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There's another layer of stubs missing from those - the WP Africa template allows for country-level setting of importance. Petscan is your friend, at least for Top and High. There are no Vital Stubs, and so I've given you Vital Starts --Tagishsimon(talk)10:32, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hi, I've created this as a maintenance/development tool, so general navigational templates by district and region of each country can be documented and developed evenly. I began listing for the UK but an error seems to have crept in on Wales #invoke:Navbox . Is there a maximium number of templates which can be displayed on one page at one time or something? Obviously eventually sub pages would be created by region of each country but if I knew what the maximium load was I could work around that. It's a long development anyway, any is free to help.♦ Dr. Blofeld14:09, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I'm trying to build a metatemplate ({{identifier}} so we can streamline identifier templates such as {{doi}}. In particular, I want to have a switch that allows/disallows inputs.
the goal here is that if {{{allow-free|}}} is set to yes in {{doi/sandbox}}, then that the template will allow the access-parameter to have a value of 'free'.
To my understand, when we use {{doi/sandbox|10.1234/0123456|doi-access=free}}, we should get doi:10.1234/0123456. However, as of now, I get doi:10.1234/0123456.
In {{#switch: string | case = result}}, the = must syntatically belong to the switch construction and in your code it doesn't. I'm not sure of the details but I think case and result must be separate complete expressions. Even if you get that working, it gives tricky template maintenance if case is not a simple constant. Can you use something like this instead:
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
Look at the buttons
Can anyone guess how I did that (I changed nothing in .js/.css pages). I think I have stumbled upon an Easter egg! I'll tell you if you are unable to guess it! 10:34, 24 September 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by VarunFEB2003 (talk • contribs)
I can't see anything in that screenshot other than the standard edit window in MediaWiki UI format—what are we supposed to be looking at here? ‑ Iridescent13:01, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Special pages are (almost?) all dynamic (our servers build them from scratch whenever they are fetched by your browser); yet they may be transcluded. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:54, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Could someone continue to update this template? I see updates stopped on 12 July 2016 on en.wiki (and other Wikis too), and user Ace111 (whose bot Acebot used to update these variables) seems inactive now on en.wiki, Meta and elsewhere.
Is it possible for other bot to continue Acebot's work on {{NUMBEROF/data}} (or, better, for bot Acebot itself to continue them as it did)?
Template {{NUMBEROF}} that uses data from {{NUMBEROF/data}} is used widely (on en.wiki in articles about other Wikipedias, such as article for e.g. German Wikipedia, which is now not updated because de.wiki has >1.979.765 right now and en.wiki article says 1,958,190 what is the last value updated in {{NUMBEROF/data}} on 12 July) and on some very visible places on some Wikipedia projects (like Main Page), and would have to be removed if updates are not possible in the future.
That's why even some notification should be made if bot stops working, so users know. Is it possible to make such notifications in the future? --Obsuser (talk) 02:31, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
@Obsuser: I've look into this a bit. Ace111 has been recently active at ruwiki and is aware that his bot is not functioning. Per ru:User talk:Ace111#Acebot @meta (15 July 2016), Ace is having problems updating the bot to use https for the API. I suggest contacting him on his talk page here and/or at ruwiki. If he is unable to get the bot running again, I will look into coding a replacement. — JJMC89 (T·C) 06:33, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
@JJMC89: OK, I've just asked Ace111 on ru.wiki (he's recently been more active there than on en.wiki) and will wait for eventual answer.
Would it be possible to have these values for NUMBEROF incorporated somehow as a magic word and instantly updated/loaded by Wikisoftware as same as for magic word NUMBEROFARTICLES, for example? This way bot would not be needed, all values would be correct 100% time, and on all Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia) projects (maybe to do this in the future if not now)... --Obsuser (talk) 06:54, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Acebot made a first edit for {{NUMBEROF/data}}. I installed a recent version of pywikibot and was able to update the template using https, in July had problems with it. Sorry for a large period without updates. It seems that further regular updates are possible. — Ace111 (talk) 03:03, 25 September 2016 (UTC)
Question about native_name parameters of various infoboxes
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
In various Infobox templates such as Template:Infobox person, there are two parameters, |native_name= and |native_name_lang=. These are used for indicating a person's name in their native language's script.
According to the instructions, if we're just adding one bit of native script, (let's say for someone's name in Malayalam) we're supposed to go:
|native_name = ഇന്നസെന്റ് വറീത് തെക്കേത്തല
|native_name_lang = ml
However, as far as I can tell, |native_name_lang= doesn't produce any visible change to the infobox. Which seems like a waste of energy. If someone took the time to add "ml" to a parameter, it should probably display "Malayalam:" next to the script, so we know what language the squiggly lines are written in.
According to the instructions, if we were adding two bits of native script, we'd instead use the various {{lang}} templates, in this case {{lang-ml}}:
This would result in Malayalam: ഇന്നസെന്റ് വറീത് തെക്കേത്തല being displayed in the infobox (along with whatever the second language was...)
So the questions are: Does anyone have any idea what benefit |native_name_lang= provides to the article? Why don't we only use |native_name= in conjunction with the {{lang}} template? Wouldn't that be simpler?
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I just noticed that the edit window has a bright red background for template-protected pages. Is this a new thing, or has it been around for a while? I could've sworn I've at least opened a template-protected template for editing since getting the right, but I may be wrong. nyuszika7h (talk) 22:41, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Nah, it's an old thing. Everybody who can edit a template protected or fully protected page sees the red background if they edit it. That's so to make it easier for template editors and administrators to notice the protection status. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:48, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Could someone outline how to answer a call to delete (AfD) a new page by other individuals defending the same page contentDiogenes Loquitur (talk) 22:27, 25 September 2016 (UTC). I cannot find any easy answer to this on any WIKI page. Sure there should be a simple way of doing this? Diogenes Loquitur (talk) 22:27, 25 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Resolved
Hi, Going through this log I've noticed all the afds that have second or third noms simply say "(2nd nomination)" instead of "X (2nd nomination)", When I click on some of the AFDs some will say "X (2nd nomination)" whilst others say "(2nd nomination)",
It's never happened before so not sure if it's a bug or what, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk00:46, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi GeoffreyT2000 - I'm not sure as this AFD still says it and that's with me purging the log as well as this AFD ... or would the purging take much longer?, Sorry I'm hopeless when it comes to technical things, Thanks for your help/reply tho, –Davey2010Talk01:00, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
{{Afd2}} is used with subst: so if it was substituted on an Afd page between 13 September and 26 September then it will have |stripprefix=Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ in the wikitext. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:16, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Ahhh right I thought once a template was changed then everything was changed, Having read SUBST it all makes sense now!, Thanks PrimeHunter for kindly explaining in the simplest of terms and thanks GeoffreyT2000 for finding the cause :). Thanks, –Davey2010Talk02:47, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Opera 9.27
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion
Any progress on updating your browser to something that isn't obsolete, unsupportable, and a decade old? It doesn't support HTML 5, does it? I'd guess it probably can't cope with modern CSS either. It must be long past time to let go of it and use something supportable. Murph9000 (talk) 09:45, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
You expect people to fix an error in a browser from over 8 years ago? We don't even support MS IE8, and that was released a year later. Update your browser. --Izno (talk) 11:45, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
That's not very nice. The official story is more along the lines of: "You are using a very old browser used by very few people, which we do not support and for which we thus cannot guarantee a fully functioning website. Most will be working, but you should also expect some things to NOT work." A fix might be possible, but it will depend upon the time available to volunteers to invest in such a rare problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:37, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I was wondering if somebody could find a way to generate me a list of women article stubs for each African country in a list to distribute in this contest page. Also from the list generated on high/mid importance ones a hotlist of articles on women stubs for Africa too considered importance ones. Thanks.♦ Dr. Blofeld08:56, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
When you edit text and mention a new username they are notified if you add your signature. Before this only happened under certain conditions. [3]
Users are notified if they are mentioned in a section where you add your own signature even if you edit more than one section. Before, users were not notified if you edited more than one section in one edit. [4]
Problems
The MediaWiki version that was supposed to come to the wikis two weeks ago was put on hold again because of new problems. The MediaWiki version after it is now on all wikis. [5][6]
Changes this week
There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [7]
Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [8]
Latest comment: 8 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
When I close a "wiki loves monuments" ad banner, it appears to pop-up again and again, as I happen to login from separate IP addresses. (I suppose that is why I keep seeing it.) Is there not a way make it so that the banners do not repeatedly pop-up for the same user? I wonder if this is a bug that has already been logged? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 18:36, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
I just saw the ad banner again at my home IP, and I believe this isn't the first time. And I don't want to turn off all central notices. I just think that after I close out of it once, I shouldn't ever see it again. Is it supposed to keep re-appearing after I close out of it? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 02:49, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
An impression diet would have caused the same problem, as clicking a banner away should have the same result as an impression diet: not showing again.
Banners are enabled in such way with such settings that the banner fulfils what is supposed to do. Some banners use an impression diet, as for those it is assumed that if you have not looked at it in the for example 10 page views on a wiki, you are not interested. The Wiki Loves Monuments banner is set up differently than that, because it otherwise is not possible for participants - after going out and taking photos - to find back the website with the info about how to participate, how to upload, rules, etc.
However, if you have clicked a banner away, and you access it on a wiki with the same device and same browser, you should not see the banner again. I am not completely in the tech side of it, but so far I know the banner is placing a cookie and marks that you have clicked the banner away. Then the banner should not be shown to you again. I personally have clicked the banner away and did not show again to me. So why it keeps on showing to you I do not know.
One of the possibilities can be that a cookie contains an error, that you have an adblocker that disables the cookie or that your browser deletes cookies after closing/some time. Maybe other causes can exist as well. Romaine (talk) 19:27, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
I do also wonder just how many times people have viewed this banner (which links to c:Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2016 in the United States). I do find it annoying, and it seems to be quite long-running. I wonder how many readers are also annoyed by it. Is anyone responsible for publishing a cost-benefit analysis of this banner's use? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 18:02, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
For the WLM banner specifically, the answer is almost certainly "no". To create a banner, you have to have admin rights to m:Special:CentralNotice, but I believe that, with the exception of banners posted by Fundraising team (which endlessly and heavily analyzes everything), no further testing or cost–benefit analysis is ever done. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:02, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
New bolding in watchlist (resurrected)
Latest comment: 8 years ago41 comments17 people in discussion
Restored from 2 August premature archive. Problem remains unresolved. At least one editor has stated that they like the change. To prevent more premature archiving, I am adding a DNAU template to prevent another archive for one year, and that can be removed when this issue is resolved. ―Mandruss☎20:35, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
Firefox 47.0.1. Less than an hour ago, my watchlist started bolding unvisited page title links, where previously there was just a subtle color difference and no bolding. I have cleared history and cache and restarted Firefox, don't know what else I could do on my end. Anyone else seeing this? ―Mandruss☎21:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
@Mandruss: Did you recently change any of your gadget settings? Under Gadgets -> Watchlist there is a setting that will "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold". Is that checked? If not, check it, save, uncheck, and resave, and see if it fixes it. --Majora (talk) 21:24, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
Did you recently change any of your gadget settings? No, not in many moons. The option was unchecked, so I did what you suggested. No change. ―Mandruss☎21:26, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm having the same phenomenon, the same version of Firefox. Nothing changed on my end. But in the last hour or two, the bolding got so bold on the unvisited ones that it's blurry. It's big and thick and very dark and blurry. Only the link title is that way, not the rest of the info on the item. My gadget on Preferences is also not checked. What happened? — Maile (talk) 21:37, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
It's beginning to look like it might be a Firefox problem. I saw the change around the time that Firefox said it had automatically downloaded 47.0.1, albeit before I restarted Firefox to install it. I don't understand how the download could have introduced the problem, but then I know nothing of the internals. If it's Firefox, I'd expect a 47.0.2 very soon. ―Mandruss☎21:42, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I've had Firefox 47.0.1 for a couple of weeks now. By default of any other postings here, it's probably Firefox. But who knows. It's really distracting. And just confirming that I do not have this same problem in I.E. — Maile (talk) 21:48, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I assume that the bolding has something to do with the was Firefox handles CSS scripts. I'm not seeing the issue on Chrome so it is probably a problem on their side. I believe you can override it. WP:CUSTOMWATCH has instructions on how to make it bold. I'm guessing you would just replace, "font-weight: bold;" with "font-weight: normal;" --Majora (talk) 21:47, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
Am seeing the same myself in Chrome, Firefox, IE and Edge. Do not have the option selected in prefs. Have tried selecting it and deselecting it. No difference. Nanonic (talk) 21:49, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
Has now stopped in both my Edge and Chrome but still in IE and FF. Odd! However when I refresh the page in Chrome, I can see it bold the 'unread' entries during page load before putting them back to normal when rendered. Nanonic (talk) 22:00, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I've always experienced that in Chrome. I just assumed there was some Javascript at work that took a little longer to load. clpo13(talk)22:04, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I think I've always seen that in Firefox, but the bolding was turned off so quickly that I barely noticed it. So the hypothesis would be that whatever was turning it off is no longer working. No idea what that is, or why it would suddenly stop working. ―Mandruss☎22:19, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
It's CSS. The MediaWiki software comes with bolding and no builtin option to remove the bold. The English Wikipedia removes bolding in MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css, a gadget enabled by default and saying "(This loads the base style for the watchlist. Please do not disable this option.)" Another gadget MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistChangesBold.css can then override the first gadget and make bolding again with "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)". For some reason the first gadget is failing. I tried a dummy edit of MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css with no effect. It works in Firefox 47.0.1 if I load it using withCSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?withCSS=MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css. But it fails if I just have it enabled in gadgets and disable the bolding gadget. The English Wikipedia got mw:MediaWiki 1.28/wmf.11 three hours ago so something there may have triggered the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:31, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I'm experiencing this problem as well, Firefox 47.0.1 and briefly on Chrome 52. Interestingly enough, I tried Majora's suggestion above regarding the watchlist gadget and the bolding went away, but only in Chrome. Firefox still has it. clpo13(talk)22:04, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
I also am seeing the same bolding effect, started in the last hour or two. I am using Iceweasel 24.4.0, and have not recently tweaked any of my settings there or on WP. (Just got a new pair of glasses, but surely that is not a factor.) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:12, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
Me too. Started up this afternoon. I thought perhaps I had just loaded the page funny (sometimes clearly caches and what not fixes things like this) but apparently its still happening. I haven't tweaked any of my watchlist settings, and I am not happy about the bolding, although if it helps I have noticed that only pages I haven't directly edited are being bolded on the watchlist, those pages that I have edited and still have the current for are not bolded. Not sure what that means, but I am willing to take it. For the record, I am contributing using Firefox and I am fairly certain its the most recently available one. TomStar81 (Talk) 01:26, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
Incidentally, I just noticed that its also on the recent changes page for those items I have on my watchlist. Not sure how that happened, but its happened. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:56, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
The bolding is of watched pages that have been changed since you last visited them. I don't know why MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css fails as a gadget but the bolding can be removed by importing it in your common JavaScript:
With this, bolding will be determined by the gadget "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold". PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Thanks for helping with this, as always. Before deciding whether to fix this locally, I would like to know the prospects for a site fix that would make that unnecessary. Is anyone looking at this? If not, is there a way to get them to, such as phab? ―Mandruss☎10:51, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
My guess is it will soon be fixed but I don't know where or by whom. I only know what is written here. Many people with CSS and MediaWiki knowledge watch this page, it has only been 14 hours where many users are not active, and so far a problem is only known to exist with a locally made gadget so I wouldn't take it to phab now. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:10, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
It appears that gerrit:288026 has somehow changed the loading order of modules, so the module that applies the default bolding is now loaded after gadgets rather than before. Anomie⚔13:14, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
A short-term workaround would be to increase the specificity of the selectors in the gadget (e.g. make it "html.mw-changeslist-line-watched.mw-title") so it's not relying on ordering to break the tie. Anomie⚔13:25, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
This is still occuring, seems to have stalled in getting a "fix", think we need to this this enwiki local still? — xaosfluxTalk11:18, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
@Xaosflux: If the suggested fix looks good to you or another admin with CSS knowledge then I suggest trying it. Anomie only has one edit since the suggestion. I'm not qualified to evaluate it. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:54, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
That dreadful bolding that everyone hates!!!
I see that unreadable bold text in the watchlist is back. How do I get rid of it this time? Checking/unchecking the "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)" box, in preferences/gadgets/watchlist, makes no difference.--Ykraps (talk) 18:58, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm afraid I don't understand much of that conversation. Do I create User:Ykraps/common.js, then copy this script, "importStylesheet('MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css'); // Linkback: [[MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistBase.css]]" to it, and save?--Ykraps (talk) 19:32, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
As as side note, I don't understand why people consider the bold "unreadable". In fact I've had the bolding enabled for a while, and it's much easier to spot changes than solely based on the color of a small dot. nyuszika7h (talk) 21:13, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps it's a failing eyesight, getting old thing but in vector skin the type is so blobby the characters are barely distinguishable. With other skins it's not so bad but then the normal type is too small.--Ykraps (talk) 21:32, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
I use Firefox and MonoBook; I found that with IE (any skin), all characters get smudged. I believe that this smudging is something called anti-aliasing, which some consider a Good Thing. With my eyesight, it's not - I need sharp edges. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:47, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
Despite the assertion that everyone hates the bolding, I happen to like it, and I will go to some trouble to enable it at the few wikis where it's not on by default. WhatamIdoing (talk) 13:50, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing I think what everyong "hates" is that we already had a gadget option for this (Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold) that is broken, removing the ability for users to configure this as a preference. Perhaps the gadget needs to be changed to "DO NOT BOLD ....." ? — xaosfluxTalk21:57, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
I like the bolding too, because otherwise the only notice that a page is unvisited is the dim color of the tiny bullet to the left of the page name. (In fact, the bullets are so non-obvious that I never even noticed their color variations until I read about it in nyuszika7h's post above.) I don't care whether bold or non-bold is the default, as long as I have the power to choose bold if I want it. (I'm using Firefox.) — Lawrence King(talk)20:44, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
WikiData item call?
Latest comment: 8 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion
I see the WikiData item in the sidebar menu, but...
If I understand the question ... you'll only get the wikidata link if the article title in wikipedia corresponds to an entry in the 'wikipedia' child table in wikidata. So, for example, Bovinae points to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4979192 because en:Bovinae is found in the 'wikipedia' child table in wikidata, and points at Q4979192. Put another way, the wikipedia article title is the foreign key used to look up a Q value from wikidata via a 'wikipedia' child table. It follows from this that if the wikidata item is missing from the wikipedia page, the cause is the absence of a link to en: in wikidata and the cure is to add the wikipedia article to the appropriate wikidata item. Wikipedia:Wikidata may be helpful. --Tagishsimon(talk)05:19, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
To achieve the technological singularity, of course. :) I'm trying to learn WikiData and how it can be used in conjunction with WP pages. Like automatic data storage and data retrieval. I see the "Wikidata item" link on the sidebar, but how do you access the Q value other than by clicking on that link? Like with a script. As for "things", is there a list of the things that have been implemented? And how do you access the WP child table to get the Q value? The Transhumanist20:30, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
What seems to be being implemented are templates, such as {{Wikidata property}} which enable you to retrieve a wikipdata property based on the article name being an FK to a wikipedia article name in wikipdata. Category:Templates using data from Wikidata shows progres to date. Visit any of those and view the source to see exactly how the query is put together - such as this. Does that help? Wikipedia:Wikidata seeks to explain this and provide some links to additionally useful pages. --Tagishsimon(talk)20:52, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, I chose a really poor example. That template has little or nothing to do with the question you asked. Let's try again. Take {{OL author}}. Try adding just that: {{OL author}} to the top of the Jack Kerouac page, and preview. The result is a sentence "Works by Jack Kerouac at Open Library", and the link associated with the "Works by Jack Kerouac" substring is to https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL21491A ... and the value OL21491A in that URL is the OL author number, stored in wikidata against the wikidata item https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q160534 - its Jack Kerouac item. In that record we find OL21491A in the identifiers section, against the Open Library ID property. And in this example, the foreign key that was passed to wikidata in order to retrieve the OL21491A was the title of the article on which we placed the {{OL author}}. (And in the template's source, we see mention of #property:P648, which is the wikidata property number for an Open Library ID ... so the query is saying 'if there is one, give me the P648 value, for the wikidata record which has the title of this article in its wikipedia child table'.) ((Amongst things I don't know about wikidata: does it / how does it ensure that a wikipedia article name maps to only a single wikidata record, and/or, how does a template like OL author behave if there are two wikidata records associated with the article title ... doubtless I'm eliding a whole rats-nest of complexity in this simple answer. It's a learning experience for me, too.)) --Tagishsimon(talk)02:21, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: to answer your questions. a) it simply doesn't allow you to add Xwiki link to multiple WD entities. This is a problem sometimes to us at Wikidata,but we haven't come up with a solution. b) it may pick the best value (see d:Help:Ranking) or simply get the first one (or probably random one). Oh, didn't read the part after 'and/or' carefully. So I answered that too in 'a)' part. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 04:37, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
mw:Wikimedia Research/Showcase#September 2016 presents some interesting work about finding sources to support unsourced statements in Wikipedia articles. One of the things that complicated this work is the inappropriate use of {{cite web}} when {{cite news}} would be appropriate (e.g., for citations to BBC News) – almost a million instances, actually. I think it'd be easy to identify a handful of popular news sites that should normally use the {{cite news}} template. (We might even be able to get a list from this researcher.)
If we get a list of URLs, can we send a bot around to fix "cite web" uses that should be "cite news", or is this task better suited to AWB? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:34, 22 September 2016 (UTC)
Changing {{cite web}} to {{cite news}} should be a fairly straightforward task given a list of news sources and I can imagine how an AWB task might accomplish that. I suspect that editors at Wikipedia will not easily accept, much less trust, that the researcher's machine will insert valid citations into Wikipedia articles.
I agree with you that editors would be unlikely to be pleased with the results of a citation-inserting bot. However, the idea is that it recommends a possible source and shows you the source (including the contents) so that you can decide whether it's appropriate. They seem to have reasonably good results, but "reasonably good" means maybe 80% chance of being acceptable, not 99%.
Izno, if you're citing something at https://news.bbc.co.uk (one of the ones that has this problem), it is very unlikely that you're citing just some web page. But if COSMETICBOT is an issue, then this is better suited for AWB/when other fixes are being made anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:50, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Should spacing before heading depend on number of blank lines?
Latest comment: 8 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
Should the spacing before a heading depend on the number of blank lines before the heading, since typically one or more blank lines are handled the same in markup languages.
If the spacing actually should depend, then what number of blank lines are recommended before a heading and between paragraphs, and may no blank lines be used ?
@MortenZdk: The established practice (see MOS:HEADINGS) is one blank line before each heading (n.b. not "header", that's the top row of a table or the box at the top of certain pages), except where a subheading follows a heading, in which case the blank line is optional. Why are you asking? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:33, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks for the answer and reference to MOS; I have corrected terminology of header to heading. Reason for asking, is that I happened to see that the spacing on rendered pages depended on the number of blank lines I used, and I found this odd when using a markup language, since for example DokuWiki system and markdown language collapses consecutive blanks lines. I think collapsing consecutive blank likes is more logical, so the markup language is used only to specify the contents and logical structure of the contents, but not the appearance. It seams like Wikipedia handles blank lines inconsistently, since for example consecutive blank lines from heading to paragraph are collapsed, while consecutive blank lines from paragraph to heading are not. I recon that MOS describes the required spacing, but my guess is that a great number of the inexperienced and occasional editors have not read the MOS before start editing, and the markup language should not have that kind of unnecessary pitfalls. Also, for example the Danish MOS does not mention the requirements for just a single space before a heading, which show that having more requirements also makes it more difficult to communicate correct use. And in the end; what is the idea of giving the editor control over the amount of space in the rendering, with the risk and result that the appearance of different Wikipedia pages are inconsistent? --MortenZdk (talk) 20:09, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
There are many things illogical about MediaWiki wikitext syntax (and similar with markdown and dokuwiki syntax and almost any other plain text markup syntax that was ever invented). The problem is that it is very difficult to fix inconsistencies like this without breaking things in the process. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:30, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Sometimes you will see people adding multiple blank lines before a heading in an attempt to bring that heading below a left-floated object such as an image. The problem with this approach is that it makes all sorts of assumptions about how other people see the page - most of these assumptions (primarily the screen width) will be wrong. The correct action to take is to use a template like {{clear left}}, as I did in this edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:15, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Lets address the issues one by one when we spot them. Since the behaviour of multiple blank lines is not defined, it should not break anything define it, and thereby get a consistent view of the pages, independently of what odd formatting editors have used. --MortenZdk (talk) 05:51, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
The behaviour is defined - at least in terms of the emitted HTML. If you use one blank line before each heading, you get an orderly sequence of HTML elements, of the form
<p>Last paragraph of a section</p><h2>A heading</h2><p>First paragraph of the section</p>
...
Where there are two blank lines in the page source, you get
<p>Last paragraph of a section</p><p><br/></p><h2>A heading</h2><p>First paragraph of the section</p>
...
notice the additional paragraph element, and that it is empty apart from a single <br /> tag, this <br /> gives vertical spacing. Where there are more than two blank lines, each pair of additional blank lines will yield one additional <p><br/></p>, so six blank lines emits three of those empty paragraphs.
But it's not a good idea to use this technique; not only does it depend heavily upon unknown characteristics, but the very next edit to that section will strip out all the blank lines to leave just one. This is because the MediaWiki software is designed to leave one blank line before each heading; it does this as follows. When you edit a section, the edit box is loaded with the wikisource for the section, but it's not an exact copy: all trailing whitespace is removed, and then one newline is appended. When you save your edit, all trailing whitespace is removed, and then two newlines are appended (unless it's the last section on the page, in which case no newlines are appended). So if a section finishes with several blank lines, clicking "[edit]" for that section and going straight for Save changes will replace all those blank lines with a single one; similarly, if a section finishes with no blank lines but goes straight to the next heading, clicking "[edit]" for that section and then Save changes will insert a single blank line. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:08, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks for the detailed answer. So the MediaWiki software will actually collapse consecutive blank lines in section editing, but not in page editing nor page rendering. Also opening and saving a section without doing any explicit edits will cause the rendering of the related page to change. I see that the consecutive blank lines will generate HTML code like that, thus resulting in rendering with additional space, but I guess that this is an artifact in the WikiMedia software, and not a feature that was specified and implemented by purpose, since otherwise section editing should not alter the presentation by collapsing consecutive blank lines. Note that I have created a suggestion for change as WikiMedia Phabricator T146732. --MortenZdk (talk) 09:37, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Only a section to watchlist, not the whole page
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Is it possible to put just a section of a page to watchlist? For example if I am interested in just the responses (notification emails) only to this qustion and not interested about all the other edits on this page.
The reason I am asking is that when I get notified that something is happening here that does not interest me and for that reason I do not visit the page, I stop getting notifications even for my own section. Thanks. --Wesalius (talk) 05:18, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
No, it's not possible at the moment. This feature is frequently requested, but would be very difficult to implement due to the way the MediaWiki software currently generates wiki pages. However, it will become possible if and when we switch talk pages to use the Flow discussion system or something similar. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪05:30, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Is there some task about this at phabricator/technical discussion somewhere else, where I can get and insight on the technical difficulties you mentioned? I am curious because at my homewiki the community declined switching to Flow, so I am interested in possible solutions/workarounds to this. Thank you. --Wesalius (talk) 05:42, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Why is this not happening en masse, with a bot? Is there a reason to keep non-SSL links when there is an secure protocol for the address available? --Wesalius (talk) 05:24, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Resolved
Hi - I left an injudicious comment on my last edit of The Chippendale Society article and would like to remove it but don't know how. Could someone please do me a kindness and take my foot out of my mouth - i.e. delete same?
Thanks for both responses; I have now read the revision deletion info. In this instance I am asking for an own comment to be deleted as it is counter-productive. I had placed the Society's banner at the top of the Chippendale article, pending permission, and when I sought permission it had ruffled some feathers that I used the banner prior to seeking permission. I therefore took it down, (penultimate of my edits), and the comment I left was a matter of pique. Shortly thereafter I received a very positive email from the Society to say there was no substantial reason why I may not use the banner but it will take a few days for the Trustees to decide formally; my comment therefore may prove injurious to my general intent to improve all Chippendale-related articles; I value the Society as a source. MarkDask20:33, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Greetings, at Template:Catholic Church hierarchy sidebar group6, a left parantheses "(" is being added to display for line [[List of Princes and Grand Masters of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta|Prince and Grand Master of the<br> Sovereign Military Order of Malta]]. Asking for help here as I have not a clue as to how to fix. Regards, — JoeHebda • (talk)12:51, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
@JoeHebda: The "(" comes from {{startflatlist}}. The corresponding ")" is at the end of the list, after "Calatrava". It's doing this because most of the items in "group6" are marked as sub-items, each beginning with two asterisks not one. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:26, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Someone wrote into Wikimedia with an observation that the font size of equations is quite small in Safari 5.1.10.
I'm sure I have read some advice recently that Wikipedia has no particular interest in trying to resolve technical issues in very old browsers. Does this qualify?--S Philbrick(Talk)15:41, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
User:Physikerwelt, do you think that this is the math software or local CSS?
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I can't simply click off notifications I've read. Yesterday and preceding days, that was happening to pages where a link was made to articles I created. Way down at the bottom of that was "Try the redesigned Notifications page. All new look and features." OK, fine. And that notice was the only way I could actually access the redesigned Notifications page to click off the link notices I'd received. So...today, I can't click off notifications on that show under "Alerts". I mean, I can click on them, and I can read them, and I can go to them. But the alert stays active no matter how many times I do that. Way down at the bottom of that is "Try the redesigned Notifications page. All new look and features." I went to it...again. I finally got that Alert to stop showing. So, now instead of just a one-keystroke clicking on the notification to get rid of it, we now have to go to a separate page that is NOT the article the notification refers to, and click, click, click, then get rid of that page to go back what we were doing? Good programming intentions go awry, I think.— Maile (talk) 14:08, 25 September 2016 (UTC)
If you're lucky... Ceratinly with crosswiki notifications, but also with enwiki ones, they may remain active (or inactive but counted). Revisiting the page, or (if possible) marking the notice again as unread and then as read, may solve the problem. Nagging the WMF about the continuing problems with notifications may help as well. Fram (talk) 11:35, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Student token fatal exception
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
As the instructor, you can also add students from the "add students to course" dialog at the bottom of the page you linked. — xaosfluxTalk13:18, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
@Sage Ross (WMF): - SR, this appears to be a bug - if trying to register using the enroll dialog for a user who has their gender set to neutral - the dialog forces them to go through a gender specification screen during enrollment - then errors out. If the gender is defined in preferences first it appears to work fine. Not sure why courses are forcing this selection at all? — xaosfluxTalk14:51, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
"Not sure why courses are forcing this selection at all?" The idea was to get better demographic information about the education program. If I recall, it doesn't force a selection; you can leave it blank and proceed, it just tries to get the user to set preferred pronouns when they sign up. But the exception seems to be a new issue.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:57, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Pages not being added to maintenance categories in a timely fashion
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I just submitted this comment to Phab ticket T132467, but maybe someone here has some insight. Maintenance categories are taking more than two months to be applied to pages when a change is made to MediaWiki's underlying code or to templates that are transcluded in those pages.
Here's the latest example: I created Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags on 14 July 2016 on en.WP after a change to MediaWiki started adding a hidden category to articles with a specific kind of HTML error. As of today, 28 Sep 2016, there are pages on en.WP such as Portal:East Frisia/Region that have the error in their code and will properly appear in the category after a null edit, but that have not yet shown up in the category on their own.
That means that fundamentally, categories are not being applied to articles in a timely fashion until those articles are edited. By any measure, taking more than two months to properly apply maintenance categories to pages is a bug that needs to be fixed.
Is there some way that we can force all pages to be null-edited (or the equivalent) with a reasonable frequency? It is not happening right now, and has been failing to happen for more than two years. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:52, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
There's a bot which periodically purges certain important pages. Ping Joe Decker, the operator. However it appears that it would run too slowly to purge every page in a reasonable time. I don't know whether this could be increased but ultimately load on the server is a limiting factor.
Supposing, however, that not every page can be purged, there is another possibility I can think of. If the errors can be detected by a search (and I don't see why not) a bot could search for pages with a particular error and purge those it finds, to add them to the category. Issues like unnecessary repetition would have to be considered. BethNaught (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
You say "categories are taking more than two months to be applied to pages when a change is made to MediaWiki's underlying code or to templates that are transcluded in those pages". It's true when a new maintenance category added by MediaWiki itself is created like Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags. There is a limited number of such categories. I think they are all listed at Special:TrackingCategories. We have 40 million pages here and that's just one wiki. I don't think a delay of months is so bad for a new tracking category we lived without for 15 years. If a template is edited then the updates should happen much faster since all pages transcluding the template are stored and should be added to the job queue for automatic processing. They are usually processed within days, sometimes minutes or even seconds. There has been problems in the past where it took months but do you actually have a recent example of that? phab:T132467 is about edits to templates and modules so your post is misplaced there. Your other links are also about template edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:41, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, I guess I figured those were the same thing. I was wrong. They amount to the same thing, however, since changes to MW that result in maintenance categories are done for a reason. In this case, the category is designed to pick up invalid HTML that needs to be fixed before a newer version of MW or a related tool starts breaking pages with that invalid HTML. See the reference to replacing HTML Tidy above – before it is replaced in 2017, we will need some additional maintenance categories at the MW level to help us find and fix all of the errors that Tidy's replacement will not hide for us. If it takes months for those categories to populate, that slows the deployment of updated software and tools. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:44, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi, I'm new to this situation, so forgive me if I misunderstand the specifics of the situation you're seeing this problem in. I'm the operator of Joe's Null Bot. BethNaught's comments about server load (mine and Wikipedia's) are absolutely accurate.
I certainly believe that you see two month, or longer, delays if underlying MediaWiki code is changed and you wait for that to trigger an update to the categories associated with an article. In fact, there is no reason to believe that the categories will ever be correctly updated short of MediaWiki reprocessing the article (e.g., a purge/null edit) It's not a "waiting for the server to have time" thing, it's a "the server doesn't know its cache is invalid so it NEVER updates it" thing. So it's not a job queue issue, although the confusion on that point is both understandable and common.
I thought transcluded template changes worked properly, however.
No idea about modules.
The usual place where such things fail is when the templates work properly for the moment they're actually processed, but that nothing invalidates the cache when an external condition (e.g., how many days since something happened) passes. E.g., A page is changed four days after a template is applied, the server checks that against a 5-day deadline and decides to not add a category. The next day, nothing triggers a chance to that decision, the category which would have been hypothetically applied after five days never gets applied. --joe deckertalk23:17, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion
I was recently editing and updating articles related to Select Bus Service. This includes several {{routemap}}s (see my contributions history). Now, most of the templates work... right up to the point where I included {{reflist}}, and after that, it seems that a template limit has been reached. The templates just conk out and it shows the template wikilinks instead, like Template:Reflist instead of the actual reflist.
Does anyone know how can I fix this? Any help is appreciated. I am using Safari version 9.0.2 on OS X El Capitan 10.11.12. But this problem is seen on Chrome and Firefox, too. epicgenius (talk) 03:32, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
I hid 3 templates and everything seems fine again, but I don't know exactly why these particular templates cause template overload on this page. epicgenius (talk) 03:45, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
@Epicgenius: The limit in question is the post-expand include size. The solution is to reduce the number of template calls on the page, particularly templates that are deeply nested or output a lot of wikitext. (I'm afraid I'll have to leave finding out which templates those are until I have more time, unless someone else beats me to it.) — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪05:46, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
ANd {{B44 SBS BRT map-infobox}} is responsible for 281111 of the limit (13.4%). Deactivating just these 2 templates leaves the page at 1784845, which leaves enough room for either, but not both, of these templates if you don't add much else (even a small route template). עוד מישהוOd Mishehu11:07, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
I wonder whether the unusual size of these templates should be noted on their /doc pages. It seems that some of these route map templates have appeared here for the same reason before now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:27, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
The problem is that {{routemap}} contains much fewer templates than {{BS-map}}. Before all the maps on the Select Bus Service page were converted to use {{routemap}}, they all used {{BS-map}}, which typically had about 20 to 30 templates in it before post-expand size (compared to {{routemap}}, which is typically only one direct transclusion, not accounting for post-expand size). When the Select Bus Service article used BS-maps, the templates would be unable to parse by the time the "Q44" section was reached. I converted the BS-maps to routemaps in order to reduce the number of templates, but it seems like there needs to be some warning or something for these routemaps. epicgenius (talk) 21:24, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
@Epicgenius: Might there be a way to reduce the server load/post-expansion include size of {{Routemap}}? I might end up running into this problem in my sandbox, as there are still about 40 of the SL diagrams left to convert to {{Routemap}}. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}} to reply to me08:41, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
@Jc86035: I already removed a lot of inconsequential templates in these routemaps, like {{!}}, which seemed to not have a negative impact when I removed them. However, I think that the collapsible function has a lot to do with the high post-expansion include size of the M15 and B44 maps. epicgenius (talk) 12:50, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion
Recently I've noticed that when editors "ping" me, I don't receive a notification. If I go to Preferences --> Notification, I see that the "Web" check box opposite "Talk page message" is greyed out and I'm unable to check or uncheck it. Can this be fixed? --NSH002 (talk) 08:14, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
That's always greyed out as it has to be always checked. I am receiving pings perfectly it might be a problem somewhere in your account itself. Let's see..... VarunFEB200309:14, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
@NSH002: The box is greyed out with a checkmark for me. Don't you have a checkmark there? And please post diffs you think should have caused a ping. There are many situations where an edit is not supposed to cause a ping. See mw:Manual:Echo#Technical details. I guess one of the edits you have in mind is [10] by Randy Kryn. The timestamp said "2:15" instead of "02:15" so it's not consistent with a signature made with four tildes. I suspect Randy signs with three tildes so the automatic time stamp is omitted. His personalized signature may instead include code to add the current time without a leading zero. Cute but not good. Apart from ping problems it can cause confusion for others who may think the edit has been altered and waste time checking the page history. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:22, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi, and my fault. I sign manually, as I often type laying down and don't trust the four tildes reach so near the 'escape' key. I'll try to recall that single-digit hours need the zero in front of them. Thanks. Randy Kryn10:31, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Hee hee, that explains it. Perhaps you should switch to a UK keyboard, where the tilde is right at the opposite corner! --NSH002 (talk) 11:34, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Or even simpler click that idiot button in the window. And to be clear in QWERTY Keyboards ~ character is near the Esc Key wheras in the QWERTZ and AZERTY keyboards the ~ key is at the opposite end near the ↵ Enter Key. So NSH002 uses a QWERTZ/AZERTY keyboard and Randy Kryn uses a QWERTY keyboard! VarunFEB200312:30, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Err, no. I use two laptops at home but with separate full-sized keyboards connected to the laptops through a wireless USB gadget. One is a standard UK keyboard, the other is a US keyboard with joint Latin/Arabic markings on the keys. Both keyboards are QWERTY; there is very little difference between the two: the UK keyboard has the pound sign (£) as shift-3 instead of the hash sign (#), which moves next to the enter key, shift-# is the tilde, and the @ and " keys are swapped around. But they are both QWERTY, and all the letter and number keys are in the same position. In fact in "English" mode I use the UK keyboard driver with the US keyboard, which means some keys don't produce what they say on the key, but it's what my fingers are used to, and that's what matters when you're typing quickly. And yes, I used to use the "idiot button", but nowadays I prefer to use the tilde key. Regards --NSH002 (talk) 13:39, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Image compression and saving on hard-disk capacity and bandwidth costs
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
I've recently sent an e-mail to the Wikimedia Foundation and got an answer saying I should post this matter here.
I imagine a big part of Wikimedia Foundation costs are maintaining servers and paying for the bandwidth necessary to serve content.
I humbly suggest that a typical 10-25% of the disk space necessary to hold and bandwidth needed to serve JPG and PNG images be cut by using freely available software.
This can be done with OSS such as https://imageoptim.com/mac, which can be called from the command line. This is for OS X, similar implementations are available for other platforms.
I should emphasise that this is NOT lossy compression, but rather an optimization of the way information is encoded in JPG and PNG files, and produces visually and otherwise indistinguishable files (provided the options to remove metadata in the files, which are enabled by default, are disabled).
The output files are still standards-compliant, and will still open in all the same browsers and software. This is as close as it gets to "free money" (I personally shaved off a couple hundred Gb on high-resolution images related to my professional activity by using this software).
There is ample technical explanation available on what is going on behind the scenes (Huffman tables optimization and the like), and I'm sure some people here will be well equipped to understand and better explain all the nitty-gritty detail. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vrrp (talk • contribs) 17:14, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
The servers cost about $2,000,000 a year to run. This isn't chicken feed, but it's a minute fraction of the budget of a little over $50,000,000 a year—the server costs are a drop in the ocean compared to the staff costs. Remember that viewers aren't being served up the full-size version of images (unless they click through to them on Commons) so any "savings" from compression are illusory, and uploading fresh versions isn't going to save on server space since the previous versions will still need to be kept on those same servers. ‑ Iridescent17:21, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion of the savings being illusory. If you store images with lossless compression then you don't need to keep the originals around, as you can reconstruct the originals byte for byte from the compressed version. Storing images using lossless compression would obviously take up less disk space than storing them without compression if we didn't keep the originals. And if we could serve compressed images and get users to decompress them once they are downloaded, then it would obviously save on bandwidth costs. There are several questions still remaining about this plan, though. Here are a few off the top of my head:
How does the WMF currently store its images? They might already be stored in a compressed form for all I know.
How much bandwidth and hard disk space would we expect to save exactly? If it turns out to not be that much, then this might not be cost-effective to implement.
If we served compressed images, would the decompression on the client end work on all the browsers we support, and on all the platforms we support? And would it work without JavaScript?
Would changing to compressed images break existing gadgets, bots and scripts?
Also, it is probably worth saying that both PNG and JPEG use compression already, so with these formats we are talking about the relative level of compression, not compression or no compression. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪00:26, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
"If you store images with lossless compression then you don't need to keep the originals around, as you can reconstruct the originals byte for byte from the compressed version" is misunderstanding how Wikipedia/Wikimedia works. For attribution purposes we have to keep every revision which has ever existed; thus, if an existing 10mb image is compressed to 8mb, the total space taken on the servers will be 18mb so compressing all images will lead to a significant loss, not a saving, of space. Regarding bandwidth, both you and the OP seem to have a misapprehension regarding how MediaWiki handles images—except in cases where the original image file is smaller than the default, the software automatically generates and caches smaller versions which are what the viewer sees. Thus, a mammoth file like File:1886 Snyder's real estate map of Cook County, Illinois.jpg takes up no more bandwidth to view than a file one percent of the size, unless the reader clicks through to view the original. (We do have a 25 megapixel limit for PNG images for technical reasons; for other formats there's no limit although we strongly discourage large progressive-mode JPEGs.) I really wouldn't worry about server space; Wikipedia is actually a lot smaller than people think. The entire edit history of all Wikimedia projects takes up about 40TB; this obviously isn't tiny, but it's nowhere near as big as people assume. (If you're willing to blow about $10,000 on RAIDs you could easily run a Wikipedia mirror in your basement; indeed, the WMF strongly encourages anyone with the spare capacity to do so). ‑ Iridescent08:33, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
I assumed that the question is actually about compressing files on Commons (where most of the images are), rather than the English Wikipedia's File: namespace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:45, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Extendedconfirmed might need some more flags
Latest comment: 8 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion
It appears that an extendedconfirmed editor is not guaranteed to be autoconfirmed. The implication is that a newly registered valid alt be given "extendedconfirmed" and is able to edit Israel (ecp), but is unable to edit England (semi). Is it a "feature" that the software allows for restricting a set of pages generally deemed to be at a "lower" protection level from being editable?
I'm proposing that editsemiprotected, autoconfirmed, and autoreview be bundled with the extended confirmed user group. (and possibly the template editor group... though it's more or less understandable that template editors are not given extendedconfirmed; the lack of hierarchy there seems known.) — Andy W.(talk ·ctb)05:25, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Good idea: I see no issues with getting those flags added to prevent the situation you above described - will need a request made once a consensus has formed -- samtartalk or stalk08:20, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Who has been handing out the extendedconfirmed right to people who are not yet autoconfirmed? Alternatively, which non-autoconfirmed users have been given the extendedconfirmed right? --Redrose64 (talk) 14:45, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi all. Per a quick cry for help from Andy, I checked to see if I could edit semis with my alts. It appears I cannot. Hope this helps! TJH2018talk15:26, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
So this is only a problem when being manually flagged? Admins can just as easy check both boxes when manually doing this, no? — xaosfluxTalk17:24, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
I feel a bit terrible about this right now. I didn't mean for this to be a an admin search-and-grant when a software fix will take care of this. This was done with the best of intentions, and did not intend this to be an admin workitem, but for our devs. Corner cases are a fundamental part of software testing, and I've believed the additional flags will make our system more logically foolproof. Anyway, I looked through the user rights change log... it looks like there are two other cases to fix (above). — Andy W.(talk ·ctb)19:33, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Fixed - not sure if this really needs a programming change - ultimately while policy allows for these +ecu's to be added for accoutns that are being created for the purpose of being doppelganger accounts, I'm not really seeing a need for +ecu, much less even +confirmed. I'm not strictly opposed to it, just don't think it is necessary. Certainly can update the rights scripts and the admin directions related to WP:PERM though. — xaosfluxTalk19:52, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Fixing hundreds of broken URLs - updating links to different server with the same reference number
Latest comment: 8 years ago14 comments5 people in discussion
I edit hundreds/thousands of wp articles relating to Somerset. Recently (for at least a week) all links to the Somerset Historic Environment Records have been giving a 404. I contacted the web team who's server hosts the database & they said: "as you may be aware what is now the ‘South West Heritage Trust’ is independent from Somerset County Council – some of their systems eg. HER have been residing on our servers since their move – and as part of our internal processes these servers are now being decommissioned. Their main website is now at http://www.swheritage.org.uk/ with the HER available at http://www.somersetheritage.org.uk/ . There are redirects in place on our servers that should be temporarily forwarding visitors to the correct website eg:
http://webapp1.somerset.gov.uk/her/details.asp?prn=11000 should be forwarding you to http://www.somersetheritage.org.uk/record/11000 - this appears to be working for me, so unsure why it isn’t working for you".
According to this search there are 1,546 wp articles which include links to the database. Is there any quick/automated way to find & replace all of the links (currently http://webapp1.somerset.gov.uk ) to the new server name ( http://www.somersetheritage.org.uk/record/ ) but keep the identical record number at the end? A complication is that two different formats of the url previously work ie both formats for the URL ie /record/XXXXX & /her/details.asp?prn=XXXXXX.
I don't really fancy manually going through this many articles & wondered if there was a bot or other technique to achieve this?— Rodtalk14:39, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Thanks but I have no idea how to create that template or automate the insertion of it into the 1,000+ articles.— Rodtalk —Preceding undated comment added 14:56, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
I did that with {{Merseyrail info lnk}}, since in the seven years that I've been here, Merseyrail have changed their URL format at least twice. So, just under two years ago (when the format last changed), one edit fixed over sixty pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:01, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks for the pointer but that template link just takes me to something which says "This template's documentation is missing or does not accurately describe its functionality or the parameters in its code" - this is why I don't go fiddling about with template code.— Rodtalk15:06, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
That notice isn't relevant, because the template code is never in the documentation. To see the template code, use the "Edit" tab at the top (not one of the section "[edit]" links). When I first created it in January 2012, it looked like this:
{{ #if:{{{1|}}}
|*[http://www.merseyrail.org/stations/station-details.html?station_id={{{1}}} Station information] for {{#if:{{{2|}}}|{{{2}}}|{{PAGENAME}}}} from Merseyrail}}
Another example, though probably more complex than you need is {{NRHP url}} and its sub template {{NRHP url/core}} (used also by {{NHLS url}}, a similar template). These templates accept an identifier, akin to the 11000 in your example, and prepend a URL to that identifier. If ever the URL changes, it is a simple matter of changing the URL in the template and Bob's your uncle. It will still be necessary to replace the broken URLs in article text with the new template but that can be done by bot or WP:AWB.
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I have been fighting vandalism on Recent Changes for a while now, and I was wondering if there is any way to have a filter so you can only see the most recent edits on a page, so that you don't end up going to pages to look at vandalism when it has already been reverted. If there isn't any feature like this, does anyone else agree that this might be a good addition? Thanks, Gluons12talk15:39, 29 September 2016 (UTC).
If it has not been reverted a word like this - (current) is displayed at the end of the summary. This means that it is the current version of the page, no edits have been made after it. This is a good way to see if vandalism has been reverted or not. And if you use Lupins tool it has a function that shows whether it is current or not. VarunFEB200309:16, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
I have never had a problem with looking at, what when I got the page, was not the most recent edit - because in order to be getting pages which haven;t been fixed since I loaded te page, I would tend t have to reload, anyway. Keep in mind that if you get the recent changes, and someone else saves the revert a split second later, you will see the information on the recent changes as if the fix didn't happen. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu12:16, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Grants to improve your project
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Greetings! The Project Grants program is currently accepting proposals for funding. There is just over a week left to submit before the October 11 deadline. If you have ideas for software, offline outreach, research, online community organizing, or other projects that enhance the work of Wikimedia volunteers, start your proposal today! Please encourage others who have great ideas to apply as well. Support is available if you want help turning your idea into a grant request.
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
At 16:38 on 30 September 2016 I archived a completed copy-edit request at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Requests/Archives/2016, at the end of the second large section on the page, "Second half of 2016". I thought something looked strange when I made the edit because the edit window was entirely white except for the black text, but I went ahead and typed and saved the edit. Now, my edit (archiving the request for Black & White (video game)) appears in the revision history but does not appear at the end of the list. I logged off and restarted my computer and went back to look at it and it appears the same. I guess my edit is somehow lost. Shall I undo it and re-do it? I don't recall this ever happening before. – Corinne (talk) 17:19, 30 September 2016 (UTC) I think I see now what happened. I forgot to add a pipe and hyphen after the previous entry. I'll add it and see what happens. – Corinne (talk) 17:20, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Done Yes, that took care of it. The entry appears on the list now. I should have looked more carefully. Sorry about that. – Corinne (talk) 17:23, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
After 5 years of unstructured discussion since ACTRIAL, a dedicated venue has been created for combined discussion about NPP & AfC where a work group is also being composed to develop recommendations for necessary changes to policies and related software. It is 'not an RfC, it is a call for genuinely interested users who have significant experience in these areas to join a truly proactive work group. There is some reading to be done before signing up. See: Wikipedia:The future of NPP and AfC. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:43, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
Edit summary fields and IpV6
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
A significant issue in this general area is MW using /128 for talk and contributions of IPv6 users, which generally hinders communication and scrutiny. Many people have the automatic address hopping turned on in their OS (by OS vendor default), so the addresses are frequently meaningless past /64 level, with the second 64 bits being essentially random and frequently changing. From my point of view, MW should still track the full address used, but aggregate talk and contributions at the /64 level, and make that the default blocking level for IPv6. Shortening them to /64 would greatly reduce the length of the edit summaries. I realise that's not a simple change, but it might be a very useful change. Murph9000 (talk) 17:18, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
I do either or both of two things in such cases, depending upon how much extra room I need: (i) de-pipe the contribs link, this can save up to 40 characters - in the above example, it becomes Special:Contributions/2601:19B:C602:2CB0:C869:8B14:1697:ECA4 (which saves 39, since the second 16-bit value is only three hex digits); (ii) remove the talk page link, this can save up to 61 characters. So you can gain up to 101 extra characters by doing both. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:48, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I have sent out a massmessage to this list per the request made at WT:MMS. I always do a test run on my talk page before sending out mass messages, as a routine work I did the test on my talk page (here) which worked fine. Then I sent out the massmessage to the list, without changing anything (just the list). The mail was sent and seems to be the same code when looking at the source, however, when I'm in the "view" mode on the page, all the codes are disappearing, I can only see the link to the template. Please check out my talk page and this talk page to spot the difference. Any clue of what just happened? JimCarter10:05, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
It happens for many of the users. I haven't examined the template code but it should probably be changed to be less expensive. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:01, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I'm aware of the long standing issues with "Book Creator" (see the template notice on Help:Books), but I thought it did work at least some of the time, and that "Download as PDF" worked fairly often. We have someone at Wikipedia:Help desk § PDF issues reporting that the latter option has stopped working. I've tried it on a few pages, and it does seem completely broken at present, just endlessly refreshing at Progress: 0.00% Status: Waiting for job runner to pick up render job, and have let it refresh for quite a long time in case it was just being slow. Maybe a server / service needs a kick? Murph9000 (talk) 17:07, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Yeah, something like that. It seems to be working again now, having just done a quick test on a couple of random pages from my watchlist. It's fairly slow, as in 1990s slow, but I don't think that's anything new. Generated PDFs look ok (although I'm not sure I personally like the 2 column layout). Murph9000 (talk) 16:35, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
ampersands in pseudo-wikilinks in diff
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
@Kintetsubuffalo: At the top it says "This page explains a former standard procedure, used on Wikimedia wikis, for copying pages from one wiki to another. It is not about a software feature. For a related software feature see Help:Import", so it sounds kind obsolete to me. Have you looked at meta:Help:Import, or even at our own Help:Import? If you are not comfortable with that either, you could file a request at WP:RFPI. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:13, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago14 comments5 people in discussion
Maybe some regex wizard could make a regex for me? I would like to find wikilinks inside external link description part (e.g. [some_valid_url some random text [[wikilink]] some more text]). Opening brackets for wikilink can also be in first position of description part (or closing brackets at the end) and there may be more than one wikilink. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:57, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Which of course I would have noticed if I hade actually tested it... (You forgot to escape the last bracket though. ☺) Eman235/talk14:38, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, but it's not so simple :) When I first wrote regex for this it was also very simple, but that failed very hardly, when I tested it against database :D Pppery edited Eman235 suggested regex (with little modification) \[https?:\/\/[^\s\]]+ .+\[\[.+\]\].*\] also matches [https://en.wikipedia.org/ foo] sometext [https://en.wikipedia.org/ foo[[bar]] lorem] (here I would need to match only second link) and [http://sfdfsfsds foo[[bar]]lorem] ipsum[something] (I probably need to get the part till lorem]). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:09, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
The above doesn't find WP:PRURLs or [https://en.wikipedia.org [[bar]] lorem]. Give \[(?:https?:)?\/\/[^\s]+ [^\[]*\[\[[^\]]+\]\][^\]]*\] a try. — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:51, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Good catch about protocol relative URLs, thanks :) Your suggested regex (if we change \[ to \] at the beginning of description part) doesn't work well with multiple wikilinks in description part, so I probably will stick to Pppery's one (with changed + to *, of course) with added PRURL part. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 18:15, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Update. \[(?:https?:)?\/\/[^\s]+ [^\] ]*[^\]]*\[\[.+\]\].*?\] doesn't like bare URLs and matches [https://en.wikipedia.org/] some text [[and]] more [https://en.wikipedia.org/]. Theoretically, \[(?:https?:)?\/\/[^\s]+ [^ \]]*([^\]]*\[\[[^\]\[]+\]\][^\[]*?){1,4}\] works perfect(?), but it's extremely slow (even with {1,4})... So I abandoned it. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:15, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
That's pretty close :) From what I see, it doesn't find [https://en.wikipedia.org/ foo[[bar]]] (it should), but finds [https://en.wikipedia.org/] some text [[and]] more [https://en.wikipedia.org/] (which I'm currently not interested in). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 21:25, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Try \[(?:https?:)?\/\/[^\s\]]+ (?:[^\[]*\[\[[^\]]+\]\])+[^\]]*\]. I don't know how the speed will be though. — JJMC89 (T·C) 23:37, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes!!! Again, changing [^\[] to [^\]], but works perfectly. Found only one false postive and about the performance - it was sligtly slower than the first suggested regexes, but that's OK. {{Resolved}} then :) Thanks to everybody, who helped. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 02:06, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
Template:Location map uses a module that produces radio buttons that can be clicked. Can someone tell me what is the Lua code that when invoked will give a radio button that can be clicked to be selected/unselected. VarunFEB200307:46, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) @VarunFEB2003: It's probably Template:Location map § User selection of multiple maps, I guess (please be specific with this type of question, I only guessed that as I happened to have been reading the docs for those templates in the last few hours). Search for "switcher" in Module:Location map. I've not looked into how that works in detail, but I assume there's probably supporting stuff in MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js. It's probably the CSS and JS doing the work, with the Lua just emitting some elements. Using them for something other than that module might be "unsupported", unless you can find docs somewhere describing it as a feature. I.e. use that at your own risk, unless someone / something confirms that it's safe to do so. Murph9000 (talk) 09:37, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I've noticed that, in some cases, a user making an edit and saving without an edit summary will have the content of the edit copied as the edit summary. For example, Special:Diff/706908326: the edit summary is the same as the content, but with newlines of course removed. Or Special:Diff/706906864: the edit summary contains the content of the page, rather than the usual automatic "Created page with ..." summary. Or Special:Diff/741255865, which includes the edit plus some of the following text. This came to my attention some time ago when I noticed some users inserting the four tildes in edit summaries. Since it was a variety of users doing this at different times, I assumed that this happens automatically under certain conditions, if the user doesn't enter an edit summary and/or has a certain option enabled, however I can't find that option or reproduce the behaviour myself. Is this automatic behaviour, or would the users have to copy and paste these summaries themselves? Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 17:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
I do this religiously on talk pages, and sometimes in articles if it all fits in the edit summary. (I think I picked it up from User:Secretlondon). It's always manual cut-and-pasting, never automatic. —Cryptic18:01, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Not sure what I'm being asked to comment on, but as far as my behaviour goes, I almost always copy paste my edits into the edit summary on talk pages. Save me the trouble of having to think to describe what I commented on / what my comments were. Kinda like I'll do here in 2 seconds. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books}19:50, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks folks, that's what I was looking for. If anyone knows if there exists a tool for automatically doing such a thing, I guess I'd like to know, but thanks all the same. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 19:54, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 4 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Tidy will be replaced. Instead the HTML 5 parsing algorithm will be used to clean up bad HTML in wikitext. This would cause problems on a number of wikis. They need to be fixed first. [11]
<slippymap> will not work on Wikivoyage after 24 October. You should use <mapframe> instead. If you need help to fix this before 24 October you should ask for it as soon as possible. [12]
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi all, SplineTools (link) (used in the IP link of {{ISP}}, {{Static IP}} and more) has been dead a while and the developer inactive for over a year. I've forked the code and have it running here. It accepts the same URL format as SplineTools so can replace the splinetool links in the mentioned templates - before I go around requesting changes to the templates (essentially requesting :toollabs:splinetools/whois/ip/ gets changed to :toollabs:myrcx/whois/ip/) I thought I'd get some community feedback -- samtartalk or stalk02:48, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
African women stubs
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 8 years ago28 comments14 people in discussion
Some of you may think this is long-term planning, but I wanted to let you know about three tech projects :
mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy. Tidy cleans up certain mistakes that editors make, e.g., invalid HTML tags such as <b/> or tables that are missing their closing tags. As part of a years-long project to improve HTML compliance and get back to having only one parser, Tidy is going to be removed, probably some time in 2017. When that happens, some pages that currently look okay, even though their wikitext is broken, are going to stop looking okay. If you're a tech-savvy person, or if you like gnoming work, then please have a look. If you have time and want to help, but don't know what to do, then please drop by Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia and ask the regulars how you can help them. (User:VarunFEB2003, I'm looking at you. Also, everyone with TemplateEditor, because templates are the most confusing source of problems.) If you are involved in Commons, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, or other projects, or if you can read a language other than English, then please help with this work at the other projects, too. Those projects particularly need people who can figure out how to get the scripts and systems that CHECKWIKI has been using ported to them.
Remember when Ops switched the servers earlier this year from Virginia to Texas for a few days, as a sort of live test of what happens during an emergency? They were talking about doing it again in October or November 2016. However, they now say that the next iteration of the server switch won't happen until at least February 2017.
If you edit this page, and you get a light blue editing bar that has some pictures and then words/tabs that say "Advanced", "Special characters", etc., then you're using the 2010 wikitext editor (aka "mw:Extension:WikiEditor", not to be confused with WP:WikEd). Work on the mw:2017 wikitext editor is underway. If you want to see what it looks like, then go to the Beta Cluster and login. (That's a test site, and it's not on the SUL. If you're creating a new account there, then heed that warning about using a new, unique password in case it gets broken/hacked.) Then go to https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures and opt in to the "new wikitext editor". You'll only see the 2017 update if you enable the visual editor and switch back and forth. https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/World and https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Cat are my favorite test pages at that site. Keep in mind that this is pre-beta; stuff's known to be broken. (Feel free to tell me what you think here or at WP:VEF anyway.) If all goes well, it may become available as an optional Beta Feature here next month. One of the blockers for that is a long-requested system for auto-saving your edit-in-progress to your local computer, so that if you lose power or accidentally close the wrong tab (and you're using the new editor), then you won't (always) lose all of your work. So there's good news on the horizon there. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
@MER-C: Partially. Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags (mentioned by JJMC89) will pick up cases like <span /> or </span/> but it will not detect cases like </br>. If you want a forced line break, HTML5 recognises two valid forms of tag: <br > and <br /> (case-insensitive, and the space is optional). Some people misunderstand tag construction, and don't realise that the position of the slash is significant, and often mistype this tag as </br>. At present, Tidy converts this invalid form to the valid <br /> so you get the intended line break; but when Tidy goes, the </br> tag will be served to your browser, and the behaviour of this tag will be very much browser-dependent (Firefox 49 treats it as if it were <br>; Opera 12 treats it as if it were <br />; others might ignore the tag as invalid). At present there is no tracking of </br> and as it's not Wiki markup or a template, the capability to detect this would need to be incorporated into the MediaWiki software. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:52, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I am going to go to the beta labs and check that out! Since you particularly mentioned me, I want to know how can I help. Frankly speeking I have not been a long time here, it's the first time I heard about Tidy. Is it like a bot or is it like script/tool which you enable to easily correct. Wait! I think I got a better example to ask you. Is it like this? I am ready to help in whatever way I can. Thanks a lot and yeah thanks a lot for the input! VarunFEB200307:25, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I am facing a problem. I was creating my account at Beta cluster, but when it asks me for the CAPTCHA it's not showing me the image. How do I enter it. The request account link is also a dead page. Can you tell me some other way? VarunFEB200307:31, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I'll see the Beta thing. The photos you have given are for the visual editor. Can you give for the text editor too. Moreover even after its release I hope the current (2010) editor will always be available. There are a no. of scripts I use that will work only with it and I don't want to leave them behind. The Extra Edit Buttons and Advisor.js are the most which I like. I would appreciate if WMF doesn't yank support for it. VarunFEB200309:26, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
Just a note VarunFEB2003, that is the image for the wikitext editor (though it does look a lot like the visual editor). It looks good! No comment on backwards compatibility/availability reference the user scripts and the new release -- samtartalk or stalk09:31, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Well I just created an account it's here (frankly that's my username in my gaming apps) sites I found a big error in the new wikitext editor. It is slapping <nowiki></nowiki> tags unnecessarily (diff) and it has been marking each edit via the new editor as a visual edit. Since you asked for input I just though I'll tell you. I find it good (uh... let's say not bad!) but will there be compatibility for the scripts and an opt-out from the new editor (via preferences or via .js pages?) I have no problems in using it as long as it functions with all code perfectly (which I presently think it doesn't) and there is compatibility for the extra edit buttons. Thanks! VarunFEB200312:05, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): One thing more I came up with is why is it auto loading the visual editor? When I click the switch button while in Visual mode am I able to see the new editor. Moreover after my edit has been saved and I am back at the normal saved screen, I still see the https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Whatamidoing_(WMF)§ion=new URL and the editing name in the tab name (one that is defined using <title> in HTML) see the image . When I click anywhere I get the popup (because I have it enabled in my prefs) that "you are about to leave this page are you sure your edit might not be saved". I know it's BETA but I thought I'll leave some feedback as it'll help the teem improve it! VarunFEB200312:22, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure where to shove my comment so I'll shove it here, The new WikiEditor looks pretty cool and I have wondered for quite some time as to why this was never done sooner, I think we can all agree the current editor is outdated, Admittingly I hate changes (whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Youtube ... I hate changes full stop) so as you can probably imagine I don't really want the old editor gone however it is severely outdated!, Whatamidoing (WMF) - I'm always known for bashing and lecturing the WMF over the things they've created in the past however I don't think I've ever said thank you .... so I wanted to take the time to say thank you and the WMF for creating and working on this editor :), Don't worry come next week I'll probably moan about something else so I'd make the most of the compliments lol, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk13:18, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy: If you want to help, then please go to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Check Wikipedia and ask the regulars how you can help. It'll be far more effective to ask them for their up-to-date advice on where you can be most useful than to ask me. Also, you'll get to meet some cool and tech-savvy folks. (But if you want a place to start now, then it sounds from the above like finding and killing line break codes with a leading / would be a good idea.)
2010 wikitext editor: There are no plans to remove the "old" editor (what you get if "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" is selected in [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing]). Or the "even older" one (what you get if it's not). Or even the "original" one (what you get if both the enhanced toolbar and "Show edit toolbar" are turned off, or if you disable Javascript). NB for the record that I'm not promising that any of this will exist a hundred years from now, or even a decade or two. I'm just saying that nobody has any plans to remove any of these things, nor to make it impossible to edit without Javascript. There's no current reason to believe that anything would be improved by removing these. (There is a plan to make the 2010 wikitext editor a proper extension, rather than part of core; this should [theoretically, at least] make it easier to maintain far into the future.)
Scripts and gadgets: Basically, they'll all break. But, yes, you can adapt them to the new editing system, and even add them to the visual mode. The general goal is to make customizations easy. But "making it easy" means "nothing using the old, hard way will work in the new system". Documentation on how to port scripts might be reasonably forthcoming, once this bit is stable.
Opt out: Of course. But the choice is (for technical reasons) going to be "give me only my favorite old wikitext editor" or "give me the 2017 wikitext editor with the visual editor". The 2017 wikitext editor is really a "mode" in the visual editor (or the visual system is a mode of the 2017 wikitext editor, depending upon your POV) rather than a stand-alone product (at this time). All accounts must have one wikitext editor enabled; there will be no settings that hide wikitext editing completely. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:19, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Note: The 2017 New Wikitext editor currently has a design problem. It uses Visual Editor's Parasoid system for previews, instead of the proper wikitext preview. That means there's a big pile of things that are wrong or broken in the preview. See the image to the right for a small sample of the issues. The left side of the image is the New Editor preview, the right side is the current editor preview. Both are previews of the exact same wikitext. Note that the problems range all the way up to dumping raw wikitext onto the page, and even displaying lines in the wrong order! I'm asking in this thread at mediawiki whether WMF is willing to fix the broken-by-design preview. I see no point in deploying a New Wikitext editor at all, if they don't fix the broken preview. Alsee (talk) 09:38, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I'm glad to hear that this "2017 wikitext editor" isn't going to replace the existing variations on a <textarea> wikitext editor, since the new thing does not work with It's All Text which I use rather often. It'll be bad enough that Flow will probably force this new, non-curmudgeon-friendly wikitext editor. Anomie⚔01:08, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Undo -> Land on talk page
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
In recent weeks I have had a few frustrating experiences with editors (mostly anonynmous) who constantly revert and won't discuss their changes on the talk page. It's the most frustrating type of edit-war; at least in a heated discussion you learn about their motivations and you can always bring in other editors via an RFC/project page if a dialog exists. When I do try to communicate with them they have invariably left their IP number behind. I was thinking perhaps it might be possible that when an editor initiates a revert by using the "undo" button, once they save that edit they land on the talk page of the article. In such cases where there is an ongoing discussion it may encourage more editors to participate. I just thought I would sound out my idea here. Would it be technically possible, and if so do we think it would encourage greater engagement on the talk page? Betty Logan (talk) 15:48, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
There are three classes of IP: 1)the new, inexperienced IP, 2)the experienced IP who knows that in contentious cases they should discuss on the Talk page, 3)the familiar, well-known user with user name who edits in IP mode as a form of sock puppetting. This latter usage is the reason Wikipedia still allows IPs to edit. Far too many well-known editors want to be able to sneak around in IP mode and they resist allowing edits only by registered users. Your suggestion might encourage Talk page activity by those in class 1, but class 2 and 3 editors will simply ignore the hint. I don't see it as a useful proposal. Akld guy (talk) 20:43, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Actually, Wikipedia needs to keep getting new users - and type 1 is a significant part of our source. For many people the need to register first may deter them from doing their first edit. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu03:40, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Actually, Wikipedia needs to keep getting new users because good editors quit in frustration because IPs are allowed to wreak havoc with disruptive editing and vandalism. If registration was mandatory, good editors would stay. Virtually no other online forum allows comments by unregistered users, and yet here is Wikipedia, with an enviable reputation to uphold, allowing edits by nobodies who can only be blocked after a tiresome and high-workload appeal system at WP:ANI. If IPs can't be bothered registering in order to correct a simple typo (which is how many get started), then we don't need them. But I'm just wasting my time protesting this. I'm certain that I'll quit one day when a disruptive IP infuriates me once too often. Akld guy (talk) 05:57, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
So in stead of disrupting anonymously, where we can all see the ranges they use and those of us with the technical knowledge can find out their ISPs, they will start with massive sockpuppetry, which will mean that we will need more checkuser actions to stop them, more checkuser time doing it, etc. עוד מישהוOd Mishehu09:02, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
If Wikipedia really wanted to stop sockpuppeting, they would write code to detect whether a user attempting to create a username already has another username assigned to that IP range. Bingo, username request denied, sockpuppeting thwarted. But as I said above, there isn't the will to stop disruptive editing or sockpuppeting, because the editors on whose shoulders the decision rests are the very ones who want to be able to sneak around undetected. Akld guy (talk) 21:44, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
You seem to be particularly ill-informed as to how IP ranges and such actually work. Your suggestion would have an extremely high number of false positives. Anomie⚔01:11, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Media player always set the volume to max when you start/restart the playback
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Every time I want to play a video/audio, I want to reduce the volume to about 30% first, otherwise it's too loud. But once I clicked "play", it would just be reset back to 100% (tested on Chrome and Firefox). This is very annoying. I assume this should be reported to Phab: directly but I don't even know which part of MediaWiki it is. So I'd like to hear other's opinions here first. --fireattack (talk) 06:31, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Hi. I'm currently using a Mac Powerbook G4 running OS 10.4.11 and using Safari or Firefox browsers (my normal laptop needs a major repair.). I never had this problem before, but all material which should be collapsed is showing in full, and I have no option to hide it. Is there some setting at WP that might have caused this? I wonder, because the problem doesn't seem browser related, and in the past (up to 2013) this material was always collapsed. Thanks for any help. μηδείς (talk) 21:30, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
It sounds like you might be using very old versions of those web browsers. The MediaWiki software doesn't serve JavaScript to very old browsers, as it often causes more trouble than it is worth. Without JavaScript, collapsed boxes will always appear open, and features such as search bar autocompletion and gadgets will not function. — This, that and the other (talk)23:57, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, It's not really a huge issue, but I'll check Javascript on my laptop to see what's up. Since I have no problem with Youtube or other sites that seem to stay ahead of the game, while WP seeems to be oldster friendly, I found this weird. Especially, since, like I have said, it's a recent development. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 00:32, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Follow Up Question Is there a FREE program that maximizes OS 10.4.11? I keep getting ads for MacPaw, and that works for about two apps and then says send us $40. I'd rather save the $40 bucks toward the repairs I need on my 2013 Asus. μηδείς (talk) 00:32, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Adding a language link to the list in the navigation panel
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion
Hello all- Can anyone tell me how to add a link to the language list for a given article? I expected to achieve this via "Edit links" at the bottom of the list, but could see no way to do it there. Thanks in advance for any help. Erictalk14:34, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
It used to be done by adding a link in the form of [[it:prosecco]] (i.e. TLA for the wiki, name of the article on that wiki). Nowadays it seems to be done by linking all language versions of an article to a wikidata item. There's a link to the wikidata item in the left side menu; and if not, then a wikidata item needs to be created. Which article? --Tagishsimon(talk)15:27, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks to all of you! Was trying to do it the new way through Wikidata. Looking under the last link above, it seems this is achieved via the target article's language link edit interface. It'd be nice if that were indicated in the interface. I'll see if there's a place to suggest that. Erictalk16:46, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
I don't know what went wrong for you but all articles should have either "Add links" (if there are no links already) or "Edit links" under the "Languages" heading in the left pane. It works for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:56, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
(edit conflict) You can link it directly through Wikidata, you just need to search for the correct record there (for the case where the EN-WP article is the new one, or has not previously been linked from a record in Wikidata). I.e. it's not necessary to go via other-WP's article, although that may often be a convenient way to find the record. Murph9000 (talk) 17:02, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes, it was in the interface under "Edit links" that I was hoping to find more guidance. But I think I've got it now. Thanks to you both. Erictalk17:07, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Annoying new feature
Latest comment: 8 years ago15 comments7 people in discussion
Theres an annoying new editing tool at the bottom right of my screen on all articles. How do I get rid of it? Mjroots (talk) 19:47, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
@MZMcBride: - there was a grey box at bottom left of the screen, hovering over the various sections it showed that you could perform various actions including unmarking as reviewed, nominating for deletion, thanking editors and tagging sections as needing improvement. It seems to have gone now, but I haven't enabled any new gadgets in preferences for a long time. Mjroots (talk) 05:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Mjroots, this sounds like some prototype from the WMF Reading Department... if it is then it's targeted at readers. I've been spending a painful amount of time trying to follow the WMF's projects, but I saw no indication they were actually going live with anything yet. The Reading department is trying to find ways to make Wikipedia "more interactive" for readers, and for readers to be "casual contributors". You can see their list of generally bad ideas at MW:Reading/Readers_contributions. The ideas include readers tag-bombing articles and thanking editors.
Can someone catch a screen shot of this? I'll ping the Reading project manger and ask on the talk page if this is theirs. Alsee (talk) 11:16, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Alsee Thanks for checking in. This is definitely not the reading team's doing and I don't think there are any projects across the WMF product department that would do this.. Thanks for checking. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
It's back! Now showing on the 2016 Hoboken train crash article. At least the box can be moved by left clicking and holding the mouse, so I've parked it at bottom left where it is not so obtrusive. Would be better if I could prevent it from appearing altogether. Mjroots (talk) 16:58, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
The function of the bottom button in the grey box is "go to the next page in the queue". What queue would that be? Might be a clue as to what's happening. Mjroots (talk) 17:04, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Top button is "minimize". Once minimized, there is a tab that says "Curation". The gadget can then be closed. Mjroots (talk) 17:10, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
2016 Hoboken train crash is only a week old and I have a "Curate this article" link under "Tools" in the left pane. This activates the Curation Toolbar and is normal for new articles. I don't know why you saw it on Chillenden or other old articles but if it only appears on new articles now and can be closed then just ignore it. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:41, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Were any of those pages turned into redirects (even briefly, perhaps as the result of a page move or vandalism that was undone) recently? I believe that a redirect that is expanded into an article appears in the new page feed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
If you visit Special:NewPagesFeed and then "sort by: Oldest" (top-right) and "set filters: Unreviewed [only]" (top-left), there are a few dozen pages that are a year or more old, (and some are appearing because they're recently converted-from-redirects-into-articles as Whatamidoing explains above), and then an increasing number up until 3 months ago when the bulk of the backlog begins. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Restoring articles deleted because the editor is banned
Latest comment: 8 years ago9 comments5 people in discussion
Articles produced by blocked or banned users are typically deleted. If the content is good and the sources show the subject is notable, would it not be better to have some kind of process that holds on to them and allows legitimate editors to create them instead? Or is it purely up to editors to watch out for any article about to be deleted and squirrel away a copy in their sandbox? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:47, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
That's not a technical question, but a deeply philosophical question - remove the edits of ban/block-evading users to discourage them from evading further? Saving edits that are actually useful? These are roughly the two schools of thought. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:52, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
If someone wanted to look at the content of a banned user's deleted article, they could ask an admin to provide it in a sandbox or via email, unless it had issues like BLP or copyright problems. That editor could then review it and decide whether they're willing to take responsibility. But that does mean take responsibility. If there do turn out to be problems, they're on the hook for it now. It's often better just to write a new article. SeraphimbladeTalk to me19:00, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Well, sorry, I couldn't locate WP:Village pump (deeply philosophical). Take responsibility? Sure, just like any other created article. The current situation just seems a little haphazard. Sometimes admins seem to have access, to provide a copy of a deleted article hours, or even days, after deletion. But other times you ask, perhaps a little late, and get the response "I've no idea". Martinevans123 (talk) 19:46, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Since how bans are handled is a policy question, probably the policy VP would be the most appropriate place for questions like this going forward. For my part, I went back and looked at stuff I deleted in 2007, and it's all available to restore. If you're waiting longer than almost a decade, well, yeah you might want to get to it a bit quicker. SeraphimbladeTalk to me19:51, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello! I'm writing from the Wikimedia Foundation to invite you to give your feedback on a proposed move from CC BY-SA 3.0 to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license across all Wikimedia projects. The consultation will run from October 5 to November 8, and we hope to receive a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. Please, if you are interested, take part in the discussion on Meta-Wiki.
Latest comment: 8 years ago19 comments10 people in discussion
As many of you know, Google anything is blocked in China. Flash Earth was the best substitute because it had coords with crosshairs in the middle of the screen.
I came here to ask about it (not sure why it didn't come to mind earlier), figuring that it wouldn't work because it's Google-based, but expecting that it couldn't hurt to use. I always use Google Maps for directions, but I virtually always use Acme Mapper for all other purposes. Nyttend (talk) 16:28, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Crosshairs are vital, CKoerner (WMF). There's no good way to specify the _exact_ coordinate needed (for a new {{coord}}) without them. You might also note that mapper.acme has +5 and -5 zoom buttons as well as the +1 -1 which wikimedia maps beta shows. I find that very handy. displaying coordinates on the page (as you do with Zoom Level) would be preferable to leaving us to fetch them from the URL. mapper.acme is probably worthy of some study. Oh, and at least 5dp. --Tagishsimon(talk)21:38, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
maps.wikimedia.org is insanely slow and has no crosshairs and I think it's the first time I've ever used it. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is faster and more complete, I think. Plus, openstreetmap zooms in closer so you can center the map be more precise with the coords.
I remember at some sites, when no crosshairs, there is a "center map here" button that finds exact locations.
Isn't Flash Eerth replaced by https://zoom.earth (the old domain jumps to it)? I have never been to Flash Earth before so I don't know if they're the same (possibly not), but at least the new one still have the crosshair and coordinate function. -fireattack (talk) 15:45, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
I use Apple’s Maps.app. Only available on Apple platforms, but it seems to have complete and accurate data for any part of China I’ve looked at, without the odd alignment problems of Google. Fast too. I have also used map.baidu.com which is as comprehensive and also includes a Streetview-like street level feature. But it is slow to access from here in the UK, and direct links to e.g. (long, lat) positions seem not to work.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds21:40, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Hi JohnBlackburne. Hmmmmm, Apple, eh? Well, I live in the Windows world of the free. :)
Baidu maps is good and fast in China. The problem is the coords, as you point out. Another problem is no sat view closeups except for cities. The street view is great, though. Best, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 22:00, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
I had a look at mapper.acme.com which I had not looked at before. Seems to be just a wrapper for Google maps with an uglier interface, and so has the same misalignment problem as Google, and presumably is blocked in China because its data is.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds00:53, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
How can I find my contributions?
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
As for why it went there instead of your main page - the message was targeted to a category (not a MMS list) - and your subpage is in the category, not your main page - this may be due to a userbox not categorizing to the basepage name. From what I can tell "page creation" as part of message delivery is allowed. — xaosfluxTalk18:00, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
The messages are posted to the talk page of the page the category is on, seems like. So the fix would be to move the category to User:Doug Weller. It is not a given that all users want to have the mass messages on their main user talk page, so I don't think that changing the behaviour of the deliverer is the right way to handle this. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:11, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Agree with Jo-Jo here -- this type of MMS issue is most common when using category targets - I usually recommend to only send MMS's to dedicated lists - also much easier to opt out of a future list without having to leave the category. — xaosfluxTalk22:25, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi Doug Weller. Andy's suggestion directly above to make a redirect should work. MassMessage did post to a talk page, just not the talk page you were expecting, I guess. As noted on Meta-Wiki, some people like getting certain types of messages delivered to subpages instead of their primary user talk page (e.g., "User talk:So and so/Signpost"). I think this is perfectly fine and should be supported.
I believe we already have logic in place to prevent certain types of errors, such as "retired" users redirecting their user talk page to their user page. I believe in certain cases we opt to just log an error at Special:Log/massmessage instead of blindly following the redirect. If you find any cases where you think MassMessage is doing the wrong thing, please feel free to file a task in Phabricator.
In general, MassMessage is kind of stupid. It's the equivalent of delivering the paper to everyone's doorstep instead of having them go to the Web site and read the news there, y'know?
Redrose64, I think your history is about right. As I recall, category support was dropped from EdwardsBot (MassMessage's predecessor) because categories are painful to query and most message senders expected/wanted tree traversal (i.e., including subcategories and their members). This seems like a simple enough feature request until you realize that our categories are rarely trees and instead are insane graphs. :-) The input system for EdwardsBot was also finicky and having two options for recipients lists (cf. Special:Permalink/497259111) often confused people. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:56, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
MediaWiki message
Resolved
Hi, Yesterday Ser Amantio di Nicolao had sent invites to everyone with the MediaWiki message tool however I've ended up with notifications at here, here, here, here, and here as they'd used Category:WikiProject_Olympics_participants to send them (so other editors have to ended up with the invites in bizarre places),
So my question is is there nothing that can be fixed or something to fix or stop this?,
There was a thread posted a while back[15] but IMHO something should be done as admins may have no idea about the issue - Even if it's a warning when sending things via category that'd be better than nothing,
Anyway thanks, –Davey2010Talk00:11, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
He had come to my talkpage saying "basically I don't have any way to weed anything out when I send the message. I'm really not impressed - there ought to be some way for me to pick and choose who within a group gets the message!" - I assumed he had no way of changing it or whatever ? ... I've never used the tool nor have I even seen the interface etc etc so I have absolutely no idea on any of it but I guess my point is it shouldn't be happening, Ah well I'll mark this as resolved as I'm beyond clueless here, Thanks for replying and apologies for essentially wasting your time. –Davey2010Talk01:20, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
The interface only lets you target a complete list or a category. Whenever I send these, I always use a list - especially if it will be a recurring or project email - because it gives people a way to opt out in the future. We can add some warning information to the header file above about using categories, just need some prose. — xaosfluxTalk01:32, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Ahhh right so that explains why I've seen lists of usernames on various wikiprojects, Just a suggestion but what about having something along the lines of "Don't use via categories" or something which hopefully would stop the problem no ?, Thanks, –Davey2010Talk13:44, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Nevermind half of these have been redirected with the rest being G6'd so not sure what to do for the best here (G6'ing the lot seems a better plan). –Davey2010Talk13:51, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Please do add that header information - to someone like me it's not immediately clear that it can happen. I see what you mean about lists, and I intend to use one in future, but I'm enough of a Luddite that it's not something which might have occurred to me. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa.02:10, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Comet Group and Allders are two defunct UK retail companies, which ceased trading in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The articles on both are headed by a "company" infobox, and at the bottom of both boxes there appears a website url. This is obviously meaningless and undesirable, as neither company exists any more: the Comet link is in fact dead, while the Allders domain name appears to have been acquired by somebody with ambitions of reviving the brand online, but the site currently contains minimal information and has nothing to do with the business described in the article. I would like to delete these urls, but if I go into "edit" mode they are not there: they are being generated indirectly by some other means (via the logo?). Can somebody please explain what's going on, and what I need to do to get rid of them. GrindtXX (talk) 20:52, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
You can click "Wikidata item" under "Tools" in the left pane. You can override Wikidata with for example website = allders.com (defunct), or write website = hide to display nothing. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:08, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Locator map question ... 1. {{Infobox military conflict}} lacks the parameter position found in {{Location map}}. How can the position of the pushpin label be controlled through Infobox military conflict, and/or, would it be possible to add the position parameter to Infobox military conflict? And 2. does {{Location map~}} work with Infobox military conflict? Can an infobox location map have more than one pushpin? Experimentation recently on Attack on Convoy AN 14 was, for me, a complete fail, including the current situation in which two pins are displayed, one at a location for which there do not seem to be source coordinates. thanks --Tagishsimon(talk)16:18, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks @Edgars2007:. That almost works, but in 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt (as far as I can see) the image= parameter takes {{Location map many}} as its argument (and that supports both of what I'm after: multiple pins, control of label positions) but at the cost of losing the opportunity to post a more conventional image in the infobox. Attack on Convoy AN 14 shows an image of the ship Lupo and has its map lower in the infobox. So for my money, not a complete solution, and still pointing to a shortcoming in {{Infobox military conflict}} or in my understanding of it. --Tagishsimon(talk)21:40, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Starting a new article
Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments6 people in discussion
This shows up even for registered users when going to a page which is not currently an article:
Sandbox
I just want to experiment for now. Article Wizard
An easy way to create articles. Get out of here
Oops. This isn't what I wanted.
Puzzly.svg
Before you create an article, you should read Wikipedia:Your first article.
To experiment, you can use your sandbox.
You can use the article wizard to submit your article for review before being published to the "main" article space.
Please provide references for your article. Articles without references - especially biographies of living people - are likely to be rejected.
Need help? You can ask a question at the Teahouse, help desk, or through live chat.
Unlike other system notices, there seems no way to turn it off. I can undersstand its purpose for new users trying to create their first article. I can't find the code for it. I can't find the code that calls it. It's presumably in the css somewhere, hard coded.
Who approved it, and why?
And how do we get rid of this new" feature"?
And, even more important, how ddo we get things working so we get asked before implementation of stuff like this? DGG ( talk ) 01:24, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
@DGG: You were pinged in the discussion! Sorry you did not see it in time, we assumed this to be uncontroversial. The edit notice is part of an effort to revive the Article Creation Flow program that was meant to be deployed back in 2012. Kudpung and others have been asking for it ever since. I realize experienced users may not like it, but it is a mild distraction with a potentially profound impact on how new users approach article creation, and I certainly hope others can understand that... I think there might actually be a way to make this only show for unconfirmed users, looking into it now — MusikAnimaltalk02:36, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
BOOM! Using the magical MediaWiki:Group-autoconfirmed.css, this notice is now only shown to new users :D Similarly the old message (conveying the same information in plain black and white text) is now shown only to confirmed users. This technique now opens the door for other newbie-targeted improvements, using the CSS class .unconfirmed-show— MusikAnimaltalk02:52, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
Hi. How do I go about finding how many users are using a certain script? I've created a number of scripts used by WP:TV, and out of curiousity, I'm wondering how many editors actually use them, so that I know if I should merge/delete the unused ones. I tried to use "What links here (all NS)" on AWB, but it came up with nothing other than the links on my main scripts "home page". Alex|The|Whovian?06:54, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
This database report says of itself
This table contains people who have biographies on multiple language versions of Wikipedia, and who are marked as living on enwiki but as dead on others.
Useful, and simple to understand. The problem is with its "Articles without a born category" section, which lists articles with a death-year category but no birth-year category — this can be useful for individuals, of course, but most of the articles in this section are either about individuals' deaths, e.g. "Death of John Doe", or are about groups of people who were killed (or mass deaths in some other way), e.g. Martyrs of Compiègne or List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, July 2013. These articles fit in the death year categories, since all the martyrs died on the same day, and of course every entry in the list of folks killed by law enforcement died in 2013. And at the same time, they don't belong in the births category: the list isn't a person or an article about something related to births in a specific year, and the martyrs weren't all born in the same year. Is there a way to avoid getting these articles into this section of the database report? I'm thinking either changing the database report's criteria, or creating a Category:Year of birth not applicable that would, when put into the births category tree, cause the database report to ignore it — but I'm not sure if this would be a good idea. Nyttend (talk) 19:40, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
I don't think so. The report presumably looks at all pages with a death year category and lists the pages that aren't in a births year category, after excluding pages that are in one of the categories representing an unknown birth year, whether greater ranges such as Category:19th-century births or outright uncertainty such as Category:Year of birth uncertain. We definitely don't want to put CAT:Deaths by person into the births tree, so if we don't want to create the not-applicable category, we'll have to do something such as figuring out how to tell the database report to exclude articles in the Deaths by person tree. Nyttend (talk) 22:00, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Categorizing red links
Latest comment: 8 years ago14 comments10 people in discussion
Is it technically possible to categorize a red linked title? If not, would enabling such a capability be possible/feasible?--John Cline (talk) 10:02, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
It's not possible now. It would require a change to MediaWiki with a new way to add categories or a way to make a link red when it does have content. phab: would be the place to request it but I don't think it would be supported. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:37, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
There has been some semi-related discussion over the years, about storing categorization and possibly other metadata, in a structured system (either Wikidata or a local wikibase or something else). That might enable this functionality? The closest I can find quickly is phab:T87686 - possibly User:Jheald can comment here, or give a layman's overview, or point to other related links? @John Cline: can you give a couple of examples of specific use-cases that you have in mind. Examples almost always help! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
@Quiddity (WMF): On the topic of metadata, phab:T107595 is probably the implementation of interest. I think it still wouldn't be possible, since you still need to have a page that exists in some way, even though you're storing the metadata separately. --Izno (talk) 20:13, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for these replies. My thoughts regarding the categorization of red linked titles relate to building an asset that can be used to screen for topics without an existing article that almost certainly would exceed Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion. I understand that we can categorize redirects into Category:Redirects with possibilities, which works fine when the subject appears in the section of some other article, on an appropriate list, or even perhaps a disambiguation page, where a redirect can be supported.
My query relates to red linked titles of note whose subject does not appear in Wikipedia at all; being woefully under-served in a volume hoping to document "the sum of all knowledge". To preclude bloating of the category, it would be a prudent design, in my opinion, to require extended confirmation of editors marking entries into the category. I believe an example of such a title exists with Glen Ruby, a notable geologist of verifiable acclaim. These represent my thoughts on this matter. Thank you for asking Quiddity (WMF).--John Cline (talk) 23:01, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
Storing the requests as links in a wikipage has the advantage of letting us store notes alongside the redlinks. I guess the main drawbacks are that 1) they're less discoverable (not being in the default site search, and not linked to from the empty redlinked pages), and 2) they're potentially duplicated E.g. an article about a person who is notable for their work as a politician & musician & athlete might have notes in 3 places. Other pros/cons/options? (Years ago, some people used to store notes/drafts as "Talk:Foo/subpage" but I vaguely recall that practice was killed off deprecated for various reasons.)
Thank you again Quiddity (WMF). The categorization I am interested in is definitely meant to supplement existing efforts opposed to replacing. I also find Matthewrbowker's article request tool interesting and would like to see its documentation to learn more. Based on some of the previous efforts from others, work-arounds appear to be the only recourse available. In that vein, perhaps a companion of the edit notice could be created to display only when a page does not exist; itself capable of becoming that structured system where categorization and other metadata could be stored. How doable would that approach be? Is it currently possible to create an edit notice for a nonexistent page? Thank you all, again.--John Cline (talk) 08:50, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
@John Cline: I'm not sure how doable that is, nor what the ideal solution(s) is/are. I suspect we need to further research possible options, including how things work on other projects (to find good alternatives/ideas), to get a more comprehensive set of feature-requirements for a good and scalable long-term solution. This involves one of the most complicated areas of our diverse wiki projects (new page creation), and we already have many partial solutions, so I'd be hesitant about adding another quick fix, without doing a deeper dive into what all and who would be affected. (E.g. WP:AfC haven't been mentioned yet, but is obvious crucial for all of this!). I don't have time (as staff or volunteer) to give this the attention it deserves, but am really interested in following along. Please ping me (at either account) if the thread continues elsewhere. HTH, and thanks. Quiddity (talk) 22:04, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for mentioning that redlink list of women authors from Wikidata Quiddity (WMF)! Creating lists from Wikidata is easy these days with Listeria and you can filter for the redlinks on English Wikipedia. Unfortunately only people seem to have labels in Wikidata that are suitable for creating actual articles from. Place names, such as "Saint John's Church" or "Middletown" are too generic. That said, the issue here is I think different. What you are looking for does exist but not for the English Wikipedia (yet). It is called the "article placeholder tool" and is meant to be a sort of "dummy redirect" which can be used (as I understand it) as a pop-up state for "super-redirects" that actually correspond to Wikidata items (sorry haven't seen it so don't know for sure) - or- it can be used as a pop-up for redlinks (which currently don't go anywhere, but also correspond to Wikidata items). Jane (talk) 11:22, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
If you go to ht: (Haitian Creole) Wikipedia and search for an article that doesn't exist there (e.g., Milk or George Armstrong Custer), but for which there is a Wikidata entry, then the search results page will have a section at the bottom titled ==Discover data on the topic==. That provides a list of links to the Article Placeholder pages for items with that name. When the item you want is in the list, and when the Wikidata entry is reasonably rich, the results can be positive.
And in other cases, such as milk, when actual milk (d:Q8495) doesn't appear in the search results (but a whole lot of pop culture works named after milk do appear), then it's not necessarily any worse than what you would have had otherwise. (User:DGarry (WMF), are these search results your problem?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
@Jane023 and Whatamidoing (WMF): I added some example links for it at mw:Extension:ArticlePlaceholder#Links a while ago. Please replace or add to that list, if you find much better examples! Jane023, I'm not familiar with the pop-up for redlinks feature, can you explain how to trigger that, or where you heard about it so that I could track down details? (If not, I'll ask the developer). Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
@Quiddity (WMF):@John Cline: Hello, sorry about the delay in answering (I don't see pings always... it's a me thing not a software thing). My Article Request tool is intended to provide a quick and easy interface for people to add an entry to the Requested Articles system. Currently, these red links are sorted on subpages to Wikipedia:Requested Articles. The intention was to provide an easy interface for users who don't want to learn Wikimarkup or Visual Editor to add a request. We also enforce two sources on the tool, so that unsourced entries aren't added.
This tool is still under development, however; it's undergoing a major overhaul right now. The backend of the tool, operating under my bot account Matthewrbot was placed on hold in favor of making the tool OAuth only - see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Matthewrbot. I am in the middle of re-writing the tool itself to use OAuth and post the requests under the user account.
How does wikipedia get reflist list-style-type's to work?
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I've been trying to get lower-alpha footnotes (ref's with group=lower-alpha) to show up on other wikis (e.g. Wikimedia Commons & MediaWiki) the way they do on Wikipedia. Comparing Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and MediaWiki:
all three use the same MediaWiki version
all three use the same Cite extension version
all three have the same Template:Reflist
only on Wikipedia do lower-alpha footnotes work, e.g.[a][b] (wp sandbox); on other wikis they show up as [lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2] (commons & mediawiki sandboxes)
For <reference/> tag, there is an easy workaround – just add css along the lines of div.reflist ol.references{list-style-type:inherit;} and it works (reference list uses letter instead of numbers). However, the <ref>'s within the text will still be [lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2].
I haven't been able to find a way to apply css to ref tags. They're trickier since their html (<sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-2">[lower-alpha 1]</a></sup>) is pretty much the same as normal ref's (<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup>). Can a wiki's css do anything to the ref tags before the Cite extension convert them to html?
I found this css within the Cite extension code, but I don't know why it works on Wikipedia but not elsewhere. All three wikis are using the same Cite extension code, so I'm a bit confused.
@Lam-ang:, thank you for the quick reply. I looked through the system messages previously, but those weren't there. Do you know why they don't show up in the system messages list? Commons and MediaWiki don't even have the group-decimal system message, even though that's the ref default – how does that work? Is there anything needed to connect the Cite code to the the system messages or is it hard coded into the Cite code? Thank you, 15zulu (talk) 21:23, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply. I already knew how to use the group lists on Wikipedia and change the MediaWiki:Cite references link many format (which changes the backlinks of a ref from 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 to a, b, c etc…). I spent quite a bit of time going through Template:Reflist/doc, {{reflist}} code, mw:Extension:Cite, and other pages, but none of them explained how to get the list-style-type's to work on a different wiki. I figured out that I needed to add css to ol.references to inherit list-style-type (which I later confirmed with MediaWiki:Common.css), but that only fixed the numbering/lettering within the list, not the text (text would still have[lower-alpha 1][lower alpha 2], while the reflist would display a. b. etc.). None of the instruction pages mentioned the system messages group-lower-alpha, group-lower-greek, group-lower-roman, etc. Hopefully creating those messages will make everything work. Thank you very much for the explanations. 15zulu (talk) 01:42, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
HTTP 404 on revision histories of non-existent pages
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
@GeoffreyT2000: That seems like unremarkable and perfectly valid behaviour to me, at least for the 404 being sent by the MW server. It's correct behaviour under the W3C standards. Inclusion or exclusion of 404s from browsing history is an issue between you and the people who made your browser. Are you saying that the behaviour is incorrect or problematic? Murph9000 (talk) 23:30, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
@GeoffreyT2000: Ok, so it's something that has changed recently in MW. The change seems to me like it is a change for the better. It makes MW more compliant with W3C standards, where it is considered a bad thing to reply with 200 for resources which either don't exist or have been deleted. Serving 404s for this case seems to me to be the correct thing to do, and my only surprise is that MW wasn't already doing it. It greatly helps web robots, as it lets them know reliably that the URL does not currently point to a resource, and eliminates problematic and unreliable parsing of the HTML to try to detect it. Are you saying there's a problem with this new behaviour, or just mentioning it? Murph9000 (talk) 03:04, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Generating a list of African IPs
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I was wondering if somebody could generate a list of ips on English wikipedia who have made more than a few edits in the last month or two which come from African nations? I would like to encourage them to create a new account and participate in the upcoming African Destubathon.♦ Dr. Blofeld09:40, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
I just ran a quick, simple query. There are 306,227 unique IP addesses that made contributions in the last month. (RecentChanges is limited to 30 days.) I haven't filtered for African origin yet, but there could be quite a few. There could be fewer when filtering IPv6, because the highest /64 is probably "unique enough." (I'm not sure how you'll invite an IP range.) It would be difficult to check which ones were spam/troll edits or made through proxies, too. What criterion would you like to select them, total number of edits greater than N or the top M contributors or something else? --Unready (talk) 01:57, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
@Od Mishehu: If you don't have a Special:MyPage/common.js, use Special:MyPage/skin.js. When you click this link, it'll display a three-column table with four rows. After a few seconds it should redirect to the appropriate .js page - if it doesn't, find your current skin in the first column, and click the corresponding link in the third column. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}. [18]
The notification badge is coloured if you have notifications. When you check the notification the badge will now turn grey on all wikis instead of just the local one. [19]
Colours used in the Wikimedia wikis' main interface changed slightly. This is to make them easier to see for readers and editors with reduced eyesight. [20]
Changes this week
Hidden HTML comments will be more visible when you edit with the visual editor. <!-- You write hidden HTML comments like this. -->[21]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Language converter syntax will soon no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. [22]
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
When a talk page is edited, a message at the top says: This is a talk page. Please respect the talk page guidelines, and remember to sign your posts by typing four tildes.
I know I can suppress a similar message when creating a new article by placing #newarticletext { display: none } in my css. is there an equivalent for thus message? (Bonus question: how & where can I find out what these page elements are called?). thanks --Tagishsimon(talk)20:57, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
#talkpagetext{ display: none; }. To find out the name, you need to use the point-and-highlight Developer Tools (provided by your web browser) or an old school "View source" to identify the id of the offending box (in this case talkpagetext) and prepend a # -- although if it doesn't have one, it's a bit trickier! - Jarry1250[Vacationneeded]21:20, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
Finding the name is easier than that. Just add ?uselang=qqx to the end of a normal (read-mode) page, and you'll see all the labels. If you're editing (if it's en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=etc.), then add &uselang=qqx (& instead of ?). There's also a gadget you can turn on that adds "Message names" to the end of the "Tools" section of the sidebar.
? starts a query string in a url while & separates parameters in a query string so &uselang=qqx is for all url's which already have a ?. uselang=qqx shows names of used MediaWiki messages like MediaWiki:Talkpagetext. These names may or may not correspond to an id or class in the html. It's the name of the id or class you need to hide it with #name_of_id { display: none } or .name_of_class { display: none }. A search of the MediaWiki namespace finds messages created at the English Wikipedia but not default MediaWiki messages which have not been changed here. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:50, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Hashtag bug
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion
Ive noticed that recently sometimes when I open a talk page, or a wikipedia page, it has a "#" at the end of the URL, this # has always coincided with me for some reason not being able to open boxes, such as wikiproject shells, or use any of the buttons above or below, like signature button, or link button, I have little to no idea why, does anyone know how to fix it? IazygesConsermonorOpus meum17:30, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
@Iazyges: It's a hash character, not a hashtag - those are Facebooky things, and we don't use them. Hash characters have two main purposes in URLs - to initiate some piece of Javascript, or to separate the URL proper from the fragment (a fragment is a link to some identifier within a page). Fragments should never always be non-blank, so I suspect that it's Javascript related. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:46, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
Well, perhaps I'm wrong, but I believe that hashtags are used within the Wikimedia movement. There's even been talk of using hashtags in edit summaries. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:36, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
I suspect you mean "fragments should never be blank," although they can be. Links (<a> tags) that are bound to a JavaScript function frequently have href="#", because the coder for some reason didn't cancel the default click action, which for most other URLs would reload the page. --Unready (talk) 07:42, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Ah, rats. I meant "fragments should always be non-blank"; corrected, Thank you. My phrase "to initiate some piece of Javascript" covers your second point, I think. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:08, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Special:RecentChanges: tag filter fails for tag names of >1 word
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
You can show Special:RecentChanges on a page by using {{Special:RecentChanges}}. You can now use tag filters by using {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=tagname}}.T142878 refers.
Trying this I found that it doesn't work if the tag name is more than one word. Thus:
{{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=autobiography}} or {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=blanking}} produce a list of results: whereas
{{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=Section blanking}} or {{Special:RecentChanges/tagfilter=possible vandalism}} produce only No changes during the given period matching these criteria, although there were in fact plenty of pages with these tags: Noyster (talk),11:27, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
Recursively checking that a template is in a category tree
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I would like to add a template (GeoGroup) to a wide range of categories, but am finding it hard to comprehensively follow the tree manually, and wouldn't want to employ a bot, as the template would not be appropriate to all categories. So I'd like to download all the relevant category pages to my computer so I could inspect their names and grep their contents to make sure I'd make all the manual changes.
I see you can export individual pages and the whole database, but can you download with one command a categories and all categories it references, to save me writing a parser for the files and issuing repeated requestsVicarage (talk) 10:27, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
| It seems to occur in multiple selected articles as well, not just one. Is this normal for selected articles or not? _ CyanoTex (talk) 13:57, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Portal guidelines#In general says: "It is common practice not to include references in portals. As on the Main Page, readers should be able to verify the portal content by following a prominent link to a relevant article, and checking the references there."
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
The title shown on the browser tab now simply says "Wikipedia" instead of "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". For example, this page says "Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) - Wikipedia" on the browser tab rather than "Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". GeoffreyT2000 (talk, contribs) 13:59, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
Some technical details. MediaWiki:Pagetitle added code like this to the html before [23]: <title>Example - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</title>. See HTML element#title tag. Many browsers display it on the tab where the page is viewed. It's not meant as a file name but browsers may suggest it as the file name when a page is saved. Browsers may have an option to change the name before saving but most users probably keep the default. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:16, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
show public domain sections in Wikipedia pages in different color?
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Which sorts of public domain sections did you have in mind? All public domain media is already tagged on the file page with a PD template, and placed in a PD category. It wouldn't be feasible to do what you're asking for article text that's been lifted from a PD source, since that will cease to be PD once someone makes substantial edits to it, which can happen at any time. Are you asking instead for PD media that's displayed in an article to somehow be marked in that article? Someguy1221 (talk) 04:26, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Because Wikipedia has documents that state that PD material must be clearly marked as such, so I was wondering if there was a way to highlight those sections in a different color to quickly locate them visually, that's all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1.174.160.122 (talk) 04:45, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Why is Português shown twice when connecting some pages via Add links, in "Link with page" window? You can check screenshot (just example, test, I did not link those categories). --Obsuser (talk) 15:44, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Is this intended behaviour (that Wikisource and other sister projects pages show up when connecting via Add links)? --Obsuser (talk) 15:56, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
As there's a significant prize for geography/wildlife in Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon, I think we should probably have some lists to make it easier for people to work on. It is possible to generate lists of existing geography stubs by country for Africa and also a scan to enable finding stubs on wildlife (flora and fauna) which are known to be native to a given country? I know there might be an overlap on many but overall that would really be useful as contestants are to elect just one country to list it under.♦ Dr. Blofeld16:31, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Strange notification
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I've got a notification that says "Bahnhof St Gallen mentioned you on the Lord's Cricket Ground talk page in "Requested move 11 October 2016"
"Support as per above - clearly the primarytopic here."
but this is the diff - I don't appear to have been mentioned and the support quote is me not them?,
Anyway thought I'd post here incase it was a bug or something .... Thanks, –Davey2010Talk13:02, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
If text with a user page link (e.g. an existing signature) is moved around in a signed edit then it's sometimes interpreted as an addition of the moved text. The MediaWiki diff recognizes that a 20:16, 12 October post was removed while your 03:16 post is unchanged, but if Echo uses another diff algorithm then it may have interpreted your signed 03:16 post as an addition by Bahnhof St Gallen. I cannot tell from mw:Manual:Echo#Technical details whether Echo makes its own diff or uses the diff we see on the edit. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:55, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, why your template loop doesn't works correctly in all cases when you want to use it with a template i.e. you want to repeat template certain times? This is Czech template called "Pahýl", see [24]. I've tried to use it with loop, see this as result. But when I've tried the same thing at cswiki, it works correctly. The only one difference is I don't pass params as named to the module. But as you can see it works correctly even = is used. Could you explain this behaviour or fix it? Thanks in advance, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 14:41, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
It fails because the second table does not get {| at the start of a line when the loop is made. The line starts with |}{| due to the end of the first table. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:45, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
IP block warning
Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments8 people in discussion
Any idea why I am seeing this notification of a blocked IP address when I look at new user contributions? The IP address traces to a local school board in Ontario, I'm in the UK and my IP is totally different (I am logged in). Nthep (talk) 15:51, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Same, and in all skins, and logged in or logged out. Shows up in other language wikis too. Looks like something is leaking over from meta. CrowCaw18:28, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Quite possibly. Now the same page yields a block message for User:179.7.115.118, an individual address rather than the range mentioned when first found this issue. Nyttend (talk) 14:27, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I raised this issue a few days ago at the help desk. As you can see, Murph9000 made some comments about IPs and suggested I come here. I don't believe that my IP is changing or if and when it does, it has anything to do with the problem of Wikipedia logging me out. To prepare a little before I came here, I've been recording my IP address every morning when I start up my computer since October 7. My IP address has not changed, including this morning when I turned the computer on at about 13:00 UTC. I remained logged in until 15 minutes after I turned on the computer when Wikipedia logged me out. After that happened, I again checked my IP address and it had not changed.
So, back to my original question: is this a known bug or is there something that might be peculiar to my set-up that is causing these seemingly random log outs?
@Whatamidoing (WMF): I followed the bypass procedure I think yesterday, and I was just logged out. Although I can't swear it's the only time it happens, it seems to occur when I'm in the middle of a CU.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:02, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Would it be possible to add Storymap to Wikipedia?
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Yes. I know. First it would be Mediawiki. Then meta... then each Wikipedia. But the question is: could it be possible to add something as great as Story Map to Wikipedia, either using their software via inclussion or creating something similar? It would be a great feature in history articles, for example. Or even complex graphs. -Theklan (talk) 15:41, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Wow! I'll search it all. I'm very happy taking data from Wikidata, as in the basque Wikipedia (where I normally am) we don't have a big task-force to make changes. Thanks for all, Yurik! -Theklan (talk) 18:53, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
The description of button for "All languages" from "Compact Language Links" beta feature is broken
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
It works for me but apparently not for everybody. I don't know how many are affected but we could probably fix it here by simplifying MediaWiki:Ext-uls-compact-link-count from {{PLURAL:$1|One more|$1 more}} to $1 more. The only difference is that it would say "1 more" instead of the intended "One more" when there is only one. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:01, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Developer Summit wants you
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Wikimedia Developer Summit is the annual meeting to push the evolution of MediaWiki and other technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement. The next edition will be held in San Francisco on January 9–11, 2017.
We welcome all Wikimedia technical contributors, third party developers, and users of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia APIs. We specifically want to increase the participation of volunteer developers and other contributors dealing with extensions, apps, tools, bots, gadgets, and templates.
Important deadlines:
Monday, October 24: last day to request travel sponsorship. Applying takes less than five minutes.
Monday, October 31: last day to propose an activity. Bring the topics you care about!
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Hi all, I'm just browsing some articles and came across Donald Trump. It seems like the whole article body is being redirected to a YouTube video. I tried clearing my cache to no avail. I'm not too sure what's going on or even if it is affecting other users. -- LuK3(Talk)02:26, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
Did you know that you can easily re-arrange columns and rows in the visual editor?
Select a cell in the column or row that you want to move. Click the arrow at the start of that row or column to open the dropdown menu (shown). Choose either "Move before" or "Move after" to move the column, or "Move above" or "Move below" to move the row.
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 mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.
Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.[27] A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.[28]
Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.[29]
At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department are adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more on MediaWiki.org.[30]
The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page.[31] In the future, the "Save page" button will say "Publish page". This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems. More information is available on Meta.
Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image. Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.[32]
Future changes
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.
The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.
@Whatamidoing (WMF): This was announced (and rejected by most people here, and by e.g. Wikinews) a few months ago. At the page you link to as "Information is available at Meta"[33] it still says "This change will probably happen during the week of 30 August 2016." Apart from that, that page still makes multiple claims you have been unwilling or unable to substantiate, about "Repeated user research studies", and no indication of any counter-study has been done, i.e. how many people would be confused by the "publish" label for their sandbox, drafts, or in general. Have you made these concerns publicly known to the people at Meta? Fram (talk) 14:12, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Some users got a warning about Wikipedia's security certificate last week. This was because of a problem GlobalSign had. This has now been fixed. Only a small number of users got the warning. [34]
Editors couldn't edit semi-protected pages in the Wikipedia app for Android. This has now been fixed in the beta version. [35]
Changes this week
There will be no new MediaWiki version this week. [36]
Future changes
The Editing Department are working on a new wikitext editor. It will have tools that are in the visual editor but not in the wikitext editor today. You can read more about this. This is an early plan and things can change. The old wikitext editor will still exist.
2. How can I add Special:WantedTemplates to my Watchlist so that I can see when it changes? There is no option to add it with the usual star, and when I try to add it to my Watchlist manually by editing the raw Watchlist, the page does not get added. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:52, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi, last year we had a wishlist process to decide what the WMF Community Tech team should focus on. The latest status report is out now, if you want to keep track of what's happening (and to make sure credit goes where credit should go: it's not just the Community Tech team doing things – other WMF teams, Wikimedia Germany and MediaWiki developers who do this in their spare time have worked on this as well).
Failure of templates applying NOINDEX and probably other __magicwords__
Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion
Several templates attempt to apply __NOINDEX__ to hide problem-pages from search engines. It has just been discovered that this doesn't work. The pages don't actually get NOINDEXed. It seems likely that all __magicwords__ are being dropped from transclusion. A WMF staffer is currently looking into this. It will likely get fixed. Alsee (talk) 21:22, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
P.S. Roan Kattouw is the one looking into this. I'm pinging him here to post any updates. Oh, and "It will likely get fixed" was my assumption of the proper outcome here. Roan didn't say that. Alsee (talk) 21:31, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
It looks like it's working just fine to me, from a quick test of a few pages (e.g. talk pages of BLPs are correctly showing it, non-BLP talk pages not showing it). Note that it can potentially take months for a change to be reflected in search engines, and that it's only an advisory request to them (i.e. search engines can ignore it if they want to). Note also that some namespaces have it disabled or forced on. From a quick look at InitialiseSettings.php and CommonSettings.php, it looks like NOINDEX is disabled in the main article and File namespaces, defaults to on in User and User talk, and is forced on in Draft and Draft talk. For other namespaces, it defaults to off and can be enabled on a per page basis. That's for enwiki, other WMF sites have different settings. See mw:Manual:Noindex for details of the MW config variables which control it (i.e. what to look for in those config files). Ideally those configuration settings should not be changed by WMF without first establishing community consensus for any change. I didn't check when the config last changed for them. Murph9000 (talk) 12:02, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
SOLVED. It has nothing to do with transclusion. NOINDEX is completely blocked in article space. That was where Roan Kattouw and I were testing it. The reason this came up is because there was discussion of having certain templates (like BLP-violation speedy delete) apply NOINDEX to the article. Alsee (talk) 12:46, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
I and many others could have told you that immediately and saved time investigating if you had just posted an example. One of the instructions in the edit notice here is: "Where did you encounter the problem? Please add links when possible." PrimeHunter (talk) 13:36, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
Well, that explains things, thanks for pointing that out. I've been a MediaWiki developer for over 9 years, yet I still learn new things about it from time to time, today is one of those days :) --Roan Kattouw (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
BTW, the reason that this is the way it is, is to prevent people from easily NOINDEX'ing content, which is a highly non-visible change to a page. It's restricted out fear of abuse. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:39, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
And when an inappropriate NOINDEX is removed it may take a long time before search engines discover it and start indexing the page. For this reason I would oppose any possibility of NOINDEX in mainspace, also with careful tracking. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:36, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
Noindex also intentionally does not work on the internal site search engine for similar reasons; it would be possible to hide pages from scrutiny incredibly easily, which has a lot of abuse potential. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 03:22, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Title blacklist
Latest comment: 8 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Hello, folks. If this is not the appropriate place to ask this question, I'll be happy to be re-directed elsewhere.
As a reviewer at Articles for Creation, I tried to accept a submission for publication, but was stopped with the notice that the move was forbidden ("titleblacklist-forbidden-move"). I took a look at both the local and global blacklists over at MediaWiki, but I'm not sure that I actually understood everything that was printed there.
For most of today, my watchlist had a notice that there was some central computer problem -- might this be what is preventing the move from Draft space into article space? Or is the title "There's a Gold Mine in the Sky" really on a black list?
Thanks Pppery; that makes a sort of sense, although it feels more like a sort of unicode to ascii mapping than a case-insensitive issue ... but this is not my area. --Tagishsimon(talk)03:23, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Linking new article to Wikimedia Q ID?
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I am so not a tech guy. At the Greek Wikipedia, I stumbled on the Wikimedia Q# for Demetrios Alexatos. Right now I have just parked it at the article, but that's not right, I know. How do I link the new article to his Wikimedia Q ID?--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 08:43, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Visit Wikidata. Search for your man's record. Once found, look for the wikipedia box, hit edit, add en as the language and the article name for the page parameter. Wikidata checks that it has the right values for both (they appear beneath the input field boxes) ... save, done. But I've been there and done that for you, so, err... --Tagishsimon(talk)08:49, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Deleted article causing Petscan woe
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
A petscan report of mine lists Deborah L. Kerr as an extant en.wiki article, but per the redlink here, it does not exist; was deleted some time back. The fact of the undead article in the petscan list seems to break the WiDar tool which enables wikidata items to be created from petscan lists; it hangs. So that's bad. Can anyone throw any light on the problem? thanks --Tagishsimon(talk)03:18, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
I can report I get the message: Grabbing data of earlier revisions: error "Service Unavailable" occurred while contacting the API. when trying to use Twinkle. RickinBaltimore (talk) 15:35, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
I'm in the same general boat... "Grabbing data of earlier revisions: error "HTTP/2.0 503" occurred while contacting the API." Shearonink (talk) 16:30, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
I haven't experienced this myself, but then again, I haven't had a need to use Twinkle yet today. However, it seems to be working now based on reports being made with it over on WP:AIAV. Amaury (talk | contribs) 17:08, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
My "notifications" widget is showing that I have 1 new notification, but when I click on it, I get a message stating "Failed to fetch notifications". (Monobook.js skin; Twinkle installed.) WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!!16:02, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
Got it, thank you. What threw me off is that previously the empty article links appeared in red, seems like was intended to indicate that there was no article for that year, and I think it worked. Now that they are redirects they appear in blue. This seems to be confusing. I will contact the editor that created the redirects. Rybkovich (talk) 18:22, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Edit filter gone nuts
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Edit filter 320, which hadn't been changed for two months, went "nuts" today at exactly 17:30 (UTC) hitting a large number of non-vandal IP edits. Was there some change to the software? And can anyone help resolve it? -- zzuuzz(talk)18:22, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I'm not sure where to ask, but it involves a request for action by a bot, so this might be a good place. A Teahouse question did not get a response. Dandelany saw a potentially harmful web site and wanted it blacklisted and hoped a bot could remove it if it was added many places.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:15, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Search only finds it on 5 article pages so I've removed them by hand, less spam than a poor way of using foreign language wikipages as references here. Nthep (talk) 19:30, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
After uploading to commons.wikimedia.org, the resulting file is still the old one. One needs to wait some time, and refresh, for the change to the new file. Did I miss a notice about this ? Xb2u7Zjzc32 (talk) 02:56, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
@Xb2u7Zjzc32: That has been that way for as long as I can remember. The old image is cached by the server. A WP:PURGE fixes it. Whenever I upload a replacement file I always just purge the page when I am done. If you have the clock gadget enabled this is easily done by just clicking the clock. The gadget can be enabled by going to your preferences -> gadgets -> appearance -> Add a clock to the personal toolbar that displayed the current time in UTC and provides a link to purge the current page. The gadget has to be enabled independently on Commons but is actually called "UTCLiveClock". --Majora (talk) 03:35, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Incoming links from sister sites
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Is there any way to look for incoming links to a specific page from our sister sites, such as other Wikipedias, Wikibooks, the Commons, etc? עוד מישהוOd Mishehu08:11, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
This minor aspect of watchlists has bugged me for a long time. Why can't there be a way to mark an individual watchlist entry as visited (i.e., unbold it) without having to actually visit the page? I have on-page means to see the diff without actually clicking the link and loading the page. And sometimes I don't even feel the need to look at the diff (like if the edit came from a trusted bot or editor), but just want to tick off that the entry is visited. I searched Phabricator and there doesn't seem to be any requests for this. Being able to mark these entries as visited would seem to save a bunch of wiki-time in accumulation. If there's no interest in changing the wiki software, might there be a script I can use to accomplish this? Stevie is the man!Talk • Work00:30, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
This is on my wishlist too. Generally, what I do is visit all the diffs that need visiting, and click "mark all as visited" to tick off the rest. Eman235/talk00:40, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks NQ for the info and the gadget! I couldn't find the gadget in en preferences, so I added it to my .js, and after setting some variables to my tastes, it works very well. The only nit I would note is that if I mark an entry as visited, the visited filter doesn't remove it from view unless I reload the page (but this won't keep me from using and loving this gadget). As for Writ Keeper's inline diff, I'm not sure I want that to automatically mark an entry as visited. Stevie is the man!Talk • Work13:01, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I am trying to help someone at OTRS with an issue. The issue originally seem to be related to Commons so I was handling it as part of the Commons queue, but I just realized this morning that the problem is in the German Wikipedia. Now I'm quite aware that this is not the German Wikipedia but I'd like to describe the problem and asked if this conceptually could happen in the English Wikipedia or is it something that plausibly could be due to a different configuration of mediawiki for the German Wikipedia.
In short, if you go to this article while logged in:
I don't know why the software would deliver a different image when logged in versus not logged in. If this is possible in the English Wikipedia, then perhaps someone could tell me what's causing it and how to fix it. If it's not possible in the English Wikipedia then I'll have to direct my question to the German counterpart of VPT.--S Philbrick(Talk)12:43, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the prompt answer. So what advice should I give? Do they need to prod someone to accept the latest change, or do I tell them to just wait, and it will be fixed shortly?--S Philbrick(Talk)12:59, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Is there a way to find all article titles matching a particular regex?
Latest comment: 8 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion
There is a discussion going on MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist to blacklist all titles which contain (or consist exclusively) 10 or more digits as they tend to be created by spammers. Is there a way to find out if there are legit titles which match this pattern? Something asked by MER-C on that talk page. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 09:30, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
What I can do now is to set up a test abuse filter that checks all newly created pages against an arbitrary regular expression and just log the results. It'll take a week or so to get an idea of the false positive rate. MER-C10:14, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes, MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist overrides MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. Blacklisted titles can be created by administrators and edited by others once they exist so there isn't much reason to add individual pages to a whitelist. Regular expressions are more useful. If many consecutive digits are disallowed by the blacklist then we could use the whitelist to allow titles only consisting of digits, or digits followed by " (number)". PrimeHunter (talk) 17:02, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Usernames with large numbers and their user talk pages appear to be another common false positive (per MER-C's edit filter above), so I'd restrict the blacklist to articles, page creation and new editors to reduce collateral damage. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:17, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Archive bot
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi everyone,
I tried to file a copyright violation by the link the template gave me and ended up on a "Permission error" page. Now I was wondering: Is this a login issue only or possibly a time zone issue (Wikipedia possibly still being on October 20 while I am in a time zone where we have Oct. 21 already)?
I did the best I could now and filed it on the Oct. 20 page. --84.190.89.103 (talk) 09:22, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
No, Wikipedia has been on 21 October for over nine hours now. The problem is merely that people who are not logged in cannot create pages in Wikipedia: namespace. I've created the page now, so you should be able to carry on filing your copyvio. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:30, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
New discussions placed at top in certain venues causing issues with section edit links
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Most venues such as WP:AFD, WP:TFD, WP:RFD place new nominations at top. This causes an issue with section edit links. If you try to edit a section and a new discussion has been added to the page since you have opened it, you will end up editing the wrong section as those links refer to sections by their number. I'm not sure what's the best place to discuss a possible change to that, but perhaps something could be done from the technical side, I don't know. nyuszika7h (talk) 22:01, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
The issue doesn't affect AfD as there you get transcluded subpages rather than sections, but otherwise I agree: commenting in RfD and TfD sometimes gets annoying because of that. – Uanfala (talk) 22:20, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps developers could section-edit by matching title: Although sections can be titled with numerals, it might be easy for the wp:developers to change section-editing to match a section-header text title when the "§ion=" is not a numeral. The edit-merge has matched such section-headers in the past, to the first matching header title. This section-header edit could be added as a suggestion in the "meta:2016 Community Wishlist Survey" during November 7-20, 2016. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:23, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Special:Notifications pagewidth
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Thanks. On a second look, I found the long URL. I'm happy its in the pipeline; thank you both for that double-fast WMF response; I presume screengrab is now superfluous, but if not let me know and I'll send. --Tagishsimon(talk)17:29, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Background and border color of a table
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hello. Which are the parameter to have a white background and with border of a table. Actually I need to have no color at all. Just to have the background colour of the Wikipedia page. Xaris333 (talk) 18:19, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Tables are transparent by default; you're probably adding the default styling with class="wikitable"; remove that. If you needed to force it, you'd use background-color: transparent; in the style attribute. For borders, don't use the deprecated border attribute; use border: 1px solid #aaa; or similar in the style attribute instead. In summary: use something more like {| style="background-color: transparent; border: 1px solid #aaa;" instead of {| class="wikitable". {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}}19:33, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
User:Nihiltres I still have the outside border. I want also to remove that.
Latest comment: 8 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion
Hi, could someone please check whether this edit is correctly done, and fix it if necessary. The purpose is to stop a line break being inserted before the bracket, which happens in some browsers. The edit appears not to have worked, but I'm not sure if could be just a propagation delay. I am not familiar with editing templates. Thanks. 86.185.218.185 (talk) 03:12, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
What bracket? I don't see any bracket in that vicinity, and certainly not within the text that you nowrappped. ―Mandruss☎09:09, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Template:Nowrap says, "It prevents word wraps (line breaks) within text or inside a link which contains spaces or hyphens ("-")." There are no spaces or hyphens within "language(s)". Unless the Nowrap doc is incorrect, the edit itself seems questionable. ―Mandruss☎09:16, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Bracket means parentheses here. The edit looks OK. You could say the Nowrap doc is incomplete because it doesn't list all cases where a browser may wrap text if it doesn't have nowrap code. My Firefox doesn't wrap at parentheses like in "language(s)" but some browsers do, e.g. my IE and Opera. It can be tested by narrowing the window slowly and see whether "(s)" alone wraps to a new line below or "language(s)" always stays together. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:07, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. My Firefox doesn't wrap it either, not surprisingly. I can't imagine the rationale for wrapping that, but whatever. ―Mandruss☎11:17, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd put a hidden comment on that to explain the odd use of Nowrap, if that would work there. Otherwise I couldn't expect it to survive long term. Editors naturally tend to remove stuff that they see as unnecessary. ―Mandruss☎11:25, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
(OP) Thanks, it seems it was a propagation delay. I tried purging earlier but I think I must have got the syntax wrong. Anyway, I have purged the relevant page correctly now and it is working fine. 86.185.218.12 (talk) 13:59, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Template:Dynamic IP has broken hostname/IP links, WMF splinetools is no longer functional
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Category:User en-GB redirects to Category:User en-gb. However a template is populating the former and attempts to adjust the entries don't currently work.
Latest comment: 8 years ago54 comments24 people in discussion
Watchlist bolding
Since today, all entries in my watchlist are bolded. I have the " Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)" unchecked (like it used to be), but it bolds them anyway. If this is the new WMF standardn can the option in preferences please be turned into the opposite? I hate pages with that much shouting. Fram (talk) 06:52, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Bold IS the default, it's English wikipedia that is divergent. A change was rolled out to how gadget's etc load, and it seems that for some reason our overrides are no longer overriding, we probably need to rework that gadgets slightly. This used to be Edokter's cup of tea :( —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:53, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Chiming in. For me it started yesterday in the late afternoon my time. I didn't post anything because I was foolishly hoping some overworked developer who no doubt inadvertently caused it would realize their error and fix it by today. Apparently not.--Bbb23 (talk) 12:52, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
I posted something about it on the VP yesterday or the day before, but I can't find it. The bolding is horrible and totally unnecessary. Another whim of a WMFer who thinks he knows best and probably never edited a Wikipedia to any extent. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:00, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
Your comment about the people involved is unfair, and I think you should strike it. If you look at the bug linked above (three days before your comment), the patch was written by someone who's an admin on two wikis and who has made more than 50,000 edits as a volunteer. The patch was written to resolve a real technical problem that was reported by a volunteer, User:He7d3r, who is an admin at two wikis and has made more edits than you. Describing this as merely some "whim of a WMFer who thinks he knows best and probably never edited a Wikipedia to any extent" is rude and wrong. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:32, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Whatamidoing (WMF), in most cases my comments about the WMF are perfectly correct. I won't say publicly what I think about your comments over the years. Patches to MediaWiki software should NEVER have to be repaired by unpaid volunteers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:01, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
I can agree that it's annoying when a favorite script stops working, especially when you have no idea how to fix it. However, it's quite the other way around: all local user scripts (gadgets are merely local user scripts that you can enable with the click of a button) are required to adapt to the global MediaWiki software. It is neither typically practical to find out which of the many thousands of user scripts on the hundreds of WMF wikis might be affected by any given change, nor reasonable to refuse to solve a known technical problem merely because it would require an update or a correction to a local user script. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 07:49, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
But they could at least be aware of the type of problems their fix might cause, and give some indication when a solution might happen once they have been made aware of the problem. (And of course, equating one of the few general gadgets on enwiki with "the many thousands of user scripts on the hundreds of WMF wikis" is quite an easy cop-out). Fram (talk) 08:29, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Please note: All entries aren't bold. Only the entries that were last edited by someone other than yourself. That's the purpose of the bolding -- to let you easily see where other editors have changed something. If you made the last change, the entry isn't bold. Softlavender (talk) 06:59, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
We know that, we aren't stupid. That doesn't mean this is the best way to do this. In the past, we had the opposite as default, and a gadget if you wanted this version. Now, we have this as the default, and no way (except by editing your css, which is not really a userfriendly way of doing this) to get the reverse. Fram (talk) 08:29, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Fram, why would you need your own edits to be bolded? We already know about our own edits. What we need to know about are other people's edits -- that's why they are bolded, to accentuate them. And why does your OP say "all edits" if you don't mean "all edits"? Softlavender (talk) 22:11, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
You're right, I didn't explain that correctly. My watchlist (and the watchlist for everyone on enwiki who hadn't checked the gadget) showed no bolding at all so not "the opposite" of the current situation). Unviewed edits could be seen by the colour of the circle in fornt of the edits (blue or green). As to your second point, I do mean "all edits" as I have "hide my edits" checked by default (why would I want to see my edits on my watchlist?). So for me, all entries were bolded, with a few select ones later unbolded after I visited the page. 95% or more are bolded at any one time. Fram (talk) 10:03, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Some of us are stupid, so thanks Softlavender. Some of us are just technophobes. Some of us may be newbies. Some of us are (getting more) forgetful. So thanks, Softlavender, for reminding us of what may be obvious to some. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:31, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
I note that I have given two possible solutions/workarounds already in this section, yet no community member has chosen to act on either. This is just an indication of how underrepresented technical skilled editors are amongst the sysops. We need WMF'ers to do everything for the English Wikipedia these days ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:11, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Any word on when this bolding in the Watchlist will be fixed? I had to laugh, was in my "Gadgets" tab today and, bless my little peapicking Preferences' heart... there still sits the artifact line of "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)" with its unchecked box. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 12:27, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Display problem, MonoBook, black background gadget
I use the MonoBook skin, and the black background with green text gadget. Since yesterday evening (British Summer Time) it has not been displaying properly. The left hand column with the search box, help, recent changes links etc. is displaying in blue text on white, and a phantom Wikipedia globe is present to the right of where it should be, overlaying some of the links at the top of the page. I have uploaded a screenshot to Img Safe here. DuncanHill (talk) 13:08, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
Dark Skin Gadget Use a black background with green text on the Monobook skin is not fully working properly
Hello,
There is an issue with the following gadget: 'Use a black background with green text on the Monobook skin'. The issue is that the page MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin.css is not updated to work properly with wikipedia's design.
Basically, the gadget is outdated at this time, causing breakage of appearance.
For instance, 1) the sidebar remains blue-text-on-white, 2) the background remains white, and 3) the table of contents remains blue-on-white.
You can test by enabling the gadget yourself, and the issues should appear on any computer.
As this gadget provides a high-contrast theme for users, I'd like to request that the gadget be updated to fix these issues. X.A.N.A. the Evil Virus (talk) 04:55, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
Watchlist bold type
I see the bold type has mysteriously returned to the watchlist. How does one turn this unsightly mess off? - I can't find where too do in my preferences. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:05, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
@NQ: I commented out the code. First, it moved my edit button back to the left, which I hate. Second, it didn't help the watchlist. I'm putting it back the way it was.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:26, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
@Bbb23: No I meant you have to copy this code - .mw-special-Watchlist .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title { font-weight: normal; } and add it to your common.css :) - NQ(talk)15:34, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
+1 - I've had it since yesterday and assumed someone somewhere had cocked something up .... Then again I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere thought "Hmm lets improve the project ..... by making the watchlist bold" ....., I dislike the watchlist being bold full stop - It looks bloody awful and isn't an improvement (atleast not too me anyway). –Davey2010Talk14:52, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Instead of per-user hacks, how about the fixes get put in to MediaWiki:Gadget-WatchlistChangesBold.css that everyone can already toggle via gadgets? If we've given up up having this gadget be used for this purpose, a replacement to unbold could be put out - and this one can be deleted. — xaosfluxTalk16:00, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Is anyone doing something to fix this site-wide? I'm wary of such per-user hacks. This bold is incredibly ugly. I can't believe any experienced designer made deliberate choice for that to be the default. older ≠ wiser16:13, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
Are you running Microsoft Windows? In the past, the common denominator for people who found bold ugly/fuzzy/difficult to read (as opposed to just disliking it) was having Microsoft Windows, which apparently tries to be helpful with bold fonts, but doesn't necessarily succeed. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:37, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes. I also edit on a Kindle where the bolding is a little less hideous, though still objectionable (although the biggest gripe about editing on kindle or or on my phone is that the size of the type changes when I click on something in my watchlist with the result I often end up clicking on something else as the entire line has shifted).older ≠ wiser10:03, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
I've noticed over the last few days that the "Widen the search box in the Vector skin" gadget in preferences no longer seems to be working. Is this intentional? Is there a workaround? Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:38, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Nevermind, we may have implemented the wrong fix. It seems that the devs changed div#simpleSearch to have the attribute max-width, thus if one overwrites the max-width value, we can actually set a width value greater than it. Although, it appears that the max value is already at 20em. We need only use div#simpleSearch {max-width:20em; width:20em;}if the max-width value is what needs changing. We should check to see that a fix like that is needed. I don't want to be changing things where they don't need to be changed. -- The VoidwalkerWhispers17:50, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
In the above CSS rule, the part inside the pair of braces is the declaration list, and the part which precedes the opening brace is the selector list. There is only one selector here, it is div#simpleSearch which is specific to any <div>...</div> element that has the attribute id=simpleSearch - if this selector had been #simpleSearch it would have been specific to any elements that have the the attribute id=simpleSearch. #simpleSearch has lower specificity than div#simpleSearch (and the div selector has even lower specificity since it applies to any <div>...</div> element, whatever attributes that element has). What we need to do is raise the specificity of div#simpleSearch still further, perhaps by using a type or class selector for the enclosing element. In this way we can avoid the use of !important - which is a last resort because it is so difficult to override: there is no !veryimportant annotation. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:53, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
This has been going on for about two weeks for me...article titles are bold in my watchlist. I don't know if this has any affiliation with this since I only use Twinkle. — JudeccaXIII (talk) 21:55, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi. Appreciate if anyone can have a look at the possibility of fixing this template. Thanks in advance! Rehman13:06, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Template:Weather box errors
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
In Shanghai#Climate I currently see four errors below the weather box: "The parameter "Year humidity" is not recognized by Template:Weather box". The same goes for "Year sun", "Year precipitation mm" and "Unit precipitation days" parameters. Perhaps something was messed up. Could someone check what's going on? Brandmeistertalk11:23, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello fellow Wikipedians, I have been working on something on my userpage that displays a different piece of text every day (if you look at my userpage, I'm talking about the dedications at the top of my page), and repeats the display of this text every month. I want to create a link that links to the previous and next day's text (without me having to update it every day). I have figured out a way to do it on my account only by editing my common.js. When I try to put script tags on my userpage they seem to get escaped out, because they don't actually call the code that I put in them, they actually get displayed on the page. Is there a way to add a script to a local page in such a way that all visitors of the page see it? Gluons12☢|☕15:13, 22 October 2016 (UTC).
No, <script>...</script> cannot be used on a wikipage. The way you should probably try to do what you are doing is either the Help:Magic words or WP:Lua. I would guess that magic words are sufficient for your use case. --Izno (talk) 15:23, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
As I was editing a file just now, I caught a key (A?) accidentally, and the font used in the edit displayed in the edit window changed from the usual proportionate-width font to a typescript font with every letter the same width. Please how can I change it back? Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:25, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Anthony Appleyard, the font in my edit form is always monospaced. I use the default skin (vector) and as far as I remember I have no special configuration to force the monospace font (I could, because I prefer it, but I think I don't and just checked whatever I remembered could influence it). So... maybe you have some configuration that changed it, either using a different skin, or some browser configuration? - Nabla (talk) 09:48, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I am using Google Chrome, where I saw a small, one-line, and orange fundraising banner. I closed it. But then I saw again the larger banner I'm more used to seeing. Is it a bug for people to see another banner after closing out of the first? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 22:31, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
@Biosthmors: I don't know for sure. It might be they want to hit you with the big banner to try to sway you if you don't respond to the small one. I believe you aren't supposed to see banners over and over (unless you are blocking or clearing cookies on your end, as a cookie is used to track whether you've seen a banner). The Meta Fundraising talk page is probably a better place to ask, as that is watched by members of the WMF Fundraising team. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 00:05, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Deletion log entry not shown in related changes
Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Ok, I am so not tech-ish but I will try to explain what has just happened...
I went to add a reference to an article.
I opened up the Cite templates - when I edit an article it is the last menu option on the far right, from left to right-> Advanced...Special characters...Help...Cite
I clicked on Templates, clicked on Cite book and...
nothing. None of the drop-down items are coming up for the cite option - no cite web/cite news/cIte book/cite journal. (Btw, the other options are working - Advanced, Special characters, & Help.) But what is up with Cite not working? Is it just me or is it everyone?!? HELP. Shearonink (talk) 14:49, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
It failed when I tried it here after your post but worked on an article and now it also works here. Is it still broken for you? What is your skin and browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:00, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
I had tried it a couple of times after I posted and it wasn't working at the time but just now I tried it again and it worked (yay!). Nice to know I wasn't the only one though so thx for your response. Shearonink (talk) 15:09, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Why is the use of magic word templates discouraged?
Latest comment: 8 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
There are several reasons. The template may get a bad edit. Other wikis may copy code which fails if the template has not been created at the wiki. Templates may not expand if a template limit has been exceeded. Editors may search for the magic word's normal syntax and not find it. Some tools may also be confused. The template may not duplicate all features of the magic word. Even if it works in one case it may encourage bad uses elsewhere. For example, {{PAGENAME|2 + 2 = 5}} produces "Village pump (technical)/Archive 150" here because it has no unnamed parameter ("2 + 2" is interpreted as a parameter name due to the equals sign). {{PAGENAME:2 + 2 = 5}} produces "2 + 2 = 5", the name of 2 + 2 = 5. {{PAGENAME|1=2 + 2 = 5}} correctly produces "2 + 2 = 5" but many users don't know or forget this fix for unnamed parameters with an equals sign. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:36, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion
AutoWikiBrowser has disappeared from the "Downloads" folder on my computer, where it has been for several months, and doesn't appear to be anywhere on my computer. Is there a cause for this, and should I download AWB again, if this is possible? Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 17:20, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Archive box broken? Or archives themselves? MiszaBot?
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Talk:Old Testament has a problem out which I can't figure. Per this edit the page clearly was supposed to have at least four archive pages, but only Archive 4 (2008? to 2015) appears to exist, and the only archive linked on the page is Archive 1, which is a red link. 2 and 3 also don't appear to exist. But the current talk page includes unarchived posts from 2003. What is going on? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:59, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Lowercase sigmabot III isn't working properly at all. The archiving at WP:ANI has been set to 72-hours-old for years now, but there are currently threads on the page that have gone 5, 6, and 7 days without responses or archiving. I've seen countless other pages over the past several months with threads well past that page's "expiration" that Lowercase sigmabot III has failed to archive. It appears we need a replacement for this bot as it is failing. ANI in particular needs a working bot that archives stale threads promptly.
This sometimes indicates unparsable timestamps. Some bots - and I think that Lowecase sigmabot III is one of them - cannot handle timestamps that are not in the same format as those produced by four or five tildes. Even a non-breaking space or a left-to-right mark can confuse them. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:27, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The abuse filters had a problem and caught too many edits. This has now been fixed. [38]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from October 26. It will be on all wikis from October 27 (calendar).
The "Search" text in the search box will show the name of the project. For example, on Wikipedia it will say "Search Wikipedia". [39]
Some wikis that want numerical sorting in categories can also ask to use UCA to sort categories. The biggest difference is that characters with diacritics will be sorted together. For example, for most languages Ä will be sorted with A instead of at the end of the alphabet. This is not true for languages that have Ä as a character in their alphabet. Wikis that already use UCA are listed on Meta. Languages that can use UCA are listed on MediaWiki.org. You can test it.
I think that it's general, not specific - several times over recent weeks I've had a HTTP 502 when viewing a diff, previewing an edit, or merely visiting a page. You just need to back out and try again. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:11, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply, but it just isn't working for me. Every time I have tried to use the edit count tool in recent days, I have received the "502 Bad Gateway" error. zazpot (talk) 23:29, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
[ https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/ec/ ] returns "301 Moved Permanently This tool has moved to a new location. You will be redirected to [ tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ec/index.php? ] shortly", then a redirect.
Hello. Apologies about not checking in sooner. I've done some digging and everything appears to be up on xtools' side. No errors in the logs and the web service is running.
Thanks! I tried again shortly after you posted your message above, and had no joy. However, something must have changed between then and now, because I tried again a minute ago and it worked! zazpot (talk) 19:07, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Now that we have a reliable Page Views count, could a link to it be added to the sidebar? At present you have to go for "Page information" and scroll all the way to the bottom of that to find the page views link under External tools: Noyster (talk),13:41, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
It's also at the top of the page history. I don't like linking an external tool in the sidebar. I don't know whether the tool can handle the traffic it might get there. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:51, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago15 comments10 people in discussion
Hey, have messages sent through "email this user" always revealed the sender's email address? I remember this being masked through the Wikimedia servers, but lately emails I've received have come from "Username <user's real email@a real address.eg> via Wikimedia.org". Was there a switch or am I just ignorant? Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 17:18, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
They've certainly always been visible as long as I've been active (10 years or so), otherwise how could anyone reply to emails? You should see a massive "Your email address will be disclosed to the recipient" warning box whenever you click on Special:EmailUser. ‑ Iridescent17:25, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
[O]therwise how could anyone reply to emails? There are plenty of websites out there that let you sustain an email exchange without revealing user's email addresses. – Uanfala (talk) 17:36, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I suspect you are thinking of things like Facebook Mail or Web forum private messaging, which aren't e-mail at all, but a completely separate internal messaging system implemented in the website. I understand how non-"computer people" just lump them all together, but "under the hood" the mechanics are completely different. The other thing that I think some sites do is set up their own e-mail aliases, where everyone with an account at example.com gets a "[email protected]" address, and e-mails sent to that address are relayed to their "real" e-mail address. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 23:53, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
This is how it has been for years. If user "Example" sends me an email through Wikipedia, I see his email address ([email protected]). The reverse is not true. At the bottom of the email to me will be the words:
"This email was sent by user "Example" on the English Wikipedia to user "Guy Macon". It has been automatically delivered and the Wikimedia Foundation cannot be held responsible for its contents."
"The sender has not been given the recipient's email address, nor any information about his/her email account; and the recipient has no obligation to reply to this email or take any other action that might disclose his/her identity. If you respond, the sender will know your email address. For further information on privacy, security, and replying, as well as abuse and removal from emailing, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Email>."
Well I guess I'm just ignorant, then. I know of at least two websites (craigslist and Kijiji) which enable two-way email communication between users by masking email addresses. I don't know what protocol that is but seems a simple enough idea. Emails I receive by users responding to my ad on Kijiji come from, for example, [email protected], and if I reply to that address the user receives mail from a similarly masked address. This is Kijiji's help page about it. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 12:14, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
A few notes, there have been many phab requests (e.g. phab:T137337) to stop spoofing our user's address as the sender - for the most part these aren't going anywhere - this would also fix the email receiving problems with domains such as yahoo. As far as enabling "reply" if this isn't sent - many think it would be good to be able to reply from their email system directly - so at tleast a reply-to header may be needed to allow this. As far as "facebook style" etc - we don't really want "private storage" onwiki for a host of legal reasons. — xaosfluxTalk16:24, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
If the mail is coming from Special:Email to a user that is pointed to a mailing list, it should help - but if it is someone just emailing the list that is a different problem (in a nutshell yahoo.com knows that the email wasn't sent from the domain that owns the email address, and blocks it). — xaosfluxTalk17:21, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
The Technical Collaboration Guideline (TCG) is a set of best practice recommendations, for planning and communicating product and project information to Wikimedia communities, in order to work better, together. The TCG allows Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Product teams and Wikimedia communities to work together in a systematic way in the product development and deployment cycle. It is hoped that the TCG is useful enough to be utilized in planning and communications regarding any project, from anyone. The TCG is intended to be flexible as plans and products change in development; it is a guide whose contents will help build collaborative relationships.
The initial draft of the TCG was written after discussions in small groups with members of the Community Liaisons and Product Management teams, to identify successes and failures in communication, and what we can do to encourage collaboration with the communities. Over the next month, we are seeking review and feedback from Wikimedia community members. All feedback that is left will be read; if there is a case for immediate action, it will be made. All feedback will be taken into consideration when editing the next draft of the TCG. Please keep in mind that the TCG is intended to be lightweight information and instruction and will not be completely comprehensive. The TCG and the conversations about it are in English, but comments from all languages are welcome. We look forward to reading your comments at mw:Talk:Technical Collaboration Guideline. Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
I use it very occasionally; no load problems observed when going direct to a page, but occasional load failures when using it thru the 'check wikidata' links in petscan lists (which I have assumed is some sort of application issue rather than Safari issue - e.g. from this list with WiDaR enabled. --Tagishsimon(talk)22:57, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Another approach uses templates: The {{disambiguation}} template is on 170K pages in the mainspace, and the stub template base is on 2.05M pages in the mainspace. It's uncommon for a stub to lack a stub template, but I'm not familiar with any similar way to count list articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd caution against putting too much weight on the stub-template and stub-class counts; my estimate a while ago (can't find the calculations) was that 25% of these at least are no longer stubs by any reasonable definition, but there's a long lag time in people updating the tags for various reasons. Treat them as a very upper bound, perhaps, but don't rely on it. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:34, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
While the Random redirect itself has no problems, the fact that it is hard to repeat (like how you can control-option-x and keep scrolling through articles, the only way to get to random redirect is to either have it bookmarked or go to special pages each time. While I understand that many people wouldn't use the feature, it would be helpful. IazygesConsermonorOpus meum02:47, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
Just looking at your recent edits over there. If you believe that you need a full citation format for a source parameter in the information section, you don't. A simple link to the source will do. --Majora (talk) 23:29, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Commons does not use modules for citations. Doing this is a big step you would have to discuss at Commons. Previewing {{cite thesis|title=Example}} here shows seven citation modules at "Templates used in this preview" at the bottom of the edit window. It produces: Example (Thesis). See commons:Category:Citation templates for other options. I don't know whether they all work. Commons uses citations far less than us. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:34, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
@Pppery: They are useful for formatting source attributions from which images have been taken and uploaded. For example PLOS licenses their content under creative commons (example category) - when images are uploaded from them people use {{cite journal}} to attribute, without putting it in <ref> tags. Other sources are similarly used, the range of citation templates available is pretty limited (available templates).
@Majora: Although simple link is sufficient, it can help people wanting to re-use the image to attribute it back to the original source to have it formatted by a citation template rather than just a raw url. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk23:41, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Here at en.wiki, the thing that distinguishes {{cite thesis}} from other cs1 templates is the automatic insertion of the title type (the (Thesis) in Editor PrimeHunter's example). None of the templates that I looked at over at commons support that parameter. If you can get along without it, then perhaps their {{citation}} will do for you.
It would appear that this commit deployed earlier today seems to have broken the ability to identify with owner only consumers. IABot is now dead in the water because of this.—cyberpowerTrick or Treat:Offline03:38, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Tgr: Try InternetArchiveBot which is the bot's actual name. You'll find a consumer there. Since yesterday morning the bot has been dead in the water getting this error, when it tries to run an identify request
ERROR: Invalid header in identify response: {"error":"mwoauth-invalid-authorization-not-approved","message":"The app that you are trying to connect seems to be set up incorrectly. Contact the author of \"InternetArchiveBot AUTH v2\" for help."
Is it just my perception, or has there been more template vandalism than usual as of late, particularly involving politics? These exposed templates (particularly ones used on lots of articles) need to be protected. Dustin(talk)19:47, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
There should be clear guidelines for what constitutes a highly-used template (probably in percentage terms of all articles/non-mainspace pages depending on a template's primary use) and then all templates above that threshold should be protected as a result. There's been the "random" batch done here and there from what I can tell but there's e.g. nothing in WP:Protection policy which describes what makes a template high-use (just the "conditions"). (And the use of the {{high-use}} template is ad hoc at best.) --Izno (talk) 20:00, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
I'd like any template edit by a non-admin or non-template editor that adds a div, a picture, or an external link to either be restricted or require review of some sort. I'm not sure how feasible it would be, but I think it would eliminate the problem and wouldn't impede most normal template editing. --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:18, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
(E/C) We already have 139 (hist·log) that does that, but it is bypassed or the condition limit is reached. See also a related discussion about potential solutions to this, including pending changes. In the long term, we can't template protect every template with a couple hundred of transclusions... Cenarium (talk) 21:34, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
Note that there is a redirect from the CamelCase "GamerGate" to "Gamergate controversy", which I suspect might be the trigger for the bug, but I haven't looked if similar cases also trigger the bug.
Latest comment: 8 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
I'm working on a new implementation of character encoding converters for Firefox. For benchmarking purposes, I'd like to use real Wikipedia pages, because
Wikipedia is an actual top site, so its performance matters.
Wikipedia has human-written content in various languages. (E.g. Google Translate injects its own markup, which messes up the natural interleave of ASCII and non-ASCII, and that interleaving is the crucial thing I'm looking for in the test data.)
Wikipedia is hypertext, so it has a Webby mix of markup and human-readable text (unlike obvious passages of text with translations to multiple languages).
Wikipedia is suitably licensed.
It turns out that it's quite hard to find a single Wikipedia topic that has representative content in multiple languages. (So far tried: A popular food item: apple. Not actually popular everywhere. Basic elements like iron and gold. Not actually inspiring substantial articles globally. Globally-interesting calamity: World War II. While long in all languages I tried, varies in length and has more dense hyperlinking than a typical article, AFAICT.)
What would be a good way to find examples of articles in various languages such that are representative: not stubs, not excessively long, typical number of references, typical level of outgoing links, hopefully not a controversial/offensive topic?
I'm thinking that for a given language, finding a median-length featured article (median among the lengths of featured articles, that is) might be a good way to select. Is there a practical way to actually perform that kind of selection? What kind of selection would be practical to perform?
The list of languages I want to test is ar, cs, de, el, en, es, fr, he, ja, ko, ru, th, tr, vi, zh-cn, zh-tw. (In case you are wondering, why that list: It contains a language of each script that has an associated Web-relevant legacy encoding, then the list contains multiple Latin-script languages with different interleaves of ASCII and non-ASCII.)
Note: I don't want to use massive XML dumps as test data, because you don't normally load those in a browser. I'm looking for HTML as rendered on the site. I'm also not looking to do scientific comparatives between languages. Rather, I'm looking for something representative enough for a given language so that I can track performance for that language compared to other libraries and across converter changesets. So I'm looking for one article per language, not a huge dump.
Is your idea case same subject/same length/same complexity for each of the languages, or just any article that's reasonably typical for each of the named languages? If you want "matching" articles, then it's possible that searching for articles that were created with the mw:Content translation tool would be your best approach, but even with that, you're unlikely to find the same article in a dozen or more languages. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
Initially I was hoping for the same amount of logical content (i.e. fewer characters in Chinese than in German) and same complexity, but then I gave up on that goal being too hard and not essential for tracking optimization progress for a given converter over time. For now, instead of bothering a specific user, I posted a request to the "Request a query" page. Thank you. Hsivonen (talk) 06:30, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
It turns out that Wikidata doesn't carry Wikipedia data in the form I thought, but still, I was pointed to the topic Mars (the planet) being the most featured topic across languages and, indeed, the various language version of that topic seem good enough for my purposes. Thanks again! Hsivonen (talk) 10:26, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Help requested re botched portal move
Latest comment: 8 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion
I tried to help out with what I thought was a routine move of a portal Portal:Molecular and cellular biology but there was a problem — the move had three components and it may have been that they had to be done in a particular order. In any event, the initial move didn't work correctly, and my initial attempts to correct it made it worse. Rather than dig myself in deeper I thought I'd check and see if someone would be willing to help out.
. However, as of now, I get doi:10.1234/0123456.
Resolved
Abandoned tools on Tool Labs could be taken over by other developers. There is a new discussion on Meta about this. It will be discussed until 12 October and then voted on. [8]
ORCID iD (P496) (see uses)
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:42, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
Fixed — xaosflux Talk 19:01, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
Done Yes, that took care of it. The entry appears on the list now. I should have looked more carefully. Sorry about that. – Corinne (talk) 17:23, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).
VarunFEB2003 07:25, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
. 
Moved from WP:AN
