan is for the default setting to have the Edit button open the editing environment you used most recently.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has fixed many bugs and expanded the mathematics formula tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving support for languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and providing rich-media tools for formulæ, charts, galleries and uploading.

Recent improvements

You can switch from the wikitext editor to the visual editor after you start editing.

The LaTeX mathematics formula editor has been significantly expanded. (T118616) You can see the formula as you change the LaTeX code. You can click buttons to insert the correct LaTeX code for many symbols.

Future changes

The single edit tab project will combine the "Edit" and "Edit source" tabs into a single "Edit" tab, like the system already used on the mobile website. (T102398) Initially, the "Edit" tab will open whichever editing environment you used last time. Your last editing choice will be stored as a cookie for logged-out users and as an account preference for logged-in editors. Logged-in editors will be able to set a default editor in the Editing tab of Special:Preferences in the drop-down menu about "Editing mode:".

The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the following Wikipedias in early 2016: Amharic, Buginese, Min Dong, Cree, Manx, Hakka, Armenian, Georgian, Pontic, Serbo-Croatian, Tigrinya, Mingrelian, Zhuang, and Min Nan. (T116523) Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. The developers would like to know how well it works. Please tell them what kind of computer, web browser, and keyboard you are using.

In 2016, the feedback pages for the visual editor on many Wikipedias will be redirected to mediawiki.org. (T92661)

Testing opportunities

  • Please try the new system for the single edit tab on test2.wiki.x.io. You can edit while logged out to see how it works for logged-out editors, or you can create a separate account to be able to set your account's preferences. Please share your thoughts about the single edit tab system at the feedback topic on mediawiki.org or sign up for formal user research (type "single edit tab" in the question about other areas you're interested in). The new system has not been finalized, and your feedback can affect the outcome. The team particularly wants your thoughts about the options in Special:Preferences. The current choices in Special:Preferences are:
    • Remember my last editor,
    • Always give me the visual editor if possible, 
    • Always give me the source editor, and 
    • Show me both editor tabs.  (This is the current state for people using the visual editor. None of these options will be visible if you have disabled the visual editor in your preferences at that wiki.)
  • Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mw:VisualEditor/IME Testing#What to test if you can help, and report it on Phabricator (Korean - Japanese) or on Wikipedia (Korean - Japanese).

If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

Whatamidoing (WMF), 00:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Single edit tab

  • Oppose. I discussed this deployment a month ago on Phabricator. I asked whether the WMF was going to try to slip in a Visual Editor default as part of the single-edit-tab-deployment. Jdforrester-WMF assured me the answer was no.[55] I apologized for being paranoid. Whelp, I just went to the test wiki. I created a brand new account. I clicked the edit tab. Would anyone like to guess which editor came up by default? Alsee (talk) 02:11, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Unclear what is going on here. Apparently there's a bug that there is supposed to be a menu, which isn't showing up. Could other editors report what browser you use, and whether you get a menu or if it just defaults to VE? And regarding the menu (I saw an image of it), it seems like a poor plan. New editors are asked to answer a question they don't understand, and get locked into whatever random editor they click. With two edit buttons they will naturally explore both. Alsee (talk) 04:59, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
    I recommend reading the long box on the right, with the two pictures. The second picture is from Special:Preferences, and shows how to change the settings whenever you want. You don't get "locked in" to anything. NB that the first "menu" box only appears once, but if you reset all of your preferences at test2, it will come back (or "should": I can't get it to appear in Firefox today). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:05, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
    I can't see what it's supposed to look like in action, because it's broken. So I'm going on little info here. By "locked in", I meant that a brand new user may well quit before they discover Special:preferences. With two edit tabs they will most likely explore both within a matter of minutes. Alsee (talk) 05:15, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
    I just tried editing the test2wiki in Chrome on Windows 7, and I saw the window asking me to choose my editor without any problems. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 06:45, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose default single edit tab for IPs who delete cookies. I agree with most everything Alsee wrote here. I saw the popup choice on the test wiki while signed in. New IP users are going to bail if they make the bad decision to choose VE, and are using Firefox. Because when on a page like Barack Obama they will see that it takes 25 to 30 seconds to load VE before they can do anything. As it does for me in Firefox. They might get lucky and figure out how to get back to wikitext as they are used to in the past. But since many IPs delete most or all cookies when they close their browser, they will be stuck with wasting time on this confusing popup choice again and again later. So this creates user paralysis, confusion, and loss of yet more editors. This also breaks the promise to not impose VE on editors. Imposing this popup window over and over is all about VE. It will be a waste of time for them. They just want their "edit source" button as before, and no cookies. People edit Wikipedia at work too. They don't want to leave a trail of any kind. So they don't save the Wikimedia cookies. Or they just want to be as anonymous as possible no matter where they are editing from. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:39, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
    • Under the current configuration for the English Wikipedia, the single edit tab for IPs would open in the wikitext editor. It would really be no different from what they have right now. The main question for the English Wikipedia is whether this set of four preferences would work for logged-in editors – for example, for the people who want the wikitext editor for everything except editing tables, and whose current choices are either (1) get used to having two edit buttons all the time or (2) re-enable the visual editor every time they want to use the visual editor for a single edit, and then re-disable it again to get rid of the double edit buttons. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
      • Right now IP users apparently don't have a choice. I logged out and looked at an article. They get a single edit tab, labeled "edit". But it edits wikitext only. As for logged-in editors I see no benefit in giving logged-in editors a single edit tab. I only see problems. They will have to go to preferences to choose editors. Whereas now, they can choose which editor to use at anytime by picking "edit source" or "edit". I think we should put those 2 buttons on IP articles too. Same labels. Why are we using an "edit" button for IP users that produces a wikitext editor? --Timeshifter (talk) 20:40, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
  • To quote from the Phab thread, "it's not clear to me what problem is being solved by a single edit tab." I don't find the responses there compelling (Some users click the wrong tab and some users don't know which tab does what) because a single button obscures what interface will be used and disguises that there even are multiple editing interfaces. That said, that's just my initial assumption so I'll go test it and come back. Sam Walton (talk) 15:58, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
    • I'd be particularly interested in hearing what you think about the ability to switch back and forth between the two editing systems during your edit (=without needing to save). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
      • Whatamidoing (WMF), looks good. I ran into no problems during my brief testing. If any anomalies do show up with switching-and-saving I assume they would be routine bug cleanups. Just don't try to make VE a replacement for the Preview button. (Flow does that - forcing unnecessary round trips through Parasoid is bad.) Alsee (talk) 10:59, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), perhaps there would be less confusion if we weren't going to a VE-configured test server to see what is being proposed here? Alsee (talk) 00:15, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

And what effect would this have on people like me who have disabled VE? Will I lose my edit tab entirely until I enable VE? I see that cookies will save the option that I picked last time, but we'll need to ensure that it gives both options until a "last time" happens. Nyttend (talk) 15:15, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
If you have disabled access to the visual editor, then this will have no effect at all. "Always give me wikitext" is nearly equivalent to disabling it (pages would always open in the wikitext editor, but once inside it, you'd have the option of manually switching solely for that particular edit), but if you've disabled the visual editor entirely, then this doesn't affect your editing experience at all. You can't even set a preference for this if the visual editor is disabled. (Cookies are only for IPs. Preferences for registered are recorded directly in their accounts, not in cookies.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Comment. Please create a dedicated talk page for the single edit tab on English Wikipedia. There is the dedicated talk page on MediaWiki.org but it uses Flow, and many people have problems with it. I suggest this:
  • Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/single edit tab
  • Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor/Feedback/single edit tab
See also the Flow discussion below in this section: #Flow is driving people away from Mediawiki.org reporting. This tech board is also inadequate. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:02, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Mobile app including HTML tags in edit summary section titles

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T122714

I noticed that this edit's summary includes <i>...</i> tags. This does not happen on the normal web interface, formatting in section titles is normally just thrown away. I guess a Phabricator ticke should be opened for this if there isn't one already, but it's too late right now for me to make a proper bug report. nyuszika7h (talk) 00:54, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

@Nyuszika7H: Thanks for the report. I filed a Phabricator task for you. The team that works on the app does not routinely check this page, so it would be prudent for you to file a Phabricator task for such issues in the future. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 05:20, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Very wide table is cut off on the left

As mentioned on Talk:Time zone#Display issue with wide table, a table in the associated article does not display correctly for me. I'm using Firefox 43.0.2. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:50, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I removed "float:right". Ruslik_Zero 20:06, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
 Fixed Thank you! Now it works correctly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:37, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Metro app's license

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T122468
Wikipedia App Windows 8

Does some developer know where's the license for our Wikipedia app for Windows 8/10? Its source is on our Wikimedia git repo – http://git.wikimedia.org/summary/apps/win8/wikipedia.git. It's titled as 'open source' on Windows Store. --RezonansowyakaRezy (talk | contribs) 23:39, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

@Rezonansowy: I can't find one, either. I've filed a report on phab:T122468. Zhaofeng Li talk (Please {{Ping}} when replying) 06:34, 27 December 2015 (UTC)
OK, thanks! --RezonansowyakaRezy (talk | contribs) 22:50, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Display language

Using the Display Language feature in language settings, I have my display language set to English; on many but not all other language WPs it correctly translates at least some of the interface to English, and it's a very handy feature. But for the deWP, for some reason, the language displayed is Italian. Iknow what the headings mean, but it's peculiar. DGG ( talk ) 05:57, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Does de:Special:Preferences say "en - English"? Try changing it away, save and change back to en. What interface language do you see at de:Wikipedia:Hauptseite and at http://de.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Hauptseite?uselang=en? I have en and see English at both. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:14, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
re-selecting it as you suggested fixed it. thanks! DGG ( talk ) 05:25, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Cite templates not working

Has anyone else been having trouble with the cite templates? I can't get any of the buttons to work (i.e. cite web, cite news, etc.). Also, the "Named references" button isn't working either. --♥Golf (talk) 13:09, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@♥Golf: Wasn't working for me yesterday when editing in the draft-space, it's working now though. Could you confirm if it still not working, and which namespaces you tried using it in? -- samtar whisper 14:30, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
It works for me in Firefox. What is your skin and browser? Please give an example page where you tried it and describe what goes wrong. You must click the icon to the right of "Named references". PrimeHunter (talk) 14:35, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
I use Internet Explorer 11. I haven't had a problem with this until today. I tried the usual "dummy fix" by rebooting my computer but that didn't help. The article I've been working on today is Charlie Murray (golfer). I have noticed that the problem is limited to this one article and doesn't affect any others I've edited today. The problem must be hidden in some metadata that I can't see or can't find. --♥Golf (talk) 14:43, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
fwiw, works for me on Firefox 43.0.1 - can you try another browser? -- samtar whisper 14:46, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the help from both Samtar and PrimeHunter. It looks like a problem with my browser that affects only this one article. I will work around the issue and trudge ahead! I appreciate you folks offering a helping hand! --♥Golf (talk) 14:56, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Maybe a WP:BYPASS would help? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:44, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Missing interlanguage (fa) link, only shows on my talk page

Greetings - At my talk page, User talk:JoeHebda today's Wikipedia:Tip of the day/January 2 shows the FA interlanguage link correctly. This link is missing everywhere else: Wikipedia:Tip of the day, Template:Totd CP, Wikipedia:Tip of the day/Display template gallery. Before posting here, I did the purge on all of these pages & problem persists. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 14:11, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

I see it below "Prior tip" at User talk:JoeHebda, and under "Languages" in the left pane on all the other pages. This is in accordance with Help:Interlanguage links#Method:
  • On Talk pages and on Meta, you can omit the leading colon. An interlanguage link like [[fr:Jeux olympiques]] will appear inline in the text, like a regular link.
If it works differently for you then what is your browser and skin? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:28, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Browser is Chromodo (Chrome) and skin is Modern. Will add the leading colon to test. Cheers! JoeHebda (talk) 16:38, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
 Done - I added the leading colon & now displays correctly. Thanks! JoeHebda (talk) 16:44, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Do you really want to display "fa:ویکی‌پدیا:نکته روز/۱۲ دی" inside the tip box when it's transcluded? If the code is in <noinclude>...</noinclude> then it will only display on Wikipedia:Tip of the day/January 2, and if the leading colon is omitted then it displays under "Languages" as normal for interlanguage links. If it's displayed inline then it can be piped like Persian. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:16, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
When I ran all 366 tips through AWB, non of the interlanguarge links are within the noinclude tag. So it looks like all is okay. I did open a FYI section at Wikipedia talk:Tip of the day#FYI - interlanguage wikilinks (fa) updated in case there is any further discussion needed. Thanks. And btw, the piping does look better to read. JoeHebda (talk) 17:36, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

References in section

Someone showed me once how to show references within a section of a talk page, rather than (irritatingly) always appear at the bottom of the page. I have forgotten. Help appreciated please. Peter Damian (talk) 16:20, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Shoot me, but does {{reflist}} work if you put it at the bottom of a section? -- samtar whisper 16:22, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
I just found it. {{reflist-talk}} Peter Damian (talk) 16:24, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Oh good :) that's one for the books, didn't know there was a variant for talk pages -- samtar whisper 16:25, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Yup it was new to me, despite 12 years editing here. Peter Damian (talk) 16:26, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
{{reflist-talk}} isn't obligatory. It just wraps a regular {{reflist}} in a box with a dashed border. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:40, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Lol, thanks. It does look neater though. What happens if you put two reflists in different sections? Peter Damian (talk) 22:34, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Answer Peter Damian (talk) 22:37, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: (actually, this is for new editors reading this thread - I'm sure Redrose64 already knows this) while {{reflist-talk}} isn't obligatory, it's all-but-obligatory to put "something" at the end of your comment or at the end of the section containing your comment so your references don't "fall through" to the bottom of the page, or worse, to a lower-down comment-section where someone else DID use "reflist-talk" or something similar. Besides reflist-talk, {{reflist}} and the original <references /> are options. Another frequently-used option when you don't need a full citation is to just put the url inside your comment or at the end of it, like so: blah blah (see [http://www.example.com here]) or blah blah[http://www.example.com], which render as blah blah (see here) and blah blah[56] respectively. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:45, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
What I mean is that you can use {{reflist}} instead of {{reflist-talk}} and it still works. You can use them (either one) in as many sections as you like, both of them will sweep up any as-yet undisplayed refs, whatever section those refs were in. Any refs that occur after the last {{reflist}} or {{reflist-talk}} will fall out the bottom, regardless of which one has been used. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:51, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Peter, to answer your question about multiple uses per page: It does exactly what you hoped for.
If you put either of these in Section #1, and another copy in Section #2, then the first template displays all the footnotes that are above it, the second displays all the footnotes that are between the first and the second, and any footnotes below the last one are "lost", and therefore automatically displayed at the end of the page. If you need to sort footnotes by any other order (even ones in this list, odd ones in that list, or whatever) then you need to use the |group=. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:51, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
Yes thanks I tested that and it does exactly as you say. {{reflist-talk}} makes it look nicer, in my view, but both do the trick. I didn't know about 'tlx' either. Wiki has come a long way. Peter Damian (talk) 10:10, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
{{tlx}} has been around since March 2006, and is an eXtended version of {{tl}} (Template Link) which has been around since February 2005. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:29, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
February 2005, rather. :-) Graham87 15:10, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Presentation of Citation needed span template

Could somebody please improve the presentation of {{Citation needed span}} as suggested on the talk page? The highlighting is difficult to recognise now. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:54, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Flow is driving people away from Mediawiki.org reporting. This tech board is also inadequate

People are sent to Mediawiki.org from this tech board. But then they have to use Flow. See WP:Flow. Many people are reporting problems with using it at Mediawiki.org. And Flow is no longer in active development. See mw:Flow: "However, starting in October 2015, Flow is not in active development."

The Mediawiki software is being hurt by Flow driving away people from reporting and commenting on Mediawiki bugs and features. From what I read, English Wikipedia will soon be Flow-free. Flow-based talk pages are eventually abandoned on English Wikipedia due to lack of users, and so they have been deleted one by one.

I hope we are not depending on this tech board to take up the slack for Mediawiki.org reporting and commenting? --Timeshifter (talk) 01:46, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

So you want mediawiki to change from flowboards to talk boards? — xaosflux Talk 01:48, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I want mediawiki.org to use regular talk pages for all discussion pages.
See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Suspcq0bf5nd3gsd
People were sent there from this Village Pump recently. Some of the discussion is about Flow problems. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:59, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
First of all, Flow isn't evil like some people seem to think it is. I sometimes respond to technical support requests at mw.org using Flow, and have no problems. It is a smooth interface for simple discussions.
Secondly, I'm not sure when people are sent to mw.org from this page. I suppose some WMF teams might want to have all feedback centralised, which is a very sensible idea to avoid duplication of effort across many wikis. But I can't think of any recent feature developments that would have included a request to post feedback at MediaWiki.org.
Thirdly, I'd like to know where "many people are reporting problems with using it at Mediawiki.org", so I can make up my own mind.
Finally, any software bugs and feature requests should, as always, be reported to Phabricator. — This, that and the other (talk) 05:01, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Your experience is not my experience with Flow. I find it to be terrible talk page software. I don't want to go all anthropomorphic and "evil" about it, though it is tempting. :)
Software bugs and feature requests are reported at Phabricator, here on this Village Pump, and are discussed on the talk pages at Mediawiki.org. Phabricator is not really for discussion. Comments tend to be short, and many are not replied to right away. It is not really meant for discussion. Newbs are intimidated by it, and developers are very busy. People feel much freer to discuss things here, or on Mediawiki.org talk pages. That is why it is important to use easy-to-use standard talk page format.
See the Mediawiki.org thread I linked to in my previous comment for some comments by people mentioning their difficulty with Flow. See also my talk page, and User:Alsee's comment recently about Flow. He is very knowledgeable about Flow problems. --Timeshifter (talk) 11:21, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
As "Phabricator is not really for discussion" was written: Phabricator's Maniphest tool is for tracking specific software development requests. It's not a forum software. :) Discussing those requests is one important function, among many others. Issue tracking system in general welcome contributors clearly sticking to the topic to keep discussions focused (hence I'd agree, if that's what was meant by writing "people feel much freer to discuss things here"). Right now I don't see how "Comments tend to be short" is a criterion for something plus "easy-to-use" can mean a lot of different things to different people...
Coming back to Flow: If many people are reporting problems with using Flow at Mediawiki.org, could you please point to some of these reports so interested people (like me) could take a look at them? Thank you a lot in advance! --Malyacko (talk) 12:05, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
Malyacko. See my comment farther down. The one that includes the box. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:44, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
No we are not dependent on this board to take up the slack, because there is no slack (not in the least because a core crowd of tech savvy users actually visits both venues as well as phabricator to tie stuff together).
Indeed, I(DONT)LIKEIT is not something that tends to go into phabricator. And indeed, please report actual experiences of users, so that interested people can look at them, triage them and possible distill an actionable out of it to file in phabricator. Which doesn't mean that they will then be immediately fixed; resolution time for any ticket is somewhere between 1 day and 8 years. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:59, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
"please report actual experiences of users, so that interested people can look at them". I prefer that users report their experiences themselves. Flow makes that difficult for many. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:42, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
People are. Don't extend your own aversion to using Flow towards the entire population. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:16, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I didn't say "the entire population". I said "Flow makes that difficult for many." Plenty of others have expressed problems with Flow. See Alsee's comments below. Did you bother to read it? Or did you look in the MediaWiki.org thread I linked to a couple times previously? It uses Flow, and as I said several times already people in that thread commented on the problems they were having with Flow. People were sent to that Flow thread from this Village Pump. Specifically, from this section: #Testing opportunities which is a subsection of the "VisualEditor News #6—2015" heading. I think it is a good thing that the Flow thread it links to is dedicated to a single topic (single edit tab). But the problem is that it uses Flow. I would prefer a dedicated talk page using the standard talk page format. For example:
  • Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/single edit tab
  • Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor/Feedback/single edit tab
It doesn't have to be on Wikipedia. It could be on MediaWiki.org, but the Wikipedia watchlist is looked at much more often by average editors than the MediaWiki.org watchlist. Now that the cross-wiki watchlist was voted as the number 4 priority by editors, maybe the location of a dedicated talk page will soon no longer be a problem. But I would prefer a standard Mediawiki talk page, not Flow.
--Timeshifter (talk) 03:59, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes,Ii read all of that. I just don't think that 3 people amongst many are a problem. People complain ALL THE TIME, all feedback pages by nature are 95% complaints, people who don't care or are happy don't have a reason to post. That doesn't mean anything in itself. Alsee is running an anti change campaign, you are annoyed, I get it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:56, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
People were invited to that Mediawiki.org thread from VisualEditor News #6—2015. 3 of the 11 editors in that thread mentioned problems with the Flow software used in that thread. Others may have had problems and did not bother to comment. That thread's topic was not about Flow. I think that is pretty significant. And if English Wikipedia has deleted almost all its Flow pages one by one due to people not using them, I think that is significant. Obviously, Flow is not ready for prime time. I never really saw a need for a complete rewrite of the talk page software. But anyway, my main point is that the number of Flow pages on Mediawiki.org should go down, not up. They should be eliminated altogether from Mediawiki.org for now. Mediawiki.org is too important. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:12, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
DJ, It's interesting that you say I'm running an anti change campaign. I believe I'm speaking for consensus, and that the WMF has been campaigning to get Flow to where it is. "Where Flow is" is that Flow deployment has stopped on EnWiki and most Flow pages are either gone or are about to be gone. If you disagree with our view on Flow, that's fine. But please don't imply we have a fringe view unless you're prepared to open an RFC proposing to move forward with Flow deployment, with a sincere belief that it might pass. I would welcome a Village Pump discussion to clearly ascertain the general consensus towards Flow. Alsee (talk) 09:52, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Re "running an anti change campaign", Flow is a clear case of "Our current editing scheme/software has several known problems. Something must be done. Flow is something. Therefor implementing Flow must be done." Give us something good that replaces the current system and we will be a lot more open to change. If I resist switching our drinks from coke to pepsi you could accuse me running an anti change campaign, but if I resist resist switching from coke to sand, I am not running an anti change campaign but rather pointing out that sand does not have the attributes that allow it to function as a beverage. --Guy Macon (talk) 10:14, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

(unindent). Here is a comment below about Flow from my talk page. It is from User:Alsee in reference to my comment about Flow in this MediaWiki.org thread I previously mentioned higher up in this Village Pump discussion.

What you saw was Flow.

  • The WMF has been eliminating most of their talk pages (user pages and some major mainspace pages), so you're forced to use Flow if you want to contact them to discuss problems with their projects. A particular problem is that they switched over all official contacts points related to Flow itself! That is particular problem for discussing Flow bugs. (Writing about the bug *in* Flow triggers the problem!)
  • You've only seen the tip of the iceberg. The list of problems with Flow is 142 feet long. Copy-paste is broken. A simple revert destroyed my original comment. Problems with templates. History is a disaster. The reply-threading turns modest-size discussions into unreadable spaghetti. You can't delete your own comments, much less someone else's. (You "hide" it, which leaves a link for it on the board.) IMO the biggest issue is that Flow does not store an accurate stable copy of what you write! Flow can randomly rewrite your formatting codes and nowikis etc. The way Flow works is kind of like translating your text into Russian, then translating it from Russian back to English when someone views or edits it. Sometimes those bugs can mangle your entire post into garbage during the rewrite. In fact Flow preforms that round-trip translation every time you try to preview what you wrote. So you preview, return to editing your wikitext, and Flow has REWRITTEN your wikitext! It's like editing on quicksand. There's no "truetext", everything Flow shows you is an illusion created on the fly.
  • It seems the WMF still wants to eventually get Flow deployed, but the good news is that they've realized that there are serious objections here. They have been *trying* to improve their relations with the community ever since the superprotect incident, with limited success. Putting Flow on hold has been one of the successes. The current official policy is that no Flow pages will be deployed without local consensus requesting it. I think they are hoping the tiny wikis start accepting it, and that eventually all the 'obstructionist-change-averse editors' get dragged along into the wonderful future. BTW there's a doc page where "Admins" and the most "Experienced" editors are defined as the change-averse groups. Lols.
  • There used to be 7 Flow pages on EnWiki. Activity has dropped to zero on every board where Flow gets deployed. One board was the Flow testing board: it died and was never fixed after an admin tried testing admin tools on it. I had a pair of abandoned boards deleted at MFD. I have another abandoned board at MFD with unanimous deletes so far. I have an open RFC at a dead wikiproject to roll back Flow - I *think* its passing but running an RFC inside Flow is a disaster. We can't move the discussion posts down to a separate discussion area, it's almost impossible to tell who is replying to who, and it is difficult to figure out which posts are !votes. Anyway, assuming it passes, that will leave us with two dead Flow pages. It's possible that EnWiki will be Flow-free in a month or two. I need to contact some of the other language Wikis with Flow to see if they want to move forward with Flow or start rolling it back. Alsee (talk) 17:28, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #6—2015 sent people to the MediaWiki.org thread. VisualEditor News #6—2015 is also still on this Village Pump page. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:48, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that everyone in this discussion is capable of finding my talk pages and WP:VisualEditor/Feedback here at en.wp, none of which have Flow. I'll make sure that the information gets passed along. (For those who haven't read the thread there, yes, I have explicitly posted this as an option in the mw.org for anyone who's struggling with Flow. So far, nobody has taken me up on that offer.) I'll even take Flow bug reports, although I've got nothing to do with that product. (If you're feeling "stuck" in Flow, then the most important thing for an experienced wikitext editor to know is that you should click the "[[ ]]" button in the lower right corner, and then proceed with plain old wikitext.)
Whether some other wiki ought to do something else cannot be decided here. What another wiki chooses to do is up to the community at that other wiki. If you want to change things there, then you need to actually have the conversation there. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), doesn't the link to the Flow text editor look more like this: {{}} ? PS: I like a lot of the features of Flow. One thing I did not care for was the refresh time for paging down when scrolling down page by page. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 08:26, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
No, it's square brackets, as you can see here:
This screenshot was taken a couple of minutes ago at mediawiki.org, on the mw:Talk:VisualEditor page. Flow is set to using VisualEditor and the full width of the screen for this screenshot. In Flow, the same [[ ]] icon is used to switch from the wikitext to the visual editor, and vice versa. Outside of Flow (aka in the real visual editor, which can do a lot more than Flow's current version  ;-) the two editors have different icons (the pencil from the mobile site in one direction, and "[[ ]]" in the other). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:37, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
Eventually, someone will attempt to implement WP:Flow here. If Flow is failing miserably at other wikis, I want to know about it.
For example, the history of the Feedback page you can't click "prev" in most edits?? When looking at past postings, I can't see what the whole topic looked like at a certain date?? This kills my main user cases. I can understand why editors would abandon Flow boards..... Flow looks like a much bigger clusterfuck than talk pages ever were. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:55, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
This issue is phab:T96895, and partially related to the wikitext contentmodel's issue at phab:2851. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
  • I for one don't like flow, and the moment it gets forcibly added to my talkpage, and other places I visit, is the moment I leave Wikipedia. I hate it. One big reason is, what the hell is up with those topic names?? I'm glad the project has been abandoned, because it means I won't have to deal with flow. Testing it left a bad impression with me.—cyberpowerChat:Online 21:01, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
    Fixing the UUID-only links, is phab:T59154. The project has not been abandoned, just put on hold for major feature development whilst the small team concentrates on Echo for a few months. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
  • More than 90% of users that go to mediawiki.org are users that have not edited on any other wikis on wikimedia and if they find "flaw" unbearable, unwelcoming or hard to use, why the hell are we trying to enforce it on all wikimedia wikis?.. the idea itself is over 3 years away from being implemented cause it has more "flaws" than then number of hair on your head (if you are not bald or balding)....I can honestly say its anti-user friendly and should not be enforced on mediawiki for now..--Stemoc 02:16, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
  • One very annoying feature with Flow is that each topic needs to be individually added to my watchlist and that I need to remove all topics individually whenever I wish to unwatch a talk page. The standard talk pages do not have this problem; watching and unwatching one page automatically watches and unwatches all topics. --Stefan2 (talk) 12:46, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

A challenge for anyone who supports Wikimedia Flow.

Note: Anyone unfamiliar with Flow can freely try test posting at the Flow mw:Talk:Sandbox.

Background: When the Flow project was first proposed, the Wikimedia developers insisted that [A] no existing software was suitable for Wikipedia talk pages, [B] no independent software vendor was qualified to create Flow, [C] If the Wikimedia developers were allowed to create Flow, it would come in on time, under budget, and [D] the users of Wikipedia would embrace the result as being better than what we are doing now. If I were in charge of the project, there would be documentation posted somewhere on the Wikimedia website that attempted to prove [A] and [B] with a detailed evaluation of multiple existing software packages and multiple vendors. I would also expect them to provide evidence that [C] and [D] are reasonable claims, perhaps by pointing out how well the Visual Editor project worked out.

I have a simple challenge for anyone who supports Wikimedia Flow. Please look at the following Free and Open Source software:

After looking at the above software, can you honestly say that Flow is better suited for Wikipedia talk pages? Can you honestly say that any upgrade to Flow that can be created in a reasonable amount of time is better suited for Wikipedia talk pages?

And now a challenge for those who dislike Flow:

After looking at the above software, can you honestly say that what we have now is better suited for Wikipedia talk pages? Please keep the Baby Duck Syndrome in mind and imagine the respose I would get if I was proposing new talk page software that requires a reminder to add four tildes at the end of your comment, requires a bot to fix it if you forget, and allows you to edit anyone's comment (including forging the signature) in a way that is invisible without checking the history?

I think that it is time to reexamine the alternative of starting with existing Free and Open Source software, then hiring someone to customize it as needed for use on Wikipedia talk pages. --Vlad Putin (talk) 16:17, 31 December 2015 (UTC) <--- forgery | real sig --> --Guy Macon (talk) 16:17, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Given that we are a wiki, and by definition must have a system for editing documents including templates, wikilinks, advanced formatting etc, I actually think it makes a great deal of sense to use the same system for discussions. At a minimum any replacement must accept all of the same markup syntax as is used when editing articles. There is no doubt that there are some significant areas for improvement, but most of these could be addressed with low-drama tweaks to the existing system (auto signatures, "reply" link automatically added to each comment, etc). But I don't believe that the pain associated with the current system is anywhere near severe enough to justify throwing it out, particularly if it would be replaced by something significantly less capable (c.f. Flow). And for what it's worth, the current system is very far from being the first forum/discussion system I have used so I don't think I'm baby-ducking on this one. Thparkth (talk) 16:15, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
  • I used multiple forum sites, including one running phpBB, before starting at Wikipedia or MediaWiki, and I can honestly say that (IMO) what we have now is better for our talk pages. You can sandbox content, make unobtrusive redactions, and view the entire history with MediaWiki, not to mention the best feature, which is the immense power of wikitext, templates and Lua to make and customise a variety of processes tailored to our needs. Perhaps this is not necessary on all talk pages, but using multiple systems is worse than putting up with minor annoyances in a single one, but of content incompatibility (as others have demonstrated with Flow) and just having to be fluent in multiple systems. BethNaught (talk) 16:54, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

  • If I'm having any "baby duck" issue, I'd be requesting systems that resemble a bulletin board system, or perhaps a newsgroup. (Cue cracks about showing my age). So I don't think that's at issue with me. Wikitext would probably not be a great choice for a system designed to be a pure discussion forum, which the software you cite often is used for. That's just fine. But this is not primarily a discussion site. Article talk pages are intended for work on the article. That may mean that sometimes, users need to copy over chunks of text to work with or discuss. Sometimes, I've even seen an entire article be copied into a Talk subpage, for editors who disagree to try to figure it out without worrying about the state of the "live" article. Using the same setup for talk pages as article pages allows that type of thing to happen. They are powerful, flexible, and work the exact same way the corresponding article page does.

    Additionally, our community isn't like others. If someone comes along and spams "Make eleventy billion dollars working from home!!!!1111!!!!" or "YOU ALL SUCK!!!!!!!!!" crap on a talk page, we don't want to have to have an admin come along and remove it. Anyone can. (That is even more true when the garbage is harassment or a blatant BLP violation). I have not yet once heard of talk page signature forgery being at issue, and why would it be? As soon as someone says "I never said that!", they, or someone else, will immediately go check the history to find out who did. I would consider deliberately forging someone else's signature in an attempt to harass or joe job them to be worth an immediate indef. But I've just never even heard of it happening, except perhaps from a few instances of blatantly obvious vandalism. So for those reasons, I just don't see the benefits of Flow (or the other systems you cited) being worth the tradeoff of losing the power and flexibility talk pages provide. We could make talk pages better, likely (perhaps auto-signing of posts being available as a preference and triggered by a flag on the page, as an example), but I don't see replacing them with something that's not wikitext. Seraphimblade Talk to me 17:42, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

    • This is irritating. I keep coming along behind User:Seraphimblade and find he's said what I wanted to say, only better. Yes please, don't make changes that make talk pages work in a form basically different to article pages. I also frequently copy over material from articles. And anyone should be able to revert spam/vandalism/socking etc edits on talk pages. Doug Weller talk 19:46, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
In a bid to understand-- is Flow the software I am using now? Is the proposal to set up a bulletin board system? Is the issue the wikisyntax that I can type in my sleep, or the text-editor that I dream of patching into Firefox?
There are a couple improvements I would like to see- like the ability to display two character subset panels at the same time- or set up a custom one. ( I have a gedit file that does that job). Like a drop down menu of my favourite templates- such as efn sfn convert. Like being able to customise the number of lines displayed on the fly- oops I have just found that button- wow. Default autosign would be useful. Clem Rutter (talk) 19:06, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
See mw:Flow, and for an example mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:31, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
I have to say, the idea of making incremental improvements on what we have now is quite appealing. Especially if the WMF gets away from the mentality that prevents them from paying a software development company to do that for them instead of giving the job to the organization that produced Visual Editor and Flow. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:11, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
I would also like incremental improvements. Some of them will be imperfect because talk pages aren't set up with clearly defined posts and fixed sections but many things could be done without starting over without MediaWiki features we are used to and like.
  • Automatic signing cannot be done reliably but then make it semi-automatic. Run a Sinebot-like test on save and ask the user whether to sign, or always do it depending on a preference.
  • Section watching cannot be done reliably because sections can be renamed, archived, and full page edits can make changes that are hard to identify correctly in diffs. But allow section watching anyway and give a warning (depending on a preference) if the software can no longer identify the watched section. Many section renames are easy to detect in diffs, and archiving could introduce standardized procedures that tell the software where a section goes as long as the recommended procedure is followed, for example wikilinking the archive in the edit summary which removes the section.
  • Indenting is hard to automate with the current system but then semi-automate it. If any indentation at all is used then accept it. If no indentation is used in an addition of a paragraph then ask the user whether they are replying to the preceding post or something else. There will sometimes be wrong indentation but it could be made to usually work. Maybe add a small reply link after identified signatures (with a disable option in preferences) to reply to that post, automatically adding one more indentation.
As long as new features which may annoy power users come with a preference to easily disable them, the drama about changes will be reduced a lot. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:28, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
All points well taken here except maybe for the 'Section Watching' one. Besides getting the HTML5 semantic/heading element bits up and running under mark-up already (don't get me started), all we really need to do is treat "sections like an extension of the PAGEID magicword ({{PAGEID}} = 48645470 in this case) approach and assign each "section" its own unique id too. No more fumbling around with ascii/escape/control/Unicode character considerations, no more ltr/rtl concerns, no more language translation issues; the possibilities go on and on and on. The User: will never "see" anything different when it comes to page titles, section names or target anchor linkages to boot.

Nice to dream aloud once in awhile <sigh> - George Orwell III (talk) 23:33, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

  • The other forum software cited is useless here because wikipedia isn't a forum. It's a workplace. Wikicode gets tossed about as part of that work. Our pages have all the power and features of article space because talk pages *are* article pages. We can copy-paste anything from anywhere to anywhere, do anything anywhere, and literally move any page from anywhere to anywhere. There is an underlying simplicity in that powerful system. There are tradeoffs whatever system we use. If the software had been designed from the start *by* the community *for* the community, maybe it would have been worthwhile. For a while I was submitting bug reports and improvements, but then I realized it was counterproductive. Developer time is a limited and valuable resource, and I realized it was just diverting them to do work that shouldn't actually be done. Imagine all of the improvements we could have gotten if the WMF hadn't sunk god-knows how many man-years of work on Flow. The current system hasn't been improved because the WMF decided not to improve it.
Regarding section-watching, it was on the Community Wishlist but it didn't get enough votes to make the cut. The WMF was talking about complicated and difficult ways to reliably track sections - bad idea. Simply ignore edits that don't touch an existing section. In the worst case it would alert you to an edit that causes the software to lose track of that section - like if someone moves the section and renames it. That is an edit you want to be alerted to anyway. It's no big deal if that case forces the software to ask you which section (if any) you'd like to select as a replacement-watch item. Alsee (talk) 00:37, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, section watching was supported by the German Community Wishlist, but already back then did developers caution that the rewrite of core software that would be required to support that section may be too impractical to happen.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 00:51, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Of course it was poo-pooed; it would have needed the required HTML5 elements vetted and in place, have 'defined' how those elements must be applied in order to consistently detect &/or generate document outlines that are "usable" and a period of trial and error testing before it was made 'permanent'. If a page can be tracked for "changes", its only because the 'foundation and position' of that page has been well establish and consistently the same. Define a 'section' the same way a page (article) is at its most basic of components and the same 'tracking' very could have been done with sections.

Heck, have every section reside on a sub page of the root main page and transclude them all in for viewing - problem solved; your section is really a page. If you look at it that way, its really not all that different than what we have now.

So, if you can't even keep "pace" with the basic advances & improvements provided by new specs and better agents, its no mystery to me why participation is dropping off. "Whaaa.... we'd be stranding tens of thousands of current users if we kept pace" or whatever was a poor excuse not be ready to hit the floor running next month any way you cut it imho. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:28, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Would it be possible to use the same solution (transclusion) for articles too? I've been annoyed for many years now by how long our articles are and wished that every section were basically its own article that you can edit and watch completely independently. (Basically, the way it used to be in ye olden days, although I didn't know Wikipedia yet at the time.) That would also reduce the conflicts that keep me from easily undoing edits. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:09, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
I don't know how something like would go over on WP but it is most certainly possible - its pretty much the only way the high end stuff on Wikisource is created nowadays. You can see an example of a "section" being hosted as its own "article" here. Remember to take a peek at adjacent entries (previous or next) as well checking out the article in edit mode as another bit of proof that transclusion can be of use. -- George Orwell III (talk) 18:35, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
That's the other way round, though – my idea was more along the lines of decade articles such as 90s BC, where every "section" under "Events" is transcluded from specialised year articles. So, the idea is, instead of one long article you get a number of considerably shorter articles, which are transcluded into the main article to make up its sections. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:47, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Not really. The point was it doesn't matter where or what you are transcluding-in from -- be it from a different namespace or from sub-pages of a main root-page -- just as long each page (or section in your case) is consistently well defined (beginning and end are properly labelled) to begin with. Maybe this page is a better illustration of the premise. Either way; the bottom line is its still possible and developed well beyond just a prof-of-concept on Wikisource. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:17, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Section watching exists now on Portuguese Village Pump

See: Portuguese Village Pump.

--Timeshifter (talk) 09:02, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

This was discussed before at English Wikipedia somewhere. The consensus was not to add such functionality. Can't give you the link, He7d3r most probably will give it. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:32, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Each section there is a transclusion. It works for section watching but it's a lot more complicated. A new section requires creation of a subpage then adding the subpage as a template to the main page. You can't really edit the full page anymore, and trying to do this to articles would be particularly ugly. I'd be curious to look over the previous discussion mentioned by Edgars2007, but I think we're better off with software that simply filters out edits that leave the title and section-content unchanged. Messy edge case show up as an obviously relevant change. Alsee (talk) 09:43, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
We've had a system like that on en.wp for *years* - it is used at WP:AFD. Consider any bulleted entry in WP:AFD#Current and past Articles for deletion (AfD) discussions, this is a link to one of the daily subpages. Go to any one of those, such as 20 November (Wednesday), and you'll see that it appears to be a page with sections as usual. If you edit it using the tab at the top, you'll see that after the __TOC__ magic word, it's just a whole bunch of transcluded subpages. Now edit it using a section edit link, and you find that you're editing a subpage, which may be watched without the need to watch all of the other deletion discussions for that day. The downside is that you can't blanket-watch all of those: you need to watch them individually. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:50, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Do you mean Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 93#Support or oppose a test Village Pump based on Portuguese VP? Helder 16:44, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Yes, that is the one. And now I understand why I couldn't find it myself - I looked at your contribs, Helder :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:20, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
This technique is also used at the (French) fr:Wikipédia:Le Bistro, (Danish) da:Wikipedia:Landsbybrønden, and (Italian) it:Wikipedia:Bar Wikipedias (and probably more), though all use different systems (code) and setups (e.g. per-day subpages or per-section subpages). Adopting the concept globally, has been discussed before, and I'll try to find those old discussions, next... which hopefully have the full lists of concerns and technical-blockers (something about scaling and caching, IIRC, plus of course the added complexity for everyone and especially for newcomers). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Best way to handle a temporarily-infected URL?

I added a big warning to readers because the official web site for Gusi Peace Prize is being blocked by my security software as being "infected."

I don't know of any wiki-precedent for handling cases where legitimate web sites were recently reported by reliable security vendors as infected and are not yet confirmed to be cleaned up. If there is a wiki-precedent, let me know and I will undo my edit and follow precedent.

If there is no precedent, we need to come up with a solution.

My recommendation comes in two parts:

  • NOW:
    • Create a warning template similar to the "hand-done" warning I created on the page above. This template should be a "dated" template with categories so it can be easily tracked and bot-removed after a few weeks.
    • Have a bot regularly sweep all uses of the template for web sites then put a similar notice on all pages that have those web sites on them.
  • As programming resources are available:
    • Change the Wikimedia software so that if that template appears on that page, web-sites that are listed in the template will not be "clickable" without going through a warning of some type.
    • After the software is changed, redo the warning template so there is no visible test. This way people (and web-crawlers) that are just reading or editing the article and not clicking on the affected links are not distracted with unnecessary warnings.

Again, this is only for legitimate web sites that should not be added to the normal blacklist, on the assumption that any legitimate web site will be cleaned up within weeks if not days, hours, or minutes. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:43, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

@Davidwr: Good ideas - I've done a bit of a readability copyedit on your warning. Just a note, what security software are you using? I think we need to be careful with claims such as this, as VirusTotal only gives a 1/66 detection and Sophos tends to over-react -- samtar whisper 14:06, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
I'd agree with maybe a warning should both VirusTotal and a reliable security vendor flag a URL - however it raises the question of Wikipedia providing a layer of security to its readers? On one hand we have the argument that its the reader's responsibility to ensure they have up-to-date antivirus etc but on the other Wikipedia often drives a lot of traffic to these sites.. Interesting concepts -- samtar whisper 14:13, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Too bad Kaspersky does not rate it as Kaspersky is a gold standard compared to the rest of the 65 AV vendors. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 15:09, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
This should probably be discussed with User:Beetstra or any of the regulars at the WP:BLACKLIST. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

My advice would be to remove (not just disable, remove) all those links from the article to protect the reader, (meta-)blacklist it (to disallow re-additions) and to . People will ignore the warnings, even if they are next to the links. The links are always 'convenience', references should be able to stand also without a direct hyperlink to the document, and the loss of the homepage of the subject is not detrimental for the article either. When the website is clean again, de-listing is trivial and the article can be brought back to normal.

Note that having the link clickable in the warning is a WP:BEANS-like action (people will follow the link and notice that a) their antivirus does not detect any problems and b) find out that their computer behaves oddly). --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:20, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

  • To everyone who responded Thank you. Please note that this is a special case of a legitimate web site which by how has (I expect and hope) cleaned things up but which the security vendor hasn't (as of the last time I checked) re-scanned. OR it is a false-positive from one security vendor (none of the other security vendors are flagging it). davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 04:02, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
    • It is fine that it is legitimate, but this is about protecting the reader. If the link is malicious, it should be disabled and it should be made so that the link can not be added back while it is a problem, and while it has not been confirmed yet that it is not a problem anymore. --Dirk Beetstra T C 05:17, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Vertical align table rows

Is there an easier way to vertically align all rows in a table than adding the style to each row individually? Can I set it for the entire table at once? SharkD  Talk  22:22, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

In HTML5, yes; in Wiki markup, no. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:22, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
You can do it wiki-markup by establishing a class setting modifying the tbody element (which is always there in html but you won't see it under wiki-mark-up and can't apply it in an edit session either). To see what I mean add 
.valign-top > tbody {
	vertical-align: top;
}
to your local .css file, give it a chance to work its way through the 'cache' and then apply class="valign-top" to any table tag to see its effect on all the descendent table elements. tr, th and td all inherit their vertical alignment values from tbody, thead or tfoot - whatever the case might be - normally; tbody is the only one that is ever present in wiki-mark-up though. We're just changing what the rows and cells are inheriting with the above in short. -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:43, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
What is a local css file? SharkD  Talk  01:38, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
It's a CSS file that only affects the way you see pages, not the way that other people do. For example, if you add the code above to User:SharkD/common.css then you will see all the rows in tables with class="valign-top" as vertically aligned, but other people will see them as they did before. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 05:11, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Why article Fair License has been deleted?

As a dedicated web site http://fairlicense.org/ has been created I wanted to check/update the the wikipedia article.

But this article has been deleted since 2015-04-17. And I wonder why. But I do not know how to find the archived debate of the proposed deletion of the Fair License article.

I have attempted:

Please explain how to find the archived debate of a deletion proposition.

Moreover I am interested to improve the Fair License article in order to undelete it. How to request undeletion?

For information, this is the web.archive.org version before deletion date.


Oliver H (talk) 15:29, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

@Oliver H: The article in question was PRODed, meaning it was asserted to be an "uncontroversial deletion" and thus no debate took place. The reason given for the PROD was "NN, no references". You can request undeletion (I believe) here -- samtar whisper 15:40, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
This is enough of a request and I have restored the article. -- GB fan 16:02, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
@Oliver H:Please note that if the issues which lead to the deletion aren't dealt with (NN stands for "Non-notable), it probably will be nominated at AFD and deleted. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:13, 4 January 2016 (UTC)


Thank you for your help. For your information, User:GB fan has removed the deletion banner and I have added a new section /* History */. Oliver H (talk) 16:40, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Oliver H, I removed the Prod as part of the restore after you contested the deletion. Anyone can nominate the article for deletion using AFD. You will need to show that it meets the WP:Notability guidelines to survive a deletion request there. -- GB fan 17:06, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
@Oliver H: to directly answer you question, some changles to articles are in the Special:Log (such as this article's deletion here). — xaosflux Talk 19:05, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Rollback and notifications

When you use rollback on a page that has signatures, does it notify the people whose signatures got removed in the edit that you reverted? I rolled back a bunch of edits by an editor (example) who was vandalising user talk archives, and I wonder whether I pinged a pile of people suddenly. WP:Notifications mentions that edits mentioning more than fifty editors won't send pings, so I assume that this one won't have sent anything, but some of my smaller reversions definitely had fewer than fifty userspace links. The page doesn't mention rollback at all, except by misusing the term to mean merely "revert". So in summary, does rollback send pings to mentioned users, and if it does, can we ask that the function be tweaked so that rollback doesn't send pings? It's not a "mention" in any real sense. Nyttend (talk) 03:19, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Looking at the docs confirms experience: edits like those will not generate any notifications. Points that seem to disqualify a notification include: it's changing lines, not just adding new lines; the wikitext is complex (it contains a section header not at the start); no new signature at end. Johnuniq (talk) 03:30, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
No new signature at end — of course. I forgot that I had to sign the end of an edit for it to generate a "mention" notification. Nyttend (talk) 03:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Can the edit filter do this, and if not, how do we request it?

Some people at this thread were playing with the edit filter trying to keep an IP vandal from causing trouble at the Refdesk talk page. Since a talk page is where the people who can't post on the regular page go, the alternative of semi-protecting it is extremely undesirable - anywhere you send them, the same thing could happen. The IP was annoying people by deleting someone else's comment repeatedly, which is indeed the sort of thing to arouse a fury, though the irritation of other non-Wikipedians unable to communicate with us at all should be balanced against it. What I proposed there was a filter that would "allow non-autoconfirmed editors to add text to this page, but not change or remove it; each edit must be a single continuous block of added text and it must contain a four-tilde signature or it will be rejected... the signature must be at the end of the added text, save for a few characters of whitespace." I had three people agree, but they weren't entirely sure this can be done with the existing filter. So the first step is figure out, can you do this with the existing features, or is something altogether new required? And if so, what is the best way to get work started on it? Wnt (talk) 22:15, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

A purely technical answer:
allow non-autoconfirmed editors to add text to this page, but not change or remove it
  • yes
each edit must be a single continuous block of added text
  • this would be harder, but technically is possible
must contain a four-tilde signature
  • not possible, but you could enforce a link to a user page and a time
the signature must be at the end of the added text, save for a few characters of whitespace
  • yes
I wouldn't recommend setting up a filter this way, as there should be easier ways to do it. Do you have diffs of the problematic edits? Prodego talk 22:51, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Someone at the thread I mentioned talked about how the IP had dodged his attempts to set some other kind of filter. This was one recent example. I'm drawn to set up something like this on an ideological basis - I want a solution that is open source, that doesn't assume that someone talking about any particular thing or posting from a particular place is bad, but which simply makes it impossible for them to do anything but post some nonsense under their own name that people will immediately see and can gripe about if they like. Wnt (talk) 01:17, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
I suspect the lnegative impacts of such a filter: Users can't edit their own comments, users can't reindent other editors comments, users cannot remove vandalism... will outweigh the benefits of stopping this particular vandalism. Revert and block is probably the best way to go here. Prodego talk 01:21, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Agree, revert and block the ip - same as if they were interfering on any other page. — xaosflux Talk 01:56, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Just to clarify Wnt's suggestion, the proposal is for the filter to apply only to IP edits - logged-in users won't be affected. Reverting didn't work for the incident in question as the IP user rapidly changed addresses. (Incidentally, why isn't it possible to enforce a four-tilde signature? Does the filter have to come after the wikitext is parsed?) Tevildo (talk) 20:24, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
As I understand it parsing occurs first. Example. Obviously this is good, since otherwise you could just bypass a filter by setting your signature. However, I've never actually tried it. Prodego talk 20:35, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Based on discussion at Wikipedia talk:Edit filter#"pre-save transformed" variables it appears it is possible to detect a signature. Prodego talk 22:56, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Issue with Navbox template - text lines not flowing full width

Greetings, For Navbox Template:Roman Catholic ecclesiastical provinces in the United States I added the right parameter to move logo to right side of the navbox. I notice that the detail lines are still not taking the full width of the navbox; and do not know how to fix, so am reporting here. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 15:20, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

What do you mean by "detail lines"? --Izno (talk) 15:27, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
Every line that follows after list1=. JoeHebda (talk) 15:32, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
This seems to happen in Chrome but not Firefox and IE. In the resulting code, the table cell with the image (navboxes are tables) has width:0% CSS and the cell with the links has width:100%, which is apparently varyingly interpreted by browsers. SiBr4 (talk) 16:25, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
For some strange reason, the rendered width of the image cell is positively correlated to the length of the navbox title. SiBr4 (talk) 16:42, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
@Edokter: BTW. --Izno (talk) 16:49, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
My browser is Chromodo (Chrome) and skin is Modern.
The navbox for Template:Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee has a 100px image and does not have this issue. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 16:51, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
It is indeed a Chrome (Blink) issue. It goes away when you disable/remove the width:100&;. We may want to investigate if the 0%/100% cell widths are actually necessary. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:46, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
I updated the Anchor (#) that was changed in the article, and added BR to shorten the template title. Seems to have helped. Cheers, JoeHebda| Talk 20:56, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
That is not really a solution; it only (partly) moves the problem to the title header. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:23, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
* Agree Yes, the title line-break is a temporary work-around. I have not a clue of how to fix. JoeHebda| Talk 17:16, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
This has come up before, Template talk:Navbox/Archive 18#Width having opposite effect. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:40, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Thankyou Redrose64 for this info. I removed the title line BR and added line liststyle=width: auto after line listclass = hlist, and with a good result. Cheers! JoeHebda| Talk 18:30, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

How easy or how difficult is it to convert the Mobile edit applications to a two-phase operation for a Mobile Village Pump

Wikipedia editing by Mobile has used vast human resources to develop a mobile editing system but with limited success. It might be better and offer more options if a two-part Mobile editing environment could be considered as a Mobile Village Pump for processing Mobile Edit Requests.

For example, in the first part of the two-stage Mobile Village Pump described here, Mobile editors and users would recognize that their edit environment is lacking in comparison to full-keyboard editing, and Mobile editors would simply have a way to "mark" or identify edit problems in an article, with a short description of what needs to be done for a desktop full keyboard computer to fix it at the "Mobile Village Pump". The second part is then to relay the identified "edit problem" passage of a Wikipedia article to a Mobile Village Pump in order for Wikipedia editors who are at a full keyboard computer to then do the fix, or send it back to the Mobile editor as either "fixed" or requiring further clarification. There are so many criticisms in the newspapers at this point about the poor Mobile editing experience that it might be nice to consider technically implementing such a Mobile Village Pump for Wikipedia, rather than continuing huge human resource investments into improving stand-alone Mobile editing capacity which is not really catching on as was once hoped for. How difficult would it be to technically implement such a Mobile Village Pump and associated apps, or is it even possible to do this? Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 17:52, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

>>> "There are so many criticisms in the newspapers at this point about the poor Mobile editing experience..."
could you please link to some of these critiques? before (or in parallel to) turning the whole mobile editing process on its ear, it may be worthwhile to go over actual complaints, and, if nothing else, at least make sure each legit complain has a corresponding phabricator ticket. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:59, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
@קיפודנחש: Here is one of the links from The Guardian last summer [58]. Here is the link to The New York Times article last summer on Mobile problems: [59]. Many more are out there, basically that growth of Mobile at Wikipedia has not come close to the growth-rate of social-media on other sites as a significant issue. Cheers. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 19:46, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
This sounds very much like "Make it easier for mobile users to slap a cleanup tag on an article and expect someone else to fix it". That's... not been a very effective way to improve articles historically. —Cryptic 18:26, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
When I wrote this I also recalled that it may have similarity to how non-account editors request edits to protected pages by posting the requests on the Talk page. The key here is to follow your words which point to finding an "ëffective way" for Mobile users to do edits. So far Mobile editing has not proved an easy challenge using conventional approaches in spite of hundreds on programmer hours devoted to this issue. The suggestion here is that such a two-phase approach could offer a new approach to make things easier and more accessible for Mobile editors, and to find a more "ëffective way" to get Mobile editors and users involved. Cheers. Fountains-of-Paris (talk) 19:46, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Is this script safe?

Is this script safe? Its supposed to get the edit count of a user page and display it in the accompanied userbox. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.66.71.156 (talk) 17:38, 5 January 2016

Probably: it was written and largely maintained by Waldir (talk · contribs) who is not known for writing unsafe scripts, and the last edit was by Krinkle (talk · contribs) who is similarly trustworthy. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:46, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks 79.66.71.156 (talk) 17:50, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
What I love about scripting languages is that you can always look at the source and see what it's doing :) and yeah, for what it's worth, you have my word that the script isn't malicious. At best, it may be technically flawed, but others are welcome to fix any bugs they come across. Cheers, Waldir talk 18:26, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Please note that the big warning, Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account etc., is always present on users' .js pages — it's not something that the software added because it thought the page was dangerous, and it's not something added by a wary human. Nyttend (talk) 23:05, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
Oh no. There are a bunch of pies coming out of my printer now. </humor>—cyberpowerHappy 2016:Online 00:14, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_142&oldid=1142560644"