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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 101

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Stylesheets just broke?

All of wikipedia seems to have just lost its stylesheets for me. (Hohum @) 18:34, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

And they're back. (Hohum @) 18:35, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
Happens occasionally, but it's nice to know what it was. Thanks. Ryan Vesey Review me! 18:37, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
I am seeing no styling when using https, normal when using http. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:38, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
It is working now. I tried http and https twice each on Firefox, IE and Opera, clearing cache between attempts. http always had styling, https never did. tried again 15 minutes later, everything normal. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:55, 28 June 2012 (UTC)


To me something seems seriously wrong with the article Guru Har Krishan, there is no style applied whatsoever. I get it that ... humpf ... now it's working again. OK, I take it that "happens occasionally" happened to me too. Some glitch in the serving of Javascript combined with caching on my computer. Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 18:45, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Notice: Bug 38040 (Rollbacker)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T40040

I just posted bug 38040 to bugzilla, which said the following:

Bug 38040

Hi.

Recently several additional user-rights were added to the Rollbacker user-group. (See Special:ListGroupRights.)

This was done in relation to the poll at Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5/Archive2#Request_for_Comment. (There were apparently 15 total commenters.)

I believe that this was of course well-meant.

However, the poll in question is by it's nature a "local consensus".

To quote: Wikipedia:Consensus#Level_of_consensus:

"Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.

Wikipedia has a higher standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines than to other types of articles. This is because they reflect established consensus, and their stability and consistency are important to the community. As a result, editors often propose substantive changes on the talk page first to permit discussion before implementing the change. Changes may be made without prior discussion, but they are subject to a high level of scrutiny. The community is more likely to accept edits to policy if they are made slowly and conservatively, with active efforts to seek out input and agreement from others."

What was the wider community consensus in this case?

Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback - The over-all poll is located at Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback/Poll with the very lengthy discussion on several sub-pages and talk pages, including Wikipedia talk:Non-administrator rollback

This was (as you can read) a very contentious discussion. And gained consensus specifically because the user-right group only contained one user-right. (Something similar could be said concerning several other single-user-right user groups given out by administrators.)

While I firmly believe that consensus can change, I believe that a recent poll of 15 editors should probably not undo one of over 450 editors.

In addition, even in this recent poll, it was suggested that the reviewer user group (a package of several user-rights which also "mark edits") be used for this, rather than rollbacker.

And it could be suggested that the poll itself was not clear about this (even the nominator appeared to not be sure about this.)

I understand being enthusiastic about the upcoming roll-out, but as you can see here Wikipedia:Bureaucrats'_noticeboard#Granted_local_rights_to_WMF_staff (another well-intended, enthusiastic project - which appears to be taking community concerns very seriously, and is working on resolving the related issues), the community would appear to jealously protect their right to approve such things.

And subsequent to this, Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer has been re-activated, and people are already requesting the reviewer user-right in preparation for this. So there is also no "need" for rollbacker to have these extra rights, (except the understandable want to have a broader editor base of those who have these rights).

So anyway, I'm requesting that these "extra-user-rights" be removed from rollbacker until a clearer (and broader) community discussion may be had.

As an aside to this issue, autoconfirmed and rollbacker were given:

  • Feature/Resolve feedback (aftv5-feature-feedback)

However, reviewer was not. This appears to be an oversight, rather than intentional. So I would also ask that this be fixed and assigned to reviewer.

Thank you for your time,

jc37

- jc37 20:32, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

HTML5 is comming (again)

Does anyone know of any [t]echnical hurdles for enabling $wgHtml5 on Wikimedia sites?

The change is going to be scheduled soon. Helder 21:43, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

T29478 (comment #12), if they're not going to disable $wgExperimentalHtmlIds (or did someone fix that already?). Anomie⚔ 23:48, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure. $wgExperimentalHtmlIds appears to be off in DefaultSettings.php, and doesn't seem to appear in our site config, but I don't think that's been considered. Thanks for bringing it up! Would someone here be willing to test if the problem in T29478 (comment #12) is a problem on https://test2.wikipedia.org , and report a separate bug in Bugzilla if this is still a problem? -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 17:23, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
They seem to be working in the examples at https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5
Helder 19:26, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
Looks good to me too. Anomie⚔ 20:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
The backlink of the 3rd example doesn't work for me: link: #_ref-_foo_2-0 anchor: _ref-_foo__2-0 Not sure if that is expected. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:14, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
It doesn't work on English Wikipedia either, so it is not a problem with HTML5. Helder 21:37, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Script list location

I'd like to move Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts → Wikipedia:User scripts (replacing the redirect). I think this very useful and constantly growing resource deserves its own top-level page in Wikipedia space, rather than being a subpage of a WikiProject. This is also the primary page where script installation instructions resides. I hope this might help newer users (and even established ones) find these instructions and notice scripts that will help make their lives easier.

Taking Wikipedia:Userboxes as an example, the instructions for use and list of available boxes is available at its own top-level page, with the WikiProject for userboxes (Wikipedia:WikiProject Userboxes) appearing separately.

PS. I'm posting this here as opposed to some proposed-moves page because it seemed like a more prominent move that should get a centralized discussion. Equazcion (talk) 14:43, 29 Jun 2012 (UTC)

Toolbar Issues

When I use Toolbar V2.0b and edit too many Wikipedia-space or namespace articles in a row, the "cite" dropdown disappears and I have to use V2.0a for a while, which doesn't cite as well, for a while. How do I fix this without giving up editing Wikipedia-space and namespace articles? Brambleberry of RiverClan Chat ♠ Watch 19:39, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

  A number of editors have reported that the cite button has disappeared totally or intermittently. Please check Wikipedia:RefToolbar, look at the examples and find the RefToolbar version you are using. Then open the talk page and join the current discussion. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:43, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Adding more than one extra column to Template:Track listing

Hi, I would like to add TWO extra columns to Template:Track listing. If you look at FabricLive.59, I'd like to use it like that, but with the Writer(s) column renamed Artist. The problem is that the 'extra' column has already been used up as Label, which I also want to keep. Is the solution to add a second extra column? If so, how do I do it? Thanks. — sparklism hey! 20:38, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Layout errors on A14 (road) article on some browsers

We have been having layout problems with the A14 road (England) article for some time now with different behaviour for different browsers. The 'Blank page in Chrome' issue from early June (as described on the talk page) appears to have now been resolved with no change to the article. More recently the 'Layout errors?' issue (another section on the talk page) where references are messed up when using FF has been resolved with the recent inclusion of {{clear}}, but we are not sure why. Could someone take a look? PeterEastern (talk) 06:47, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Fixed (hopefully). Removed float formatting from the full-width table. — Richardguk (talk) 11:55, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Many thanks. That does seem to have sorted it. PeterEastern (talk) 04:49, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Keeping a record of article names in view history

In this edit I moved a page to a different title, but if you go back and look at previous versions of the article before my move, the article title will only show the moved title, not what it was called at the time of the edit. Is there no way for completeness that the name of the original page title can be shown, even if it is shown as well as the new name? Hope that makes sense. Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 09:10, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

The title is not the only thing which is not shown as it was in the past when looking at old revisions. See bugzilla:35066 / bugzilla:851 for example. Helder 11:21, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
I believe that the database which records the revisions doesn't hold the article names, but their curid numbers; there is a separate table which links the curid to the article name. See the curid= query string in mw:Manual:Parameters to index.php#Page revision or version; for example, 3252662 is Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). This saves space, because the revision table needs only to hold a four-byte integer, and not a string of several dozen bytes. When a page is moved, the curid remains constant, but the change of name is tracked in the page move log. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:15, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Using the same footnote multiple times with cite web template.

The section on using citations says I can use "ref name="name"" to assign a name to a ref and ref "name="name" /" to quickly add addition citations from that same source, but is it possible do that using the cite web template? I can't figure out how and it would make my life a lot easier for a page I'm working on. If someone could explain it to me it would be a big help. Thanks. Lando242 (talk) 20:47, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

It's not a characteristic of the template (in this case {{cite web}}) but of the <ref>...</ref> tags that enclose it. So, construct the <ref>...</ref> as described, and where it says to put details of the citation, that is where you put the {{cite web}}, as in <ref name="name">{{cite web |url=http://www.example.com/ |title=Web page title |accessdate=30 June 2012 }}</ref> --Redrose64 (talk) 20:59, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Ah, thats what I was doing wrong. Knew it was something simple. Thank you. Lando242 (talk) 21:00, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Checkuser request not moving

I recently added a check user request to an existing SPI request but it did not move down to the checkuser section on the SPI page. I tried purging it and it didn't help. Smartyllama (talk) 01:15, 1 July 2012 (UTC) nevermind. It's working now. Smartyllama (talk) 01:16, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

No changes in "What Links Here"?

  Resolved

I have fixed disambiguation in Template:Violent Femmes, and Special:WhatLinksHere/Something's Wrong and Special:WhatLinksHere/Something's Wrong (album) have not yet been changed for at least one hour. I've checked links, and there is no link to Something's Wrong in articles except template. Is there something wrong with this process? --George Ho (talk) 01:45, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

It could be the current lag issue, but it sounds like T7382. The table checked by Special:WhatLinksHere might not be updated until someone edits each page using the template. Anomie⚔ 02:00, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
I see some links disappearing. I guess recovery from lag is still processing. --George Ho (talk) 02:13, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I guess it's just a lag. --George Ho (talk) 02:16, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Longer edit summaries, please

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T6714

I just went to revert a change made by a IPv6 editor and the default text (179 characters) left me very little room to indicate the rationale for my revert. Typically, I just remove some of the extra stuff and just leave the editor's "name" if my comments run too long, but by default, this is far too much text. -- Avanu (talk) 17:15, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Are you talking about when you use the "undo" command? One solution is to just blank that long boilerplate message. I don't think that we are required to leave it in and IAR could apply if there is such a guideline. "Undo" is really no different then any other revert (except for rollback of course) but if you want to make a distinction you could do something along the lines of "Undo last edit because XXXXXX" and that might leave enough room. Having said that a longer edit summary field would be nice when trying to leave a detailed explanation. This is just one suggestion and I'm sure others may have a better one for you. MarnetteD | Talk 17:24, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
There can't be a requirement to retain that message, because if you undo two or more consecutive edits as a single operation (using the (undo) link, not WP:ROLLBACK), you are presented with a blank edit summary to fill in. Anyway, the present limit of 250 characters has been the default for all users since about February or March 2011; prior to then the default was 200 but a gadget was available which pushed it ip to 250. 250-179=71 so the present limit is not too restrictive; there are two things you could do.
As Marnette suggests, you can remove part of the default summary; typically you get both a contributions link and a talk page link. The talk page link is probably the less-useful of the two, so remove that. You can also gain space by de-piping the contribs link - that is, change e.g. [[Special:Contributions/2001:470:890A:1:216:D4FF:FEEB:DF4B|2001:470:890A:1:216:D4FF:FEEB:DF4B]] into [[Special:Contributions/2001:470:890A:1:216:D4FF:FEEB:DF4B]] - the resultant display will be longer by 22 characters, but the actual stored text is shorter by the length of the IPv6 plus 1.
Another method is to use abbreviations, see Wikipedia:Edit summary legend. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:57, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
Typically, if your edit summary is that long (and I do say "typically") then you should raise the issue instead on the talk page, i.e. because the undo requires the understanding of some nuance or point of balance that can't be explained in the style of Twitter. Anyway, yes, definitely shorten the default if necessary. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 12:20, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
I agree that longer edit summary space would be advantageous. Bus stop (talk) 12:33, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
While many of the above posters have been thoughtful in their suggestions about how to reduce the default text, I have to tell you guys, I already do this. I think it is helpful to have some indication left as to who you're reverting, and then of course why you're reverting them. I've removed spaces between punctuation, used clipped language, and occasionally abbreviated, I've re-written stuff to be shorter, etc etc, but sometimes it just takes a bit of text to explain the 'why' in a concise way for an edit summary. It is nice to be able to click a link for a reverted user's contribution history or Talk, or a section link to find the conversation faster. It feels a bit like the old DOS 8.3 limits with it being so constrained, although I understand we don't want novels in the edit summaries. It would be nice if it could have the actual user-generated section be an independent limit from the Wiki-generated stuff, although I know that right now that is just one open field. -- Avanu (talk) 14:08, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
We're not going to get any increase over the present maximum of 250 bytes for an edit summary. Unlike the 200→250 increase last year, for which the space already existed, there is no space for a further increase so it would require a redefinition of parts of the database. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:18, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
IMHO the summarization and focus required to shorten something represents an INCREASE in communication. North8000 (talk) 14:30, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
See also bugzilla:4714 and its dependencies. Helder 18:22, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
One reason that I set up User:Wavelength/Note was so that I could link to long edit summaries, but I have not yet done so.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:27, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Well you could get a 250→255 character increase, beyond that things get difficult. [Hey 5 characters is like 2 whole emoticons!]. Bawolff (talk) 17:26, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
 

OK- thinking out of the box- what actually is the History log for? Ten years ago- its function was simple, but now it really could be improved. If I go back to an article that I had heavily savaged (edited) two years previously- I can't remember what I did- (rm redlink, +2 ref) were fine at the time, but now I want to know why it is still only a C class. I want to see longer comments evaluating the text, and no I don't want to trawl the talk page. If the history page is asking for something I can easily do- then I will talk- and go on to do it. So I am saying there are now occasions when value is added by a longer comment.

I will go further and say that editing is more than swiping at an IP, in a percentages of cases making a full constructive comment will persuading to him come on board. I would also suggest that inadequate commenting is inhibiting the the conversion of Bs to FAs.

So heres an idea to explore. An extended History Comment is really like the opening sentence of Talk page Section. And we have five bytes to play with! So User:Verbose shoots through the 250 byte comment limit- javascript unhides a full edit box. He taps away a 780 byte comment. The first 250 bytes go to the History log and the next five form a reference to a section on the Talk page. Automagically a a new section is created on the talk page- titled Extended Comment by User:Verbose- and the entire section is saved there. Looking at the History log entry we see the first 250 char (or 500 perhaps) of the comment: if we do a 'cursor rollover' the whole comment displays in a pop-up. If there were follow up comments on the talk page, a blue link to the talkpage section is displayed.

--ClemRutter (talk) 23:41, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Thats an interesting idea. And also at first glance sounds like it could be feasible. Bawolff (talk) 13:19, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
WP:REVTALK has a some good ideas and some bad ideas. Some of the "good ideas" are part of such polices as WP:TPYES, WP:NPA, and WP:CIVIL. But it also has what I think are bad ideas. I think it is a bit simplistic of WP:REVTALK to say "Avoid using edit summaries to carry on debates…" Edit summaries are always going to be used in support of one's personal stance on whatever issue is at stake. I think that a more lengthy area for explaining one's reasoning for a given edit can serve a similar function to Talk page space. But very importantly we should not be misusing edit summary space and this should be enforced more strictly than it is at present. Using an edit summary to tell someone that they are a jerk should have repercussions. Along with longer edit summary space should be an emphasis in enhanced policy language encouraging the proper use of edit summary space. Though I am arguing for an increase in the space allotted for edit summaries I agree wholeheartedly with the comment above by North8000. We should always be aiming for succinctness and clarity. Bus stop (talk) 13:24, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

It's not impossible to enlarge the rev_comment field, though only a 'mediumblob' type in MySQL could fit the bill. It would hurt performance a bit since blobs tend not to be stored alongside the rest of the row on disk. It would be nice if there was a varchar(512) or something. I always felt that the 255 byte limit was way too small since the "display length" can be much shorter than the "syntax length". Links with pipes (e.g. [[link|text]]), only display "text" and not all of the wikitext characters. It's worse for non-English languages, since some Unicode characters take up two bytes (even though it only shows as one character). A 512 *character* limit enforced by MediaWiki is a lot better for users than a 255 *byte* limit enforced by the DB. Aaron Schulz 18:57, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Slowness

Server slowness seems to have returned...pages loading slowly. - The Bushranger One ping only 21:02, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Seems like it's gotten much slower in the last several weeks. The page loads, then some seconds later, other elements of the page finally load. Makes editing really drudgery. Anything javascript is really slow. Like it was a drag voting for best picture for the year on the commons because the javascript thingie would whirl and whirl before anything happened. This has been consistently a problem recently. Has some new version of something been introduced? MathewTownsend (talk) 21:52, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
Nothing that should have caused this. Next time, when the page is slow, try right clicking, view source. Then, right at the bottom, you'll find a line like "<!-- Served by mw20 in 0.432 secs. -->" but where the two numbers are different. If you could post back when you find, that'll help the devs work out what's going on here. Thanks, - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 22:36, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
What two numbers do you mean? "Served by mw20 in 0.432 secs" seems like only one number (the seconds). MathewTownsend (talk) 22:50, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
In this case, the first number is mw20; the second is 0.432 secs. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:48, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
I tried "try right clicking, view source" but that doesn't work while it's slowly loading. Am I understanding what you're saying? MathewTownsend (talk) 23:13, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
There are several stages to the retrieval of any page, these include: (i) the request being sent by your browser; (ii) the preparation of the page by the server; (iii) the transmission of that page to your browser; (iv) the actual operation of display by your browser. Steps (i)-(iii) might need to be repeated one or more times in order to obtain stylesheets, images, etc. You need to wait until the beginning of step (iv) at the earliest before you can use the "View source" function - ideally, wait until page has fully loaded. Prior to the start of step (iv), the server is still working, so won't be able to give a completion time.
If you use a recent version of Firefox (such as 12 or 13), you may have noticed a spinny thing in the tab as the page loads. When this is grey, and revolving anticlockwise, it's still in stages (i)-(iii); but when it's green, and revolving clockwise, it's reached step (iv); and when the green spinny has stopped revolving and been replaced by the shortcut icon, the page has finished loading. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:48, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the reports. We're in the midst of a partial outage right now, such that many services (too many to mention) are going to seem slower than normal. Technical mumbo jumbo follows: the problem is that our load balancer (LVS) is depooling servers for many services based on some faulty health checks ("faulty" in the sense that the machines are fine, but the health check seems to indicate they aren't fine). There are thresholds configured such that LVS doesn't depool everything (different for each service), but that means that it's not going to be uniformly slow, but that some services are going to get hit harder than others. You can follow the latest in the debugging on the #wikimedia-operations channel if you're interested in the details. This should get resolved soon. -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 01:19, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

This incident should now be resolved. The configuration error in our load balancers has been corrected. Bhartshorne (talk) 02:24, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

  •   Unresolved
    - Still having the exact same problem today. It's mostly when trying to save a page, but loading a page immediately/shortly after saving another also loads slow. Data after a save of Jimmie Johnson: Served by mw37 in 14.185 secs. - The Bushranger One ping only 21:19, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
  • Hyderabad, India, Served by mw29 in 30.015 secs.. Is this excessively slow, or just something the readers have to put up with? Mr Stephen (talk) 10:34, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
    That is excessively slow. Nobody should have to put up with a wait like that. If we were in the business of selling products, we'd lose customers. However, for the same page, I got Served by srv275 in 0.197 secs. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:12, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
    It's a large page with a lot of citation templates, which will tend to make initial rendering slow. It's hoped that Scribunto will allow those templates to be fixed. Most readers won't see any slowness about it, though, as it is cached; you'll usually only miss the cache if you edit (or preview) the page or if you have unusual preferences set so the cache isn't populated for the parser cache key you need. Anomie⚔ 16:00, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
    And once again I'm getting random "logouts" (fixed by refreshing). - The Bushranger One ping only 21:18, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
    Same as Bushranger its getting ridiculous. These problems are getting more and more frequent these days.Edinburgh Wanderer 21:54, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
This is just a wild stab at a guess but is there any chance that this has anything to do with the huge storm that caused damage along the eastern seaboard? - either at the location of WikiP's computers or where individual editors are located. I only throw this out there as, except on the very largest articles I am not noticing as much of a slow down as you are mentioning. MarnetteD | Talk 22:05, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Broken template

Could someone be very kind an fix this template, which is transcluded on many pages? See: Template talk:PDB Gallery. Graham Colm (talk) 08:21, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Toolserver?

Is there an issue going on? I've not been able to refresh WP:AFDO for two days, and User:Mathbot is not creating the new day's AfD pages (I've just done yesterdays manually). Black Kite (talk) 12:48, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

The replication lag is abnormally high (35000 is just under 10 hours), although it's nowhere near as bad as it was three months ago. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:58, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
It seems to have killed Cydebot, too. - The Bushranger One ping only 18:30, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Today's AfD nominations not listing

For some reason, the top few AfD posting don't seem to be appearing Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2012_July_1. SplashScreen (talk) 22:12, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

See #Toolserver? above. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:25, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
I guess you refer to the error introduced in [1] where a comment end tag was misformatted so the following wiki code became part of the comment. It has been fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:05, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Diff/watchlist difficulties

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T39225

I'm a little puzzled about some recent edits to the Nicole Kidman article. For example this edit is one of several blank edits, which I thought were usually disregarded and shouldn't normally appear in the edit history. Also, when the blank edits showed up in my watchlist, it appeared that the edit added ~72,000 bytes of data (+72,000) although there was no change. --Bongwarrior (talk) 10:19, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Odd. One thing that I, as an admin, can check is for deleted revisions (some times an admin may have deleted the page, and selectively restored some versions while leaving out all between 2 identical ones) - and in this case, there aren't any. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:53, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Same issue with this edit (and also the preceding one) at Admiralty Arch today. There's nothing in the history or watchlist entries indicating that the edits have been hidden. — Richardguk (talk) 11:57, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Are you sure your watchlist didn't say (+73,930)‎ on Nicole Kidman? That's the page size shown in the page history and it says (+73,930)‎ for the blank edits on my watchlist when I enable "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist. Here is another example from Sonia Sotomayor. If the software cannot retrieve the size of the preceding revision then I think it gives the page size as difference like if it had been 0 before. I don't know how MediaWiki identifies null edits so they can be omitted in logs but if it thinks the page size has changed then maybe it will never identify it as a null edit. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:23, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
Yes, 73,930 sounds right. I couldn't remember the exact number, and I didn't know of an easy way to go back and double check the exact number after I had already reverted the edits. --Bongwarrior (talk) 01:58, 31 May 2012 (UTC)
grand Theft Auto IV is another one. On the page history, the edits are 0, but on a watchlist they are +125,384 (as if created from zero). ☮Soap☮ 02:18, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I was just going to ask about this. I've seen something similar at several articles, most recently Mario Chalmers. If you look at these recent changes, an IP is shown making three consecutive 18,826-byte additions, though the visible changes only account for 45 bytes. Zagalejo^^^ 02:35, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Is it always three null edits? It seems so. And http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Blitz&action=history shows it with an edit summary also repeated three times. It's unlikely he would have made four consecutive edits with the same edit summary. Im guessing that all of these cases are really just one edit apiece under the hood, which for some reason is "echoed" three or so times. ☮Soap☮ 02:37, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

I just noticed something similar that brought me here to the Pump: This edit, which shows no change in the diff and which didn't change the byte count in the page history, was shown as "+24,991" on my watchlist. The watchlist and history figures agree for the edit immediately preceding it. (I saved a screenshot, if any developer wants hard evidence in all its gory detail.) Rivertorch (talk) 04:38, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

  • I saw this earlier today (over 14 hours ago or so): this edit showed to have a change of +23,000k or so to the article (via the indicator on my watchlist) but the actual diff shows nothing. It was perplexing. Killiondude (talk) 06:44, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
This is what just happened to me about 3 minutes ago. My watchlist showed a (+27,138) change, but that was the size of the article at the time and the history showed 0 change - which is what it seemed to be, I can see no change here. Dougweller (talk) 16:41, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
Are developers aware of this? That is, has anyone here created a bugzilla report? I don't really care for the search function there. Killiondude (talk) 07:02, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
Bangalore and Mysore are two articles on my watchlist that have this problem currently -- the + value is the actual size of the article. —SpacemanSpiff 09:13, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
There is a variation of the problem in this June 1 diff. It's a null edit so it shouldn't have been recorded but unlike other reports, the edit and the predecing edit were by different users: Two bots making the same interlanguage change. Both edits say (+5) on a watchlist. This is correct for the first but the second should have said (0). The watchlist does not claim the page size 174,825 as the size of the change. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:02, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
  • I saw similar anomalies on recent changes and article history at Wikiquote yesterday: null edits that should have shown (0) showed up as (+article size). ~ Ningauble (talk) 15:42, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
Bug logged on 30 May 2012 as Bugzilla:37225. — Richardguk (talk) 01:45, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
Another instance: this edit showed as (+2,864) in the watchlist, the same as the page size according to its history. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:33, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
I'm seeing this type of thing on my watchlist a lot now. It's a bit disconcerting. Rivertorch (talk) 04:12, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

I've just noticed it now with this edit on the 2011 Christchurch earthquake with (+139,895) Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 21:36, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

A fix has been included in MediaWiki 1.20wmf5 (not listed in the change notes), which is set to be rolled out to enwiki between 18:00 and 20:00 UTC on 18 June 2012.
— Richardguk (talk) 01:05, 16 June 2012 (UTC)
Still occurring, despite the 1.20wmf5 rollout 3 hours ago.
For example, 4 identical edits to Croatia national football team by 86.182.161.144, at 2012-06-18T20:45:02‎, 20:45:48‎, 20:46:38 and 20:47:14‎ (UTC) (example diff).
There are corresponding anomalies in the byte-change entries at Special:RecentChanges, Special:RecentChangesLinked and Special:Watchlist (but the article history tab correctly lists each of the last three edits as having a change size of zero bytes).
— Richardguk (talk) 21:36, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
Even worse: a non-null edit conflict was saved 6 hours ago (coincidentally, to this very page – Hoo man conflicting with MiszaBot II archiving). Unlike a manual edit conflict (where an editor accidentally overrides an edit conflict and the change in byte-size of the article is correctly recorded on watchlists), the edit shows an incorrect change size of the entire article size (+209,033) in recentchanges (though the history tab correctly records it as +10,462).
— Richardguk (talk) 13:12, 19 June 2012 (UTC)
There are definitely still watchlist anomalies occurring after the "fix". One thing I noticed about 12 hours ago was an apparent null edit (at least I couldn't find any difference either by using popups or by examining the diff page) registering on the watchlist as having doubled the page size. I can't remember what the article was, but this sort of thing has become so common that I'm barely noticing it anymore. Rivertorch (talk) 21:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

One more data point in case it's useful: Spratly Islands reports two edits on 22 June 2012 at 19:00 by CommonsDelinker. The first edit is correctly reported as -54, the bot's accurate summary reads 'Removing "Vietnam_Spratly_island.jpg"...'. The second edit saves the same text, but is reported as +34,288. The edit summary also reads 'Removing "Vietnam_Spratly_island.jpg"...' which is inaccurate: it's a null edit. Perhaps the bot repeated its edit on the previous version and suffered an edit conflict with itself. Certes (talk) 10:29, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I came here to report a similar problem. Looking at my watchlist a moment ago, I saw this:

Futurama‎; 23:18 . . (+102,623)‎ . . ‎70.15.32.125 (talk)‎ (→‎Humor: )

In actuality, 102,623 is the total number of characters for the whole article, and the actual change was the addition of only 6 characters. ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 02:37, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Another one, Human height ... I know this probably doesnt help, but I want to keep this thread on the page for at least a little while longer in case anyone else sees the problem and wants to know what's going on. ☮Soap☮ 02:08, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Replication lag

Well toolserver seems to having some replication lag lately. Hope it doesn't become like the one we had a few months ago. What's the probable cause? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 10:18, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Anyone have some info on when this might be resolved by? The replication lag is now over 11 minutes for my watchlist... Jenks24 (talk) 10:17, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Add view source to every section

Hi,

Would it be possible to add a view source link to every section. When a page is protected, the section edit links are gone, and you have to view the entire document source and scroll through it.

Thanks,

--76.110.201.132 (talk) 17:02, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Category history

Is there a way to find the number of articles that were in a category at an earlier date/time? —Torchiest talkedits 07:11, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

No, there is no way to get that historical data. This is because the category is a property of a page revision, and only the latest revision updates the database table of the category (consisting of a collection of articles). To rebuild the collection of articles that forms a category at a particular moment in time, would require either collecting all joins and leaves to a category with a timestamp (not implemented and will create huge tables) or reparse the entire base of articles as they are in a certain time in the past (very intensive job) using a data dump or something. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:27, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
That's what I was afraid of. Oh well, thanks for the information. —Torchiest talkedits 12:24, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Make it STOPPPPPPPPPP !!!!!!

When are we going to get the cessation of our screens flipping over to "Wikimedia error" again and again and again ! Maile66 (talk) 22:09, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I enjoyed to see the old error screen. Only down for 3 minutes(14 minutes ago). All seems fine again now. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 22:12, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

help with template

I've added support for a new database at the language infobox, here. It links fine from within the box, but I'd like support for a regular ref at the bottom of the article, which means passing the params to a separate template. I tried creating one at {{AIATSIS}}, but it doesn't link properly, as can be seen at Karranga language.

Could someone help? Thanks, — kwami (talk) 22:31, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

  Done There you go. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:48, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks! It's humbling how simple that was. — kwami (talk) 22:49, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Education Program extension applied to English Wikipedia

Today, the Education Program extension for MediaWiki was added to the English Wikipedia. This extension will be used primarily by volunteers, staff, instructors, and students in the Wikipedia Education Program (WEP), as well as individuals who choose to help review student work. It will aid in streamlining WEP overhead, organization, information handling, and data collection.

The extension adds the following namespaces:

The Course and Institution namespaces will contain information for a relational database structure on Wikipedia to assist in managing the WEP data.

The extension also adds the following user access:

  • ep-staff - Education Program staff
  • ep-admin - Education Program admin
  • ep-campus-ambassador - Education Program campus ambassador
  • ep-online-ambassador - Education Program online ambassador
  • ep-instructor - Education Program instructor

These user access levels grant permission to do various things related directly to the WEP and do not grant any other permissions.

Additionally, a new tab "Education" will appear in Special:Preferences.

We will be monitoring this in the near future to see whether the extension is an improvement. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:59, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Help! We can no longer access pages that begin with "Course:" such as the episode Course: Oblivion (Star Trek: Voyager) (see What links here for that page). – Fayenatic London 19:15, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
This is always going to happen when people use stuff that looks like a namespace to MediaWiki, and subsequently becomes one. Often happens when adding NS' to other projects. People think just using it like a namespace, makes it one. Which it doesn't. The problematic articles for "Course" are:
mysql> select * from page where page_id IN ( 25401566, 2536861, 4299296, 8626602, 8626602, 25401567, 6850747 );
+----------+----------------+-------------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+
| page_id  | page_namespace | page_title                    | page_restrictions | page_counter | page_is_redirect | page_is_new | page_random    | page_touched   | page_latest | page_len |
+----------+----------------+-------------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+
|  2536861 |            442 | Oblivion_(Star_Trek:_Voyager) |                   |            0 |                0 |           0 | 0.344189657393 | 20120622173807 |   496538068 |     4112 |
|  4299296 |            442 | Oblivion_(VOY_episode)        |                   |            0 |                1 |           0 | 0.813639596905 | 20120608024140 |   331609884 |       51 |
|  6850747 |            443 | Oblivion_(Star_Trek:_Voyager) |                   |            0 |                0 |           0 | 0.447606566677 | 20120619170908 |   422542944 |     1884 |
|  8626602 |            442 | Oblivion_(Voyager_episode)    |                   |            0 |                1 |           0 | 0.395165121676 | 20120608024140 |   331609990 |       51 |
| 25401566 |            442 | Oblivion                      |                   |            0 |                1 |           1 | 0.039634633516 | 20120608024140 |   331182450 |       51 |
| 25401567 |            443 | Oblivion                      |                   |            0 |                1 |           1 | 0.927857661538 | 20110405171623 |   331182453 |       56 |
+----------+----------------+-------------------------------+-------------------+--------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+----------------+-------------+----------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
namespaceDupes.php has moved them properly into that namespace, but with the way EP overrides them, they're not viewable. Tell me where to move them to, and I will. Reedy (talk) 19:41, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
You could as well say "This is always going to happen when people appropriate a common English word for a namespace name. People don't think about the fact that books, movies, television shows, songs, albums, or the like might have a title that begins with a word followed by a colon, and that editors might punctuate the article's title in the same way. Which they sometimes do." Anomie⚔ 20:09, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
At least no other articles are affected; it looks like just this one plus its talk page and some redirects. I suggest that the best option for moving it is to omit the colon. Would you be prepared to set up a cross-namespace redirect? – Fayenatic London 20:48, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
I don't think a cross namespace redirect will do anything, due to the way EducationPage overrides the handling of "pages" in the Course namespace. Reedy (talk) 21:09, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
Wouldn't it make sense to move the page to another name (this will probably have to be done in the database...). Course Oblivion (Star Trek: Voyager) will probably be best. That way, we won't need a CNRD or anything, it'll just exist as a different name. ~ Matthewrbowker Talk to me 04:33, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
Yes – please do it. I meant the suggestion of the cross-namespace redirect as an additional step; there is no need to wait for agreement on that. After moving the page, please update the link in Template:Star Trek VOY S5 (which, oddly, does not show up in the "what links here" given above). – Fayenatic London 06:18, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
Looks like even with the ep-staff user access level that has full access to course pages, there's no page to be moved. I'm notifying a tech on this. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:09, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
Like Reedy noted, you cannot keep it in the Course NS in any way - it has to be moved out. We could of course add support for redirects and stuff, but if it's just this one page, that might not be worth it. --Jeroen De Dauw (talk) 15:15, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
Just an update, we are taking this issue very seriously and have temporarily disabled the extension until we can repair these pages and rename them. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) (talk • contribs) 17:12, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Hey all, I've asked our developers to temporarily disable the extension, so we have enough time to come to a consensus on this issue. My understanding is that there are two options: (a) Move the Startrek page to a name without the colon, and (b) use a different name for the "Course:" namespace of the Education extension. Now, with that said – how likely is it going to be that we're going to have pages in the article namespace that start with "Course:"? And would someone be opposed to solution (a)? To me, this seems to be the easiest way of fixing it. What do you think? --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 17:14, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

We can't use something like "EP Course" or some such? Aaron Schulz 17:41, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
Sure, that's basically (b). Without using an abbreviation it would be something like "Education Program Course:" etc. I'm just wondering how likely it is that articles start with "Course:" – I guess having a "Course"-namespace would be much more elegant and easier to use. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 17:49, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
How about "Class:"? It's not in use on any pages yet. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) (talk • contribs) 19:49, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
This extension is perpetually reserving names in article space on en.wikipedia.org. The "course" name clash seems less troublesome to me than the "institution" name clash, because that means we'll have:
  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemson_University
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution:Clemson_University
The casual reader of Wikipedia will have no indication from the name of the page that the second URL is automatically generated tool information specifically geared around the Education Program, where the first is a general purpose article about Clemson University. I think at least an "EP" prefix (if not "Wikimedia EP Course" and "Wikimedia EP Institution") seems better to me. -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 22:54, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
A name which is very specific should be used due to the problems noted by RobLa. Maybe Wikiinstitution (camel case?) and Wikicourse? I would personally change the namespace to only use one namespace, but that's just me. --Izno (talk) 23:46, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
  • Easy enough to solve this problem: this all belongs on its own wiki, not on this project. I cannot understand how anyone can justify using 2 of our 12 namespaces to administer a single program that involves a minuscule percentage of our edits. Regardless of where these namespaces are hosted, there will need to be navigation pages from this project for people to find things; so the links go to a separate WMF wiki that operates within the SUL envelope. That also resolves the issue of having a mass of extremely fine-grained user rights when English Wikipedia has absolutely nothing to do with selecting the individuals who are in those roles. At the same time, there is good reason to limit access to those pages. So the best solution is to host them on another wiki (the Outreach wiki would do fine for now), with the recognition that it can be used by all of the education projects from around the globe, not just the ones that involve English Wikipedia. Risker (talk) 02:06, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
    I think the point that education programs like these being of an international tune is an excellent one to make to indicate that another wiki be used for this purpose. Wikiversity might also be a good candidate as another wiki to handle what are most often university students. --Izno (talk) 02:15, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
    Wikiversity sounds like a really good idea Izno. And anything which adds activity to our sister projects would be, I presume, a very good thing? - jc37 21:57, 28 June 2012 (UTC)
    Only if Wikiversity wants those extra namespaces (which wouldn't even relate to activities on their own project), and those additional user rights (which would be completely irrelevant to them). That's what this extension does, it has nothing to do with actual education, just the administration of the education programs. Risker (talk) 03:56, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Unicode horizontal bar and zero-width space in sig confusing Firefox

When I look at this edit my screen shows several unwanted newlines. This happens with Firefox 13.0.1, but not with IE 8 or Opera 11.61.

The problem is at Talk:Black hole (near the bottom or just search for "effect should still be included in the article").

Firefox appears to be choking on the sig. (do any other Firefox users see a problem?)

My trusty hex editor says that the html going to my browser contains the hex strings "E2 80 95" and "E2 80 8B".

E2 80 95 is Unicode Character HORIZONTAL BAR (U+2015) encoded as UTF-8, and E2 80 8B is Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH SPACE' (U+200B) encoded as UTF-8.

Wikipedia's servers are serving the page correctly, with "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" in the HTTP response. The page also has the correct meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" in the head, so I can't see why Firefox is having trouble here. Any ideas? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:18, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Looks OK to me; Firefox 13.0.1 under Windoze XP. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:53, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
Possibly related to Wikipedia talk:Tools/Navigation popups#Broken in Firefox 13?. Is the HORIZONTAL BAR rendering in a font with a large lineheight? ("Gentium Book Basic" is specified in the styling of the problematic signature, but it might be being substituted by a fallback font such as "Cambria Math", which often causes lineheight problems.) — Richardguk (talk) 16:32, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
Yup. that's it. I hadn't thought about it being a font rendering issue. If course changing from, say, Arial to Courier won't do a thing, because neither of those have the Unicode horizontal bar. I need to figure out which font it is falling back to for that character.
Looks like http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors-websites-use has instructions on changing the font, and Fallback font has some interesting candidate fonts. Thanks! --Guy Macon (talk) 16:49, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
I have searched high and low, and I cannot figure out how to tell which font is rendering that Unicode HORIZONTAL BAR, how to tell FireFox the fallback order, or how to tell XP the fallback order. All I find are tips on CSS font setting for your website. :( Surely someone has had this problem before... --Guy Macon (talk) 12:28, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
I took a list of default XP fonts and stuck them in individual <div> tags at testwiki:User:Splarka/U+2015. Any joy? The problem is, determining the font an individual character is coming from seems to be an OS level problem, not something easily findable via Firefox. --Splarka (rant) 08:36, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Fiddling around on a Windows 7 machine (man, who even has XP anymore, I mostly use Ubuntu), you might be able to paste in some text containing that character and then cycle through all the fonts (Format/Select Font...), and see if any look weird. I was able to streamline it with repeated alt+o,f,down arrow. --Splarka (rant) 22:03, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Quoted text overlap problem

 
Quoted text overlapping a thumbnail.

At the article Wassily Kandinsky#Return to Russia (1914–1921), I noticed text in the Cquote2 quotation template badly overlaps the thumbnail picture over to the right. Seems to happen even if I drag the browser window to be an absurdly large size in width. I'm using Firefox 13.0.1, Windows 7. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:17, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Looks fine to me: Firefox 13.0.1, Win XP - this is in both Monobook and Vector. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:29, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
The same happened at Pi Day, with the pie photo, but I changed the position and it seems to be fine, although preview lied for about 5 edits in a row.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:33, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Possibly related to Template talk:Cquote#Chrome error? But this problem has only been reported on Google Chrome previously — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:34, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
I am using Chrome.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:38, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
This has also been reported on Portuguese Wikipedia, by Chrome users only. Helder 17:50, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
What happens if you change the browser's zoom level? Nyttend (talk) 04:59, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Reading this again, it sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 100#Display bug: overlapping infobox and navbox, a similar bug which apparently only affected Google Chrome. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:19, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Seeing who changed text in a diff

Is there any way that when I'm looking at, say, then last ten changes to an article, I can scroll over the changes and see who made them? Right now, you can see the users on the earliest and latest revision you're looking at, but not the ones in between. This would be helpful for checking several changes on a page and seeing which, if any were vandalism. David1217 What I've done 05:12, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm confused: why can't you just check each revision individually? Are you simply wanting a faster solution than going revision by revision? Nyttend (talk) 05:45, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
In a word, yes. Some pages on my watchlist have lots of changes per day, and I want to have an easy way to check "whodunit". David1217 What I've done 05:48, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I usually look at an article's WP:HISTORY and then WP:POPUPS allows me to point to the (cur) or (prev) for each revision to see how close it's approaching the most recent revision (so "already reverted vandalism" is not seen) and what changed in that one revision (to see what edit needs to be undone or which editor is being a problem). Popups also work in watchlist, where simply pointing displays the history. DMacks (talk) 05:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks; just wanted to make sure you were aware of that. I'm pretty sure that we'd need a new feature or a gadget or some other piece of not-yet-written software to enable what you're talking about. Nyttend (talk) 05:51, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Hmm. I'm not much of a fan of popups, so do you know of anyone that I could request to code a script that could do what I'd like? Not that they'd have to, of course. David1217 What I've done 05:56, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure what you're wanting (and my own .js magic is quite weak), but Wikipedia:WikiBlame is another approach to "whodunnit". DMacks (talk) 05:57, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Another useful site to file away, but basically what I'm looking for is this: If I saw that vandalism had been added on Foo, but I didn't know who had added it (say there were quite a lot of IP edits with no edit summaries), then I could click on a diff for the last ten changes, scroll over the vandalistic change in the diff, and (in a popup perhaps) see which editor had vandalized. Does that makes sense? David1217 What I've done 06:03, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Ay, that makes perfect sense now, and I'm not aware of an implementation quite like it:( DMacks (talk) 06:16, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Do you know of anywhere I can request someone to code a script to do what I what? David1217 What I've done 06:19, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I find it not too difficult to just open the history section and open each successive diff in tabs. Obviously not the best thing for what you want, but it works ok. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:29, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
There doesn't seem to be anything that does what I want, and it's probably to much to ask someone to make a script for it. (Though were would I ask if I did want someone to code a script?) Oh well, thank you all for your suggestions. David1217 What I've done 15:21, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
WP:US/R --Redrose64 (talk) 16:47, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I doubt it this can be done with a script. What is desirable, I have often thought, is something like the ViewVC source code tool, which annotates each line of a program showing the code revision in which it was last modified. It would be major work to create such a thing for Wikipedia, but it would be valuable. Looie496 (talk) 17:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I'll ask at WP:US/R (thanks Redrose64!) and see what they think about creating a script. And yes, something like ViewVC would be what I'd like. David1217 What I've done 22:15, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Difficulty editing

I was trying to leave a friendly message regarding garish colours that make my eyes hurt here, but find it completely impossible to edit - it simply won't let me type in the box. Chrome.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 13:11, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

It's the users' edit notice. I'll fix it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:16, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Fixed, and informed the user that he should try not to break his own talk page :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:33, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist section link doesn't work for ANI

I have noticed that clicking the → link that takes you to the relevant section in your watchlist (and in popups) doesn't work for ANI. The anchored section link will appear in the URL, but it leaves you at the top of the page. Does anyone know why this is? Can it be fixed? Ryan Vesey Review me! 16:52, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

The arrow link in watchlist/contributions/page history/recent changes fails if there are certain things in the section heading, for example a template as is often the case at WP:ANI, but most other sections work for me there. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Alternative_proposal_for_AWB_restoration works for me but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Excessive_block_of_.7B.7BUserlink.7CKiefer.Wolfowitz.7D.7D fails. The link in the TOC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Excessive_block_of_Kiefer.Wolfowitz works but the arrow link adds template code which doesn't match the anchor generated by MediaWiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:49, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Ahh, I wasn't aware of that, thanks for letting me know. Ryan Vesey Review me! 18:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

New type of Bot?

I don't know if it is needed but I came across some vandalism that had added some spam about a non-notable band. The name was obscure and when I did a search I found other pages that it had been placed in. Can a bot do a search for a string of obscure text to see if it gets added back? The editors were various IP and sock accounts so who knows if they may try to enter it again.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

That's really one of the things edit filters are for. Looie496 (talk) 18:13, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I know little of how the bots filter. elcheson5, elcheson Five, or just elcheson is the name of the band. None show in search now but vandal bots may want to add the string.--Canoe1967 (talk) 18:21, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Hide page content from public view

Is there a way to hide a page so that people must log in to see the page content? -- Avanu (talk) 19:11, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

See mw:Manual:User rights. Don't know if we do that here though. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:55, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
I don't see a specific setting for hiding a page. -- Avanu (talk) 21:01, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
It is not possible unless we install an extension like mw:Extension:PrivatePageProtection.--Jasper Deng (talk) 21:10, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Rod Serling Audio

Hello. I need your advice on this. I have an audio file of Rod Serling speaking these famous words from his TV program, "The Twilight Zone":

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own."

My question is this: Could this audio file be placed in Serling's Wikipedia Article Page, or on the "Twilight Zone" Page? As computer-challenged :-) as I am, I wouldn't have a clue how to upload it. I would appreciate any input on this. Michael David (talk) 00:48, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it is technically possible to upload audio files and add them to articles. Just folow the the prompts at Wikipedia:File Upload Wizard. In this specific case i would recomend against it because that audio file is copyrighted and we have very strict rules on when we can use copyrighted works. You can read more about when it's acceptable to use copyrighted works at Wikipedia:Non-free content. Best regards. 64.40.54.55 (talk) 05:46, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.20wmf6 deployment complete

Hi everyone! Yet another deployment in our bi-weekly deployment cycle was just completed (at 18:05 UTC). See mw:MediaWiki 1.20/wmf6 for a full list of changes. Note: there are some unrelated database lag problems that are unrelated to this change, which we're aware of. Other than that, let us know if you encounter problems caused by this deployment. Thanks! -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 18:08, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia error, just for documentation

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


Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk, from 10.64.0.132 via cp1014.eqiad.wmnet (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to () Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno [No Error] at Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:26:32 GMT

— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:31, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, now in addition to the lags, I'm getting these errors over and over. WP has become almost unusable, although, obviously, I still keep editing.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:42, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Mysterious rollback and page screw combined with several error messages and pages taking 30 seconds to load.—cyberpower ChatOnline 18:49, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
I got another one. I've gotten a total of five or six, at the times listed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.


Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk, from 10.64.0.129 via cp1014.eqiad.wmnet (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to ()
Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno (11) Resource temporarily unavailable at Mon, 02 Jul 2012 19:04:38 GMT
— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:06, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
These are not related to the deploy according to the IRC channel. These are due to some network issues in the infrastructure. Apparently mark has been working on it all day already. Also remember that due to the east coast storms this weekend, there has been significant disruption in the entire internet infrastructure, which might affect some users (when ISPs need to route around stuff, you tend to get cul-de-sacs in networking at times). And then there was the leap second bug crashing linux and Java. It's been one of those weeks, you might say :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:03, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
I don't think Wikipedia was affected by the leap second as nothing in it depends on exact time. All they would have to do is readjust the clock.—cyberpower ChatOnline 20:24, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
He, if only. Search was down, multiple servers went to 100% load, ntpd needed to be disabled etc etc :D If you look over the server admin log for this weekend, you'll see that there were several issues —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:00, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Was the leap second one of them?—cyberpower ChatOnline 21:56, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Several of those issues were effects of the leap second yes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:21, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
Here is an email thread about the background to these issues btw. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:19, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Picture loading errors

Some pictures in articles are not loading, sitting there loading, or half-loading since the update. - The Bushranger One ping only 21:55, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

A database error has occurred

A database error has occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused. The most likely cause of this problem is a search or other operation that took too long. Possible reasons include:

A search where all words are in quotes. Try searching without the quotes initially or add a few more words outside the quotes to restrict the search;
An exceptionally large personal watchlist (probably over 10,000 items); or
Exceptionally heavy load on the database servers.


Technical details about this error:
Last attempted database query: (SQL query hidden)
Function: SqlBagOStuff::set

MySQL error: 1637: Too many active concurrent transactions (10.0.6.50)

Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:30, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Duplicate report from User:Titodutta

A new type of error: Trying to copy paste below:

A database error has occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused. The most likely cause of this problem is a search or other operation that took too long. Possible reasons include:

*A search where all words are in quotes. Try searching without the quotes initially or add a few more words outside the quotes to restrict the search;
*An exceptionally large personal watchlist (probably over 10,000 items); or
*Exceptionally heavy load on the database servers.


Technical details about this error:
Last attempted database query: (SQL query hidden)
Function: SqlBagOStuff::set

MySQL error: 1637: Too many active concurrent transactions (10.0.6.50)

--Tito Dutta ✉ 21:29, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I got one too. Checking my contribs, the edit did in fact go through. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:40, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Ditto (several times).
Though my edits went through as well. - jc37 21:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Also getting the error message, but my edits go through. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 21:52, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Just got that exact message on two different articles in succession. Maile66 (talk) 21:54, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
And again when I did a "Save" on this page.Maile66 (talk) 21:56, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Seriously, what the flying F-sharp is up with the site? It should not be this b0rky. Fix your damn servers or whatever's making this site so buggy of late. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 21:58, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
10.0.6.50 isn't an IP address AFAIK; whois says it's reserved by IANA. KarikaSlayer (talk) 22:01, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
That is an IP address, it's a non-routable address allocated for internal networks, such as the Wikimedia Foundation's internal server network where all the databases are. That specific machine is likely one of the database servers. [stwalkerster|talk] 23:09, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Specificly its a server used to store parser cache (As far as I'm aware). Which is probably why your edits went through, since it was only being used for caching. Bawolff (talk) 17:49, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
I just got his error too. Any further explanations for what is behind it? older ≠ wiser 13:17, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Fixing broken archives after page renames

Hello, I am trying to fix the archive for the Talk:Sōka Gakkai page so that the archive section of the talk header works. The article has been moved from "Soka Gakkai International" and there are still archives with that page name e.g. Talk:Soka Gakkai International/Archive 3 so the standard archive templates (list and search) do not see them. I created Talk:Sōka Gakkai/Archive 1 as a redirect, and it now appears in the talk page header. However the next one I created Talk:Sōka Gakkai/Archive 2 does not. It also seems that the search does not work "through" a redirect (I can't get any results for either of these 2 new pages).

Am I correct in assuming that what is really necessary is to move all the archive pages to the standard pages for the current article title?

Thanks Mcewan (talk) 09:57, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

I just made a null edit to the top section of Talk:Sōka Gakkai. After that, Archive 2 appeared at the bottom of the talk header. (Technically, it was a dummy edit which is recorded in the edit history; I only meant to make a null edit, but the editing interface automatically removed some empty lines.) A null edit is often helpful to refresh the cache; it works for other things too, e.g. changes not showing after edits to categories or templates. Sometimes you may need some lateral thinking to figure out on which page to make your null edit.
I think your suggestion of moving all archived pages to match the current article title is a good one anyway. Use {{db-move}} on any redirects that you may want deleted. – Fayenatic London 12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
Many thanks for the help, and the null edit tip. I will do the moves. Mcewan (talk) 14:23, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
I think the search problem maybe due to this Wikipedia:Searching#Delay in updating the search index rather than the redirects, but moving feels much cleaner anyway. Mcewan (talk) 15:37, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

IPv6 and whois

2001:630:12:1010:385B:113F:E871:D916 (talk · contribs) was obviously a sock of banned editor Mikemikev (talk · contribs) editing from Imperial College, but neither his userpage or talk page had the whois, etc. options. I thought this was fixed. And is there an idiots guide to rangeblocks for IPv6 as we need one here. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 08:29, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Code was added to MediaWiki:Newarticletext page for the whois links, but it only works for numbers separated by two or more dots (making the links also appear on accounts such as 1.2.3 and 0.0.0.0.0); it doesn't work for colons and letters of IPv6. Two bugs exist for this: one is 9128 (to add a message to the edit page, similar to 9397 which shows how it was added to Special:Contributions); the other is 15352 (for a new parser function). For range blocks, see mw:Help:Range blocks/IPv6, the page linked from Wikipedia:Blocking IP addresses. Peter E. James (talk) 10:03, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Database error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T40202

Am I the only one who receives: 

Database error
A database error has occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused. The most likely cause of this problem is a search or other operation that took too long. Possible reasons include:
A search where all words are in quotes. Try searching without the quotes initially or add a few more words outside the quotes to restrict the search;
An exceptionally large personal watchlist (probably over 10,000 items); or
Exceptionally heavy load on the database servers.

Technical details about this error:
Last attempted database query: (SQL query hidden)
Function: SqlBagOStuff::set
MySQL error: 1114: The table 'pc017' is full (10.0.6.50)

every time I attempt to go to a page in the user namespace? I haven't checked all of the namespaces yet, but Wikipedia: obviously works and the article namespace works as well. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:12, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, the issue appeared for about 3 minutes, but now seems resolved. I had never gotten that error before and my watchlist isn't that large. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:15, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I actually just got the same error - and checked it after you posted that it was resolved. This time, in the article space - same error code, same table. UltraExactZZ Said ~ Did 13:15, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Actually, I received the same error after that last post. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:16, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I get a similar error on the vep and se Wikipedias. --Iketsi (talk) 13:17, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I just got that error on this page, and was about to report it before seeing it was already covered. Chrome.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 13:21, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Also registering this "error" on several "Article Space" edits. Someone want to reach out to metaSysOps and let them know that we're seeing some smoke from the servers? Hasteur (talk) 13:22, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
bugzilla:38204 filed.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 13:42, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

This is a seperate, but related posting Hasteur (talk) 13:22, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

When I tried to save my sandbox [2] I receive this page (twice): 

Database error
(other descriptive text)
Last attempted database query: (SQL query hidden)
Function: SqlBagOStuff::set
MySQL error: 1114: The table 'pc230' is full (10.0.6.50)

I guess I should practice some patience? ~-DePiep (talk) 13:19, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

A similar error is preventing me from reading Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Request_for_Comment_2012. --Michaeldsuarez (talk) 13:20, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
The saving did succeed though. -DePiep (talk) 13:21, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
  • This is what I got when I tried to move a page Excessive query data removed Something is seriously wrong. Monty845 13:23, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm getting database errors regularly now. (including, of course, attempts to access and edit this page)--SPhilbrick(Talk) 13:27, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm getting the same sort of error persistently, particularly when trying to edit an article ("The table 'pc129' is full (10.0.6.50"). The edits appear to "take", however. --Orlady (talk) 13:29, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Issue is under investigation by ops folks now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:34, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Things are getting worse and worse. Categories I create remain empty, even though they are clearly included in articles; and now when I create a category, it appears as a redlink on my contributions! Plus, of course, a fair number of database errors, and now the beginning of a database server lag. Fram (talk) 13:35, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm getting the same error, but the server lag looks like it's gone. I'm editing on the secure server, and when I access pages on the regular server I can see pages without the database error. Albacore (talk) 13:48, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Squiffy database

I posted this originally at Wikipedia talk:Twinkle, but it seems to be a wider issue... For the last half-hour or so, every edit I make or action I perform is rewarded with this message:

A database error has occurred. We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused. The most likely cause of this problem is a search or other operation that took too long. Possible reasons include:

A search where all words are in quotes. Try searching without the quotes initially or add a few more words outside the quotes to restrict the search;
An exceptionally large personal watchlist (probably over 10,000 items); or
Exceptionally heavy load on the database servers.

Technical details about this error: Last attempted database query: (SQL query hidden) Function: SqlBagOStuff::set

MySQL error: 1114: The table 'pc117' is full (10.0.6.50)

The MySQL table varies, but the rest of the message is consistently the same. Interestingly, the edits always save, despite error message suggesting otherwise. Since I'm not doing a complex search and have fewer than 1,000 articles on my watchlist, I assume that it's a server error. Is anyone else experienceing this, and does anyone know what's causing it? Yunshui 雲‍水 13:41, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I got the same error multiple times now and now got the following for the first time:
Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.
Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.
(Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.50))
You can try searching via Google in the meantime.
Note that their indexes of our content may be out of date.
-- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 13:44, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
Indeed, I've seen both messages now, and simply loading (not saving) this section failed around eight times for me before I was able to read this change. --j⚛e deckertalk 13:58, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm finding that secure server(https) mostly fails to load a page while none secure server(http) is mostly fine to load a page. Is anyone else getting the same behaviour? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:06, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
All of my problems are with nonsecure. I can't even edit without doing some weird workarounds using popups, normal watchlist links no longer work for me (I actually had to go to the newest revision in the revision history to make this edit). Ryan Vesey Review me! 14:09, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

There was an issue with the database server powering the parser cache (which speeds up loading pages) running out of diskspace and starting to flail, for reasons yet to be fully diagnosed. The server has been back in service for several hours now, and the issues should have stopped. If you're still seeing database issues, please report them here.--Eloquence* 01:20, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki flaw

MediaWiki is extremely flawed. I am always getting errors while creating an account. 96.50.22.205 (talk) 00:01, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Such as? Someguy1221 (talk) 00:02, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Problem with MatJaX

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T38059
Resolved

Why i don't see correctly these formula?

 
 

--Dega180 (talk) 11:26, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

They look fine to me. You need to give more detail: what browser etc are you using and what do the formulae look like on your screen? Dricherby (talk) 11:56, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

I use Firefox (Iceweasel) 13.0.1 and Chrome 19.0.1084.56. And I use the MathJaX extension in My preferences -> Appearance, not the nageh's scrpit. Instead the first formula I see 

a<b>c (see the wiki code!)

and, in the second formula, I see 

amp;

where there are & --Dega180 (talk) 12:19, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
PS:with the nageh's scrpit I see those formulas correctly but whit the official script of wikipedia in My preferences -> Appearance no, why?--Dega180 (talk) 12:34, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

I also observe these problems. Ruslik_Zero 15:53, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
Raised on 18 April 2012 as Bugzilla:36059 (which, despite being marked as "RESOLVED FIXED", is awaiting code review of the patches gerrit:9739/gerrit:10708). — Richardguk (talk) 17:31, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
Code reviewed and merged. Should be live in a couple weeks. Kaldari (talk) 04:57, 29 June 2012 (UTC)
It seems to be working now (see on Help:Formula). Helder 21:45, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
But in the other wiki MatJaX is still not working.--Dega180 (talk) 09:06, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
Works for me. Have you enabled MathJax in your itwiki preferences at it:Speciale:Preferenze#mw-prefsection-rendering? And, if that doesn't work, have you cleared your cache? — Richardguk (talk) 10:00, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
Ok! Now it's working also for me. --Dega180 (talk) 08:37, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
There's some recent discussion with the bug reopened at Bugzilla:36059 for more narrow reasons, but it looks like the key problem is now fixed. — Richardguk (talk) 12:48, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Revision 500000000

A milestone has been reached: revision 500,000,000, about 4 hours ago. Luckily it was not vandalism...

(For those not in the know, this represents the 500,000,000th edit to Wikipedia since January 26, 2002, when the software began to record history as we know it.) — This, that, and the other (talk) 07:13, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

And it was an IP edit. Hooray for IPs. Woohoo! 64.40.57.128 (talk) 23:09, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Just a note: all the edits before 26 January 2002 were imported into the database long after that date, either by a script that ran in September 2002 or by importing old edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia. Graham87 08:14, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
I have given some WikiLove to the IP. Haven't gotten any response though. David1217 02:05, 2 July 2012 (UTC)
That was a nice thing to do, although I can't count the number of times I've seen a popup – Congratulations, you are the nice round number visitor to our site, click here for your prize. So even if seen, it might be ignored.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 14:53, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. David1217 What I've done 21:43, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Adding watchlist customization to user preferences

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T40210

The Watchlist RfC that was set up after the unwatched changes furor was never closed and implemented. The final totals were:

  • 43 for opting-out of the default style (bolded unwatched changes)
  • 31 for opting-out of a different style (of which a subtle underscore received the most support)
  • 101 for opting-in

It seems like a pretty clear consensus for opting-in. However, many supporters of that position requested that preferences include an easy way to change the style of unwatched pages, instead of having to manually edit your CSS page. I am requesting that the RfC be closed and a preference option be implemented. Thank you, David1217 What I've done 16:20, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

And what will it be the style for that new option which needs to be implemented? Helder 18:03, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
Potentially all of the styles under Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Watchlist survey#Choose a default style. However, for starters I would include bold, which had 43 supporters (option one people) and the subtle underscore (24 supporters). I would also suggest that a link to Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists is included. David1217 What I've done 18:19, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
Sounds like a bad idea to me. I vote (guess i'm late) we just disable the option for english wikipedians again, less waste of human resources and and fewer confusing options for newcomers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:14, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
The DJ, I do not want any watchlist option to be on by default, I simply want an option in preferences that enables it to be turned on. Also, one of the concerns expressed in the RfC was that newbies who might find the feature would never be able to find it if you had to manually edit your CSS. David1217 What I've done 18:19, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

So, would someone (I don't know how) please set up an option in user preferences to customize the way unwatched changes are displayed? I think consensus was reached in the RfC that an option should be added. David1217 What I've done 03:17, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

You need to file a bug on Bugzilla. Most likely, nothing will get done for years, or if you're unlucky, the bug will be closed as "invalid" or "won't fix"... such is life on Bugzilla. — This, that, and the other (talk) 04:47, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
Filed... I'm not familiar with Bugzilla, though. David1217 What I've done 05:09, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
My guess is that bug will be closed as WONTFIX or WORKSFORME, because the only wiki needs such as feature is enwiki, and it already has the tools which allows this to be done: gadgets. Just create as many gadgets you like (one for each wanted style). This should not clutter the interface for other wikis which use the default style or can have consensus to get at most TWO styles (the default and the one provided by a gadget). Helder 14:29, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
I've put a request in at WP:GP. Not sure what I should do with the Bugzilla request now though... David1217 What I've done 15:04, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Bypassing of normal action of basic search

In Wikipedia's basic search, I notice that searching for web design causes an immediate jump to the web design article rather than displaying a list of all the articles related to web design. What is causing this behavior, and can it be easily reverted to the normal behavior? I think it makes it difficult for the average user to find and explore all the articles related to web design. LittleBen (talk) 04:01, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Click the magnifying glass icon instead of pressing ↵ Enter. --Redrose64 (talk) 04:48, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. Maybe I clicked Go by mistake instead of Search. LittleBen (talk) 05:16, 5 July 2012 (UTC)
I've just discovered that if a user is not logged in, the default action of basic search is to bump the user directly to an article, rather than to display all related search results. This is like clicking "Go" rather than "Search" under the search box that is displayed when a user is logged in. "Search" is surely better default behavior. Surely most ordinary users who are not logged in are not going to be able to work this out. It would surely be better if the two search boxes (for logged-in users and for non-logged-in users) were the same/consistent. LittleBen (talk) 03:49, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
Logged-in users only have the Go and Search buttons if they have selected Monobook skin at Preferences → Appearance.
Vector skin (which is the default for logged-in users who have not expressed such preference, and also for all non-logged-in users) has a different search facility. Whilst you are typing in the Search box, a dropdown menu of likely matches is offered, as with Monobook; but at the bottom is an entry not found in Monobook: it's titled "containing...". Click that, and you get all related search results. If your mouse is unavailable, you can achieve the same effect by pressing ↑↵ Enter. The behaviour of the Vector search facility is the same whether logged-in or not. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:41, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Timeline refusing to show label

I went to do the monthly update today on Template:FIFA World Ranking leaders, but if 8 or 9 August is posted as the end date, the final label (Spain) goes missing: 7 or 10 August gives no such problem. Not a major problem given the scale of the timeline (one day in 18 years is undetectable), but seems odd that 2 dates don't allow the template to function properly. Might illustrate a glitch. Thoughts? Kevin McE (talk) 21:35, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

The difference between different till dates is shown below in a reduced example. The 2012 Spain disappears for 08/08/2012 and 09/08/2012. I'm not familiar with timelines. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:18, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

07/08/2012:

Spain national football teamNetherlands national football teamSpain national football team

08/08/2012:

Spain national football teamNetherlands national football teamSpain national football team

09/08/2012:

Spain national football teamNetherlands national football teamSpain national football team

10/08/2012:

Spain national football teamNetherlands national football teamSpain national football team
Thanks PH: I hadn't thought that would work so I didn't even try, great job of illustrating it. I had wondered whether the problem with 08/08/12 and 09/08/12 was to do with the length of the timeline which started on 08/08/94 (probably most of us failed to function effectively on our 18th birthdays, and the following day, as well), but this shows that it is something about those specific dates, not the length of the timeline. Even stranger... Kevin McE (talk) 16:43, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Contributions Error

 

(Chrome) On my contributions page, some of the pages show up as red-links, but the link still works, see picture.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 20:41, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

It's probably an issue with Wikipedia's cache. Basically, you created the page, but Wikipedia hasn't yet realized that the links should appear blue instead of red. This is pretty normal, although you may see it rarely depending on how often you create new pages, and/or when you edit. Someguy1221 (talk) 20:50, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Misplaced invisible LTR marks

Hi! I noticed a lot of misplaced invisible characters U+200E (LTR mark) inside categories markup, images markup and wikilinks. Examples:

These invisible characters do not break the links, nevertheless they create problems with some tools (example) and generate confusion. I suggest to remove them, in particular from categories markup. What do you think? -- Basilicofresco (msg) 21:22, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Agree. LTR should only be processed when from dedicated template, like {{Script/Hebrew}}. -DePiep (talk) 21:38, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
I believe that this is the character which I had to remove with this edit (it was immediately after the word "stubs"), because its presence in the previous version caused the template to show in Category:Stub message boxes needing attention. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
Even better: LTR should be skipped outdside of en: elsewhere. We should add it in any language or script template shure. [3]. -DePiep (talk) 22:16, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
Oh, and to solve it: every languge template should have RTL (opening effct) and LTR (closing effect}}. And yes I know. -DePiep (talk) 23:48, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is blocking links that are not SPAM

I am placing a request on a talk page, to add information to the corresponding article. Wikipedia is blocking two links that I am providing but neither link is spam. How can a rectify this Suzanne Opp (talk) 19:53, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

You could show us the links here (type them out without coding) and we could try to see what the problem is. Bielle (talk) 20:01, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Here are the two links: corporationwiki com California Los-Angeles stellar-motion-pictures-llc 67210350.aspx

investorscopes com STELLAR-MOTION-PICTURES-LLC D-A 11927355.aspx

Thank you Suzanne Opp (talk) 20:06, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I couldn't make the second one work, but they appear to be directory listings for a specific company. There wouldn't be many places this would be appropriate on WP, if any place at all. The company itself does not have an article, so these listings might well be considered link spam. You might also have a look at this guideline. Bielle (talk) 20:24, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
corporationwiki.com was blocked in December 2010 because someone affiliated with the site was attempting to add it to various articles. investorscopes.com was added in April 2012 because various IPs and new accounts were adding it to various articles in a spammy manner. If these really are necessary and reliable sources for your article, you can ask for the specific links to be whitelisted at Mediawiki talk:Spam-whitelist. If you have good reason these sites should not be blocked at all, you may raise the issue at Mediawiki talk:Spam-blacklist. Anomie⚔ 00:32, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Here is the reason I am trying to use these links: I am a patron of a subject of a Biography of a Living Person. Technically, by Wikipedia rules, neither of us can edit the article because we have COI's. So, I am trying to add pertinent, up-to date info about the subject via talks with the "editor" on the talk page of the article. The so called "editor" will not put up the information of the subject being a director of a new business without a link. I realize that these links that I am trying to give to the editor are business directories, currently that is what we have to support this fact. Suzanne Opp (talk) 17:16, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

User:JzG added corporationwiki to the blacklist in December 2010, see the log. I've copied him on this discussion. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:29, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
Blacklisting is a red herring - it's not a reliable independent source. We have a whitelist where a site has been spammed (as this one was) and where there is a pressing need for a particular link, but in this case I don't really think that applies. user:Nomoskedasticity is active on the talk page, I suggest that Ms. Opp ask that worthy for assistance, I think the problem will soon be resolved. Guy (Help!) 22:36, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Blocks while blocked

Can a blocked administrator impose blocks or perform other admin actions? Obviously not by policy, but is it technically possible? 142.161.147.7 (talk) 20:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

They can unblock themselves but that's it.--Jasper Deng (talk) 21:07, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
That is to say, they can unblock themselves, and then do all the usual stuff.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 21:12, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Self-unblocking is not necessarily contrary to policy. However it "will almost never be acceptable".[4] Thincat (talk) 10:52, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes obviously they can, as they can unblock themselves. There's something very wrong with the way that blocking works. Malleus Fatuorum 11:05, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
It's a necessary safeguard, and it is common for computer systems to operate like that. For example, on Windows, any user can easily adjust the permissions on a file so that no one has permission to access the file (including the user). However, the owner of the file can still change the permissions (despite not having permission to do so). Similarly, MediaWiki allows an admin to unblock themselves to safeguard against stupidity (say one admin account is compromised, and the rogue account blocks all other admins). Johnuniq (talk) 11:36, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

I was just reading a conversation on a related issue here (see bottom), where the conclusion was that blocked admins can perform admin actions. I also recall that admin actions but not edits could be performed during the SOPA blackout, though I have no idea what the technical implementation of that was. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:50, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

The SOPA blackout was a special case as only certain actions were blocked by the software - there was no technical reason, as I recall, that admin actions couldn't have been blocked as well, they just chose not to block them. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:18, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Possible to change user links at top of the page?

Hi everybody, I have a technical question for you. You know those user links which appear at the top of the page for logged-in users, where it says "[your username], my talk, my sandbox, my preferences, my watchlist, my contributions, log out"? Well I was wondering if there was any sort of script or other program for customizing these links. I wanted to add my user tools page, in order to have one-click access to it. Can anyone here offer any advice? --Eastlaw talk ⁄ contribs 03:29, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

You could ask User:GreatOrangePumpkin (he created the "link to my sandbox" script) if he could modify the code for that script for you. David1217 What I've done 05:35, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I did not create this gadget, but User:Anomie ;). Anyway, the code is: 

mw.util.addPortletLink ( 'p-personal', mw.util.wikiGetlink( 'Special:MyPage/tools' ) + '?action=edit',
        'My tools', 'pt-mytools', 'Edit your personal notes' );

Add it to your monobook.js on My preferences - Appearance. The only issue is that it appears at the end. You may ask Anomie how to move it. Regards.--GoPTCN 09:13, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, thanks. --Eastlaw talk ⁄ contribs 13:05, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
If you don't want to edit the page by clicking on it, then you can remove "+ '?action=edit'". Also you can change the name and the alt text. Regards.--GoPTCN 13:28, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

GOP, I thought you had created the script because you were very involved in pushing for it to be a gadget :^) Glad this has been resolved. David1217 What I've done 20:20, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Editing others' userspace editnotices

Look at the history of User talk:Tarc/Editnotice. How was Cracker92 able to edit the page at all? I was under the distinct impression that "All users can create editnotices for their user and talk pages, but editnotices for other namespaces can be created and edited only by administrators and account creators". Has it always been possible for everyone to edit an unprotected userspace editnotice that had already been created? Cracker92's user rights log is entirely empty, except for a recent removal of the "edit" permission. Nyttend (talk) 04:58, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I believe the checks on editnotice creation are implemented through the MediaWiki:Titleblacklist (account creators have the tboverride right, which enables them to override titleblacklist checks). However, the blacklist only lists Template:Editnotices subpages, so I think userspace editnotices can actually be created by anyone, and all editnotices can be edited by anyone. I haven't checked that, though; perhaps there is some other check that I am missing. Ucucha (talk) 05:11, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
I've just logged out and tried to edit (without saving) some existing /Editnotice subpages in both User: and User talk: space. I also tried to create some that didn't already exist. I then logged in as my legit alt account (which is not autoconfirmed, so has minimal rights), and tried the same four tests.
  • Create User:???/Editnotice  N if logged out;  Y if logged in
  • Edit existing User:???/Editnotice  Y always
  • Create User talk:???/Editnotice  Y always
  • Edit existing User talk:???/Editnotice  Y always
(here, the real page names have been replaced by ???). I believe that when editnotices were first introduced, it was much more restrictive. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:56, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
IIRC, there has never been any restriction against anyone editing any user's /Editnotice subpage. I don't think the Title blacklist could be used like this; I think we'd need to make it an edit filter of some sort. Anomie⚔ 15:26, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
I also think that the edit filter would be needed to implement this. And I think it should be implemented - edit notices should be treated similarly to .js and .css subpages by the software - visible to everyone, but only editable by the users themselves in the normal course of things. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:12, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit History

Ive noticed recently apparently an edit that has made no change been added to the article history. See Here[5]. Yet when i initially saw this on my watchlist it said the edit was of +85,061 which is actually the size of the whole article. Ive seen this a few times lately.Edinburgh Wanderer 18:25, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

See #Diff/watchlist difficulties and (I think) a few others. Mainly that one though. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:37, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Lost TUSC password

How can I recover/ reset a forgotten Toolserver User Screening Control (TUSC) password? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Probably just get in touch with Magnus? Or just reregister - I'm fairly confident you can associate multiple TUSC usernames with the same onwiki account. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 18:34, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Results from the timestamp feature experiment

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give a quick update on a new feature that the experiments team at the Foundation A/B tested recently.

The results have been described in detail on Meta and in a blogpost. The short answer though, is that having the new, more prominent timestamp more than doubled the clicks through to the 'View history' tab by visitors who weren't logged in. For people who were logged in, there was an increased use of the history as well, though it was not so large as with anonymous users.

We think this clearly means that more easily findable and understandable information about when a page last edited gave more people a motivation to inspect a page's history. We think that kind of outcome is officially a Good Thing™, providing greater transparency to readers about the encyclopedia.

We put forth some ideas for how to iterate based on these results, but in the short term we will be moving on to experiments that are more directly related to editing. If anyone feels excited about the feature and the results and would like to start a proposal to implement it more widely, we'd be happy to support you.

Thanks, and please do speak up if you have any questions. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:13, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I'd be interested in seeing if a notice on the view history page reminding readers that they can edit the page would increase the number of new editors (specifically when combined with this more prominent timestamp). I'd also be interested if that increased editing comes in the form of vandalism or constructive editing. Ryan Vesey Review me! 23:22, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm confused: if a page have the new feature enabled, will the normal "This page was last modified on DAY at TIME" still appear at the bottom? I occasionally find that line useful and would be annoyed if it were removed; having both that line and the new link would be much better. Nyttend (talk) 05:01, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes, the new timestamp was in addition to the one at the bottom. There was no reason to remove the default for the purpose of the experiment. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 05:39, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
In response to Ryan Vesey's comment: if people are encouraged to edit while viewing the history page, will this lead to people editing an old version rather than the current one? --Redrose64 (talk) 10:39, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
My gut says that we should do more usability testing to try and improve the core functions of the history page before anything else there. Motivated editors who inspect the history will make edits where appropriate, but we have no idea how much the visual complexity (tons of links, etc) of the history is having a negative impact on newbie editing. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:58, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
How does this thing work with pages with really long titles? -— Isarra ༆ 05:49, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
I tested this out, partially using Google's browser size tool, and it depends on the width of your browser. For very long titles where your browser is too small to display the full width, it wraps the text and does not overlap with the timestamp. If you have a big screen size and the length of the title is exactly the full width of the page, it will overlap. Obviously this would need to be dealt with before any permanent or semi-permanent deployment. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:29, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Change upload Wizard

Where can I request to change the special:upload to Wikipedia:upload, Pls guide me. It's on behalf of the Assamese Wikipedia. Bishnu Saikia (talk) 18:38, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Don't know. Today I tried to upload an improved file, and only at the end of the upload-page I got warned "do not do this on en:, go to commons". Had to do three routes to finish it. Still do not know what the difference is between an en-file and a commons-file. "en" is local, they say. -DePiep (talk) 21:50, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
I guess you mean how to change the Upload file link in the toolbox from Special:Upload to Wikipedia:Upload. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 62#How to add link sidebar toolbox ( Upload file-->Wikipedia:Upload). PrimeHunter (talk) 22:16, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, I will try these links. Bishnu Saikia (talk) 14:42, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Link to an image: how for a reader?

The broader question I have put at WP:VPM: if a Reader clicks on an image, they regularly end up at the File:-page, which is WP-editor space. Now my VPT question is: is it possible that that reader sees just the image, not the technical stuff? Say, in screen where the article text usually is and the WP top & left border intact? A click-image-does-full-zoom action? I remember I had a same quest when working with non-English characters (zoom in on a Vietnamese character with diacritic). -DePiep (talk) 22:34, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. Obviously the image cannot just be displayed by itself: at the very least, the license and description must be given beneath the picture. Ideally it would should the whole {{information}} template (if present) and a precis of the licensing information below each image. And it would be a on-by-default gadget that logged-in users could disable (and most would want to do this). There may be certain technical/other objections, though. — This, that, and the other (talk) 02:31, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Pages where template include size is exceeded

I notice the footer at Wikipedia:Copyright problems isn't rendering properly. (See hidden cat "Pages where template include size is exceeded") It is created or updated, I presume by DpmukBOT. Per Dpmuk, it may be a result of too many templates. The page size is trivial, about 4k, but I assume it has tons of templates, which are creating the problems.

One possible solution is to harangue admins into clearing out the backlog. Frankly, I wouldn't be unhappy if someone says this is the best solution, as it would provide an excuse to whine for more help.

I note there are 880 pages in this category, maybe it isn't such a big deal?

Are there other solutions? SPhilbrick(Talk) 00:58, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I've now read Template limits, which is informative, except I don't know what to do next.SPhilbrick(Talk) 01:16, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
"One possible solution is to harangue admins into clearing out the backlog.". Yep, that's the best solution. The listing for each day is transcluded onto WP:CP like a template, and hence counts towards template limits. The include size increases approximately linearly with the number of items. You will need to remove entire days to get the page displaying correctly again. MER-C 02:29, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
After deleting or otherwise resolving copyright issues for several pages, I just removed their listings in order to help with the number of templates, but apparently that's not the best idea. Nyttend (talk) 16:59, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Article statistics

I'm looking for statistics on how many times a given article title is searched for. I am aware of http://stats.grok.se/ but I want to separate out page hits due to a search term and page hits due to following a link from another page. Is such a thing available? SpinningSpark 17:44, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Wouldn't you have to have the logs for Special:Search? I don't think that's available. You'd also need to account for people knowing the name of a page itself; that's how I virtually always reach pages. Nyttend (talk) 18:21, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Barcharts from easytimeline

Could someone with expertise using easytimeline add some more examples to Help:Barchart.Smallman12q (talk) 00:09, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Subject/headline

  Resolved

How to write Subject/headline by querystring on address bar on my browser? Help me please. Aris riyanto (talk) 04:23, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Use &preloadtitle=title%20to%20use. See mw:Manual:Parameters_to_index.php#Options_affecting_the_edit_form for details. Bawolff (talk) 13:22, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Apparently resolved, see User talk:Aris riyanto#help. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:15, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Flag-decorated country templates and section titles

On the page List of administrative division name changes, most of the sections have a title specified like "=={{AUS}}==". These templates each expand to a little flag and the linked name of the country, as you'll see when I use one here:   Australia. Between the flag and the name is a non-breaking space &#160;. This whole idea is not my taste, but plenty of people seem to like it, so that's fine.

But the thing is, when the template is used in a section header, the article's table of contents drops the flag (no doubt burning it in a dignified manner afterwards), but it doesn't drop the non-breaking space. Consequently, the TOC entries that use this template all end up misaligned compared to the other ones — as you can see on the linked page.

I don't know how this dropping of the flag is implemented, but to look as good as possible, it needs to be done in a way that causes the &#160; to be dropped as well.

--142.205.241.254 (talk) 19:10, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Frankly, I don't know of any way to cause different text to appear on the headers and at the TOC, and if such a method exist, it's likely really complicated. I just decided to cut the Gordian knot and added NBSPs to the References and See also sections; they don't look bad on the headers, and now the TOC is all lined up. Nyttend (talk) 20:56, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Really, you should have left those two alone and fixed all the others. See MOS:HEADINGS particularly "Headings should not normally contain links, especially where only part of a heading is linked." and "Headings should not contain images, including flag icons." --Redrose64 (talk) 21:29, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Oops, you're right. My sense of taste is vindicated this time. I've changed those headings to plain ==Australia== and so on, and I guess the issue of making these templates look right in section headers becomes moot. (Original poster at a different IP address) --65.92.2.230 (talk) 05:08, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia Status Dashboard

There seems to be a connection problem with http://ezyang.com/wikistatus/ , the Wikipedia Status Dashboard. Mr Stephen (talk) 21:01, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

The url has apparently changed from http://ezyang.com/wikistatus/ to http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/. The old invalid url is still linked at http://ezyang.com/. Maybe somebody should email him at the address there (it's a private site not run by Wikimedia), or via email at User:Edward Z. Yang (he is inactive). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:36, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I guess the template at {{Editnotices/Page/Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)}} could be edited in a jiffy. Is the page at http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/ actively updated? Mr Stephen (talk) 21:47, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I have updated {{Editnotices/Page/Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)}} to the new url. I don't know how maintained or accurate http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/ is but the changelog currently shows two entries 10 hours ago. I haven't tried to contact Edward Z. Yang. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:22, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Chick skin

On Chick skin, can somebody show me how to move the search box to the top right? I currently have some programming in my script but it doesn't work for it. I would also like to propose a new skin which is full page by default but when you hover with the cursor over the side the itinery of vector or monobook appears. Would be much more useful and greatly improve usership.♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:55, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Templates not rendering

At WT:WikiProject Spam, a lot of templates are used to provide links. Currently the templates are not being expanded after a certain point in the page (search for "Template:" to see that point; I tried "?action=purge"). There are 483 templates that are expanded, but the following 126 do not. Any ideas (yes, the page is too long, but why the change)? Johnuniq (talk) 00:20, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Oops, I just noticed #Pages where template include size is exceeded above, and that is the problem (the page is in Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded). Johnuniq (talk) 00:27, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Changing the edit toolbar to help prevent test edits

I am proposing that the buttons on the (Vector) edit toolbar should be changed. Currently, if you if you click the "Bold" button, you get '''Bold text''' inserted into the edit window. What I'd like is that if no text is highlighted, a pop-up window opens saying something like "Insert bold text", possibly with a note on when to add bold text in pages. A user would then click "Insert" to put the bolded text in the edit widow. If text is highlighted, then it is surrounded by the bold markup. If you don't get what I'm talking about, click on the "Link" button—that's the model I'm looking at. The same design would apply for "Italic text", "Bulleted list", "Big text", etc. I think this would help cut down on test edits and make the toolbar more usable. David1217 What I've done 15:17, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

So does anyone like my proposal? Not like it? Some feedback, please. David1217 What I've done 03:14, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

If text is selected, the Bold button already works the way you describe, so I assume you are only suggesting changes to what should happen if no text is selected. IMHO the existing functionality is clear enough; the phrase "bold text" are highlighted, so if they don't delete it and do click "Save page", it's fairly obvious what will happen. In the hands of editors like that, it's fairly likely that test edits would be saved even after using a popup dialog as you suggest. – Fayenatic London 11:57, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
It's true that testing editors will still make test edits, but for editors who don't know when to use bold text in article, it might be helpful. And one more suggested change: disambiguation pages would have a little icon if you tried to link to one using the "link" button. For example, if you typed "rose apple" (which is a dab page) into the "target page or URL" portion of the "link" button, an icon would appear—similar to what there is if you try to link to an non-existent page—saying "this is a dab page". David1217 What I've done 17:24, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Section viewing

There seems to be a problem with pages getting very long which causes problems with slow connections, download costs to mobiles, and just general slowness. I believe editors should use hyperlinks for subtopics more, too many articles are developed as monolithic paper articles with lots of duplication of other articles and too little splitting up. That can't be fixed easily and quickly but what could be done is to let people download only what they want.

I don't know how the innards work but this is my take on what should be done.

We should be ensuring pages can as far as possible be cached i.e. only store a few different versions of pages as downloaded at most and do personal customization as far as possible via css and javascript at the browser. There would be a new incremental profile which would be the default for mobiles. When a browser with the incremental profile accessed a page it would only get the lead section. When it accessed a section of a page via a #id it would download the smallest encompassing section, or perhaps the top level section with the identifier in so only top level sections mattered. One would also have a next and last link on the sections for those who wanted to read linearly. One probably should also have a minimum cutoff size for sections so for instance a stub article would be fully downloaded because all its sections put together were below the minimum size.

There are any number of ways of doing this. One could generate variant pages on the server especially for the purpose so the browser didn't need javascript or I think requiring javascript would possibly be acceptable. The server could either search for and select the sections as required or treat the sections as cacheable mini pages with a dependency on the whole page and identified by possibly more than one #id value.

Overall I believe something like this would reduce the load on both users and the servers quite considerably and lead to a much quicker displays of results. There is just no point downloading 400k to a user if they just want to read the lead and that is I believe what happens quite a lot of the time, and why for instance download a history if they just want to read the latest?

With this the contents list would naturally appear with the lead section because when pages are processed for download they occur after the lead and before the first section. Dmcq (talk) 13:20, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

A particular problem that occurs to me is large tables, in particular large sortable tables. I can see large sections even with large indented lists could be dealt with easily if they were important but large tables would require some harder work. I think one would want to just chop out most of them except the headers footer and the first few entries and put in a facility to load the rest but it isn't altogether straightforward. Dmcq (talk) 13:40, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Actually the Mobile app will soon have an approach of per section downloading. First downloading the lead section + header titles, start rendering it and then start downloading the other sections. Similar approaches could be done for the normal English wikipedia in theory, but the problem is that we would have a dependency on the users having Javascript. I don't think that's gonna be accepted by a large group of the users. Much can be done in this regard, but it will require lots of experimentation and probably take years to get it pushed trough the editor community. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:55, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
That is basically what browsers already try to do. Why would it be better than current browsers at the job? Plus I do see a few problems.
The whole page is downloaded.
For things requiring Javascript support like MathJax the Javascript would not be run till the whole page was loaded and then it would be run on the whole page.
Unless you've been very careful all the images would still be downloaded. This could eat up a person's entire mobile allowance in no time flat. For this one may want a option saying if a person is worried about costs and if so only load when viewed.
Overall it would still mean us downloading huge files which people never looked at. I was just reading that people spend four minutes on average on the site and look at four pages, that's one page a minute. All we're doing downloading long pages is slowing them up as well as wasting the resources of the Wikipedia servers. At least with quicker access they might look at a few more pages even if they only spend a minute on them too, and if people really are interested in a page they won't mind clicking for more - in fact a little interaction will make them more committed. Dmcq (talk) 09:11, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit box style/format

For some reason, just in the last hour or so, the format of the edit box (like the one in which I am typing at the moment) has changed. I recall being forced to use this format in the past, until I changed some setting in my preferences, but now it is back, despite not having changed any of my preferences recently. Am I explaining the situation adequately? Is anyone aware of this problem? ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 20:50, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I have encountered the same issue today. I conservatively use MonoBook with new features disabled, no custom additions, no changes in settings during last weeks. Suddenly I'm facing a Vector-like "white" Edit toolbar which is very unfriendly for me because I have troubles to see edges of editing windows etc. I have of course tried CTRL+F5, even tried to solve the problem by turning visibility of toolbar in Preferences off and back on, but in vain. The unwanted interface layout still haunts my computer. It's very disturbing and annoying to spend several times a year an evening with trying simply to have constant editing enviroment. --Miaow Miaow (talk) 21:20, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
So, for me the problem seems to be solved after turning off and on not only the toolbar visibility but also the Usability features at bottom of Preferences/Edit (i.e. Enable enhanced editing toolbar and Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more) then applying CTRL+F5. The usual view is back. Anyway, whatever the cause, one and half hour lost... --Miaow Miaow (talk) 21:43, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I've tried that but either I'm not doing it right or the toolbar has been hardwired in. What's the best setting to kill it for good? Timrollpickering (talk) 22:03, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I tried those steps, Miaow Miaow, but to no avail. Obviously, something is happening across the site, given that we are talking about this, and I doubt that it is only the three of us. I would like to kill Vector for good and never be bothered by it again. ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 22:09, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
It looks like the Help:Edit toolbar is there, whether or not you have it enabled. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 22:22, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps this is due to Ryan's attempt to fix the reftoolbar problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:30, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Having the same problems getting the new toolbar rather than the older Wikipedia:RefToolbar 1.0 which is more useful. Keith D (talk) 22:56, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I'm having the same problem here. Basically I'm getting the Vector editing window despite having MonoBook selected. Interestingly, the MonoBook editing window loads first, then it switches to the nasty Vector screen... - The Bushranger One ping only 23:02, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
    • Can somebody maybe fix up a script to go in the css or js files to hardset RefToolbar 1.0? - The Bushranger One ping only 23:12, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about that. It was my fault. It looks like I need to see what version of the edit toolbar people are using before declaring the dependency. Does anyone else think it's a total nightmare trying to maintain 3 different versions of the edit toolbar (soon to be 4)? Kaldari (talk) 00:12, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

      • I just want the old one back. If we need more than one, then let there be some selection system in the preferences.  Ronhjones  (Talk) 00:14, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
        • OK, I think it should be fixed correctly now. The RefToolbar should be reliable and it should respect the type of editToolbar you want to use (hopefully). Let me know if you notice any problems. Sorry for the error. <wanders back to the basement> Kaldari (talk) 00:17, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Nope, I am still seeing the Vector toolbar. ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 01:11, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Try hard refreshing (shift+refresh). I also changed to Vector then right back to Monobook in preferences. One or the other reset it for me. - The Bushranger One ping only 01:53, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
Nope, still Vector. Frankly, I'd rather not edit at all than deal with this bs. ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 03:08, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Now fixed for me. Timrollpickering (talk) 10:56, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

A hard refresh did nothing, but changing settings to Vector and back to Monobook worked. --NE2 23:31, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Is anyone else still having an issue with this? ---RepublicanJacobiteTheFortyFive 13:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit/deletion conflicts

Imagine that two pages are found to need a partial history merge while they're being edited frequently. An admin decides to delete page 1, restore only the mergeable edits, move it to page 2, delete page 2, and restore the history of page 2 to complete the merge. In the mean time, someone edits one or both of the pages, but doesn't save the edit until the page has been deleted. Will this have the result of undeleting a recently deleted page, or will the editor simply be told "this page has been deleted, so you can't edit it without creating a new page"? And what if I click the "delete" tab (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&action=delete ), someone saves an edit to the page, and then I actually delete the page. Will this have the effect of deleting all revisions, or just the revisions that existed when I went to the deletion screen? I can't remember ever getting into this kind of technical conflict, so when performing a history merge earlier today, I had to protect the pages in question for fear that edits would get moved around by accident or otherwise lost. Nyttend (talk) 17:06, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I highly doubt that a user would be able to undelete a page simply by submitting an edit after the page has been deleted. That would be a major flaw in mediawiki software, which would completely undermine the notion of deletion. I'm sure they would be presented with an error of some sort, although I don't know if it would actually tell them what happened (e.g. "The page was deleted while you were editing it") or just give them a general error message (e.g. "Server error 704B-25"). As for deletion, all revisions are deleted at the moment you commit the deletion, not from the time you initially clicked the delete button and started playing around with the deletion parameters. So, if someone made an edit between the time you clicked the delete button to get to the deletion page and the time you actually committed the deletion, their edit would be deleted as well. -Scottywong| communicate _ 17:11, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
I was typing a response to a contested speedy deletion on a talk page, when an admin came by and deleted the page. I remember getting a error message from MediaWiki saying something like "The page you have been editing has been deleted." David1217 What I've done 17:24, 10 July 2012 (UTC)
It's only a warning, so you can continue to save and recreate the page. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:36, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Articles with redlink categories

Every now and then I find an article that has an invalid (i.e., redlinked) category in it. Is there some way a list could be made of all articles with redlinked categories in them, to aid in cleaning them up? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 03:23, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

How about Wikipedia:Database_reports/Red-linked_categories_with_incoming_links? GoingBatty (talk) 03:40, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
That report shows the number of pages linked to a category, i.e. those using the syntax [[:Category:Example]] or the equivalent {{tlc|Example}}. It does not show whether any pages are actually members of those categories.
The desired report is one which I asked for in February 2011. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:40, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
I apologize for my lack of understanding. Thanks for setting me straight. GoingBatty (talk) 16:22, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Special:WantedCategories shows red-linked categories, sorted by the number of entries. I would think that this would be a good resource for such a clean-up effort. The top-listed entries often need to be created. Down a page or two, where there are three or less pages per category, you start getting to ones that likely should be removed or replaced on the included articles. - TexasAndroid (talk) 16:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
As for one needing cleanup, I think Category:Wikipedia articles that use‏ results from not specifying a English variant in the editnotice. However, an admin or accountcreator is needed to edit them. Chris857 (talk) 17:09, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
All but one lacked |variant=British English. Sorted. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Intermittent failure to load

For the past few weeks, I have been encountering an intermittent failure to load pages across Wikimedia sites. A page begins to load but gets "stuck". When it eventually loads — after a minute or so — the page will come up but without CSS styling. I decided to investigate what was failing to load this evening. Anything from bits.wikimedai.org failed to load:

  • bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php
  • bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.20wmf6/skins/vector/images/search-ltr.png
  • bits.wikimedia.org/images/wikimedia-button.png
  • bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.20wmf6/skins/common/images/poweredby_mediawiki_88x31.png

The issue is intermittent, after a few minutes it will go away and pages will load fine. But it is a frequent issue.

Using Safari 5.1.7 (6534.57.2) on OS X 10.6.8. --RA (talk) 21:20, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Template:Afd and equivalent

I've noticed an odd bug with this template in that even when the deletion page has been created, the link there stays as a redlink in the template. Clicking on the redlink still takes you through to the deletion page as normal however. Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 21:53, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

If the template is added with Twinkle then the deletion page is often created so shortly after the template is added that the creation isn't registered yet and the link becomes red. This can be fixed by purging the nominated page. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:01, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
I don't use twinkle. The bug seems to affect other pages not done by me as well. Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 22:13, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Please give an example. That applies to all reports of suspected bugs. If the template was added before the deletion page was created then a purge will also often be needed. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:19, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I don't use twinkle either; but I've seen this happen several times. Whenever I notice a redlink in an AfD banner, I go for the "purge" tab. In case you're wondering where to obtain this... see Preferences → Gadgets and switch on 'Add a "Purge" option to the top of the page, which purges the page's cache'. Such a purge almost always turns the redlink blue; if it doesn't, the nominator hasn't done WP:AFDHOWTO step II. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:22, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. Although I have seen it redlinked on different computers, I used that tab and it went back to normal. Cheers. Simply south...... always punctual, no matter how late for just 6 years 21:50, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Sort order problem

Is there any way to get consistent sorting results for entries with the same value in a sortable table column? Take the Players table in this article for example: Sort any of the columns with numerical values and compare it with the "Cap" column; keep sorting the same column over and over again, observing the pattern of the "Cap" column (ex: The top results for batting HS goes 2, 37, 2, 27, 2, 41, 2, 32...) I know that this can be fixed by assigning appropriate sort values in the template {{sort}}, but this is going to be quite tedious for columns with entries that have dozens of similar values. Is there a simpler way of doing this? Perhaps using a different template? Thanks in advance. ASTRONOMYINERTIA (TALK) 12:11, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

The best way to fix it would be to fix the tablesorter itself to use a stable sort. In the mean time, if you hold Shift while clicking the sort arrows it will do a multi-column sort, e.g. click on one of the numeric columns and then on "Cap" to use that as a secondary sorting criterion. Anomie⚔ 20:10, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Previously reported in March (VPT/Archive 98 and Bugzilla:35526). Thanks for filing the above fix. — Richardguk (talk) 23:23, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Can you please clarify how to apply the fix for the table itself? Or an example would suffice. Thanks!! ASTRONOMYINERTIA (TALK) 14:50, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
It's not something to apply on an individual table, but a change to the MediaWiki software that will correct the issue in all tables. It just needs to get reviewed and pushed live, hopefully that won't take too long as it appears to be a fairly simple change. the wub "?!" 22:14, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Pointless message and button on Watchlist

Isn't it about time we removed the "Pages which have been changed since you last visited them are shown in bold" message and "Mark all pages visited" button from the Watchlist? The message is irrelevant because nothing is shown in bold, and pushing the button has no effect. It has been like this for a few months now, and it's ridiculous and embarrasing. I think the message and button were left there pending the outcome of this discussion, but this now seems to have ground to a halt. Either we should enable the bolding and button functionality, or remove them. And this should be done globally, not just for users who know how to mess around with css. Bazonka (talk) 07:43, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Users with the default language en at Special:Preferences don't see "Pages which have been changed since you last visited them are shown in bold". The watchlist displays MediaWiki:Wlheader-showupdated which is blank for en. Users who changed language see the MediaWiki default for that language. For en-gb it is as you quote: MediaWiki:Wlheader-showupdated/en-gb. en-gb and en-ca are not recommended because many messages have only been customized for the default en. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:21, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
I am set to en-gb, so that would explain it. But it hardly seems to be in the spirit of WP:ENGVAR - "The English Wikipedia prefers no major national variety of the language over any other". I object somewhat to being forced to set my preferences to what is essentially a foreign language, albeit one that is mostly mutually intelligible. En-gb and en-ca should work in exactly the same way as en, and so this ridiculous message and button should be removed from their settings. Alternatively en-gb and en-ca should be removed entirely - if they don't work properly, then why do they exist? Bazonka (talk) 14:02, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Huh? My setting is the default "en - English" but I still see that annoying button... Jared Preston (talk) 14:57, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
You see the "Mark all pages visited" button but not the text "Pages which have been changed since you last visited them are shown in bold". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?uselang=en-gb for how it looks with en-gb selected. The choice between en, en-ca, en-gb and a lot of foreign languages is part of the MediaWiki software. The English Wikipedia usually only customizes the default language en. Users with all other choices see the messages built into MediaWiki. The language choice only affects interface messages and not wiki text. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:07, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
In other words there is a button and a message next to it. The message is blanked in default language. — AlexSm 15:14, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes it is ridiculous and embarrasing but apparently someone decided that his time is much more valuable than of hundreds other editors. Discussions were here: MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Please undo the last change. It breaks functionality for one group for the aesthetic appeal of another and User talk:R'n'B/Archive 16#Common.css. — AlexSm 15:14, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Alex, I don't appreciate the tone of your comments or your presumption to claim to know my thoughts. My reason, which I expressed in the discussions you linked to, was that changes should be made after the RFC discussion was completed, not before. If the discussion is now completed, the results of that discussion should be implemented. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:54, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
If the message is blanked by default then so should the button too. But I guess I'm not the only one thinking this. Jared Preston (talk) 15:25, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Note to whoever decides to be bold or reckless: please get things right this time. There are two systems, one is opt-in, and a large number of users (myself included) make use of the opt-in system. Because of the way Recent Changes was enabled, long after the discussion, it evoked a strong reaction and was hidden away. An endless slew of .css amendments were crafted to overcome each change, and it quickly became frustrating to have to seek out why my watchlist wasn't working every 36 hours. Make this a gadget, or don't change anything. Otherwise, you will have a lot of angry users to forcefeed some new css amendment to make Recent Changes work properly. A pointless button is better than a broken function. With one you get an odd "so what does this do, exactly?"; with the other you get a borked watchlist for hundreds of users. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 15:41, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
I agree that a pointless button is better than a broken function. But no pointless button and no broken function is better still, which is what we used to have. Can't somebody put things back to where we once were? And if the css users (a small minority of Wikipedia editors) have to make some more changes then so be it. Bazonka (talk) 20:20, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
And having a useful feature not hidden from all new users would be better yet. Anomie⚔ 22:12, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
So what is going to be done? Bazonka (talk) 13:51, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Who writes on Wikipedia

Who writes on ikipedia — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.233.154.239 (talk) 20:26, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Who writes Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:32, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

MediaWiki parser trashing white space

See Template talk:Legend#Whitespace effect

Consider the following HTML:

<span style="color:black;background-color:yellow ;">Black text, yellow background</span>

This renders as Black text, yellow background. It should render as Black text, yellow background. The MediaWiki parser appears to be changing the (valid) normal space &#32; in the style= attribute into a non-breaking space &#160;, which is invalid. Are there any outstanding bugzillas for this? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:27, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I understand you mean &#x20; for regular space. -DePiep (talk) 13:52, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, sorry. Doesn't affect the demo though, where I used a keyboard space. For consistency with the &#160; shown as such in the HTML, I've kept it as decimal so amended to &#32; --Redrose64 (talk) 15:36, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Yeah very minor. I like your analysis, well pointed & explained. -DePiep (talk) 15:52, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
MediaWiki has a "feature" where it tries to make normal spaces into non-breaking spaces in certain contexts: before '?', ':', ';', '!', '%', or '»', and after '«'. Apparently this sort of thing is common in French, as the comment describes it as "french spaces". As you noted, it can cause problems when a normal space is what is actually needed. I don't know if there is a bug for this issue specifically, but T20469 and T14752 are somewhat related. Anomie⚔ 16:51, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

User:Svenbot

I have a ton of edits by User:Svenbot (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) on my watchlist, including when I click the "hide bots" button. The edits are not showing the "b" next to the bot. However, Svenbot was given the botflag in 2011. Why is this occurring? Magog the Ogre (talk) 19:33, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Bots don't have to use the bot flag they possess; I guess in this case it's usage has been turned off for some reason (usually talkpage messaging?!) - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:00, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Best would be to ask the bot op for the reason, and if there is no good reason ask them to start using it. Anomie⚔ 20:46, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Byte changes in histories and contributions

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T10327

The negative changes should certainly have the &MINUS; hyphens instead of the regular hyphens at present. Surely this wouldn't overload the Wikimedia software? (I am a Chrome user, but the browser should be irrelevant) GotR Talk 00:53, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

See T10327 Anomie⚔ 03:37, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Section 0 edit link proposal

I have been asked to inform you of a proposal concerning the section 0 edit link. See WP:VPR#Activate section 0 edit link for everyone -- 76.65.131.160 (talk) 11:19, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

  • WARNING: (corrected) Although the option to display section-0 edit tab "[edit]" does not disable page-cache display, beware setting unusual user-preferences which make an article appear different and disable cache display. However, I have tested the section-0 edit option in Special:Preferences, now, as safe to use:
  • [_]   Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page.
Beware other Special:Preferences options which might disable the page-cache display, so as to make viewing most articles/pages 10x-50x slower (forced custom reformatting upon each viewing), as happened to me for the past several years. Any similar page-display option, which causes an unusual page format, will make that user's format out-of-step with the bulk of users who view standard, cached copies of articles. Using a different default image-size is NOT so unusual, as experiments have confirmed that both 220px and 250px default-image settings will display cache copies of major, large articles. The constant, slow reformatting is not a problem for small, or stub, articles which can reformat within 4 seconds each time. I will try to have confirmed this section-0, lead-section edit option still allows page-cache display, since I am quite used to having seen 30x slower reformat of every page for the past several years now. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:08, revised 00:46, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Nothing in the Gadgets tab is going to fragment the cache in that manner. As far as I can tell, options that will affect it include the math preference, stub threshold, date format, "Auto-number headings", user language, thumbnail size, and "Enable section editing via [edit] links". Basically, if you look in the page source for the HTML comment along the lines of "Saved in parser cache with key enwiki:pcache:idhash:15580374-0!*!0!!en!4!*", any preference that manages to change that key has a chance of causing your pageviews to have to rerender; the actual amount of rerendering you experience will depend on how many other people have preferences giving the same key. Anomie⚔ 02:23, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Thumbnail preference 250px disabled quick cache: Anomie, thank you for taking time to list those options. Option 250px was trouble, but default-thumbnail as 220px was fast. Even with "Enable section editing via [edit] links" (edit-tabs), it would display cache-article copies when 220px. For me, the default thumbnail size 220px was lightning fast with cache-article copies, but default-thumbnail setting as 250px caused slow reformatting of almost all major articles (films, celebs, famous scientists) and all 7 Special:Random articles which I viewed. I switched the Special:Preferences several times, between 220px to 250px, to establish a clear cause-effect link: all pages reformatted at 250px, got cache copies at 220px, reformatted at 250px, got quick caches at 220px, etc. I was surprised the tiny no-image stubs reformatted, because it would seem the servers could "see" there were no images in a tiny stub to reformat the page, but I guess the upset potential for included templates, for a template to pop-in an image, caused ALL tiny random stubs to reformat at 250px preference. It is difficult to predict when a transcluded template might be changed, in an instant, to now throw an image onto a page. Hence, every single article reformatted at 250px, even mega-article "Wikipedia" took 24 seconds to reformat, as if no one ever viewed that page with 250px defaults. Again, thank you for your page-cache notices, as you helped me view major WP articles 38x (yes) thirty-eight times faster as cache-article copies. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:21, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
The option Preferences → Editing → Enable section editing via [edit] links is the default. It is turning this off which will cause a non-cache copy to be served. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:15, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Alternate editing mode is buggy

Hello folks, Please excuse my lack of technical know-how and vocabulary! When I am editing articles on English Wikipedia I use an alternate editing mode that was suggested to me by someone on here a couple of years ago. I don't know the name of this mode, but I find it very handy because it shows file names in green, links in blue, hidden text in yellow, etc. It's very easy to find your way around visually because of this. However, it is quite buggy. The software quite often leaves out ledding spaces between linked words when you save. It also gets very confused with line spaces when you save, sometimes converting one line space into two, three, or more. And, just in the last couple of months this interface has developed a really major bug whereby it won't preview or save a new article but shows a blank page instead. Am I using an outdated version of this interface? Or what is going on? Thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 14:31, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Maybe you are using wikEd from User:Cacycle/wikEd. Some weeks ago it stopped functioning with me. I used to toggle it on/off, to use its value and to sail around its bugs (eg find & replace). -DePiep (talk) 15:04, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I am using Safari version 5.1.7, what are using DePiep? And should I report this to User:Cacycle? Invertzoo (talk) 18:55, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

My signature breaks stuff

And I'm not quite sure why. As you can see, it is currently causing #39 under the "Sports and recreation" section at WP:GAN to display in superscript. If someone can figure what's wrong in the code and let me know how to fix it, I would be greatly appreciative. Evanh2008 (talk|contribs) 07:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

My guess is it's the pipe in your signature that broke it. I've fixed WP:GAN. DH85868993 (talk) 07:28, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
You could change the pipe to &#124; in your sig. Would still look the same. | | -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:38, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) As above, it is probably the pipe | which separates [[User talk:Evanh2008|talk]] from [[Special:Contributions/Evanh2008|contribs]]. I suspect a similar problem to User talk:Piotrus/Archive 36#Signature problems. This pipe therefore needs to be either recoded or omitted; I assume that you don't want to omit it, so if you were to amend this to &#124; it should work. n.b. don't use {{!}} instead - signatures must not contain templates. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:38, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Users with the default language "en - English" at Special:Preferences see MediaWiki:Tog-fancysig below the signature box. If you have en-gb or en-ca then it's not recommended because you miss many customized messages like this. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:28, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
  Resolved
 – Fixed now. Thanks for the input and the help, everyone! Evanh2008 (talk|contribs) 10:52, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Database lag III

Lag seems to be spiking and disappearing sporadically. It's at 12 minutes now. PS. To plug yet another one of my scripts, you can use User:Equazcion/LagToMinutes to have lag notices display minutes/seconds in addition to the default total seconds, which I find useful during long lag periods. Equazcion (talk) 19:22, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

I'm experiencing the lag, too. It seems to be going down, though. Hadger 19:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikid77 and new 'fast' citation templates

Moved from WP:ANI

Wikid77 has created a suite of new 'fast' templates; {{fcite web}}, {{fcite book}}, {{fcite}} and maybe a few others and some redirects. They may be faster, but they break things like {{harv}} and {{sfn}} links. See India, England, Brazil and a few others where I've undone this. They also use a more restricted set of parameters. Wikid77 has deployed these to at least 50 articles often while making a sea of white space changes in the same edit. I left a note seeking discussion, but it has gone unanswered. I have also left notes for Gadget, Thumperward and Redrose64 seeking their input. I believe there is no consensus for this shift to new more limited templates. There was a thread on Jimmy's page about this, but I didn't read it.

I believe these need to be immediately reverted as manually removing them will be complex. These are mostly large, highly edited pages, so others are editing on top of this, which complicates restoring the standard versions. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 05:45, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

  • Hello, Wikid77 here. I have stopped adding those fast-citation templates to make major articles reformat 3x faster (reducing 21-second page-load to only 7 seconds). I have not been getting typical "You-have-new-messages" for the 2 messages on my user-talk page today. However, I noticed the ANI link on Jimbo's talk-page, when that thread failed to archive after 2 days of no other replies. Since ANI is not the proper forum for making articles load 3x faster, where should this topic be discussed? The exisiting gargantuan templates using Template:Citation/core are not easily improved, so I was able to make "50" of the most-read articles load (or edit-preview) within 7 seconds (rather than 15 to 32 seconds) by using streamlined fast-cite templates. Perhaps this is a general topic for WP:PUMPTECH, as it exceeds the {{Cite}} templates. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:15, revised 09:28, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
WP:CITEVAR. I'd say that's large scale disruption. Have they stopped? If not, they may need a preventative block to get them to talk. Fifelfoo (talk) 05:58, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
They did Andorra after I posted to their talk (where I got no reply). I'm not asking for a block; I believe we need more eyes on this stat. I've only looked at about a half dozen of them (and have reverted it). The prior 'talk' is at:
Br'er Rabbit (talk) 06:04, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • If they're breaking articles, just revert them. If it continues with no dialogue, then a block may be in order. Black Kite (talk) 06:20, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • They are breaking articles; I've reverted or removed them from about a half dozen, but there are at least fifty (and they're large and heavily edited). There was a lot of search and replace here that was not properly done; red links in articles to template:Fcitation needed; others, too. Some of this was over the last week, so there are a lot of subsequent changes. I'm asking for others to look and help. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 06:36, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
If Wikid77 is correct that some of our template heavy articles take 30 times longer for registered editors to edit than for IPs then they deserve a barnstar for identifying the problem and starting on a solution. I'm almost tempted to log out and speed up my editing. If there are problems with the templates they are using then lets fix those templates and then deprecate and replace the slow ones. ϢereSpielChequers 06:50, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
With a buggy incomplete template, breaking CITEVAR on heavy trafficked articles. Yes they deserve a barnstar. Yes, if they continuing doing this without discussing on article talk pages per CITEVAR or getting a high traffic RFC, yes they should be blocked (preventatively, not punatively). Both may be in order. Blocks aren't punishment, in this case it is a restriction to enforce the RD elements of BRD because of a failure to pay attention to appropriate levels of consensus. Fifelfoo (talk) 07:04, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
@WSC; it's rather exaggerated. It's also not a new understanding; this has been talked about for years. The simplification here is extreme and more than 'buggy', it's about throwing out huge amounts of functionality. I've left notes for editors knowledgeable of the citation/core internals, so we should hear from them tomorrow. I'm all for slimming down dross in the standard templates. There's support in them for too many options and that has a cost. They're used millions of times; the solution is to work on the current templates. What's occurred over the last few days is an effort to cement this new thing into large complex articles without more than a few essays and a thread on Teh Jimbo's talk. These articles are now often broken. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 07:16, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
No one editor's talk is ever an appropriate place to establish consensus; especially for wide ranging multiple article changes that go against established understandings of how to deal with citation variations. Jimbo is just one of us, just an editor like any one of us. Fifelfoo (talk) 07:26, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Jimmy doesn't much edit articles, 40% of his edits are to his own talk page. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 08:15, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
@Br'er Rabbit. I was aware that we had a problem, especially with large pages. We have had a couple of long threads at FAC about subdividing long articles to reduce page load times, and I recently spent a couple of hundred quid upgraded my own hardware because I thought it was just my kit getting obsolete. Wikid77's solution might not be working, but it does highlight a problem that we should try and resolve. It sounds like the Foundation has something in the works that may reduce the problem, but a lite template structure sounds attractive to me. If we can get Wikid77's templates debugged would that be a sensible route to follow? ϢereSpielChequers 12:32, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
I do think some of the largest articles should have stuff culled or split off, but not really for this reason; they're simply not articles, they're small books. Gadget's talking lite templates, but these ones are profoundly flawed. Too lite. The approach taken is to simply not support many parameters; like |last2=; the idea is to shuffle much into |coauthors=. See India before I fixed it. It may look right, but all the footnote links are broken. The article uses {{sfn}}, which relies on much that was omitted from these too-lite templates. It's not a matter of debugging; the design is wrong. This may well serve to start a discussion about refining the current templates or even deploying lite ones. But this was far, far, too disruptive; it cost me the last 8 hours. And I'm pretty sure there's still damage out there.
The 'related' is about navboxes; they take a fair amount of preprocessing. Too many/too huge navboxes can combine with templates to over burden the servers. That's on of the core ideas behind using WP:HLIST in navboxes. Since that launched late last year, the burden of navboxes is significantly reduced (the huge ones are still ridiculous). Br'er Rabbit (talk) 12:57, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Comment Hello, everyone. Can you please define "fast" here? I am not sure I understand correctly. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 08:13, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
There are speed issues with previewing very large pages. These are a good faith effort to address that, but there are issues; they break things and starting a new set of templates is not the way to go. Nutshell is this is a lone effort that has no consensus. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 09:00, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
I have since then added parameters to not "break things" and noted the Fcite templates are an "additional" choice, not a "new set". -Wikid77 15:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
The new templates also change the output and so violate WP:CITEVAR which says that you should not change the citation style without discussion and agreement of this on an articles talk page. Keith D (talk) 12:23, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
The minor changes to the output format were unintentional (as putting commas for "."), and I have modified the output to match the older templates. -Wikid77 15:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
related
Diff of Egypt {{tl}}'ing {{navbox}}es.
This is about not using navboxes, but rather linking to them. It's a very poor idea.
Br'er Rabbit (talk) 07:26, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I see no point in these. We should be subtly changing the old templates (if we need to) not creating new ones and introducing them on such a scale without prior discussion. GiantSnowman 08:45, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
    Yes, I do believe that some consolidation of the standard templates is the appropriate means of addressing the speed issue. I have cut back a fair number of these. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 09:00, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
    • The introduction of Scribunto at the end of this year, will remove a large chunk of the speed issue with templates. Cite templates are the logic first set of templates that should make use of that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:34, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Looking at these articles before they were reverted it is becoming clear what the "f" in "fcite" stands for. pablo 09:07, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

  • Lite versions of the citation templates have been discussed before, and have been on my todo list for a while. The current templates are rather bloated and do cause problems in page load speed and template limits when an article has a huge number of citations; this often occurs in conjunction with other templates, such as flag icons. Implementation of new templates like this should have involved a lot of community input and testing. Just looking at the markup, I can see that these will break certain citation implementations. There has also been discussion on converting the citation templates to Lua when the Scribunto is installed, which should resolve these issues. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 10:53, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Gadget850, I thank you for noting that, so I have added parameters last1, first1,... last3, first3 to support other citation implementations. -Wikid77 15:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
  • (@TheDJ, too) That would be mw:Extension:Scribunto. Looking forward to it. I know this has been discussed before. I'm thinking that the current templates could probably use a bit of streamlining; so many aliases and options. These templates did break a lot of pages; I happened to notice India with all of the harv/sfn glowing red with Ucucha's script. So I looked. A new template. It is dropping the lastn params and that's going to break harvs left and right (as will not supporting ref=). The deployment was sloppy. I found many red links to templates due to s/r of hundreds of cites. Wikid was not responsible for all of the deployment. I spoke with another user who happened to see it and, in all gf, adopted it. I saw IPs using it. That's to be expected when something appears in popular articles; people mimic. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 11:07, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Just a note, Scribunto is (per the MediaWiki site) "incomplete. None of the interfaces are fixed at this time." Claiming that this will fix something does not fix anything now (although the problem is present now). In fact, it stifles development. To have someone say that these templates should be removed as Scribunto makes them unnecessary is akin to saying that creating any new article is unnecessary since, if the topic is notable, the article will be created eventually. Such a mentality serves no benefit to Wikipedia. --Nouniquenames (talk) 16:17, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Fcite_web is a very fast alternative, and compatible

All of the {{Fcite_*}} templates are faster variations of the others, running about 5-6x times faster, but allow mixed use with the original templates. So, to list names of 8 authors, separately, then use the older template {{cite_web}}, while using {fcite_web} for fast cases of just 1 or 2 authors (or list all in "coauthors=") or 1 editor. To support {Harvnb} & {sfn} cross-links from author names, the Template:Fcitation has been fixed to set the {anchor|xx} tags in "CITEREFxx" format, and allow name parameters: last1, last2 and last3. The intent is to allow very rapid formatting of most references, but still support author-crosslinks, while allowing use of any and all original templates of the {{Cite}} family. In large articles with 100 or more references, the speed improvement has tended to make the whole article reformat 3x faster, such as during each edit-preview when editing the whole page. The 3x reformat speed has occurred in major articles, such as nations or big cities, but also in research topics which use many {cite_journal} or {cite_book} cases. With rare cases, such as 7 author names or 3 editors, then the speed improvement will be less when using some of the old cite templates. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:26, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

It's all quite moot given that there's a much more robust solution in the pipeline (see below, and above, threads). These are still reduced functionality templates and their use will only confuse editors who will not know just what the unsupported bits are. {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, are *standards*. They are on offer to all in the toolbar above every editbox (even anons). Forking to new names is itself disruptive. aside; I'd be all for nuking {{citation}} and making |ref=harv the default in the standard ones. Aren't we about sick of the noise over stops (or not), over commas, italics? And yours are doing some other anomalous formatting, right? Br'er Rabbit (talk) 23:50, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
What's wrong with {{citation}}? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 09:17, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Template:Citation is very slow, only 14/second, compared to Fcite also setting anchors for {Harvnb} at 72/second, or 5x faster. Article "Israel" takes >41 seconds to edit-preview, but would be 13 seconds w/Fcite. -Wikid77 (talk) 12 July 2012, 05:06, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Do you mean in comparison to Citation Style 1, or in comparison to the new {{fcite}} etc. or in comparison to something else? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:04, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
I happen to like the ability to use {{citation}} for just about any citation without having to think about which particular template to use. And this ability also makes it much easier for software to convert other sources of bibliographic data (such as bibtex files) to Wikipedia format automatically, for the same reason: the software neither has to guess which type to use nor be told manually. As for making cite work with the harv templates without having to add ref=harv (while citation always works) my understanding is that in some cases this will generate broken html, because the ref=harv option in conjunction with multiple cite templates that happen to have exactly the same authors and years as each other will lead to html anchors with the same name as each other, not allowed in html. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:12, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
@Dmitrij; my comment really is that it's superfluous. The editbox offers {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, and {{cite news}} to every editor. This makes them standard, and we should be moving that way. I wouldn't mind {{citation}} as thin wrapper that produced the same look (the convenience that David Eppstein speak of), but its look is different in trivial ways and so it doesn't mix well with the others. We've endless arguments over formatting with full stops or not, periods or commas. This is stupid.
@ David Eppstein; We should not, of course, be generating duplicate anchors. {{citation}} has |ref=harv on by default; I just want that for the others, too (working properly, of course). Br'er Rabbit (talk) 17:00, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
@David Eppstein: Yes, if you use two separate {{cite book}} with exactly the same authors/years, and give them both |ref=harv, you will generate invalid HTML by creating duplicate anchors. But exactly the same problem will occur if you use two separate {{citation}} and the same parameters (but omitting |ref=). There is no guard against such problems in either form, but the fix is exactly the same for both: you can either use |ref= to specify a custom anchor; or you can use the |year=2012a/|year=2012b system.
Regarding the thing about {{citation}} not requiring either the cite tool or the user to determine the source type: the problem still exists, but it's {{citation}} which has the responsibility for working that out. It doesn't always get it right, as witness threads like Template talk:Citation#trans_title or Template_talk:Citation/Archive_5#trans_title. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:23, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Need to limit ref=Harv to limit collisions: Due to the danger of generating duplicate span-id tags, the current practice is to avoid using {Citation} for everything, and instead use Cite_book (Fcite_book) or Cite_journal (Fcite_journal), which do not create the span-id tags and allow 1 author to be cited for several publications in the same year, without risking a name collision on the span-id tags. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:45, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
This is simple. If it's faster and has the same capabilities and is fully compatible with our existing system, that's good but that is NOT the case here as it's breaking existing widely used template systems. This needs to go back into the lab post haste.PumpkinSky talk 10:17, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Your concerns are so 24 hours ago (just kidding). It has been "back into the lab" and back out again, for further review. The reports of breaking links are from the early days, and author links have been correct for almost 1 week now. -Wikid77 16:34, 13 July, revised 05:06, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Scribunto to fix the ~30 second page loading time problem for logged-in users?

Further information: /Archive 101 § Slowness

Perhaps you should explain in more detail, TheDJ and Gadget850, how Scribunto will change things, given that it's been previously mentioned only as an aside, once ever, on the Technical Pump. What would a Scribbled {{cite book}} template look like? Why would it be faster for logged-in users? What should editors be planning for? Uncle G (talk) 10:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

I think there are two separate issues here:
  • A lot of the settings in user preferences are injected into the rendered HTML as JS/CSS. Then there are any custom user scripts or CSS. All of these can cause slow loading for logged in users.
  • Articles with a huge number of citation and other templates may load slowly due to template overhead, but this issue is not inherent to being logged in.
There have been instances where articles with a huge number of citations will not load at all when logged in, but it is due to a combination of the above.
I know little of Lua right now, but the Foundation is pushing it to resolve many of the current template issues. It is supposed to be more efficient, thus much faster and with less overhead. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 11:18, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Really its the non-JS/CSS preferences that cause slowness, not the preferences that inject JS/CSS. The non-JS/CSS preferences usually cause different parser options which cause pages to be re-rendered (which is slow, esp with heavy template usage). The preferences that inject JS/CSS usually do not cause very much slowness (I'm sure there are exceptions, especially for user scripts, but I mean in general). Bawolff (talk) 13:10, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
A "scribbled" {{cite book}} would bear some resemblance to the examples at scribunto.wmflabs.org; the general idea is that using an actual programming language rather than the current huge mass of parser functions for processing all the parameters the citation templates use will probably be much faster. BTW, the "slowness" referred to above doesn't really affect all logged-in users all the time; it affects people with unusual combinations of certain preferences, use of the Preview button, and the save/initial page view after a new edit is made. Anomie⚔ 14:46, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Well, to be even more exact, of course it applies to everyone on these pages with an exceptional high complexity, it just depends on the configuration of the user and the timing of the request how much you are affected by it. The more caches that are invalid (due to edits) or elements that need to be specifically calculated (for you because you are either the first user in a long while or have 'differing' preferences), the longer the request to generate the page might take, the 'slower' the server will seem to respond, the more 'slowness' you will experience. It's all very subtle, specifically because so many different optimization levels have been created in the past.
An example of the coordinates for instance:
The first example uses copy of {{Coord}} and it's many subtemplates. The 2nd example a conversion to a Lua module with similar capabilities. You can note considerable speed differences. The Lua module is also far from optimized, because I converted in a style staying close to the original, instead of optimizing it fully. The final version of that lua module will probably be another factor of 2 faster in terms of logic, and there is likely also further optimization to be made in the processing logic of the Scribunto extension itself. But I think you will agree that the speed improvement is already quite noticeable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:27, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Cleaning this up

Right. Now that the "fast" templates have been orphaned from articlespace, is there a reason to keep them around? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 08:03, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

As an attractive nuisance? ;) Br'er Rabbit (talk) 16:46, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure that qualifies as a good reason to keep them around. As such, I'll probably TfD these in a few days, with a view to userfying them to Wikid77's space. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 08:14, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Didn't mean it as a good reason. I'll be supporting you there. You see on Jimmy's talk where wikid said he expected to be reverted? vely pointy. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 11:43, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
The "reverted" is the middle letter in "WP:BRD". I made a bold move to create and use this set of lite templates as add-on choices, and people have a choice to revert in each B-R-D cycle. -Wikid77 15:56, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
That's an essay. Performing an action dozens of times when you expect to be reverted is pointy and disruptive. Br'er Rabbit (talk) 19:30, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
The wp:BRD essay is linked from policy wp:Consensus, as an explanation of consensus techniques. I think the plan was to make B-R-D a guideline, but part-time volunteers can only do so much. See wp:BOLD, which is already set as a guideline. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:55, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Just stumbled across {{Cite fast}}. It uses {{citation/core}} with some minimal parameters. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 11:49, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
  • New Template:Cite_fast: Yes, {Cite_fast} was only 2x as fast as {Cite_web}, and there are still concerns of omitting all the optional parameters. Instead, {Fcite_web} remains 5-6x faster, and looks like it can handle many more parameters being added. However, I encourage others to explore faster methods everywhere. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:55, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Thumperward/Chris Cunningham, why do you announce a TfD in the middle of this discussion? -DePiep (talk) 16:04, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
  • About TfD: Well, User:Thumperward submits many templates for discussion (wp:TfD), even perhaps most of my original templates have been recommended for deletion by him, over the years. However, announcing intent here does seem like wp:BATTLEground, rather than let people discuss the issues for a few weeks, with no talk of deletion. Any overly long VPT thread can be split, to close the old portion, but continue a new thread of conversation for weeks, where some users unaware of benchmarking techniques for template operation could discuss tactics so that more people would understand how some templates can be timed as being 5-6x times "faster" in actual use. Anyway, I link the TfD below:
·WP:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012_July_15#Template:Fcite
After 3 years of trying to get Template:Citation/core to run faster, I would think people would realize, "There must be some big problems inside Citation/core, if it is still that slow after 3 years of wanting it faster". Anyway, let's continue discussing the technical issues. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:07, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Fcite templates expanded for more parameters

I have expanded the Fcite templates to allow more parameters (such as: last1, last2, last3 and journal types). The emerging consensus is that the Fcite templates need to support more options, where some users felt that their basic needs could not be met with templates trimmed to have far fewer options. In particular, links to ISBN & ISSN numbers have been added, and most of the journal links are allowed, such as for JSTOR, DOI, PMID, OCLC, RFC, SSRN, ZBL, etc. Of course, the addition of dozens of parameters could slow the templates 100% as 2x slower, so I have devised new tactics to support many new options while retaining extreme speed. Hence, the Fcite templates are becoming quick "turbo templates" rather than just "lite templates" because they are supporting far more options than a lite-structure template would imply. It is likely that the Fcite templates will handle 90% of all current usage, at 4-5x times the speed. Many groups of "3,000 articles" still use odd-ball parameters, such as surname1 to surname8, or "editor1last" which is a reason why Template:Citation has to be somewhat slower, to check for all those many, many variations of parameter names. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:07, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

That's an odd reading of "the emerging consensus". I for one don't think creating yet another different incompatible set of templates for the same thing is a good idea. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:39, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Interwiki mouseups

There is currently a discussion at Talk:Main Page#Languages are not in English... During that discussion, I noticed that the {{Wikipedia languages}} template has mouseup functionality showing the English language name for the language of each link (explained at {{Wikipedia languages/core}}). What I was wondering is if anyone here can say whether it is possible to implement that mouseup functionality in the place that generates the interwiki links for every article? Most of this is summarised here, but I'm hoping those here can answer the questions (either here or there). Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 18:40, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

When I mouseover the interlanguage links on this page, I get a tooltip showing the link target, just as I do for any other link on this page. It's in the language of the target page, i.e. the Català link shows "Viquipèdia:La taverna/Ajuda". But when I try the same at Main Page, there is no tooltip. Firefox 13.0.1 Windows XP. --Redrose64 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:46, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
Now I feel silly! :-) I should have realised that the Main Page interwiki links are a special case. They are limited to be just the ones in the {{Wikipedia languages}} template. Not sure how that limiting trick is done, but anyway, now I know to load up an article, I see that the mouseup/tooltip does indeed show you the interwiki title (i.e. the text typed on the source page inside the interwiki link code). That's not quite what I was after, but it is good to know that these aren't missing altogether. Hopefully someone can add them back in for the Main Page ones, and I'll have to go away and think a bit about how and whether it will ever be possible for an English-language speaker to glance over at the list of interwiki links and be able to browse down them and think "hmm, this article has equivalents in the following languages, that's interesting", as opposed to "hmm, a list of languages, some of which I recognise, some I don't. I could look up the ones I don't recognise, but wouldn't it be nice if I could hover my mouse cursor over them and be told what language they are?" Maybe one day. Carcharoth (talk) 21:08, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
There is a whole slew of issues with what you propose. Historically, we didn't have every language translated into every other language (we still don't, but 90% there probably). It's a lot of permutations. 2nd for anonymous users there is an idea that you might want someone to find their own language back if they happen upon another article. The reason for this being limited to anonymous has yet another reason, and that is that presenting a different language version of that part of the pages, would cause a HUGE amount of 'duplicates' to enter the system of cached pages, or we would have to exclude certain variants from being excluded, but that would lead to huge amounts of load on the 'backend' of the system, so also not acceptable. For logged in users, the biggest issue is that there is no 'global' preference for language yet, so if a logged in user happens upon a chinese page, he again might be unable to find his way back to the english article. Most of these issues have bug tickets, most have been known for quite a long time, they are just either difficult to solve or low priority. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:35, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
The reason why there are no tooltips on the Main page interlanguage links, is that the Main page is named differently (Some have Portal:Main page for instance) on every single instance of a wiki and they have a habit of changing once in a while. Because they are difficult to maintain by interwiki bots (most main pages are locked for editing) and because both bots and humans have made quite a few errors in the past in this field, it's a maintenance nightmare. This also partly why {{Wikipedia languages}} uses the language IDs and translations I presume. But you could just add every main page name in {{Main Page interwikis}} and you would then have tooltips that correspond to the name of the portal in that language, just as interlanguage links work on all other pages. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:56, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
If you want to translate the interwiki links to English (and add a translate link), then see User:Manishearth/sidebartranslinks. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 14:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

insecure content message

I'm new to Chrome (less than 24 hours) so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but when I load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Loko_Teacher%27s_College I get a notice from Chrome that the site has insecure content. I don't see the messgae in Mozilla. I see that I can view other pages on the secure server without the message, the only time I am getting the message is when I go to some of the pages listed as CSD G12 and look at the underlying page.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 11:54, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I guess it only happens when you are logged in and open a new tab or window. I don't know your skin but both User:Sphilbrick/monobook.js and User:Sphilbrick/vector.js have content referring to the insecure http://en.wikipedia.org. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:49, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
You don't have pages for other skins so you should be able to test whether this is the cause by choosing a third skin and opening new tabs or windows. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:53, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Your .js pages also have document.write loading, a technique deprecated for 6 years now, and something that definitely should not be used in combination with Chrome or Safari. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:25, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm sure I copied someone else's. I'm not at the computer now, will look into it when I'm home again. --SPhilbrick(Talk) 14:30, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Bolding of unread in Watchlist again...

I'm getting the articles that I haven't read in bold in my watchlist again. Wasn't that turned off?Naraht (talk) 18:13, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm getting something similar, but whatever they did now is messing up all the scripts etc people have made for customization of the feature. Looks like everything is showing up as "read already", at least for my particular script. I haven't looked into the coding changes yet though, hoping they revert whatever they did soon. Equazcion (talk) 18:16, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) And there once again appears to be no option to turn it off. Not only that but I believe I'm still using manual code written to override the last time this was done, which means the old fixes don't work either. GRAPPLE X 18:17, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I checked MediaWiki:Vector.css and MediaWiki:Common.css and neither of them have a change today. Ryan Vesey Review me! 18:18, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes I came here to ask what on earth . . . it's a sea of bold again, even pages I have visited recently. I thought the RfC demonstrated the majority didn't want this as default? Hopefully something just broke temporarily. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I think that the reason pages that have recently been visited are still showing up in bold is from the database lag, not the styling change (I had the same problem the last time we had lag, and I wasn't using the bold style.) David1217 What I've done 18:24, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict × 4) Me too. Here we go again... I'm using manual CSS to style my watchlist, and it's getting overridden. Not sure about the scripts problem though. David1217 What I've done 18:21, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
It looks like they did away with the <strong> tags and replaced them with classes instead? Which if so is actually a good thing in the longrun, as long as it's not styled by default, which it currently is, apparently. It's also breaking all the current scripts and custom css. Some warning would've been good, especially after what we went through last time. Equazcion (talk) 18:23, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

I am using a patch for now.
/* Patch for now. */
.mw-title { font-weight: normal !important; }
It may be time for a strike. I am getting tired of these code tricks. – Allen4names (IPv6 contributions) 18:25, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I suggest someone makes a gadget to hide this feature, something like .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title {font-weight: normal} #mw-watchlist-resetbutton {display:none} . Please do NOT use personal CSS this time, see #Pointless message and button on Watchlist above. — AlexSm 18:26, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Do we really have to refight that battle? Roger (talk) 18:31, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
(e/c)No, any gadget should turn it on - the default should be off - and why did someone decide they knew better - yet again? - Arjayay (talk) 18:32, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Once this feature (presumably) gets turned off by default, would someone please make a gadget for opting-in in preferences? New users will probably get to this feature easier if they don't have to manually edit their CSS page. David1217 What I've done 18:33, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Now it is gone. Bus stop (talk) 18:38, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
For anyone who may have been using User:Equazcion/ReverseMarked to fade old changes rather than bold new ones, I updated the code to work with the changes. Equazcion (talk) 18:38, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
A lot of other scripts and CSS customizations will need updating too. Equazcion (talk) 18:40, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
I want the bold-faced text, and now it's gone. Is someone fiddling with stuff? Please don't impose your personal preferences on me. I want it to look just like the normal MediaWiki default so that all of my WMF watchlists behave the same. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
(three million edit conflicts) If it was you fixed that, Equazcion, thank you! Panic over until the next time. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I want my italics back. -- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 18:42, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

This time using ".mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title { font-weight: normal !important; }" worked for me to turn it off. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:43, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

  • To whoever turned the boldface off: thank you. I thought we went down this road already, and my recollection is that consensus was established not to spring ugly little surprises on the community anymore. Rivertorch (talk) 18:45, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Caused by the scheduled rollout today to enwiki of MediaWiki version 1.20wmf7, specifically change #7357 in response to bug 36788 ("Changed since last visit" should be indicated by a class on the line as well as on an element embedded within the line). — Richardguk (talk) 18:46, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
@Slim: It was actually User:Jarry1250 who fixed the default CSS. I just fixed one of my scripts some people are using, not sure if you're one of them. I'm working on Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists to make the tips there work with the new watchlist coding. Check there soon to get code that'll fix all your customizations. Thanks for the explanation, Richard (why no warning beforehand this time though?) Equazcion (talk) 18:47, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
What kind of warning were you thinking about? - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 18:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
We've generally been seeing some notice on this page before significant MediaWiki updates, and I kinda woulda expected one before something like this. Though if no one foresaw a visual change I guess I can understand the mistake. Equazcion (talk) 18:52, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

I updated Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists. If you have customizations in place that aren't working anymore, go to that page to find the updated code that will hopefully work now. Equazcion (talk) 18:58, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

That worked for me. Thank you very much Equazcion, for doing that. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:52, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks to whoever it was for having gotten rid of that annoying watchlist-button! Hooray! Jared Preston (talk) 19:57, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
That would be User:Anomie, who despite being annoyed that no one wants the bold on by default, has apparently finally conceded and removed that button for everyone. And glad to be of service, Tryptofish :) Equazcion (talk) 20:03, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
I believe I was the first person to try to remove the button, but it got reverted. If a vocal minority is going to make us be stupid, we may as well be consistently stupid. Personally, I still think that if a few admins hadn't reacted wrongly to the "Oh noes, my watchlist has bold in it! It's the end of the world!" whining when this was first enabled and just made a gadget to disable it like we did the new diff colors, everyone would be used to it by now. Anomie⚔ 21:04, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
It's actually a vocal majority, according to the RfC. I guess we could refer to any opinion against a change as "whining", and assume that all changes are good things we should get used to... but I have to question the validity of that argument. Or is it just the changes you like and others don't? Either way. Equazcion (talk) 22:08, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
Yeah I suppose if you count 130 users as a good profiling of the thousands who were instantly affected and didn't complain, or take some equally skewed statistical analysis of an RfC. In reality, the majority of those who were vocal were against the changes. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 22:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm not talking about the ones who instantly voiced an opinion, but the ones who responded to the RfC advertised as a watchlist notice. People who didn't respond must have liked the feature? But then, when it disappeared, wouldn't we have seen those thousands complaining? The RfC notice continued after the revert, and I didn't see an equal -- much less a majority -- of counter-complaints. I guess we could each make a number assumptions about non-respondents that support our respective positions. Equazcion (talk) 22:43, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
Can I be one of the thousands complaining? I like the feature, without having to sift through all the garbage back and forth nonsense (Reads more like a silly blog here), how do I opt in again?--Education does not equal common sense. 我不在乎 23:09, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Go to Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists and copy the code for your preferred style into your CSS page. David1217 What I've done 23:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Reverted

Just to clarify, since no-one was actually intending to enable the feature, a few minutes ago I disabled it again, returning us to the place where we were before today. However, you will need to change any user scripts that reference the bolding, replacing "strong.mw-watched" wherever it appears with ".mw-changeslist-line-watched". Regards, - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 18:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Can you please be consistent and hide the useless button as well (reverting this edit)? The only reason the button was there is that (the last time) some people already customized the feature (e.g. using underline instead of bold) and did not want to fiddle with their personal CSS again. But now they have to change their personal CSS anyway. — AlexSm 18:57, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the background to those discussions, so I'll leave that to someone who is. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 19:01, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
You can use User:Equazcion/RemoveMarkAll to get rid of the button, and anything else left over from this feature. Equazcion (talk) 19:02, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
I've got a shitty looking watchlist with green stars and bolding everywhere including the rollback button. FIX IT NOW. THIS IS GETTING ANNOYING.—cyberpower ChatOnline 19:32, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Cyber, you've actually got code for that in your vector.css page, that's why you're seeing it that way. It was probably broken before and just started working because of the MediaWiki changes today. Equazcion (talk) 19:36, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

I took the advice above and changed "strong.mw-watched" to ".mw-changeslist-line-watched" to get the marking back. I used to have green stars marking unread changes. Now I have every line littered with multiple green stars. Does someone know how to fix this? I would have been just as happy with the default bolding. Why are we making life so hard? SpinningSpark 19:48, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Replace ".mw-changeslist-line-watched a" with ".mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title", I think that should work. Equazcion (talk) 19:59, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
Can we put out a watchlist notice saying, "If you use custom CSS, then replace 'strong.mw-watched' with '.mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title'"? Otherwise, we'll have a lot of angry and confused editors. David1217 What I've done 20:03, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details would be the place to request that. I'd maybe just point people to Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists instead of putting the techie-code right in the notice though. Equazcion (talk) 20:11, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)
Drat; I don't know what CSS stands for and don't care to know, except that when I hit the link in the page about how to make bold, to edit my CSS page to bring back the bold unexamined edits, it replies that user page User:Jim.henderson/common.css doesn't exist. I thought creating this file was how I got the bold. Did someone delete it, or did I get the wrong name or something? Jim.henderson (talk) 21:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Hey Jim! Are you still using the vector skin? The bolding on yours is in User:Jim.henderson/vector.css. In any case it appears like the settings changed a little bit. Try adding the code below to the page, or creating User:Jim.henderson/common.css with the code. Ryan Vesey Review me! 21:33, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Code for Jim
span.updatedmarker {
    background-color: transparent;
    color: #006400;
}
.mw-special-Watchlist .mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-title {
    font-weight: bold;
}
.mw-special-Watchlist #mw-watchlist-resetbutton {
    display: inline;
}
It's at User:Jim.henderson/vector.css, so the CSS only affects the Vector skin (common.css affects all of your skins—I assume you use Vector). Just copy-paste the code from Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists over the old code. David1217 What I've done 21:36, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Splendid and it works after some errors of my own. Biggest being, I forgot that I changed to "Modern" because that's the only skin that looks good on my strange "Superpad" tablet that I intend to sell soon. Thank you much, and I long for the day when it's just a button to push in "My Preferences".
Speaking of which, with MSIE9 when I hit any of the line of options at the top of the preferences page, it jumps, not to "Editing" or "Appearance" or whatever, but to the bottom of the "User Profile" page where the E-mail option is. Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57 shows it correctly, however. Again, all with "Modern" skin in Wikipedia though normally I use Chrome only in Commons where MonoBook is my skin. Always there are little bugs somewhere. Jim.henderson (talk) 22:56, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
I have the same problem on IE8. Very annoying. Was working fine yesterday, now not, and I have no way of knowing what I have looked at already so will stop patrolling my watchlist until it works again. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 17:37, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

GUI for editing tables

I know there are a lot of tools that convert tables from Excel/Openoffice/.csv format to the MediaWiki markup, but so far I haven't seen anything that goes backwards (Wikipedia to Excel), except for this tool that I can't figure out because I'm not a computer programmer. I was wondering if anybody else knows of a way to export Wikipedia tables to other programs so they can be edited in a user-friendly environment, and then exported back to Wikipedia.

What would be really nice is if there were an option in wikiEd to see the table as a table, instead of a jumble of code.

On a related note, there was a proposal from 2007 to move large tables to a different namespace (like pictures) so they don't clutter the editing space. There seemed to be a pretty good consensus for the idea, but I don't see than anything ever happened as a result. ~Adjwilley (talk) 19:11, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

There is some info here:
commons:Category:Commons charts and graphs
Please add links to those pages to any tools you find. Also, please write up some short tutorials to add to some of those pages. Or create additional pages in the Commons namespace. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:27, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Toolbar bloopers

Working on Firefox 13.0.1, with Windows XP. Forget about posting over at any toolbar talk page. I never got an answer the last time I posted. So, here this is. It's just been going on perhaps the last week. Cache has nothing to do with this, because I dump my browser's cache regularly.

  • Annoying, but workaround-able. The Cite button comes and goes. Workaround is that it comes back eventually, whenever. But almost a guarantee that when I first start editing, the Cite option isn't there.
  • Disabled completely. The "Link" icon on the toolbar will come up, and it works on internal links. If I try it with an external link, it goes through the motions like it's inserting the link. But it leaves a blank behind, not a link. This is consistent, as of this morning, all the time.
  • Find and Replace - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Maile66 (talk) 17:25, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Maybe when the cite button is not present your console shows a message like Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'wikiEditor'?
As explained on mw:Extension:WikiEditor/Toolbar customization, it is required that any scripts which add buttons to the toolbar explicitly declare it depends on module "ext.wikiEditor.toolbar". If it doesn't, than it is likely there will be some race condition, which results in this kind of bug.
I didn't find any mention of the module "ext.wikiEditor.toolbar" on MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js or MediaWiki:RefToolbar***, hence the problem happens.
It was suggested on January that this tool should be converted into a default gadget, but so far no one had the time to do so and I think that would also solve this problem... Helder 19:28, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
No messages on my console. But for the time being, the Cite button is there, and I can pull up cite templates. However, both Provelt and the cite templates fail to insert anything. They just sit there and do nothing. No messages on the console at all. Maile66 (talk) 20:35, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, I thought rebooting might help. So, I've had my computer off for a few hours. I've made sure my JavaScript is enabled. WikiEd is checked under Preferences. Nada. As far as I can tell, it's only the toolbar features of adding citations, references or links. The pop up will occur to add text. And I can click "Insert". Sometimes the window closes upon clicking "Insert", and sometimes the window just sticks there. But either way, it isn't inserting anything. I've even changed skins, thinking that might help. But it doesn't. Maile66 (talk) 00:36, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

A number of editors have reported that the cite button has disappeared totally or intermittently. See discussions at Wikipedia talk:RefToolbar 1.0 and Wikipedia talk:RefToolbar 2.0. Unfortunately, there are a lot of complaints, but no fixes.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Gadget850 (talk • contribs) 00:43, 8 July 2012 (UTC)
Sigh.....thanks...complaints, but no fixes...sigh...Maile66 (talk) 00:52, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
OK, should be fixed now. Purge your browser caches and let me know if you notice it missing any more. Kaldari (talk) 19:32, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Nope. Purged my cache. Shut down the browser and re-opened. The Cite button is there. But I still cannot insert anything., on anything on the toolbar that has a pop-up window to insert a reference, link or citation. The pop-up comes up, and I can type in it. But when I click "Insert" the window goes away, but nothing was inserted. Still at Square One. Maile66 (talk) 19:47, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Do you have any gadgets other than ref toolbar enabled ? Perhaps one of them is interfering with this one. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:36, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I went through the Gadgets on Preferences and unclicked everything except WikiEd, which I assume I still need for this. Well, it still doesn't work for me. Maile66 (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
You don't need wikEd for this —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:32, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
Wait, perhaps you are not using Reftoolbar at all ? Is it just wikEd that is being problematic for you and you are confusing the two tools ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:34, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm laughing...because the whole issue of toolbars and which is which can be confusing. Short of this...WikiEd was the conflict. But WikiEd is the nice visual aspect, right? With WikiEd, I've got RefToolbat 2.0b, but the citations quit working. Without WikiEd, the citations work, the visuals are plain, and the Reftool bar is a plain model without much to it. No Search and Replace, or the buttons. Better the plain model than one that doesn't work. Maile66 (talk) 22:55, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Overview

It's not THAT hard (well it is sort of, but only because WE made it difficult)

Official toolbar elements

 
Traditional (old) MediaWiki toolbar, if you have more buttons, then those are extensions UPON the official old toolbar. Can be disabled in your Preferences by unselecting "Show edit toolbar" in the Editing tab.
 
The default, sometimes misnamed Vector toolbar, but actually the WikiEditor toolbar or 'enhanced editing toolbar'. (Does not depend on Vector and can be disabled in Editing tab of your preferences, using "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" option).

Unofficial toolbar elements

Buttons that the English Wikipedia adds to the old MediaWiki toolbar (enabled by default, cannot be switched off):

 
Part of the WikEd toolbar, itself part of the WikEd editor, a user script developed by User:Cacycle that can be used on top of both the old and the new (WikiEditor) toolbar and heavily interferes in the editor to do all sorts of wild things. Usually enabled trough Gadgets tab in your Preferences. Disabled by default.

Reftoolbar is an English Wikipedia extension that bolts both on top of the classical toolbar AND the WikiEditor toolbar (involving great deals of detection and loading routines to make it happen). Enabled by default. Cannot be easily disabled yet (see earlier comment about intension to convert to 'default gadget' but no one having executed that plan just yet).

 
How the ref toolbar looks when you use the classic MediaWiki toolbar.
 
How the ref toolbar options look like when you use the "Enhanced editing toolbar".

As far as I'm aware, most issues have always been in the unofficial (not supported and user developed) parts of the software. In terms of controllability as a software developer, my vote would be to just disallow user developed scripts. But that is not realistic. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:56, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

If the so-called professionals would have sufficient time to develop such useful tools like the wikiEd, there would be no need for users beginning to write their own stuff. I dared to comment your comment on my user page. -- Rillke (talk) 09:30, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps i wasn't clear enough on this front. My comment only went as far as loading of scripts and dependencies between scripts. The fact is that user scripts (and even common.js site scripts) are a maintenance hell in this regard, often incorporating a lot of legacy and duplication. They are a bad system because they are used by too many people who are not JS gods, which in all honesty, you need to be these days to have stuff continuously 'working' on Wikipedia (Roan, Krinkle and a few others are the only ones I still trust on this front). This is why the old system needs to go and it is why gadgets, then RL, then RL2 and soon Gadgets 2.0 were developed. It is a painful transition, but it's what is needed to take us from the free for all age into a sustainable age. The question is, can we really ever get rid of the 'traditional' user scripts. Probably not, but if we would have had Gadgets 2.0 in 2001, we probably would never have chosen to add user scripts for individual users, and in my opinion that would be a more ideal situation, than Gadgets 2.0 WITH userscripts. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:57, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
I disagree. We just need self-managing code. With VisualFileChange, I started this idea on Commons. When it will become a gadget one day, it will simply remove it's installation from the user's own js and turn on the gadget. Having user scripts is important for testing. I don't want to see everyone testing new scripts as gadgets. Gadgets are supposed to work and their maintenance is also a pain. I think I made more than 500 gadget-related edits on Commons (!multilignual), so you can trust that I know what I am talking about. -- Rillke (talk) 10:10, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Could it be this?

I'm not all that techno-savvy about how the toolbar cite popups and etc work, but the timing of the most recent issue does coincide with what happened over the weekend, that the FBI and local authorities have been warning users about (note, I can't insert the link properly for you). It does seem to me that the popups are looking to connect with something that doesn't connect. Is it possible? Maile66 (talk) 16:44, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/06/technology/dnschanger/index.htm

No that's not it, then you wouldn't have any internet access whatsoever. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:29, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
I wasn't exactly thinking that this might have affected my personal system. I was thinking that maybe the event affected some Wikipedia server out there, since the FBI had isolated infected systems. Maile66 (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Skin reset

Based on feedback, it appears that a skin reset may now resolve the problem:

Open Preferences → Appearance, change your skin to anything else, save, change it back to the original skin, then save.

Please let us know if this works or does not work. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 16:10, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, it just did cure the issue. Thanks. I assume something was done to the skins in general, because I had tried a skin reset when this first happened, and it didn't work. But right now, that's the workable solution. Maile66 (talk) 16:43, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Can't "paint" and copy (Firefox)

Starting several days ago, I have not been able to "paint" and copy/cut material from my Firefox article editor. "Select all" does not work, neither from toolbar, nor from right mouseclick within editor. "Sometimes" when I disabled Javascript, I was able to "paint," but then had "other" problems. My Firefox version is 13.0.1, running on Windows XP, which is automatically updated. I am not aware of having made any editor option changes myself. Disabling Javascript no longer works (if it ever actually did!  :). I would appreciate suggestions. Student7 (talk) 20:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Does it work if you log out? Does it work at other websites? Try to clear your entire cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:39, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
YES! It works when I log out but not in!
It worked (works) everyplace but inside the article editor itself. In other words I can exit this subcomment and "paint" the title just fine. Just not when I'm inside the editor. I've tried to clear the cache with no effect. Will double check. Student7 (talk) 22:21, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
Just zeroed the cache and that had no affect, so reset it to 1024. (It had been using 756 MB BTW). Student7 (talk) 22:36, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
What is your skin? Does it work at fr: in that skin? I guess you haven't set any preferences there and I can see you don't have .js or .css pages there. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:04, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
My skin is Monobook. I do not remember how or why or when that was chosen. "Paint" DOES work in French Wikipedia! I do not have the knowledge to change the skin page. What should I select for .js or .css? I just want to do normal editing. No bots, java modification (except to my own attributes when required), etc. Student7 (talk) 14:07, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Skin is selected at Preferences → Appearance. The default for unregistered and new users is Vector. If you switch from Monobook to any other skin, your User:Student7/monobook.js will no longer be active, but your User:Student7/common.css will still be used. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:27, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Selecting Vector (and saving) did not solve the problem. Also cost me the "tabs" at the top: watch/unwatch, etc. I've switched back to Monobook (not knowing any better how to solve the newest problem).Student7 (talk) 17:05, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
In Vector skin, you typically get five tabs on all pages: Article/Talk appear at the left, and Read/Edit/View history towards the right. Most of the "missing" tabs are offered as selections in a pull-down menu. This menu is the downward-pointing black triangle immediately left of the search box; the options offered here may vary between pages. Between the "View history" tab and the black triangle, you should see a white or blue star. This performs the watch/unwatch function: white star=watch, blue star=unwatch. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:35, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
I haven't been able to reproduce your problem but it sounds like something in your account. What is enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing? PrimeHunter (talk) 19:54, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Gadgets: 1)" After rolling back an edit, automatically open etc." This ususally doesn't work, nor do I much care anymore. Could dispense with it.
2) Disable access keys. Don't know what this even means.
3) Focus the cursor in search bar upon loading page. This sounds great, but have to force "search" from "edit" BEFORE the search box comes up. Not much use.
4) Navigation popups. Really like this feature.
5) Twinkle
6) Ask a question, which I never have done. Sure don't need it.
Editing: 1) Show preview before edit box
2) Enable section editing
3) Prompt me when editing a blank edit summary.
4) Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes. Haven't noticed this working nor really understand how it could work.
5) Show me the difference between lastest pending and latest accepted pages. Not sure this is needed yet/anymore.
I will switch skins if I have to, to solve the problem, but it is a "cultural change" for me, which I would rather avoid between Monobook and Vector. Student7 (talk) 19:12, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
What do you want me to do?
Right now, when I need to move more data than I care to recopy (with footnotes!  :), I log out, edit and move, then log back in. Editors, of course, do not know who I am unless I identify myself on the edit summary. Student7 (talk) 00:10, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
  • I have the same set up as you - Firefox version is 13.0.1, running on Windows XP. My skin is Modern, and I don't have the problems you do, even if I switch to Monobook. However, recently I had quirky stuff happening with my Edit toolbar that nobody else seemed to have. The only solution was to change skins (doesn't matter which one you chose temporarily). Save the change. Then go back into Preferences and go back to the skin you prefer. In my case, that resolved my issues, as if the toolbar "booted" itself with the skin change. I don't know the answer for you, except to give it a try to change skins, save, and then return to the skin you want. It can't hurt you to try it. Maile66 (talk) 00:30, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Unfortunately switching skins doesn't seem to help. Switched to "Modern." And switched to "Vector", since that was mentioned the other day. Saved. Logged out. Etc. Doesn't work.
I guess we're at the point where I just have to try "random things" and see what happens. Since I know little about the system, this is a bit harder to do with any confidence. Student7 (talk) 14:33, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Well, selected ones didn't work either. I guess the last thing I can think to do is to restore all defaults on every preference page. Not quite ready for that yet, but I will be in a few days, I guess. Student7 (talk) 14:45, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Restored standard settings to "gadget" preferences. That worked for about 5 minutes! Have no idea why or when it quit working. Student7 (talk) 22:36, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Restored all standard settings including Vector skin and everything else. That seems to be working! How could it not? Will try to re-add vital editing tools one-by-one. Student7 (talk) 22:44, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Have you tried disabling (or blanking your User:Student7/monobook.js and User:Student7/common.css? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:47, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Might this Firefox bug have something to do with it? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692153 – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 20:05, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps increase NewPP preprocessor limits

Again, I wonder if we have gained support, yet, to increase the NewPP preprocessor limits:

  • The post-expand include size: from 2,048,000 to 2,750,000 (+34% larger)
  • Expansion depth limit: from 40 to 70 nest levels deep (+75%, or 30 if-else-else).
  • Expensive parser-function limit: from 500 to 700 instances (+40%).

Because the template-generated (post-expand) page contents can still pose a risk, I am thinking just a 34% increase would be conservative, yet enough to handle some over-sized pages. However, for years, I have explained that a 40-level depth limit is far too limited, where programmers often design if-else-else-else-else logic which, for multiple templates, would be equivalent to 200 levels. Hence, I strongly urge the 70-level limit, to encourage more editors to write templates which nest the if-else-else-else logic 7-20 levels deep in each template, before calling other templates, where 3 or 4 templates could combine beyond 40, to allow 70 levels deep. Recall that a #switch structure can only process exact-equals branches, and so the if-else-else-else logic is needed to simulate a switch based on multiple conditions, as a guarded command structure, easily checking a stack of 7-20 preconditions ("a >  b") before choosing an option. Even with some nested #switch structures, experiments have confirmed that multi-level #switches (<90 cases per switch) are much faster, as nested by 1st letter of key, extracted by the rapid {{padleft:|1|{{{key}}} }}, to branch to each nested #switch checking more-common letters earlier, then #default to all low-usage letters. For optimal template speed, all crucial validation checks of template parameters should occur as nested if-else-else-else before #switch-#switch, and hence a 7-level-deep structure would be common in many such templates, before invoking other subtemplates.

Anyway, explanations aside, I think the time has come to seriously increase the NewPP limits to allow writing more-efficient if-else-else templates, and handle larger groups of data items within a page. -Wikid77 (talk) 02:15, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it may be a non-issue with Lua coming to a wiki near you (in the far if not near future). --Izno (talk) 02:28, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
I would not say it's a non issue, it's a very real issue. I just think that the new lua stuff IS gonna happen this time, so I think any time invested is probably best spent on experimenting, improving and converting to that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:19, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

WMA button2b.png displaying oddly

Over the last few weeks, File:WMA button2b.png has started to display oddly in {{coord}} and other WikiMiniAtlas contexts, although it appears properly when I visit the image directly. When I hold my mouse over it, the miniature globe displays just like a reduced-size version of what I get when I visit the image description page, but at all other times, the globe is substantially darker and nearly black; due to my colourblindness I'm not sure what colour exactly, but perhaps dark greenish blue. I'm using IE8 like I have for years, and I've been using Windows 7 since last year. Is this perhaps the result of one of our many recent MW upgrades? I searched through {{coord}} and some of its subpages without finding anything. Nyttend (talk) 17:07, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

No it isn't the result of a MW upgrade. At most it's because User:Dschwen made some changes to his user script WikiMiniAtlas, the script responsible for adding the globes and maps everywhere someone uses {{coord}}. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:23, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
Hey guys! I have indeed made a little change due to some feedback I got at the Wikimania. I added a mouseover effect that should make the WMA icon light up when hovered. Sorry, it was a bit ad hoc and I did not get to test it in IE. Hmm, but this was just changed two days ago, not a few weeks ago. I'm still on travel right now. Give me two more days and I will have access to an IE and time to debug the issue. --Dschwen 02:01, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
IE + image + dark... Perhaps the alternative version you added uses a PNG feature that IE doesn't support by default ? We have seen that before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:51, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
For the last few days it uses the css opacity property. --Dschwen 13:38, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Maybe I'm just remembering wrongly on the date. For me, it lights up when hovered, but only because it's darker otherwise; it's vaguely like a store raising its prices and calling it a sale when it temporarily returns the prices to the old level :-) Nyttend (talk) 20:09, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
I have confirmed that this is an IE bug triggered by the opacity change. I changed it so that it only looks crappy in IE when hovered. I'm working on a full fix. --Dschwen 21:27, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

On a side note I realized, that the WMA did not work at all in IE8. This is fixed now. You won't get all the cool stuff, like overlays, but at least it displays map and labels. --Dschwen 23:12, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Duplicated coordinates at Prussian Homage (painting)

Any idea why those coordinates appears on the left and right of the article? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:08, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

About three months ago the coords were moved outside the infobox, see here. If you alter |display=inline,title in Prussian Homage (painting) to |display=title it'll fix it for this one article. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:31, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Editing oddities

Edit page annoyances. Began happening about the time I "rebooted" my skin to resolve the issue of the non-inserting enhanced toolbar. Currently on Firefox 14.0.1 with Windows XP. This problem was also happening before I updated Firefox and was on 13.0.1. If I'm doing a Delete, or insertion, or something of that nature, it jumps to another place and puts the edit in the wrong place. i.e., if I'm hitting the delete key to erase multiple characters, it will delete a character or two, and then jump to another place and delete in the wrong area. Provelt just disappeared off my screen. But before that happened, I was using Provelt to do insertions on a bibliography list. And it had a tendency to jump the insertion up into another line or paragraph. Maile66 (talk) 14:09, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Pending Changes question

I've been asked several times whether we should be considering an application of Pending Changes to long pages or busy pages. I was told at Wikimania (consider this a rumor, but it's a rumor I have to deal with) that some dev said that no substantial changes could be made before the Pending Changes rollout because it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. It's hard to know how to proceed here; I'm operating under constraints. Let me just throw out a few statements and ask for informal, off-the-top responses from anyone who wants to volunteer:

  • In most database applications, marking information as read-only tends to make the application run faster when displaying that information; it certainly doesn't make it run slower, right?
  • Merely for the purpose of pondering whether any implementation of Pending Changes necessarily has to run slowly, consider this implementation of PC-level-2 (i.e. a substitute for full-protection), suggested to me in an email: full-protect an article, except that you can still click on the "edit" button, which redirects you to a subpage of that article's talk page, the "working version" of the page. When the edits are "accepted", the old version of the page is replaced by the working version. That's a few extra pages, and surely that wouldn't take a lot of dev time. Can anyone think of a reason that this implementation would be a drain on the servers, or wouldn't be able to handle large or busy pages? - Dank (push to talk) 19:16, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

URL encoding

I'm having a bit of a problem with URL encoding in {{QRpedia article}}; the "statistcs" link, when used on, say, Talk:Kings Head Hotel, Monmouth„ should go to http://qrwp.org/stats.php?path=Kings_Head_Hotel,_Monmouth Can someone help me, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:05, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

{{SUBJECTPAGENAME}} will give you the article name without the "Talk:". Any use? -- John of Reading (talk) 21:20, 18 July 2012 (UTC)
That seems to have fixed it; thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:50, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Articles I edit not in watchlist

Though I have selected same under preferences, the articles I edit are not in the watchlist. They are, of course, under "my contributions." (I was just forced to reset all preferences due to another error. Then manually select the ones I really needed. The box to display my watchlist edits is selected). Student7 (talk) 00:21, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

So you've ticked [x] Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist and/or [x] Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist, but the software is not respecting your selection, is that correct? Do they appear in the "edit my watchlist" view (either normal or raw)? - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 10:04, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
One reason that your edits are not showing in your watchlist might be to do with the setting of Preferences → Watchlist → Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent. If this switched off, you will only get one change per page; but this assumes that when viewing your watchlist, you have not selected "Hide" for any of: "Hide minor edits"; "Hide bots"; "Hide anonymous users"; "Hide logged-in users"; "Hide my edits"; "Hide patrolled edits". For example, you might add {{cn}} to an article, without the |date= parameter. Sooner or later, a bot will come along and add |date=July 2012 to that. The most recent edit is now the bot edit, so if you have filtered out bot edits, that won't show - and nor will your edit, because it's not the most recent change. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:07, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

JavaScript help needed

Please see:

Mac user needed for test

We need a Mac user to test this. Please go to the above link. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:04, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Problem solved. Thanks! --Timeshifter (talk) 07:17, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Need JavaScript for middle click to open search in new tab

If you can help with the JavaScript please go to the above link in the beginning of this topic. We have successfully figured out the JS for ctrl-click (PC keyboards) and cmd-click (Apple key on Mac keyboards). Now we are looking to add the JavaScript for middle click. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:18, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Sortable icon disappears if coloured

hello,

how do you make the sortable icon in tables visible? It was previously always visible, but now as it was updated it can not be displayed if there is a background-colour. Regards.--GoPTCN 09:19, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

The workaround described at Help:Sorting#Header styling, links, and markup still seems to be working. Any good? -- John of Reading (talk) 10:14, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, my mistake. Regards.--GoPTCN 10:37, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi,
I have been watching advertisements on Wikipedia for about 6 months now. I have used different computers and different internet connections but they appear to pop up every where. So has Wikipedia started doing advertisements or these are just accidental? I am attaching a preview so that technical experts can get an idea of what I am facing. They appear on every article.
Preview-1
Preview-2
--Inlandmamba (talk to me) 14:21, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

They are not from Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:FAQ/Readers#ADS. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:26, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
You've got malware, spyware or something similar. As a minimum keep your plugins updated. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:52, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Okay. I'll reinstall my windows and delete the previous one. If the problem is solved, then good otherwise, I'll let you guys know.
Thanks--Inlandmamba (talk to me) 15:13, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
The culprit is almost certainly the Ilivid Downloader Manager you have there. Judging by the comments here and WOT rating there, letting it onto your computer is not a good idea.--illythr (talk) 19:45, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Strange ratings stats

Irish presidential election, 2011 has 55 ratings for "Well-written" (average of 5.0) and 0 ratings for the other three categories. Is this ballot-stuffing or has something gone wrong with its ratings stats? jnestorius(talk) 17:25, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

RefToolbar2 has disappeared again!

As in the subject, RefToolbar2 has vanished again , and DYKcheck has disappeared. I've tried switching from Monobook to Vector and back again, and clearing my cache, but no joy.Nigel Ish (talk) 21:01, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

IP serial editing on templates

This is not the place to list this, I know. But I think we have a serial thing going on, and I need to know where to get quick action. Any sysops reading this? Please see [6] This IP user is making a whole lot of format edits on templates without discussion. Looks to me like hundreds of template formatting edits. Some have been reversed by another editor. I reversed the formatting changes they did to Template:Texas History, because I don't believe the format of it should have been revised. There was a whole lot of discussion that went on at the Texas project before that template was improved a few years ago. But I don't think this should be happening at all on templates. Please advise. Maile66 (talk) 23:27, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

First ask the editor to stop and talk about it. If he won't, and you can make a case that he need to be blocked to stop damage, take it to WP:ANI (not WP:AIV as it doesn't lok like vandalism). Mr Stephen (talk) 23:35, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. Maile66 (talk) 23:44, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Account usurpation

Hi. Can someone please tell me why bot has not taken my request? Thanks. --Andreateletrabajo (talk) 01:13, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

It looks like it did, here, but due to the screwed-up section the IP made the formatting was all confused. The long delay was because AnomieBOT's server crashed again earlier today (I'm hoping a kernel upgrade will fix that). Anomie⚔ 01:21, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Ok, now it seems it make it right. Just need to wait for answer. Thanks, --Andreateletrabajo (talk) 15:31, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Self edit conflicts

I've noticed that since I switched ISPs, I've been getting a lot (like half my edits) of self edit conflicts. Just curious if there's a reason for this. Hot Stop 05:21, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps your ISP has some sort of misbehaving proxy service. Try using https version of the website. If that helps, you might want to state which ISP you are using (so others can avoid it) and then call them and complain :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:27, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
I have comcast. Hot Stop 03:57, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

How to sign your posts

For years, my signing - 4 tildes or signature button - results in automatic eMails, telling me, that I do NOT sign correctly (please also see exchange below). WHAT exactly is the Problem?

  • Signed with 4 tildes: Grey Geezer 06:10, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Signed with button: --Grey Geezer 06:10, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

It is not a bad idea to sign your posts by simply typing 4 Tildes at the end of your post. Please see WP:TILDE. Happy editing! Bus stop (talk) 22:03, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

<sigh> I do this for 5 years now - I also use the "signature button" once in a while - but somehow THE SYSTEM does not accept / see / recognize that.
Now I sign with 4 Tildes: Grey Geezer 07:29, 19 July 2012 (UTC) ...
now I sign by button: --Grey Geezer 07:29, 19 July 2012 (UTC) ... and what happens? ... :
This is what is meant by four tildes: ~~~~. Is that what you are typing? Bus stop (talk) 10:54, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Exactly that. I'm editing for 4+ years in the German WP. I now copy/paste your ~~~~ (betw. the nowikis) and I get => Grey Geezer 15:50, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Maybe if you post an inquiry at the Village pump, technical, somebody there will be able to shed some light on this. Bus stop (talk) 20:36, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll do that. Bothers me since the beginning. Grey Geezer 06:07, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Try this: go to "My preferences", remove the words "Grey Geezer" from the "signature" box partway down, leaving it empty, and then click the "Save" button at the bottom. The software should then give you the default signature like mine. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:56, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
That will fix it yes. The problem is that you signature needs to contain a link to either your user page or your talk page. If you don't have either, then the bots will not be able to recognize it as a signature. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:25, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
The Box is empty.
Above it says "Existing signature: Grey Geezer "
Below: [ x ] Treat the above as wiki markup. i.e. Checked.
Am I supposed to take the "checked" out ? Grey Geezer 11:45, 20 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grey Geezer (talk • contribs)
Taking the "checked" out results in => Grey Geezer (talk) 11:46, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
If the "Signature" box is empty, the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box must be clear. If "Treat the above as wiki markup" is switched on, the "Signature" box must contain at least one of the three links described at WP:SIGLINK. If you look at the row marked "Existing signature", you'll see how your sig will appear (without time and date); when you move your mouse over it, this will reveal any links which are present. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:06, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
All's straightened out - thanks a lot! Case closed. GEEZERnil nisi bene 13:29, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Deducing thumbnail file names for images.

When you submit an image to Wikimedia at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload

The back-end database does several things. Let us say the file name I submit is:

LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

After the file is submitted the system produces the following files in the following locations:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/358px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/143px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/287px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/359px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/459px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/612px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg

The confusing part is if you look at a file of, say, Margret Thatcher, these file images are replicated thusly:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/503px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/201px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/403px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/504px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/645px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Thatcher-loc.jpg/860px-Thatcher-loc.jpg

The problem with this is I see no pattern in the thumbnail sizes (and file names). They seem, quite frankly, random in size.

So given the image name "LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg".

Is there any way of getting a list of all of the thumbnail file names associated with it (without having to download the "home page" for this picture)?

Thanks in advance, Jeff Jroehl (talk) 00:33, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

There is a means to obtain these thumbnail sizes but it requires some number crunching to accomplish. What seams to you to be random numbers are actually the width of the image in pixels when said image is scaled to one of several standard vertical sizes (240, 480, 600, 768 pixels, or 1,024 pixels). I am not familiar with the specific algorithm(s) used by the Wikimedia software to accomplish this scaling so am unable to scaling so I am unable to assist in providing the exact formulas for the calculations. All in all it is probably simplest to just check the image description file and see what pixel numbers listed for the various sizes. --Allen3 talk 01:10, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

This was the exact response I was expecting. And this makes complete sense. The problem is that if I have to download image description file for every image, it is a whole lot of bandwidth that would otherwise need not be used. Is there anyplace where I can get this algorithm? Or a place where this algorithm is discussed?

Thanks Jeff Jroehl (talk) 01:21, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

You might try at the mediawiki support desk. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:32, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
This might also be a useful starting link; my eyes started to glaze over... Manual:Image_thumbnailing#Image_thumbnailing --02:36, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

"Eyes glazing over" I got that. I have been trying to figure this out for a week. Jroehl (talk) 03:20, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

What exactly are you trying to download: presumably not just the wikitext of the file description pages, but the full HTML? Why should the images you need to download be a mystery then - they'll just be written there in the source? Sorry, I'm obviously missing something here. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 10:01, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
The multiple and various different resolutions given on file description pages are just examples. You don't need to worry about which ones exist or not, nor what the ultimate filenames are. Just use syntax like [[File:LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg|thumb|nnnpx|A pine cone]] - just set nnn to any positive integer, and the appropriately-sized image will be displayed (it will be generated for you if it doesn't already exist). When forcing a size like this, please bear in mind MOS:IMAGES and WP:IMGSIZE. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:57, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
You can also get the image files directly in any size, by just changing the number in the URL. e.g. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg/42px-LargePineConeFromTheAngelesNationalForest.jpg. If it doesn't exist already then the servers will generate the thumbnail for you. the wub "?!" 16:28, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Wow! That is really cool. Sort of mind boggling really.

I noticed the "42px-" parameter specifies its width.

Is there any way to specify its height?

Thanks Jeff Jroehl (talk) 19:25, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

This is how to get the width I want.

original_height = 165 original_width = 200

The_height_I_want = 60

width_to_get = original_width * (The_height_I_want / original_height)

? width_to_get && 72 = This is the width to get from Wikipedia.

Jroehl (talk) 00:52, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

If you want to get a specific height, you can use a file tag thus: [[File:Wiki.png|thumb|x25px]] <-- Note the x (See mw:Help:Images#Syntax for more). You can also use the API to get a specific height image: titles=File:Wiki.png&prop=imageinfo&iiprop=url&iiurlwidth=999&iiurlheight=25. The Image generated will be fit into the box bounded with iiurlwidth x iiurlheight (you must include width parameter in this instance). There is also thumb.php (the 404 handler backend) but it doesn't support a height parameter. --Splarka (rant) 08:22, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Adding a collapsable infobox to a table

Specifically, I wanted to know it if possible to add a template such as {{Infobox D&D creature}} to the tables on List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition monsters for the purposes of merging in articles. The idea is to have it collapsible so that it doesn't take up too much space, but at the same time make it available for anyone who wants to view it. I guess I got some inspiration from how pages like List of minor X-Men characters and List of G.I. Joe video games are organized, so I wanted to bring some of that functionality in. Is this a simple "oh, here you go" fix, or am I asking the basically impossible? BOZ (talk) 00:16, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Unless I missing something, per MOS:COLLAPSE, collapsible boxes should not be used for article content (which exceptions for repeated material in infboxes, etc.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 12:30, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
OK, so if I do use it for repeated material in an infobox, is it still possible to do, and how can I do it? BOZ (talk) 14:52, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Archived talkpage discussion

When a bot has archived a talkpage discussion that is still useful and germane, what is the procedure to "un-archive" it and return it to the current talkpage? I'm not sure that at this point I can revert the archiving, but would not want to in any case, because the bot archived several older discussions together, and only the one should be restored. Thanks for any suggestions. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:11, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

The safest way is to leave the archive alone; raise a new thread on the main talk page, and at the top of that add a link to the archived discussion so that others may refer to it. See for example Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 97#Intermittent search problems and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 99#Error on loading page (2) where the link was added at the time that the new thread was raised; or Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 95#False edit conflicts where I added two links afterwards - but still at the top. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:05, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. Milkunderwood (talk) 17:24, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Talk page template

I there an easy way to add a template message when an IP editor adds a semi-protection request edit template to an article talk page? I just cleared many from the backlog at: Category:Wikipedia semi-protected edit requests. I noticed quite a few that are experienced editors but have never created an account. 'Please create an account to stop backlogging us with trivial requests' type message.--Canoe1967 (talk) 05:27, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

You could try {{subst:welcome-anon}}, or {{subst:register}}. If these aren't suitable, the place to request a new template is WT:UTM or possibly WT:WC. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:14, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
I was wondering if it could be done automatically when they use the edit request template.--Canoe1967 (talk) 02:03, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Blank error message coming up on watchlist

For some reason today, every time I pull up my watchlist I get a blank error message box that I have to hit "OK" on before I can do anything else. I'm running Windows 7 with Firefox v14.0.1. I've been running this for a few days now and this is the first time I've encountered this issue. Just to be clear, it's only when I click through to my watchlist and the error box is always empty. Has anything changed today that would cause this? Dismas|(talk) 14:09, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

It could be User:Ais523/catwatch.js called from your vector.js: it has 1 alert() in the code. Try switching to some other skin or clearing your vector.js. — AlexSm 14:27, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Note: I don't get an error on a Mac running Safari. (OSX 10.5.8, Safari 5.0.6) Dismas|(talk) 00:04, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

References

I was wondering if it would be possible to add button to the wiki markup toolbox (preferably above the page in the panel with begins with B I above next to the book symbol which insert a full one of these. I get sick and tired of having to type it out. I know we have "Reflist" in the wiki markup but its pointless if it doesn't also add the references section above it.

==References==
{{Reflist}}

♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:53, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I made some changes so that the archiving bot does not split this section by mistake as has happened in the past. – Allen4names (IPv6 contributions) 17:19, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Numbered lists in more than one part

Other than using raw HTML, do we have a means to make numbered lists starting other than at number 1? For example: 

Apples:

1. Golden Delicious
2. Granny Smith's
3. Worcester Pomains

and my favourites:

4. Cox' Orange Pipin
5. Russets

I can't find anything about this on WP:LIST. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:29, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

No; but you can force a number by adding a <li value=n> immediately after the hash:
Apples:
  1. Golden Delicious
  2. Granny Smith's
  3. Worcester Pomains
and my favourites:
  2. Cox' Orange Pipin
  3. Russets
It's only a small amount of raw HTML but it does mean that you don't have to code the entire list that way. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:57, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:32, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
And you will find this at Help:List. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 09:42, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Alt code

Hi! What is the alt code for correct minus sign? Alt + 45 gives some hyphen or something like that. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:25, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

The minus sign resides in the Mathematical Operators range of Unicode, and none of them have alt codes. — Edokter (talk) — 15:12, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Further down the same article we find Plus and minus signs#Character codes. Since its value (2212 hex, i.e. 8722 decimal) is greater than 255, I don't think that it's enterable using the Alt-number technique. The key sequence Alt+45 is the normal keyboard hyphen-minus. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:17, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
There is no. Try &minus; for HTML and \u2212 for JavaScript. BTW (for Redrose64) Alt codes have nothing to do with Unicode code points. They rely on Windows code pages (namely, OEMCP and ACP). Incnis Mrsi (talk) 16:32, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
Have you tried the method listed at Unicode input#In Microsoft Windows? Anomie⚔ 01:51, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Ok, thank you! --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:33, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

default a nav box to show as collapsed/hidden

I cannot find how you code a nav box so that it appears in the "collapsed/hidden" view. specifically this navbox Template:Anne Murray in this article The Wayward Wind. Can someone help? -- The Red Pen of Doom 13:15, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Add the | state = collapsed parameter to the navbox. — Edokter (talk) — 15:15, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
thanks!

Wikitables sortable question

Is it possible through any Wikipedia magic to have a table that is alphabetical in the Wikicode, but is displayed with another sort order by default? -- Avanu (talk) 18:17, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

No; the order given in the wikicode defines the initial sort order. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:20, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Recent changes?

I've just come back from three hours cycling, and found that while I wasn't looking the reason selection box in the Delete Article screen has extended itself, and the little down triangle is now off the screen, necessitating a sideways shift to get at it. Also, the display font in CSD windows (and that in the buttons at the top of the page (including the Twinkle ones)) looks different. I could be wrong about the buttons. I use Firefox 14.0.1 on XP Pro with Classic display, and use Monobook on Wikipedia. (OK, so I'm old-fashioned in some things...) The font I've just seen in the preview of this post looks skinnier than before. Peridon (talk) 16:21, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

As far as I am aware there have been no significant font changes (this place likely would be filled with complaints if there had been). You OS actually does the final font selection, so perhaps you installed some new software that added a font that somehow is now the default for you. We have seen in the past that people install MS Office (and it's 50 fonts) and then come here stating that their font defaults for their browsers have changed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:00, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Bit hard to install anything when out on a bike... I use Open Office and haven't done anything to it (or much with it apart from the spreadsheets - I work in DTP more than word processing). Haven't even updated XP. It's the selection box that's the main point I'm making. It's a damn nuisance having to scroll sideways to get at the triangle. And that is a definite change someone's made. Nothing to do with fonts or anything. It fitted in the screen when I went out, and doesn't now. Still doesn't next day. May look OK in those widescreen monitors, but those of us that use more upright ones to get better page views in documents of all shapes and sizes have a problem (OK - it's only admins too...). I don't have automatic update on for anything except anti-virus and firewall. Anything else has to ask my permission first. Including Windows. Peridon (talk) 18:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Are Wikipedia pages refreshing automatically now?

I have noticed some recent updates/upgrades to Wikipedia and am wondering if this is one of them or if I simply refreshed the page by accident and without knowing it. I had a Wiki open on one tab, opened a separate tab to go to another site, and when I returned to the Wiki it had been considerably vandalized, and I am certain the vandalism had not been there just five minutes earlier. Unless there has been some change to the system, as far as I know, a Wiki will not automatically update to show intermediate edits. RedSoxFan274 (talk~contribs) 16:34, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Correct, it won't do that. However browsers sometimes refresh these days. Noticeably when plugins (Flash) crash for instance. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:55, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Location map problem

  Resolved

I posted this on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates‎ nearly two weeks ago, without receiving a response, so I thought I'd try here:

This one has me stumped (not a very difficult thing to do, I'm afraid). A post on Talk:Nanjangud pointed out that although the coordinates in the article are correct, the locator map in the infobox (using File:India Karnataka location map.svg) is displaying the location of the town about half a degree north of where it should be, in Mandya District rather than Mysore District. In investigating the problem, I discovered that the locator map in Mysore is also displaying the location too far north in the same way; however, the one in Kadakola (a town between Nanjangud and Mysore) is displaying the location correctly. Noticing that the infobox used in the Nanjangud and Mysore articles is {{Infobox settlement}}, whereas the one used in the Kadakola article is {{Infobox Indian jurisdiction}}, I thought, aha! there must be some problem with the way in which the settlement infobox is handling the conjunction of coordinates and map. And, indeed, the articles Mangalore and Chamarajanagar seemed to bear this out (both too far north on the locator maps and both using {{Infobox settlement}}). However, checking farther afield in the state of Karnataka, I found other articles using {{Infobox settlement}}), such as Bidar, in which the locator maps display the correct locations. So now I'm just thoroughly confused. Can someone sort out what the underlying problem might be? Deor (talk) 17:04, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
I don't know the source of the problem, but I have seen similar issues. It also seems that Firefox and Chrome handle the maps somewhat differently leading to different shifts in the dots. There was one particular example I remember this on, but I don't remember which article. Chris857 (talk) 16:01, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Location map not locator map. Template:Location_map will be called by the infobox. Each map comes with a template which defines the co-ordinates of the map and handles issues with the projection. I expect the issue is with the template. If you make a map directly (without using the infobox) you should be able to reproduce it. Are the ones that are okay using different underlying maps? Secretlondon (talk) 16:37, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. Following your hint, I adjusted the border coordinates in Template:Location map India Karnataka (the latitude of the southern border of the map was about half a degree off), and that has fixed the problem. Deor (talk) 17:26, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Great! Secretlondon (talk) 22:17, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Semi-hidden header/footer on pages

Would it be possible to code a section into pages that only an Administrator would be able to edit? Something like a header or footer where information on a User's status might be included, like whether the editor is blocked or is a bot and similar stuff, and potentially have this automatically display when a user has a certain bit set, like the block bit or bot bit etc? Avanu (talk) 21:35, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Blocked users automatically get a pink box top of their contribs list. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:38, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
And at the bottom of the contribs list is a link to that editor's entry in Special:ListUsers, labeled "User rights". That link will show you all flags on the account, such as bot/admin/etc. Someguy1221 (talk) 08:01, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
So why can't we do that for all pages? And allow admins to post things like Block notices, 'this is a bot', etc. in that space? -- Avanu (talk) 07:59, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

template syntax

  Moved from Help desk

I've been trying to get to grips with the intricacies of template syntax. Specifically, User:U+003F/TRFC squad is defined as 

{{User:U+003F/TRFC start}}
{{football squad2 player | no=1 | name=[[Jon Smith|Smith]] }}
</div>}}

and User:U+003F/TRFC start as 

{{football squad | name=MyTeam F.C. squad | teamname=MyTeam F.C. | list=<div>

This works when the second template is substituted, but not when transcluded. Is the issue to do with the <div> element, or the unmatched braces? Thanks! U+003F? 07:04, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

What you're trying to use there is definitely unsupported syntax; if I were you I would find a way of using a less horrific construct e.g. {{User:U+003F/TRFC|list={{football squad2 player | no=1 | name=[[Jon Smith|Smith]]}}}} - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 08:45, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
I've located the problem, but haven't worked out how to fix it. Defining a template User:U+003F/open as
{{
and User:U+003F/close as
}}
then
{{User:U+003F/open}}myTemplate{{User:U+003F/close}}
is rendered as
 {{myTemplate}}
rather than transcluding {{myTemplate}}. How do you go about forcing the wanted behaviour? Cheers! U+003F? 08:29, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
It is rendered as such, but it is not read as a template to be transcluded. Already in the earlier code, the brackets are not balanced, so it is not processed as a template. Make each template balanced wrt brackets. Unbalanced <div> is not the problem here. -DePiep (talk) 08:45, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist again: space between lines

My watchlist suddenly seems cramped up to me. There is less space between the lines than in (e.g.) a revision history. Has it always been like that? Mr Stephen (talk) 09:20, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Making an infobox collapsible

I was trying to make {{Infobox D&D creature}} collapsible, but I'm not sure how to get it to work. I was experimenting on my sandbox (feel free to mess with it), but I couldn't get it to work. BOZ (talk) 23:33, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

How can sortable tables be fixed?

I've noticed this for a long time, but our sortable wikitables are effectively broken. Try sorting List of rampage killers: Americas ascending by number killed. Note that the killers with the most kills appear half way down the list because 28 kills is considered less than 3 kills but more than 23. Is there any way to fix this? Ryan Vesey Review me! 20:58, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Use {{sort}} to force a hidden alphabetic code that will sort right, eg: {{sort|03|3}} will print "3" but sort on "03". --MASEM (t) 21:13, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Is there any way to modify the underlying code of a sortable table so the workaround isn't necessary? Ryan Vesey Review me! 21:16, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
We don't have to. We already did that about a year ago. It's just not working, because it depends on some HTML5 syntax, and we still haven't switched to HTML5. Though that is planned for this month I believe. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:03, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
FYI, to those who don't know, the reason such columns don't sort right is usually that they contain things that don't "look like" numbers (in this case, ranges like "28-30"), which makes the columns sort as if they're regular text instead. If everything in a column is actually a regular number (integer or real number), it would sort correctly. See Help:Sorting#Numerical sorting problems and the rest of the info on that page. - dcljr (talk) 23:00, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Design change proposal

I think the border-radius CSS property will look cool with our template boxes since it is being used extensively on other popular Web sites. 68.173.113.106 (talk) 21:27, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

On Wikipedia for some non-English languages, the MonoBook skin had rounded corners for the tabs along the top and the boxes down the left, at least when viewed in Firefox. I can't find any that still have this feature: I guess there were browser incompatibilities. The CSS 2.1 specification doesn't mention a border-radius property, nor any other way of specifying the shape of box corners. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:39, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Ah. Apparently it's CSS3 and only supported in IE9+, Firefox 4+, Chrome, Safari 5+, and Opera. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:03, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Found it! In a document dated 24 July 2012 (today). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:13, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

WP:Article Feedback Tool/Version 5

It seems someone has messed up with the abuse filter, but I haven't got a clue where to look or who to ping. Any comment posted by any IP, even if it is unquestionably constructive, is rejected with the error message "Your post has been rejected by a software filter that suggests it may have violated Wikipedia's feedback guidelines. Please revise your post and try again." In the event that the filter was edited to temporarily disable comments, a better way of turning it off is urgently needed: at the moment we are inviting people to comment, accusing them of being unhelpful when they do, and then asking them to try again. —WFC— 06:15, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

These filters were edited a few hours ago (log) by Fabrice Florin (talk · contribs), so I've left a message at his talk page. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. —WFC— 07:09, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
The regular expression in filter 472 is broken. Is there an edit filter manager available? -- John of Reading (talk) 07:13, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
disabled it for now, while I figure out exactly why it was broken. Someguy1221 (talk) 07:23, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
There was a |\b| in there, which was matching everything. — This, that, and the other (talk) 11:28, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello everyone, my apologies for causing this problem with the abuse filters. My intention had been to modify four abuse filters we use for the Article Feedback tool, by having them 'disallow' the use of obscenities, rather than just 'auto-flag' them as abuse. While I was at it, I attempted to remove any word that was not clearly an obscenity, which is what caused the error on filter 474. Many thanks to Someguy1221 for reverting that change, I really appreciate it! I just checked the other three filters (460, 461 and 472), and get a "No syntax errors detected" message, so they appear to be working as intended. Still, it would be wonderful if an experienced filter editor could take a look at these three filters, to see if we could improve them in any way (see our Bugzilla ticket for this issue). Our community liaison, Okeyes (WMF), will reach out to filter editors in coming days to invite them to help create more abuse filters for Article Feedback Version 5 (AFT5). This new feature is now being deployed widely on the English Encyclopedia, to invite readers to contribute productively on Wikipedia, and we could really use some help to filter inappropriate words. Again, I am very sorry for making this mistake, and deeply grateful to you all for reporting it and taking immediate action. Going forward, I will let experienced editors make changes to the edit filter scripts. Fabrice Florin (talk) 16:22, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
No worries Fabrice, we're all human and all working towards the same thing: improving AFT5 as much as we possibly can. Your efforts are appreciated! —WFC— 02:42, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

"Antibytes"

Maybe I'm the only person to see things this way, but if I go to this link, I see that the second edit in the history of the article Johann Sebastian Bach allegedly removed 76,168 bytes from it, even though the previous—and first—version of it had 1,428 bytes. What's up with that?—Toccata quarta (talk) 08:08, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Edits from back then were not recorded in the database as they are now. Rather, they were imported to the current setup by a script that occasionally made some errors. You seem to have found one such error. Someguy1221 (talk) 08:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Although there has also been some funkiness with the antibytes feature since the most recent MediaWiki deployment, so...Someguy1221 (talk) 08:12, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
This is bug bugzilla:37225. The problem has been solved now, but not retroactively. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:19, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
I guess this was messed up during import from the Nostalgia Wikipedia. This seems better. —Kusma (t·c) 08:15, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your informative replies!—Toccata quarta (talk) 08:22, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Indeed, it was due to my import of an edit from the Nostalgia Wikipedia. Graham87 19:37, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Images in SQL dumps

Hi! Recently I started a project to mirror wiki for offline use using Apache and php (and of course mediawiki's official CMS). I was wondering if Wikipedia's official SQL dumps have images in them too? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.201.89.108 (talk) 15:33, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. See Wikipedia:Database download#Where are images and uploaded files. -- John of Reading (talk) 15:54, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, I saw that, but are was this regarding downloading images directly (as a large tarball/archive)? Or were they even talking about images in databases? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.201.89.108 (talk) 16:33, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Can't figure out where a template is being transcluded

While checking for stale deletion nominations, I found User talk:Shogun101 in a database as being nominated for TfD. When went to view the source, I found that the only template in the page code is {{Whoops}}, a redirect deleted a month ago. Yet when I look at the bottom, it says there are 7 templates transcluded on the page, including {{Rfd/core}}. I'm guessing that is why it appears in the database report, yet I cannot find why the edit interface thinks the template is being transcluded, as there are clearly no templates on the page (other then the redlinked one). So whats going on? Monty845 20:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I made a WP:NULL edit. That's fixed up the "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page:" list. I guess the deletion of {{whoops}} didn't update all the link tables. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:56, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, I didn't think trying a null edit. Monty845 21:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
The reason is that, while page deletions and certain other actions will cause MediaWiki to reparse the pages transcluding the deleted page, it doesn't always update the various "links" tables in the database when it does so. So you might see a page showing on the category page but without the category at the bottom, showing in Special:WhatLinksHere even though there is no link, and so on. I think T7382 is relevant. Anomie⚔ 01:08, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

RM bot inactive

RM bot, which maintains the Requested Moves process, has been inoperative since 18th July. The user running the bot, User:HardBoiledEggs, has been inactive for months. Without the bot, the Requested Moves process does not function. There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves and at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#RM bot inactive, but there is no solution as yet. As things stand, no page moves can be requested, across Wikipedia. Can anyone assist please with repairing the bot? MatthewHaywood (talk) 22:55, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Since the source code is available, another user could take it over. Or you could contact harej (talk · contribs), who wrote the bot's code. Or you could e-mail HardBoiledEggs if you haven't already. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:35, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
We've emailed HardBoiledEggs (talk · contribs) and messaged harej (talk · contribs), but no reply from either. I really am no expert on bots, but if my taking it over could sort it then I would be prepared to give it a go - what would be the procedure for this? MatthewHaywood (talk) 16:05, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm a retired FORTRAN programmer with an interest in learning bot programming, and also would like to help support this bot—maybe a bot like this should have more than one support person, so if the lead support contact takes a two week vacation, there is someone else available as backup. I think I could be a fairly quick learner, but would need a little help to get started. I see from the source that the bot echos messages such as "Posting the new requested pagemoves... ";, "done.\n";, and "Mission accomplished.\n\n";—how does one check these messages for clues about what happened? Is it necessary to log into the bot's account to see these? Wbm1058 (talk) 12:22, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
A bot in FORTRAN! Can we look forward to COMPLEX variables? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:46, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm aware that this bot is written in PHP, and I would need to learn that. The bot source code isn't particularly long. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:54, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Chris G runs a couple of bots that use harej's code. He might be worth approaching. Mr Stephen (talk) 22:46, 23 July 2012 (UTC)


The template:ToolserverBot tag on User:RFC bot indicates that that bot runs on the Wikimedia Toolserver. Presumably there are support people who ensure that that platform stays up, or if it goes down, quickly restore it to service. RM bot has no such tag. For all I know it runs in User:HardBoiledEggs's private home or office. Who else would be able to recover it if it crashed? It may be necessary to create a new bot using a new user account which runs the source code. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:58, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

The most recent version posted at User:RM bot/requestedmoves.php is 04:44, 1 January 2010 by‎ user:Harej, while User:HardBoiledEggs' edits as recently as October 2011 never made it to the source code revision history — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wbm1058 (talk • contribs)

User:RM bot did have a template:ToolserverBot tag, until 24 September 2011, apparently. Wbm1058 (talk) 20:30, 24 July 2012 (UTC) edit 21:16, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Have it running!

Well I guess I know enough to be dangerous;) RMCD bot has edited Talk:Marau. I have user:Harej's last version running on my home PC. I just modified the code to change the name of the bot. I commented out the last section where it "Posts the new requested pagemoves... ", but everything seems to work fine up to that point, best as I can tell from the console messages. I suppose the question mark in the black diamond by my bot's signature is because my bot hasn't been formally approved. Can anyone in charge here tell me how I should proceed at this point. I'm itching to fully unleash the bot, but don't want to get in trouble. I can't pretend that I fully understand how it works, but again, all I changed was the bot's name—Wbm1058 (talk) 02:31, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

See WP:BRFA and if you can, join #wikipedia-BAG on WP:IRC, as they can help you with parts of it (Harej also hangs out there sometimes). MBisanz talk 02:40, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Ah, I see I'm a bit late to the party. Wbm1058, if you're happy to take over and run the bot, great! Otherwise I am also happy and able to do so. If you need any help with the code, just give me a shout.
The question mark in the diamond, means the character trying to be displayed is unprintable. It looks to have been caused by some kind of encoding problem with the "—" (dash), in the source code, probably happened when you copied it over. --Chris 10:55, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Chris. When I save the file with Notepad, it warns me that the file contains Unicode characters which will be lost if I save the file as an ANSI file, which I did—so that's why the "—" was lost, I'm sure. The drop-down menu options are: "Unicode", "Unicode big endian" and "UTF-8"—which should I choose? Should I put up a proposal for my new RMCD bot, or to "take over" RM bot? I would need the RM bot password to take it over directly, and then maybe it should be attached to my account. I would be more comfortable if it ran on the Wikimedia Toolserver—probably all bots viewed as "mission critical"—as this bot seems to be—should be run there or on some system with 24/7 support. I'd like to take a stab at learning how it works, so I can tackle some of the User:RM bot/TODO list, but that will take more time, and in the short term, we just want to get it back up and running. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:28, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
UTF-8, based on the Wikipedia article, looks like the way to go: "the dominant character encoding for the World-Wide Web, accounting for more than half of all Web pages... increasingly being used as the default character encoding in operating systems, programming languages, APIs, and software applications." I'll try that. Wbm1058 (talk) 12:48, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
hmm, I probably should have something like default_charset = "UTF-8" in my ini file? I'm seeing funky chars in the console printout for Talk:Johanna Marau Ta‘aroa, for example, and maybe it is a different character type? Wbm1058 (talk) 13:37, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

WP:HighBeam retrospective data

Hi! One of the goals of the HighBeam free account program was to see how giving out the accounts impacted usage of HighBeam.com on Wikipedia. I did an apparently naive search using the regular search box where I apparently should have used special:linksearch. I want to know if it's possible to get special:linksearch data for how many instances of www.highbeam.com were on Wikipedia on March 20, 2012--so I can compare that to the current count. I have been told that Toolserver access is probably necessary to do this. Can you help or suggest someone who can? Thanks! Ocaasi t | c 17:09, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

No, this is not very easy to do from the Toolserver. What you'd want to do is find the first available dump from before your target date, and then run scan it for links. I'm sure someone could do that for you though (my internet connection barely manages 1 Mb/s, so I might pass!) :) - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 10:39, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks Jarry! Any idea where I could find such a Toolserver wizard? Ocaasi t | c 17:16, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
Well, a dumps wizard I guess. There might be one lurking on this list, or there is a mailing list for dumps reusers, I think. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 21:06, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
Parsing the external links table is a pain, but I have done it in the past while tracking a particular troll. It can take over 8 hours to download the dump (I think it depends very much on how busy the servers are), and an hour to run a Python script over it. For testing and vague interest, I counted link occurrences in enwiki-20110901-externallinks.sql (English Wikipedia external links dumped at September 1, 2011). Looking at that data shows 15865 occurrences of *highbeam.com and 9 occurrences of *.highbeamreview.com. There is also one occurrence of the typo "www.highbeam." ("com" missing) here. For the June 20, 2011 dump, the numbers are: 15560 of *.highbeam.com and the same for the others. The dump before March 20 was March 7 (here). If really wanted and no better offers, I could process that (perhaps ask at my talk if wanted?). Johnuniq (talk) 03:51, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
John, thanks so much for that. Would you mind checking on the same 2011 dump for www.highbeam.com and www.highbeam. com/doc/  ? Also, if it's possible to limit the search to article-space, that would be ideal. If you can't, no problem, you've already been a great help. Best, Ocaasi t | c 13:31, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
My script extracted domain names from each external link in the external links table. That means www.highbeam.com (and any other variation like abc.HighBeam.COM/doc/xyz) was counted in my figures above. I would have to add some extra stuff to the script and run it again to identify links in article space, or those links which include "/doc/". I'm happy to do that, but since it would be a bit of effort please consider exactly what you would like, and I'll do what I reasonably can (the code might be helpful for other stuff at some time), but I won't think about how hard it would be until there is a final wishlist. I just hammered the servers by saving a gigantic list at User:Johnuniq/Sandbox of all the current links from the API in case it's of interest. I forgot to mention that the list is sorted (by namespace number, then title), so it shows things like the fact that there are currently 9878 articles with one or more links (need to count the lines elsewhere as I didn't use a numbered list). Johnuniq (talk) 04:45, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
John, sorry I missed this (my watchlist is way to overloaded to catch everything, sadly). I will think about exactly what data I need and get back to you this week. You can take your time with actually running the script, but it would be great to have results by September 1. Maybe you can help me specify the criteria. The goal is to capture how many links there were to actual highbeam documents in references. We want to exclude mere mentions of Highbeam in Talk and Wikipedia space. We also want to not count mentions of the mere domain HighBeam.com, as a typical reference might include a link to a document and HighBeam.com. The crux of the matter, however, is that it doesn't really matter what metric we chose, as long as it's consistent with the comparison X months later. I suppose what would be ideal is to have three data points: A, B, and C. A would be an arbitrary dump X months before B. The change from A to B would establish 'normal' growth before the HighBeam project. B would be the start of the HighBeam project, ideally (March 20th). And C would be a dump X (or fewer) months after B, to determine what percent change occurred due to the HighBeam project. Let me know if that is possible or helpful. I'll think more about what the minimal requirements would be to see if we can do this quick and dirty. HighBeam doesn't need a formal analysis and I don't want this to be a major project for you, just a targeted strike. Ocaasi t | c 13:03, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
What is reasonably straight forward is to parse the external links table from a dump. However, that only includes the URL and the ID of the page. I think (need to check my code to be sure) that what I have can use the page ID to get its title, from which I can work out if it is an article. So, I can probably get a list of URLs in article space. I can exclude a URL which goes just to highbeam.com (that is, include only URLs of the form highbeam.com/something). It would be hard to look up the wikitext from the page ID and work out which URLs were in a ref, and I think that's beyond what I have. I'll wait to hear more and will then start thinking. Johnuniq (talk) 10:11, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Block form

The block form is used by admins for blocking named accounts or IP addresses. There are six check boxes just above the Block button. One of them is "Autoblock any IP addresses used". It is ticked by default. I understand what autoblock does when one blocks a named account, but it would appear to be irrelevant when blocking an IP address. I'm looking for a technical confirmation that autoblock has no effect on the block of an IP address.

If indeed autoblock is irrelevant, it follows that it doesn't matter whether the check box is ticked or unticked, right?

Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:08, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

If you block an IP address with and without the checkbox the result is the same both in BlockList and API output. That's a good enough confirmation for me. — AlexSm 20:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
The reason you see that superfluous checkbox is simply a regression in MediaWiki, see mediazilla:35893 "Block form shows options reserved for IPs when blocking a user and viceversa". — AlexSm 20:10, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
That probably explains why there is no instruction at WP:NAS/B - probably written when the software detected what kind of account was being blocked. I'm not used to reading these bug reports. Has the fix been implemented (see [7])? Thanks for your help.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:25, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
The fix has been applied to MediaWiki, as shown by the Status on the Gerrit change being "Merged". Unless it gets reverted it will be live here in a few weeks. It's too late to make it for 1.20wmf8 (due here on 30 July), so we'll probably have to wait until around 13 August (for 1.20wmf9).
If it bothers people enough, we could edit MediaWiki:Group-sysop.js as mentioned in T37893 (comment #6) to work around the bug for the next three weeks. Anomie⚔ 02:23, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
It doesn't bother me to wait a couple of weeks. I just wanted to sort it out.--Bbb23 (talk) 02:38, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

line-height:1

A recent edit (diff) using WP:CHECKLINKS made several good changes, but broke a complex table at Transmission Control Protocol#TCP segment structure by changing "line-height:1" to "line-height:1px;;". The problem can be seen in the diff by searching for "(if ACK set)" and observing that the next row has several cells where characters overstrike each other (next to "SYN" which is displayed vertically, as the others should be).

Would someone please check the table as it is now because these two edits have restored the original. I'm wondering if the "line-height:1" is needed, or should be done another way (and future automated edits are likely to repeat the problem). Is this a CHECKLINKS problem that should be reported? Johnuniq (talk) 02:34, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Frankly, the styling and the nonbreaking spaces are unnecessary and I would venture they make the table inaccessible (the styling, at the very least, is problematic). I've removed it. --Izno (talk) 03:20, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, although the previous table was more attractive (stuff like "SYN" is a single word, short for "synchronize", but now it looks like three letters S-Y-N). However, it is more in keeping the standard! Johnuniq (talk) 04:24, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Unintended effects of edits one makes... :^)

As for the problem of whether those kind of changes should be made by Checklinks would be to hit up the talk page. --Izno (talk) 22:15, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't matter, but if the circumflex is a comment on my exclamation point, the latter was intentional as the RFC standard is an ASCII text file, and its rendition of the table in question (particularly with its fixed character width and line height) is even more unattractive.
Yes, I could notify the Checklinks page, but I wanted to see what opinions were here (I'm not going to allege malfunction if other factors apply). Johnuniq (talk) 07:30, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
CSS requires units for all numbers expect zero. I probably should've made it drop the property (like the browser does) instead assuming the user meant pixels :-). — Dispenser 13:41, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for info. Maybe long ago someone specified a reasonable number of pixels (with px) but subsequent edits removed everything except the "1"? Anyway, situation resolved. Johnuniq (talk) 12:20, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Default enabled gadget for filing disputes

Hi everyone. As part of my fellowship, I ran a survey on dispute resolution in April 2012, and undertook an analysis of dispute resolution forums in May. From the results of this survey, where respondents expressed the complexity of dispute resolution among other concerns, I've developed (with support from WMF tech) a workflow system for filing disputes - making the process simpler for participants and volunteers. The source code can be found at User:Steven Zhang/DRW.js and has been discussed by participants at the dispute resolution noticeboard. This would need to be a gadget, enabled by default. It would only work at the dispute resolution noticeboard for a trial, for the month of August, to see if it has an impact on the resolution rate, volunteer participation and length of time it takes to resolve a dispute, against the baseline from May. This gadget would not be effective if it was opt-in, we would need to provide anyone who wanted to request dispute resolution instructions on how to enable the gadget, and I think this defeats the purpose of the gadget - to make it easier to file disputes. Once the trial at DRN is complete, assuming it is successful, I will hold another RFC on its implementation on a larger scale. To have accurate data, this would need to be implemented before 00:00 UTC, 1 August. I hope the community will support this proposal. Regards, Steven Zhang Get involved in DR! 01:59, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

If it really is supposed to be used ONLY on the dispute resolution noticeboard, then please make the default enabled gadget a loader for DRW.js, so that not everyone's connection is overloaded with Javascript bytes only required on a certain set of pages. Otherwise, no issue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Not sure how to do that...I'll get someone to look into it. It will be expanded in scope later but the scope of the gadget can be expanded then. Steven Zhang Get involved in DR! 08:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Maybe we should (re)consider AlexSm's suggestion on how to execute custom scripts per page? Helder 23:28, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
We could but, what's wrong with a few more if title =="match" then mw.loader.load statements. I don't really see the need for per page loading at this time. However AlexSm's suggestion was elegant. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:40, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

The code at MediaWiki:Gadget-DRN-wizard-loader.js should be either: 

if ( mw.config.get('wgPageName') === 'Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard' ) {
    mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-DRN-wizard.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&smaxage=21600&maxage=86400' );
}

or just 

if ( mw.config.get('wgPageName') === 'Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard' ) {
    importScript( 'MediaWiki:Gadget-DRN-wizard.js' );
}

Helder 22:52, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi Helder, thanks for your message, I've copied the second version on to the loader. Did I make a mistake anywhere else? I've not added Gadgets in a while so am a bit rusty! The Helpful One 23:03, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Odd template issue

I recently created Template:Clickable button; however, there is one problem. If the template is used in unindented text, it puts the template onto its own line. If it is used in indented text, the template appears inline. Does anybody know how this could be fixed? More information is at Wikipedia:Help desk#Redirects for recent template. Ryan Vesey Review me! 12:50, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

It uses <div>...</div> elements, which are block elements - that is, they shouldn't be used inline. See HTML 4.01 definition at w3c and w3schools. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Help with "invalid" signature.

I am trying to edit my signature and have been for several months. However, whenever I edit it, it tells me it is invalid but does not show me which part is invalid. And it will not link to my talk page. I'm just trying to update it and it isn't working out for me right now. Is there anyway you all could help me? I have that box checked that it tells me to check. I'm trying to change it to: '''[[User:Musicfreak7676|<small><span style="color:#D8BFD8">Musicfreak7676</span></small>]]''' [[User talk:Musicfreak7676|<sup><span style="color:CadetBlue">my talk page!</span></sup>]] MusicFreak7676 TALK! 21:36, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

You never closed the small tag. I don't know if that's the problem, but it's there. Someguy1221 (talk) 21:39, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
It still says it's an invalid signature. MusicFreak7676 TALK! 21:40, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Can you copy-paste, in nowikis again, what your new sig is, and also the exact error message that you get? Someguy1221 (talk) 21:42, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
I copied from the NoWiki and surprisingly it worked! Thank you so much for helping. All it kept saying was Invalid signature. That's all it was saying when it wouldn't work. Musicfreak7676 my talk page! 21:44, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Technically it's still invalid - see Wikipedia:Signatures#Appearance and color also WP:CONTRAST issues. The text colour is   which even on a white background is a contrast ratio of 1.7:1 - you should be looking for 4.5:1 or better. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:03, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Redirect-editing teleportation

Twice this day I attempted to nominate a redirect for speedy deletion, and twice I failed: after editing Serjeant-at-Arms of the British House of Commons” to add the appropriate template ({{Db-r3}}) above the redirect syntax, I saved the page only to find myself having created the redirect's talk page as a clone of the redirect, and having nominated it (the new talk page) for deletion instead of the original redirect! In other words, the text of the redirect I was editing was saved not on that page but in its previously non-existent talk page instead. Both pages have now been deleted by an administrator, in whose talk page can be found my story in slightly more detail. I am puzzled though; I am not aware of anything that could cause this kind of involuntary content transfer to another page without some sort of transclusion. Does anyone know how on Earth this kind of thing could have happened? Waltham, The Duke of 00:49, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

No, but it's not the first time; see the first entry at WP:STOCKS. Nyttend (talk) 03:06, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Lucky me for not being an administrator, then. Still, it makes no sense at all; could it be that the inclusion of the closing curly quotation mark at the end of the title broke something? Waltham, The Duke of 10:14, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I highly doubt it had anything with the curly quote. The curly quote is just another unicode character as far as MW is concerned (U+201D). There's nothing fancy or interesting about that character (And even if there was, I see no way that leads to editing the talk page). I have no idea how what you're describing could have happened. Bawolff (talk) 14:06, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
This seems to be a repeat of Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 90#CSD template weirdness from May 2011 - but no one had any ideas there either. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:42, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
A very similar case indeed. We have a recurring mystery in our hands... Waltham, The Duke of 23:03, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Increase in session errors

When saving changes, I'm encountering a significant increase in these errors: Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in.. A subsequent second attempt to save usually works, without a need to log back in, but these problems slow the editing somewhat. Anyone else getting this? Dl2000 (talk) 02:14, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

What are your editing patterns lately? I've found that this almost always happens if I open an edit window, get distracted, and attempt to save a good while later. Conversely, it's a problem if you're taking only a short amount of time between opening the edit window and attempting to save. Nyttend (talk) 02:35, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
This happens with multiple windows in play, some of which could be several minutes stale. However, similar editing appraches, say a month ago or earlier, have rarely involved those errors. Could there be recent changes to session timing thresholds or other related settings on WP? Dl2000 (talk) 03:25, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I post this only because it seems "session" related, but see Wikipedia_talk:STiki#Log_In_Failed_2 where a couple of users have been reporting problems logging into Wikipedia via API. Its unlikely to be an issue with that software since the issue corrects itself and it has never been a problem in the past. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 03:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Over the last few days ive been getting this a lot more than usual as well.B S 00:08, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Anybody else getting a simplified interface?

I'm suddenly getting a very simplified, large-text interface. I'd usually assume the server gremlins are pulling overtime, but I just upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion and (although I'm not sure how that would cause Firefox to parse the Wikipedia interface differently) I'm unsure if the cause is here or there. Is this a widespread problem or is it on my end? Thanks! --NellieBly (talk) 03:27, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for the dumbed-down answer, but first check the zoom settings for your browser. Nyttend (talk) 06:06, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I don't think it's that, since I'm now getting the same result on my iPad using Safari. --NellieBlyMobile (talk) 07:12, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I know what you're talking about. Everything suddenly looks like the old days? Happens to me every now and then, usually on special pages or page histories. Simply navigating to another page and/or clearing my cache usually clears everything. I feel like it's more common when the servers are slow. Someguy1221 (talk) 07:19, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I think what happens is that your browser somehow fails to load the CSS file that defines the page style. Forcing a hard reload (cmd-shift-R) should help. —Kusma (t·c) 07:30, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
I restarted my router and it stopped. Also now reconsidering the gremlins hypothesis: if my toaster breaks down any time soon, I'll unplug the slow cooker and see what happens. Thanks everyone. --NellieBly (talk) 20:05, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Linked image article not displaying in "What links here"

I received a notice that a non-free upload of mine was orphaned.[8] However, there is a conflict: The image is, in fact, inside of the parent article (Beach Heat: Miami), but on the uploaded file's page, the parent page is not listed as a link inside of "What links here," hence, the notice was sent. Any ideas on a fix? — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 06:04, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

After making an edit to the page, it now shows up on "what links here". Have a look at Help:Dummy edit. Jared Preston (talk) 06:44, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. At least I know what I can try if this ever happens again (first time I've ever seen it.) — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 00:21, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Page view stats

There have been several suggestions here about Wikimedia Foundation officially supporting User:Henrik's page stats tool (http://stats.grok.se/). Another editor noticed discrepancies between the raw figures and rankings Talk:WikiLeaks#Query_about_page_view_statistics, so are there any suggestions about issues with the external tool can be dealt with? --Cedderstk 08:54, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Extra line or two at the top of the page

The extra line or two (or three) that popped up between all article titles and the article text - are they permanent? Really only one question. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 22:23, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't see it. What is your skin and browser? Does it happen when you log out? And please post an example article even though you state it's all articles. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:48, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, some articles physically have extra lines in the edit window. Examples would help. Chris857 (talk) 00:06, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
It disappeared shortly after I posted this. Perhaps somebody up there was reading. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 00:14, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Change of name

Greetings. I recently changed my username on my home Wiki (BS Wiki), so what I have to do to merge my old username (Kukac) and edits with my present name (KWiki) at this Wiki (and other Wikis)? Thanks in advance. -- KWiki (talk) 17:31, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

It should all be covered at WP:RENAME. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:47, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your response. I appreciate that. But I still have some questions. I just realized that my present username (which I have unified globally few days ago) represent a different account. Does it mean that "merging" / renaming "Kukac" to "KWiki" is now impossible or I'm getting it wrong? If it is impossible, what I should do with "Kukac" name/account? Thank you for your help and sorry for any bothering. I'm administrator on Bosnian Wiki, but I'm still pretty unfamiliar with this kind of stuff and I don't want to create a mess. -- KWiki (talk) 19:54, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
I'm still waiting for answer. Can anyone help me, please? Is the "Kukac" account lost for good now and what should I do with it if it is? Thank you. -- KWiki (talk) 18:08, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Accounts can not be merged. What might be possible could be to rename User:KWiki here on enwiki to something else and then rename User:Kukac to User:KWiki (so edits by "Kukac" will be attributed to "KWiki"). To ask for that (it will need bureaucrat help), you need to go Wikipedia:Changing username/Usurpations and follow the instructions there. —Kusma (t·c) 19:21, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Instructions for using clade

Where are instructions for using the tree branch thing (is it a template? what do you call it?) in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wachovia&action=edit&section=6

Thanks. HowardMorland (talk) 18:50, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Generally speaking, when you encounter double braces {{, that's the start of a template transclusion; the next item is the template name (more at Help:Template). So, when you see {{clade |..., this is a transclusion of Template:Clade. Any template worth using should have documentation on its page, and this is no exception. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:00, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. Just what I was looking for. HowardMorland (talk) 14:05, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you, it was fixed as a result. Ryan Vesey Review me! 16:46, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Hlist navbox containing icons doesn't wrap properly

The first list in this version of {{Highways of the city of São Paulo}} doesn't wrap, and exceeds the screen width on WinXP/IE8. It seems to be the icons causing the problem (I tested a version with the icons removed, and that wrapped properly). My (fairly ugly) workaround was to add a <br> in the middle of the list, so that the problem now doesn't occur until the screenwidth is significantly smaller. Does anyone know a solution to this problem (or a more elegant workaround)? Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 01:39, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Tested on W7/Fx14. No such problem here with the above version. --Izno (talk) 02:36, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Hmm, seems like an IE specific issue. Perhaps a problem with inline blocks icw white-space: nowrap ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:19, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

View last few edits

 

Quite often I'll see an edit in my watchlist by an IP or new editor and click on the Diff link. Then I'll see that they made the previous edit, so I'll click on that. And the previous edit before that one... and so on. And while the last edit or two might just be fixing spacing or punctuation, the first edit amongst them is either POV or unsourced info or spam or some such thing.

Or I'll give up after that first or second diff and then click the history link for the article. Then I'll see that it's a good thing that I did because they made 5-10 edits to the article trying to get everything to look right and it would be a waste of time going back through them one at a time.

What I'm proposing is an additional link besides the Previous Edit or Last Edit links that will show all the latest changes by the last editor to work on the article. That way you can see all their edits all at once without having to go through the history and select the radio buttons. Good idea? Dismas|(talk) 02:59, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Potentially helpful. But what if an editor makes several consecutive edits with a very long interval (days, weeks...) between two of them? In that case, grouping all the edits might make it harder to identify those edits which you had not previously checked. Watchlists group edits by date, so would it help if the same principle was applied: consecutive edits by the same editor being grouped only where they were made on the same date?
To minimise inconvenience to existing editors, any implementation of this could be made by an opt-in gadget that inserts a suitable link on relevant diff pages.
— Richardguk (talk) 03:28, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
I wouldn't mind if this were made an opt-in gadget at all.
I think the example that you use is rare compared to the number of times where there's an intervening edit by another editor or a bot. Quite often on the pages that I watch there will be a few edits by an IP or new user and the previous edit to them is either by myself or another "trusted" editor whose name I recognize. So, I believe, this would help in patrolling. Dismas|(talk) 12:58, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
It is already available in one of our gadgets. See User:DerHexer/revisionjumper#Function: ← next-to-last editor and the image on the side. Helder 13:04, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Also note the User:Incnis Mrsi/edithysteria.js script, which I ported from one of foreign wikipedias. It gives a ready-to-use diff link to all consecutive edits of the last editor. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 13:21, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks!! Revision Jumper does exactly what I was looking for. Dismas|(talk) 00:14, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Key commands broken

I use key commands a lot, e.g., "alt-p" for preview, "alt-l" for watchlist. In Firefox 14.0.1 they are all broken. They still work (as "ctrl-alt-key") in Safari 5.1.7, but I don't use that browser because of other issues. I've tried all the usual remedies, now I'm asking for a few unusual ones, please!—Old Moonraker (talk) 20:23, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

I didn't know that Alt+P etc. were supposed to work. I have always understood that the keyboard shortcuts were Alt+⇧ Shift+P etc., which I've used for a long time now; and I note that these still work. Firefox 14.0.1, Windows XP. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:53, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
See WP:KS. Apparently it varies between browsers; for Firefox it changed from Alt to Alt+⇧ Shift at Firefox 2. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:57, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
I hadn't seen the recent change noted in keyboard shortcuts; the problem certainly started with the introduction of FF14. I found the new command using the "may as well give it a try" method, and it worked for a while but stopped again. Alt+⇧ Shift+P gives ∏, which I take to be a capital π.
The rollover used to reveal [ctrl-key], but can now sometimes (only sometimes) just show the key alone. It must be the implementation of the FF version change, so beyond the scope of this board. Waiting for FF15!
Thanks for the suggestions, and the {{keypress}} template demo — that was new to me as well!
--Old Moonraker (talk) 05:43, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
If it is just showing the key alone in the tooltip, then that might indicate that you have some Javascript which is occasionally failing, since the tooltips are 'corrected' after loading the page initially. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:48, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
In desperation (I really miss the facility), and following the point from User:TheDJ, I threw out all the vector scripts I had accumulated. Alt+Cntrl+P then worked, but for just one implementation, before reverting to where it was before: totally inoperative, or occasionally moving the insertion point in a small, random jump. Still baffled. --Old Moonraker (talk) 10:20, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Autopatrolled not inclusive

User talk:ACP2011 was approved for WP:Autopatrolled status on 17 June 2012, yet her new articles are still appearing in the Category:All unreviewed new articles list. For example, Bristol Naturalists' Society just appeared in that list. Her articles do not appear on the New Pages list. See new pages feed.

It would seem that the Category:All unreviewed new articles list is independently generated from the New Pages list, and the Autopatrolled status does not affect articles in that category. I would suggest that Autopatrolled should affect articles in that category. Please comment on whether my supposition about the two lists being independently generated is correct, and whether my suggestion about Autopatrolled could be implemented.--DThomsen8 (talk) 00:20, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

The category is added by {{New_unreviewed_article}}, which should be added and removed manually. Due to the way edits are processed, Category listings will often trail a bit behind pages, so you might see a bit of disjoint between the page and the category. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
In the specific case of Bristol Naturalists' Society, it was the presence of the {{Userspace draft}} template, which pulls in {{New unreviewed article}} if the page is not in User:, Wikipedia talk: or User talk: namespace. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:34, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
I now see how {{New_unreviewed_article}} is ... "added automatically to articles created via the Wikipedia:Article wizard 2.0 (the discussion page is at WT:WIZ2)." My suggestion is that users with the WP:Autopatrolled status should be passed without that template being added. Where can I make this a specific proposal? I look at the category frequently, and some users have the Autopatrolled status, and do such fine work, they should not have to wait for the reviewers like me to clear them. --DThomsen8 (talk) 19:37, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
Somebody who has sufficient experience to have been granted the autopatrolled right ought also to be somebody who no longer needs to use wizards to create new articles... if that's not the case, they should at least have the confidence to remove the {{userspace draft}} themselves. If I see a page which has that (or a {{new unreviewed article}}, which wasn't the case with Bristol Naturalists' Society) that's basically a sign to me saying "Please could somebody check this over, as I'm not sure yet?" Autopatrollers need to be sure. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:13, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

preventing line breaks where spacing won't help

Probably this is not solvable by MediaWiki, but "[s]he" getting a line break afer the closing bracket makes reading a bit difficult. I saw it in Internet Explorer. The bracketing is often needed within a quotation. I might like the same ability in phrases like these: "well-financed and -designed" (seen in WordPad but untested in a browser) where a line may be broken after the second hyphen, causing it to float in midair as if it had nothing to do with a word. Is it possible to suppress (during display by users) line breakage at inconvenient points when editing Wikipedia? Nick Levinson (talk) 20:14, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Use {{nowrap}} around the text in question; {{nowrap|-designed}} will never result in

lorem ipsum etc. lorem ipsum etc. lorem ipsum etc. lorem ipsum etc. -
designed lorem ipsum etc. lorem ipsum etc. lorem ipsum etc.

Just watch out for special characters; I'm not sure if your [s]he example would work. You'll probably have to use &# 91;s&# 93;he (minus the spaces between # and 9; I had to insert them to get the code to display), which appears as [s]he without causing coding issues with the brackets. Nyttend (talk) 04:18, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
See Help:Wiki markup#HTML entities. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:32, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
That template uses the 'nowrap' class so you can <b class="nowrap">boldly write text that does not get wrapped</b>. You can find the CSS code at MediaWiki:common.css. – Allen4names (IPv6 contributions) 04:47, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Can't suppress Edit toolbar v2

  Resolved

Help please! Edit toolbar v2 is appearing unbidden. I've got preferences/Enable enhanced editing toolbar deselected, which was working up until now, but today the v1.0 toolbar appears momentarily but then gets overwritten by the v2.0. The v2 is missing some features for which I don't care to memorize the mark-up (also I'm resistant to change). How can I exorcise Edit toolbar v2? Thanks --catslash (talk) 21:49, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't seen to be having that problem. What skin are you using? – Allen4names (IPv6 contributions) 04:36, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

MonoBook, but changing it to Vector does not banish the v2 Edit toolbar. --catslash (talk) 09:06, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Try to clear your entire cache. Try to select "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, save preferences, and then deselect it again and save. Which toolbar at Wikipedia:refToolbar 2.0#Troubleshooting do you see when you log out? PrimeHunter (talk) 10:16, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Now it's fixed thanks. I cleared the browser cache, switched "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" on and off again (which I'd tried previously without success), then logged out. When logged out, I got the v2 toolbar - but as I'd left it when logged in, with the "Help" section expanded. This suggested to me that the state of the toolbar must be saved in a cookie. After deleting all wiki-related cookies and logging in again v2 had gone. Hooray! Thanks, --catslash (talk) 14:41, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Odd URLs resulting from edits

As long as I can remember, I would be taken to a page's normal URL after clicking "save"; going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VP/T and editing would take me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical). Today (and perhaps yesterday, but I don't remember it), I'm getting sent to a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php URL after saving an edit, along with a # character and other text thrown in. For example, after editing User:Nyttend/Indiana NRHP/Jefferson, I was sent to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Nyttend/Indiana_NRHP/Jefferson&pe=1& instead. Why? What's going on? IE 8/Windows 7/Monobook, but I can't see how that would be relevant. Nyttend (talk) 04:14, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

See #URL change following save a few sections up from here. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:11, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Database lag again

I can't load my watchlist or contributions. Mega-lag on database? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 00:12, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

It's coming down (at about 900 seconds for me now) but it had been at 1,600 seconds for a brief while, pushing my watchlist back into the previous day. GRAPPLE X 00:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Tim Starling fixed it by disabling AFT. --Nemo 04:55, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

en.wikipedia.g-webs.com

What on earth is this? A user asked to have his user sub-page deleted, which was done, but he is upset to find that Google still shows up a copy on http://en.wikipedia.g-webs.com/wiki/. I would think it was just a mirror site, but an address starting "en.wikipedia" looks as if it is something to do with the WMF. JohnCD (talk) 22:57, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Looks like a trademark violation at least for File:Wiki.png. I don't know how agressive the foundation is about protecting that image's trademark. The actual page content there wouldn't be anything to do about, as its creative commons licensed. Monty845 23:01, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
I know the foundation went after a Christian site with a logo that looked like the globe logo but with crosses instead of glyphs. They are protective. Chris857 (talk) 23:36, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
Not sure the point of contact for trademark stuff, but someone should pass it up. Monty845 23:48, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
I posted to Steven (WMF)'s talk page because, IIRC, he has been involved before and works for the foundation. Chris857 (talk) 00:13, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) and I raised it with the WMF's General Counsel - see User talk:Geoffbrigham#Mirror site using Wikipedia logo and "en.wikipedia" address. JohnCD (talk) 00:19, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
I'd also be concerned that they offer our log-in screens. That'd be a perfect means for capturing Wikipedia login information. (Couldn't quite create an account there, though!) --j⚛e deckertalk 00:45, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
See WP:MIRROR. I think this site is in breach, since it doesn't link back to the original wiki page on English Wikipedia, hence not providing the attribution required by CC-BY-SA. It also seems to be pulling data live from Wikipedia (look at http://en.wikipedia.g-webs.com/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox?action=history, for instance), which the WMF doesn't like at all. So it would probably be blocked at the server level if the techies are alerted. (Don't know what it's doing, but it's not doing that.) — This, that, and the other (talk) 01:13, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I've sent an email to the Trademarks team for this, FYI the email address is trademarks wikimedia.org. They are all at Wikimania at present so there may be a delayed response time and I've also made them aware of this thread. The Helpful One 01:38, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
That is a very peculiar site. It seems to be a dump of WP as at 8 April. Wikilinks work, but the search box doesn't, and there are no "History" or "Edit" tabs. If you try to create an account, the form appears, but no CAPTCHA image shows so you cannot proceed. What seems to me highly undesirable is that a casual reader who happens on it has no obvious way to tell that it is not the real thing - even if they look at the web address, it starts "en.wikipedia". JohnCD (talk) 20:34, 15 July 2012 (UTC)
If it's providing the fully editing history (and therefore a list of authors), isn't that enough? At least that was my understanding which seems to be supported Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content. (Of course who any author actually is may be difficult to identify if your wikipedia username is not particularly identifiable but I believe that's accepted as the risk you take.) In fact having a local copy of the full history is generally considered better (although it doesn't preclude also providing links to here) because you don't have to worry about deleted pages (well unless they were deleted for copyvio reasons). Although to be fair, the difficulty finding the history would likely push it in to incompliance. Moot point with the trademark violation of course. Nil Einne (talk) 16:31, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
It doesn't provide the editing history - there is no "View history" tab at the top of the page. The worrying thing is that if you arrive there somehow, you might see you were not logged in, think you were still on WP but had dropped out somehow, and try to log in again using their form. This is probably just a dumb dump, but a scam to harvest Wikipedia passwords could look like this. JohnCD (talk) 22:16, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
It's how the screen renders but all the tabs are there but listed at the bottom as are all the categories, hidden cats etc. NtheP (talk) 22:20, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
  • Thanks, guys! I've made sure that Legal & Community Advocacy is aware. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Tim1357's toolserver programs

User:Tim1357 appears to be less active on Wikipedia and inactive on the toolserver, and several programs on the toolserver account are not functioning. They are listed at User:Tim1357#Toolserver (version of 04:30, 27 November 2011). For example, when I tried today to access watchlists from Wikipedia:List of WikiProject watchlists (alphabetical), I received a message that the user account had expired. Is it possible for another editor to take over maintenance of the programs? Those watchlists are very useful.
—Wavelength (talk) 02:26, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

It would be great if someone could take over the project watchlists. Only problem at the moment is the fact that the toolserver still has a replag causing the results to be days-old. The lag has gone down a little bit the last couple of days (I think), so hopefully when that gets sorted, someone would take care of Tim's tools. Jared Preston (talk) 10:46, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
tools:~dispenser/cgi-bin/transcluded_changes.py - Uses the RR servers for lower replag (currently 15 hours), but doesn't have a category option. Related changes should really be fixed instead of us writing tools duplicating it. — Dispenser 11:18, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello! When I tried the external watchlist for chemistry project, the reply was that it has been expired. The same has seen for Soxred93's editcounter. What is happening? I was writing this on this page while I just tried to check mine to quote what is written, and found it all right with no replag. Look. However XI! is retired.

But look at the external watchlist,

403: User account expired

The page you requested is hosted by the Toolserver user tim1357, whose account has expired. Toolserver user accounts are automatically expired if the user is inactive for over six months. To prevent stale pages remaining accessible, we automatically block requests to expired content.

If you think you are receiving this page in error, or you have a question, please contact the owner of this document: tim1357 [at] toolserver [dot] org. (Please do not contact Toolserver administrators about this problem, as we cannot fix it—only the Toolserver account owner may renew their account.)

And dab solver still has replag,

INFO: s1 database cluster: High replag because of inserting many SHA1-hashes.

I don't understand anything. Please help. And I don't have a permanent link for these. Vanischenu『m/Talk』 11:44, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Soxred93's Edit Counter - which for a year or two has been titled "X!'s Edit Counter" - does still work, provided that you use the updated URL given at the bottom of your contributions page as Edit count. The URL changed in February this year, when TParis (talk · contribs) took over most (all?) of the tools formerly maintained by X! (talk · contribs), a.k.a. Soxred93 (talk · contribs). In general, whenever you have previously used a URL containing //toolserver.org/~soxred93/ alter this portion to //toolserver.org/~tparis/
Afraid that I can't help about tools provided by Tim1357 (talk · contribs). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:55, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you. Now I understand why when I tried to click on the link to edit counter in a user page (given by him/her as link) showed that it was expired, but I got the edit counter by clicking on the link provided at the user contributions special page. Then why doesn't it have replag while others (like dab) have? Vanischenu『m/Talk』 07:27, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
See #Toolserver replag above. On toolserver, the data from the English Wikipedia is held in an area known as "s1"; but for some reason there are two copies of this, known as "rosemary" and "thyme" (and I still don't know which is which). They should be in sync (and should also be very nearly in sync with the real world), but in recent weeks have got seriously out of step. The one that X!'s Edit Counter uses has caught up with the real world again, and is pretty much up to date as I write (and has been for three or four days now). The other one is still seriously behind and continues to get worse. It's now at 826573 seconds (about 9.5 days), which is approximately 60% of the worst-ever replag (in April this year it peaked at just over 15 days). --Redrose64 (talk) 12:20, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
Thank you Redrose, you explained it nicely. Vanischenu『m/Talk』 00:33, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
If I may: The toolserver have 2 copies of enwp: On one (rosemary) the toolserver-users can only read, while on the other (thyme) they can also write (not in the enwp-database, but in databases of their own). It is much more stressful for a database-server to read AND write and so thyme is slower and needs longer to complete the task of inserting hash-values of every revision in the history of enwp. Another reason is that many tool-authors do not use the read-only-server even as they could – which stress thyme even more.
Ideally we would have at least 2 server for every cluster, but we can't afford that. --DaB. (talk) 22:56, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

URL change following save

Anybody noticed a recent change to the URL following a save? Let's consider page Foobar, where the first section header is "History and etymology". When you first go there, the URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar; and whilst editing the first section, the URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foobar&action=edit&section=1 - so far so good, and that's how it's been as long as I remember. Upon hitting Save page, the URL following the save used to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar#History_and_etymology but this has recently changed, and now shows as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foobar&pe=1&#History_and_etymology What's this pe=1 query string for? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:09, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Seems to be something to do with mediawiki/extensions/E3Experiments (Editor engagement experiments). — Richardguk (talk) 16:51, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
OK, thanks. Seems that I might get some sort of message when I save an edit successfully. That's going to be an awful lot of messages, the rate I go at. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:44, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
My favorite thing about Wikipedians is that we catch changes like this so fast. :) Redrose and Richard: you're correct, it's part of the post-edit feedback experiment from WP:E3. I'll be making a bigger announcement with details Monday (because that's when it starts). In the short term, don't worry about it, because we won't be showing this experiment to any existing registered editors or any anonymous editors. Only people who sign up for brand new accounts have a chance of being put in the experimental group that receives these messages. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:49, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
Is there any way that the URL could be changed, for those not in The Group (;) ), back to the old format post-save? It's a bit annoying. - The Bushranger One ping only 00:42, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Is it annoying just because it's unexpected, or does it break something? If it's the latter, we absolutely have to deal with it, but for the former, it's probably not worth re-architecting the extension to avoid appending anything to the URL. I will ask, but to my knowledge it's not a trivial change. In any case, this test is only going to last two weeks. Using extra URL parameters like this is pretty standard, especially when we need to debug a new feature. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:08, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
What is the purpose? Could a hidden field on the edit page, a cookie, or a database query provide the same information less intrusively? I'm irrational enough to find it mildly disconcerting, but it also seems an odd way to collect data instead of tracking the preceding edit-submit. — Richardguk (talk) 03:39, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Surely you're just executing some sort of hook? Is it really that difficult to make the hook do nothing if the user is not in the target group? In any case, a tweak to htaccess rules would also work. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 12:56, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
After the whatever happens, will it go back to the original URL? Some of us use the URLs for navigation - so ending with the standard //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/article name url is quite useful. I imagine it would be for many new users as well. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:29, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Also, any persistence advantage over tracking confined to the form submission stage (hidden form field, or an internal hook) could be offset by spurious page impressions if editors bookmark or share the post-edit URL. Also, by forwarding to a new URL, the browser cache is less likely to override the pre-edit version of the text, so editors may be more likely to return to an outdated version of the page. — Richardguk (talk) 17:46, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Philosopher: yes, absolutely. In the meantime, just to state the obvious, typing in normal URLs will work as expected, if that's your preferred navigation method. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:58, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Awesome. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 18:45, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
It's just Not The Way It Was. If it's going back soon, then I can live with it.   - The Bushranger One ping only 03:37, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks you two. :) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:22, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I filed bugzilla:38798 regarding this issue. Steven: your behavior and the behavior of members of your team has been appalling here. I strongly urge you to step back and reconsider what you're doing and to whom you're doing it before the E3 team is simply destroyed. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:14, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

MZMcBride: calling Steven Walling's behaviour "appalling" is a bit too much. At least based on the comments in this section he gave the reasons for the the change, and stated that it will be only temporary. Jumping to conclusion that E3 team would be "destroyed" is going too far. MKFI (talk) 10:43, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Don't know what MZMcBride's problem is today, but as long as it doesn't blow up the servers, I don't see the issue. Hell in most modern browsers users can't even read that part of the URL anymore, since the browsers gray out everything after the domain name. Chillax.... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:54, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Steven marked a perfectly reasonable bug as wontfix, following Ori's comment that "we will allow ourselves to behave like elephants from time to time and we expect to be suffered." That's the behavior I found and continue to find appalling. It's incredibly reminiscent of the heavy-handed approach that the Usability team took, which engendered a lot of ill-will toward that team.
This JavaScript should not be loaded at all for nearly every user here. It's only intended for brand new user accounts. The fact that it is not only being loaded, but also disrupting the URL scheme is completely unacceptable. Steven and the E3 team's response has been "well, it won't last very long." Yes, it's possible to stick all kinds of garbage into the URL without actively breaking anything (we could append every URL with &thee3teamsucks=true, for example), but that doesn't mean it's appropriate to do so, even for "only" two weeks. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:56, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Delete window problem

I raised this earlier, but got an answer to another problem only (shouldn't have put two problems in one question...). When I click the delete button, I find that the selection box has extended off screen (and off the blue ground into the white of foreign parts), and I have to scroll sideways before I can select a category. This mainly applies when deleting talk pages, as the categories chosen by the patrollers are pretty accurately chosen. This sideways scroll is annoying me. I use XP Pro (classic view with no big bright buttons), Firefox 14.0.1 (the latest version, I think - they aren't pestering me to upgrade, anyway) (I use Classic view) and MonoBook (I hate Vector...). I haven't installed anything since I upgraded Firefox, which was well before this problem started. The only things updated have been AVG and Zone Alarm, which are the only things allowed to update automatically. (They aren't allowed to upgrade automatically - nothing is. I prefer to be in control.) Peridon (talk) 00:38, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

A screenshot might help visualize your problem better. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:21, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Probably would - if I knew how to do it. Not done a screenshot for years - never need to. When you click the delete button at the top of the page, up comes a window with a box labelled 'Reason' and another one 'Other/additional reason. The 'Reason' box ends in a triangle for scrolling down to the reason you want. There is a thin lined box around the two boxes and the actual execution button. This thin box and the 'Reason' box are extended about 2 cm to the right, going out of the blue background and putting the triangle off screen. The 'Other' type-in box doesn't seem to have changed. Interesting - I've just this minute discovered (after having deleted over 16,000 pages in my time as an admin) that the triangle isn't needed. I clicked in the box and it opened, allowing me to scroll down with the mouse wheel. I'd like to know why the thing's gone odd, though. Peridon (talk) 12:55, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Ehm you mean like this ? That's just because your browser window is not wide enough to fit the contents. Since the reasons in the dropdown list have not changed significantly over the last few weeks, i'm not sure what else could have caused it. Perhaps the fontsize used by your browser has changed ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:30, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Interesting. I've just changed the default from Times Roman 16 to 14pt and it's brought it back into line. The text in the box has gone to a rather small size (same has happened in the Summary box below here - but that's showing a sans serif font). I've never changed the default (it was Times Roman 16pt previously and still is TR), and always wondered why it was 16pt when the text always seemed to be the same as the 12pt in my DTP displays (both programs). I always just ignored it as everything seemed OK as it was. This change occurred (as I mentioned in the Recent Changes? section above) while I was out on a bike ride. No-one was in the house. Just tried 15 - brings it to the edge of the screen but improves the visibility of the text. Peridon (talk) 16:12, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Infobox software: Don't display snapshot, why?

In this article slrn, the infobox doesn't display the screenshot ([[file:Slrn.png]]). The image seems to be loaded (it appears in the "Information on the page/Medias" function in Firefox). --Serged (talk) 07:56, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Does clicking the [show] link next to the word "Screenshot" in the infobox help? That hiding is the collapsible= option of {{Infobox_software}}...seems like it's un-necessary for such the small image here. DMacks (talk) 08:01, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Comparison of webmail providers

Could someone please have a look at the Attachment limit column of the table on that article, since it currently seems to be sorting the numbers "alphabetically", as it were (so, the order goes: 10, 100, 20, 25 ...)? Could someone please take a look and fix it? (There may be similar issues that I have not spotted with other columns.) Thanks! It Is Me Here t / c 09:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Probably the text "other than the number itself" (units, ref, "to [someothernumber]", etc.) are making the values look string-like. See Help:Sorting. DMacks (talk) 09:41, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Red X instead of thumbnail

I've tried everything to figure this out, including posting at the Teahouse where it was finally suggested I ask here. I have searched your data base for a similar problem but none of the relevant finds are right on. I posted two images on "Old Sarum" (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Old_Sarum&pe=1) The images are under the paragraphs "Norman Development" image description "Old Sarum cathedral ruins" and under "Decline" image description "Altar at Old Sarum cathedral ruins". When I am logged in, there is no problem, but when I am logged out the thumb is blank with the red X, but only for the second image, but the image will still open up. They are identical in size, shape, type, coding, etc., except for the last number of the file name. Friends who are not members in Wiki have the same problem, even if they are with a different service provider.

A fellow at Teahouse said that he has no problem seeing the thumbnail through Firefox or IE9 (which is what I have) either logged in or not. I have moved the image around all over the place and tried everything short of removing it, which I may have to. Is there anything else I can try? I've even tried switching the word FILE in the coding to IMAGE and it doesn't change anything, so changed it back. Help. Mike Allen 14:47, 30 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aurelius99 (talk • contribs)

When you can't see the image, try to your browsercache. If that doesn't help, then it might be that your ISP uses some sort of proxy to cache pages and that this is interfering. In that case, you just have to wait for the ISP cache to expire (you can't do anything about it). In all cases, there is no real problem if you can see the image when you are logged in, it's just a small annoyance, but probably none other then you or perhaps all users of the same ISP will be affected and the article will show just fine for others. It's one of those technical weirdnesses of the Internet. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:17, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Bots and urls

Occasionally when I am editing a page I see a comment on a citation that says the text name was generated by a bot. I have been doing some work on the subpages to List of nicknames of European royalty and nobility. All the cations are now in ref tag pairs, but most of them are either raw URLs or the URLs are in square brackets with no text name. Can someone please tell me whether there a template that I can put on the top of the pages to inform a bot that it should check and fix the citations, or can someone direct me to the talk page of a bot that makes such fixes so I can put in a request directly to the bot owner. -- PBS (talk) 20:13, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I suggest you look at the {{Cleanup-link rot}} template, and especially the "How to use" section in its description. This will talk you through using the Reflinks tool to fix them yourself. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:32, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks just what I needed. -- PBS (talk) 23:44, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Diff formatting uneven

Look at this. I have IE9, so I don't know if that means anything, and I chose the page appearance Wikipedia had when I started, as well as the method where I continue displaying diffs with yellow and green.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:55, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

A screenshot might be handier. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:50, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl522332/Bad_IE9_diff_for_blanking.gif was made logged out with IE9. If Compatibility View is enabled in IE9 then the diff looks normal. The same happened on another page blanking I tested. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:32, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
Hmm, seems IE9 finds reason to interpret 48% width as 100% width. Strange, there is no reason to fill out that space unless it's ignoring the colgroup styling. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:28, 28 July 2012 (UTC)
Just to make sure we're dealing with the same thing, how should I send the screen shot?— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:53, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
I already linked to a screenshot above. If the diff looks similar to you then there is no need for another screenshot. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:04, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I'll look at it later. I'm sure it's a trustworthy site but I'm at home.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:20, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Okay, it's similar enough. Thank you.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 13:40, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
On Firefox, which is what this computer has, the diff looks perfectly normal.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 13:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Live article count

Hi. I was wondering if somebody could provide me with a live article count in my preferences which keeps track of how many articles I've created like it does with edit count?♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:50, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

This probably can't be done easily, as the edit count in your preferences is taken directly from a database field, but there is no such field in the database for the number of articles created by a user. That figure would have to be calculated manually, which would take a long time for users with many edits such as yourself. :-) Graham87 08:54, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Database search query

Pew Research Center This is small (120 empolyees in infobox) American opinion(?) polling company. 'What links here' goes to many articles. When I first saw one of the links I thought it looked 'spammish'. I am Canadian so I don't know how valued this company's polls are because we have different ones up here. This has me wondering if it is possible to search the database to see if a few users have added the wikilinks to all of these articles, if it is coincidence that so many exist, or if it is a polling company that has high hits on google for 'opinion poll'. If this is possible it may be handy to see if any users are 'spamming' articles by simply doing things like adding poll result wikilinks to them.--Canoe1967 (talk) 09:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I did more research. They are notable and cited for statistics all over. I was also curious that couldn't find their Survey methodology figures. Two others I found easily at 1000 calls a day. This company may just be lower, sell their stats for less that way, and thus they are small and notable. Feel free to resolve this as a goose chase unless someone else wants to kick it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 12:50, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Character recognition in #ParserFunctions

I use parser functions (like #switch:) to handle Braille cell characters (they are defined in Unicode). So far I use numbered cell-id's, like "1356" not ⠵ (for U+2835 ⠵ BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1356). My straight 0-8 number id is to be sure that the id is correctly identified in parsing. (I was afraid that the straight Braille unicode character ⠵ might not be identifying in some situations). But maybe I am mixing font-issues up with code-issues.
So now my hypothesis is: in WP parsing code, such a character ⠵ can be used for identification and so can be used without doubt in the parser functions. Am I correct? -DePiep (talk) 12:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

To a switch statement, a (non-control, non-weird-space, non-reserved-for-wikicode) unicode character is a unicode character, and should be identified perfectly well. Fancy braille things should be fine. (One point of consideration though, the character may be changed if used in an id attribute of an html tag (It will still work, it just may be replaced with something else, probably an underscore followed by numbers) Bawolff (talk) 18:04, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
ok, thanks. All this Unicode braille is in the range U+28xx. (256 ids) -DePiep (talk) 01:56, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Feature experiment for new Wikipedians

 
One of the confirmation messages
 
The second confirmation message, but this time with a more encouraging message.

Hi everyone. I wanted to give some notice that the experiments team at the Foundation is starting a new feature test later today.

What this is: For two weeks, a random sample of newly-registered Wikipedians will get a three-second confirmation message after they save their edits. We're testing two different message texts, but otherwise they look the same (see the screenshots to the right).

If you're interested in related experiments or more about the inteface design, that's here. If you're interested in the data analysis side of things, that's here.

Why we're testing this: The overarching purpose of these tests to get clear data about what improvements to the software we can make to encourage more Wikipedians to join the project. The elevator pitch for this feature in particular is that it's a good idea to confirm to a person when their contribution is successful, unless it is visually obvious 100% of the time. This confirmation message usually takes the form of a small, temporary message on screen, and that's exactly what we're doing for the first iteration of what we're calling "post-edit feedback." This is a small change to the site, but one that I hope will increase Wikipedia's ability to give new contributors real-time feedback about editing.

Who will see it: The only people who will see this user interface change is a random selection of those who register and edit after the start of the experiment. Anyone who has contributed in the past will have learned that the normal state of affairs is that there's no confirmation after saving other than page reload, so we're not changing the editing experience at all for existing community members or people who happen to be logged out.

If you're editing and you see changes to the URL for the next couple weeks, don't panic, as it's intentional. As discussed in other threads above, the purpose of this URL change is to confirm that the page you are on is in a post-edit state, even if you are not being delivered the test. It also helps us debug the feature. Regular URLs will continue to work just fine if you enter them/click on them, and after the experiment is over, the normal links will return.

If you want to experience this first hand, please don't register new test socks here on English Wikipedia. ;-) If anyone is interested in seeing it in action for all of its three seconds of glory, then let me know, and I can upload a screencast to Commons. For the more technical among us, there's also a simple way to see the message using your browser console – the prompt is mw.experiments.showFeedback('Your message here.') on any article.

What we need your help on: If you see any breakages or very unusual site activity please report it, either here or on Bugzilla under the E3 component. We've done much more rigorous testing than our last experiment, so I don't anticipate any performance problems. However, be on the lookout for any strangeness around editing/saving.

Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:07, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

What's the "<speech bubble icon> Editing Wikipedia..." thingy in the top-left corner on the screen shots about? Bawolff (talk) 18:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Oh, that's MoodBar. It's one half of a new editor feedback system that's been around for a while. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:57, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Is there a reason the Wikipedia logo is rubbed out in the picture? If there is a copyright issue, there are a heck of a lot of derivatives that need to be deleted. Ryan Vesey 19:00, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
It is, indeed, a copyright issue. We try to blur the logos and trademarks out so that we don't run into any sharing problems and we don't have to use the "Copyright by Wikimedia" license when the files are placed on commons.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
You should really just cut it out rather than blur it, otherwise you're still just creating a derivative work. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:31, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
The whole question of how to deal with WMF mockups/screenshots and the correct way to avoid unnecessary copyright restrictions is a question to be settled with the Commons community, I think. We should probably just start an RFC or something, so that the question is answered once and for all. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:38, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Blurring it out should be sufficient, just as pixelating an image is. In any case, I feel it would have been easier to attribute the image rather than blur it. The only reason I asked was because it initially made me curious as to whether there was a more strict copyright on the logo than on other Wikipedia images. That would have made me concerned about things like File:Bouncywikilogo.gif. Ryan Vesey 20:45, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Pixellating an image is sufficient? - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:47, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
That has been my assumption at least since I've seen it done before. It may be that it is acceptable due to de-minimis. Note that per commons:com:De minimis "Where the extent of copying falls below the threshold of substantial similarity" is also an argument for de-minimis in the United States. For an example of that see File:Korean War Veterans Memorial Without Soldiers.jpg (in this case blurring is used). Ryan Vesey 20:53, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
In fact, is it possible that the image would have qualified for de-minimis without the blurring? Trademark protections would still apply. Ryan Vesey 20:55, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I think so. The blurring is just to remove any doubt, particularly outside in the US. Which is why, if you're just doing it to remove doubt, you should just cut it altogether. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:59, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
You're talking Stalin style? As in File:2009 FIFA Confederations Cup ball by adidas.JPG? At that point, I suppose it'd come down to what was easier. If this was to be used in a public manner it might make more sense to do the latter, but I don't think it matters too much now. Ryan Vesey 21:05, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Well, the usual response is "we're not entirely happy, perhaps the WMF should license its logos CC-BY-SA and rely on its trademark protection", which the WMF legal team isn't particularly happy about. And repeat. - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:47, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
The WMF being hypocritical? Next you'll be telling me the sun will rise in the east in the morning. - The Bushranger One ping only 19:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
I assume it will be too hard to give Cluebot a chance to reject an obscene edit before the contributor is given a friendly green tick and a "Thank you". -- John of Reading (talk) 21:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes, but if AbuseFilter or the spam blacklist prevents an edit from being saved, no message will be given. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Jodie Kidd image

The image File:Jodie_Kidd_2008.jpg on Jodie Kidd renders correctly in IE (8.0), but not in Firefox (10.0 - all I have to test with right now) - it's rotated 90 degrees left in the latter. Note that the EXIF information on the image was changed recently to reflect the proper orientation. FF shows it in its original orientation, but distorted to fit its current aspect ratio. This doesn't seem to be a caching issue, but I'm not sure. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:56, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a caching issue to me. Looks fine now to me, is the issue still present for you? (Sometimes images take a couple minutes before the thumbs can be purged. If the thumbnail fail to purge for only a specific size thumb, sometimes differences are noticed between users if they have different default thumb sizes in preferences ) Bawolff (talk) 18:10, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Just tried in Firefox 14.0.1, and it's still rotated incorrectly. I just tried again in IE, and in Safari as well, and it's fine in both, but not Firefox. --Fru1tbat (talk) 23:21, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Ok, looks like the problem might be the way Firefox handles the embedded thumbnail. When the image in the article is set to 300px, the orientation is correct. When it's set to 200px or below, it's rotated and distorted in Firefox. Maybe the embedded thumbnail should just be removed? This might fix it. Or is there a better solution? For now, I've just made the image slightly larger in the article. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Image caption "0" disappears

Please consider these images & their caption/mousehover text: thumb|20px|2

Thumb, caption "1":
 
1
 Thumb, caption "0":
 
0
(nothing specified) caption "1":  
Mouse hover text = 1 		(nothing specified) caption "0":  
!Has no caption (no hover text)

Anyone with an idea or workaround/solution? -DePiep (talk) 19:12, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Good catch. Sounds like a MW bug (Specificly sounds like somebody either using PHP's negation (!) operator, or using weak comparision (==) when they should have used strict comparision (===). Bawolff (talk) 19:49, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Perhaps this one $alt = empty( $options['alt'] ) ? '' : $options['alt']; from includes/media//MediaTransformOutput.php —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:32, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Also: entering "00" works well (numerical value would still be 0 right). Tested a bit with/without size param 20px -- same effect. And hey, this is from a True Aim! (ask me for details). I am not a bug seeker, I already spent dozens of edits myself on this ;-) -DePiep (talk) 00:44, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
That matches with the behavior of empty as described here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:09, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Filed bugzilla:38910 for this small problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Lowercase interwikis

Sometime ago part of interwiki languages displayed in lowercase letter (yes some language names begin with lowercase letter). But now it has been changed. I think it should be changed back to use language's own format, to start with lowercase or not. Current format is wrong for some languages. --Olli (talk) 05:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

see also discussion on the bugtracker —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:53, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
thx--Olli (talk) 09:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 100#MediaWiki 1.20wmf5 deployment complete --Redrose64 (talk) 10:43, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Article titles containing "prefix:foo"

So, I've been seeing a few articles accidentally created recently with titles ending with "prefix:foo" in them, like Chelsea Newman prefix:Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Yiddish prefix:Talk:Isaac Asimov/, and How do you cut and paste something that I have from pdf including pictures prefix:Wikipedia:FAQ (there's one from today, too, but I don't really want to link it, due to its content). Looking at the VPT archives, I've seen some discussion of it being a result of searching with the prefix and then following the creation suggestion, and that a Bugzilla entry was opened (and closed) and an edit filter was suggested. Did anything happen with this? I can't imagine an edit filter for this would be hard to make; wouldn't it just be article_namespace == 0 & article_text like "* prefix:*" or something? I don't think that would have many false positives or anything. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 14:56, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I think Titleblacklist would be a better option. And if you want to find more useless pages then grep can help; for example, currently there are 2 redirects in mainspace and 126 pages and redirects in userspace. — AlexSm 16:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Ooh, that's a good idea. I'll put an edit request over there; thanks! Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 17:20, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Or we could "fix" it even better with some JavaScript by simply hiding MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new in this case. I just did in another project (of course, we already had Search.js called from Common.js on the search page). — AlexSm 18:17, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Well, it's already added to the title blacklist, so that's probably good enough for the moment, at least. The only thing about the JS solution is that, for all the examples of this that I've seen, people aren't intending to create a new page at all; they seem to be trying to make a new section on a talk page, so, while JS is definitely a more elegant solution to the narrow problem, I'm not sure it's a good idea for the wider problem. Allowing people to accidentally create pages with more-plausible titles will probably allow more of these accidental articles to slip through the cracks, I think. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:35, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
See also bugzilla:29989. Helder 20:12, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Meetup template broken

Wikipedia Meetups
   April 2024 +/-
London 203 April 14, 2024 (2024-04-14)
Oxford 99 April 21, 2024 (2024-04-21)
San Diego 110 April 22, 2024 (2024-04-22)
North Carolina Earth Day April 23, 2024 (2024-04-23)
Edinburgh 15 April 27, 2024 (2024-04-27)
BLT Office Hours April 28, 2024 (2024-04-28)
   May 2024 +/-
Auckland 22 May 4, 2024 (2024-05-04)
Leeds 6 May 4, 2024 (2024-05-04)
Exeter May 5, 2024 (2024-05-05)
London 204 May 12, 2024 (2024-05-12)
US Mountain West online May 14, 2024 (2024-05-14)
Bay Area WikiSalon May 16, 2024 (2024-05-16)
San Diego 111 May 20, 2024 (2024-05-20)
BLT Office Hours May 26, 2024 (2024-05-26)
Full Meetup Calendar • Events calendar on Meta
For meetups in other languages, see the list on Meta

{{Meetup}} seems protected, so I can't figure out why it's not working, as, for example, here. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:03, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

It just means that the subtemplate for next month - Template:Meetup/September 2012 - hasn't been created yet. Compare for example Template:Meetup/August 2012 or Template:Meetup/July 2012. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:55, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Image thumbnail quality

The thumbnails that WP makes for images are severely JPEG compressed, such that they look "harsh" and have visible ringing artifacts. It seems such a shame to waste precious screen pixels by filling them with such low-quality stuff. Who can help work on refining this tradeoff? Dicklyon (talk) 18:49, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Not everyone has that much bandwidth and pixels to waste. The tradeoff is called a tradeoff for a reason of course. Just because your are doing some of the trading, doesn't make the balance bad. It just means it apparently isn't to your liking. Anyways, they are just imagemagick settings. The current settings are mostly in here: in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=blob;f=includes/media/Bitmap.php 80% compression, with a sharpenfactor of 0x0.4. So find some new settings, create a set of original test files (graphs, photo's, diagrams, with various dimensions and quality) show results pre and post and convince folks :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:15, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, that's useful info. I realize there are tradeoffs and opinions involved, so the real question was about who needs to be convinced. I'll also need some help making the case, as I'm not a software engineer and don't hack php and ImageMagick and such (but I can learn). I do have some useful experience in image quality and compression that I can bring to bear, if people are open to it. By the way the jpeg quality parameter 80 is not a percent, even though it is often referred to as such because it's defined from 0 to 100; it's an arbitrary parameter in the IJG's jpeg6b library (unless ImageMagick used something different, which I doubt). I very much agree with the guy who concluded "Below 85, the artifacts are too onerous for my taste", especially nowadays when bandwidth is not as scarce as it used to be, and screen real estate is usually the more precious resource. From a quick googling around, it appears that the sharpening has gone to 0x0.8 (here), which may be part of the problem. With less sharpening, the thumbs would be less harsh, and a higher quality setting could be used without increasing the file size. Worth a try, anyway... Dicklyon (talk) 22:01, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
That's probably because you are not using dial up in africa :D Anyways, in terms of sharpen, bugzilla:24857 might be of interest. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, it's fascinating how they tried to fix a problem and created another; some comments in the code might have prevented that. I've reverse-engineered their before and after kernels, in terms of both what I think they were trying to do, and what they actually did, in comparison to the unsharp-mask kernel (I did all this in Matlab, as, like I said, I'm not really a software engineer, but I can figure out C code to some extent). Anyway, the new sharpening scheme in ImageMagick is usable, and the new parameters are not as bad as the old ones. We could do better, however, by using their actual unsharp masking function instead, since its two additional parameters would let us get good visual sharpening without so much effect on JPEG encoding size, and then we could go to quality 85 and get a net win. The default 220-pixel thumbs are tiny (about 12 KB) and would stay about that size.
But in the process, I found that in spite the non-optimality of this sharpen function, things are not as bad as I thought. The main problem I was having was that I had my browser's magnification up a bit, so I wasn't seeing thumbnails 1:1, but through a cheesy upsizing. With that fixed, they're really not nearly as bad as they appeared to me, so it's probably not worth worrying about. But thanks for the pointers; now I know how ImageMagick works and how its code is written (without comments). If anyone cares about their residual bug, or how we can exploit their unsharp mask to advantage, let me know. Dicklyon (talk) 19:56, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Question about protection

I posted this at WP:AN (here) but got no reply. I have just fully protected Syria for a week as a result of an content dispute. However, the article was previously semi-protected until October because of persistent vandalism. I have no intention to remove the semi-protection that is already in place, as the full protection is for a different, shorter-term issue. However, when the protection expires, the semi-protection will also be lost (as happened at Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories). Is there a way to prevent the current semi-protection from expiring when full protection expires? If not, is it worth talking to the developers about? Thanks. ItsZippy (talk • contributions) 17:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Nope, there isn't. It's probably worth filing a bug about it on Bugzilla. Graham87 01:53, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Template help required

  Resolved

Need some help with {{Sent off}}. The current implementation overlays two images, which results in alignment problems on the subsequent line. We have a single image equivalent to the two overlaid images but it's a bit beyond me to work out how to incorporate it into the template. See Template talk:Sent off for more information. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 13:21, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Fixed —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:19, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

need help with talk page automatic archiving

Hi,

For some reason my automatic archiving stopped working in May. Further, although there are three archives I can't find them in the edit window and I don't know how to make a fourth archive (to archive my too long page myself) that would relate to the first three archives. I've fiddled but can't fix it. Help? MathewTownsend (talk) 16:16, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I couldn't see anything wrong with your Mizabot definitions, but there were a couple of stray characters in the existing archives which I have removed just in case that helps. I also tidied up the first archive to match the others. Hope that is OK. You can make the fourth archive yourself if you wish: open the third archive, replace the "3" with a "4"" in the browser's url field and open that. You then get a page with a create button for the new archive. Just start it off with {{aan}} as for the others. You can then cut sections from your current talk and paste them into the new archive. --Mirokado (talk) 17:09, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll try that. MathewTownsend (talk) 17:40, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

A question concerning scripting and protection

I'm asking this question on behalf of User:Betacommand/User:Δ

I am looking for a script, not sure if it exists or not, but I want to add a tab to my site that automatically protects a page, it loads the action=protect fills in the length (indef) permissions (sysop) and reason and then automatically submits its. Any help would be appreciated.

He will be watching this page for your reply and find a way to contact you if interested (or you can contact him directly via email too). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:14, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Try (with customisations):
var portletLink = mw.util.addPortletLink( 'p-cactions', '#',
        'Autoprotect', 'ca-autoprotect'
);
$( portletLink ).click( function(){
	var currentPage = mw.config.get( 'wgPageName' );
	var pageId = mw.config.get( 'wgArticleId' );
	jQuery.getJSON(
	  mw.util.wikiScript( 'api' ), {
		'format': 'json',
		'action': 'query',
		'titles': currentPage,
		'prop': 'info',
		'intoken': 'protect'
	  }, function ( data ) {
		var token = data.query.pages[pageId].protecttoken;
		jQuery.post(
			mw.util.wikiScript( 'api' ), {
			 'format': 'json',
			 'action': 'protect',
			 'title': currentPage,
			 'protections': 'edit=autoconfirmed|move=sysop',
			 'expiry': '20171024160754',
			 'token': token,
			 'reason': 'Blah'
	  } );
	} );
} );
Regards, - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 20:00, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

ernie bargas sunday 920 pm nov 20

Citation template problem

When using the citation template (Firefox 15.0) three things happen.

1. It works.

2. Nothing happens when I click Insert, but Preview works.

3. When I click Insert the citation is placed at the top of the section I'm editing.

I was ignoring this until someone at said I didn't add sources, showing this diff. Dougweller (talk) 20:50, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

  • I have Firefox 14.0.01 and Windows XP. I used to have that phenomenon of the citation template not inserting anything, and then sort of solved that by switching out of my Modern skin to something else, and then back again. However, I was editing earlier in the day, and it flipped back to that non-insertion and then starting inserting again.
  • The inserting it at the top of the section, instead of where it's supposed to, has been driving me nuts since at least July 18 when I reported it Here. Nobody replied to my post.. And it hasn't been just the citation template where it happened. It would also happen if I clicked my pointer in a spot to type, and what I typed would jump to the top of the section or somewhere else. Haven't had that today. Both things have happened to me, also. Maile66 (talk) 21:44, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
I suspect you are referring to the cite button on the editing toolbar; see WP:REFTOOLBAR. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 22:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)
In my case, the jumping around and inserting in the wrong place is not limited to that Cite Button on the toolbar. It has happened with Provelt. And it has happened, as I indicated above, when I'm just typing. Like if I decide to insert a few characters of typed text in another paragraph up there, I would click in the place where I want something inserted and type, and it would insert at the top of the section instead of where it's supposed to. Hasn't happened today. But it's certainly happened over this past weekend, and before. I can at least date it back to my July 18 post. Maile66 (talk) 20:20, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
And it just now did it, so it's still happening. I was doing an insert from the Cite template on the toolbar, at the end of a paragraph. When I clicked on "Insert", it jumped to the top of the section and inserted it in front of the "==" before the secton header.Maile66 (talk) 12:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Remove all browser 'Rollback' links everywhere

Hi, I'd like to remove all "Rollback" links everywhere from my browser. I have the following in my common.css: 

 .mw-special-Watchlist .mw-rollback-link {
    display: none;
 }

which removes the Rollback links from my Watchlist, but I don't want them anywhere. I want to keep Rollback permission for Huggle but not for any other use. Can this be done? Thanks... Zad68 20:03, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I think all the rollback links have the same CSS class, so if you just delete the ".mw-special-Watchlist" pit, it should work everywhere. Seems to for me at least. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 20:07, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Works!! Just as advertised. Cheers!! Zad68 20:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
  • As more and more people are using hand held/touch screen devices to use Wikipedia (especially when they are away from home), I think having this as an option in preferences might be a good idea. - jc37 20:10, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
  • Yes please! I'd actually like to disable Rollback only on my mobile device. Is there some sort of JavaScript thingie I can put in that says, If I'm on a mobile device, then remove the Rollback link? Zad68 20:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
try the following
@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
  .mw-rollback-link {
     display: none;
  }
}
It means, "only apply to screens with a maximum width of 480px" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:17, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
I'm actually not using an iPhone or iPad. WP:NPOV fail! :) Can this be done in a more general way, such as checking for mobile connectivity? I know that Wikipedia detects when I'm connected via my mobile device browser and offers the mobile version, so I know Wikipedia can tell when I'm connected mobile. What's the if-statement clause for that? I think that would 100% do what I want. Thanks in advance.... Zad68 13:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
I didn't say you were. your mobile device screen is larger then this ? Raise the number.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:53, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Just making an iPhone vs. Android joke. Actually my mobile device has 1280 x 720 native resolution and reaches into desktop resolution range. It'd be better to make this determination on an explicit "is it mobile?" check instead of making an assumption based on screen resolution. Zad68 15:21, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Detect parental controls software before all visits to wiki pages

The article on bronies is being blocked by my parental controls software. I request that all visits to wiki pages should start with a scan for parental controls software. If it detects parental controls software, the software will be removed. See WP:NOTCENSORED. -- 96.50.22.205 (talk) 01:29, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. Wikipedia doesn't censor it's own content, we don't stop people from censoring content on their own. Ryan Vesey 01:48, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Also, I don't want my browser changing or removing other software on my computer. Chris857 (talk) 02:01, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Would it even be possible? If it is, it is probably illegal. Ryan Vesey 02:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
This comes pretty close. "It was discovered that any website could force users with the plug-in to open any program on their PC." Chris857 (talk) 02:11, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
It's not possible. In regards to Chris857: Its unlikely that everyone with parental control software also has software with remote execution vulnrabilities in it, and even then we're not going to start hacking people's computer simply because sexually explicit images want to be free. Bawolff (talk) 13:30, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Pages in category

Is it possible for a template to reveal the number of pages in a category and all of the subcategories? Specifically, I would like to use it on Category:Articles without infoboxes. Ryan Vesey 04:04, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

This {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Articles without infoboxes|R}} will generate this: 0. Is that what your looking for? Kumioko (talk) 04:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Nope, that just displays the one that are specifically in that category. The real number should be somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000. Ryan Vesey 04:12, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
As another note, there are so many pages in that category, it breaks catscan. I might need to have a couple of templates modified to add the articles to an all category. Soon, the category may become a subcat of Category:All articles that need to be wikified. Ryan Vesey 04:16, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
After looking at those cats, the count is right for this one. You might be right that there are as many or more articles that need an infobox however they need to be tagged as such to be in this category and there not tagged yet. I would actually say that there are likely to be more than 100, 000. The other problem is that there are some articles even at the FA level that don't have infoboxes because some folks don't think they are necessary nor bring value to the article. I personally don't agree with that however that view does exist. Kumioko (talk) 09:23, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Template trouble

  Resolved

I have been working with the {{request edit}} template set and have run into an issue I cannot figure out. The page Template:Request edit is showing up in Category:Requested edits. There is no call to that category (or any other) in that template page. That page calls (as default) the subpage at Template:Request edit/request when it is used. The subpage calls the category, but from within a noinclude block. How do I remove the template from the category? --Nouniquenames (talk) 04:28, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

It's now fixed with this. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:28, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Thank you very much! --Nouniquenames (talk) 15:29, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Proper licensing of gadgets and user scripts

I started a topic on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Proper licensing of gadgets and user scripts which may be of interest for those watching this page.

Best regards, Helder 18:21, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Overlinking vandalism.

Occasionally a vandal will come along and disrupt an article by needlessly linking every single word in a sentence or two. I am guessing that most such efforts are merely tests, but they do tend to bump up the disambiguation link count, and can confuse readers and reduce readability. I'd like to see the bots that routinely revert additions of curse words and the like to add this to their repertoire. Such vandalism should be fairly easy to parse by a bot, since it typically includes putting links around common words like this and and and the. If not solved by a bot, perhaps at least a report could be compiled somewhere so that suspicious edits following this pattern can be swiftly identified and reverted. Cheers! bd2412 T 16:13, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Template coding technical assistance needed

See Wikipedia talk:Template messages/User talk namespace#Template:Db-attack-notice needs modification. Thanks. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:13, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Is the search algorithm in Wikipedia different than on Commons?

  Resolved

I was looking for a file named JohnLloydMiller.jpg on Commons, and the search failed.

I leaped to the conclusion that there was no such file, but this is wrong.

The same search on Wikipedia works

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=JohnLloydMiller.jpg&button=&title=Special%3ASearch

It looks like a search in Wikipedia assume that if you search in the File namespace, it should look for files whose name starts File:xxxx, but the exact same search in Commons fails?

This seems hard to believe. Am I missing something?--SPhilbrick(Talk) 00:15, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia search finds File:JohnLloydMiller.jpg which was uploaded to the English Wikipedia 26 July 2012‎. The Commons version at commons:File:JohnLloydMiller.jpg was uploaded 4 August 2012‎ and hasn't been indexed by the search function yet. A Commons search does not search files uploaded to Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:44, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
I didn't expect the Commons search to find the enwiki version, but you answered my question, the Commons search didn't work because the index hasn't been updated. Arghh, I should have figured that out myself, but it happened so long ago, it didn't occur to me that it is still the same day. Thanks.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 01:43, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Render server error

Book tool output for this book still failing rendering book output. Sctechlaw (talk) 07:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

render error text

An error occurred on the render server: RuntimeError: command failed with returncode 9: ['mw-render', '-w', 'rl', '-c', 'cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/collection.zip', '-o', 'cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/output.rl', '--status', 'qserve://localhost:14311/a1c55a0e1e5b1067:render-rl', '--template-blacklist', 'MediaWiki:PDF Template Blacklist', '--template-exclusion-category', 'Exclude in print', '--print-template-prefix', 'Print', '--print-template-pattern', '$1/Print', '--language', 'en'] Last Output: /index.php?oldid=430028393' 77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=430028393' 77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=502746659' 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=502746659' 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:56 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=504069669' 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:aclbts1.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=504069669' 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:aclbts1.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=386818719' 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=386818719' 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:35:03 rlwriter.info >> rendering: u'License' 77.0026441036% laying out License77.0026441036% laying out License77.0026441036% rendering 2012-07-31T07:35:03 rlwriter.info >> start rendering: u'/home/pp/sandbox/cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/tmpFuLpyp.rl' 2012-07-31T07:35:04 rlwriter.info >> memory usage after laying out: 732.09375 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering in function system, file /home/pp/local/bin/nslave.py, line 64

Anybody? Could this be a problem related to article templates? — Sctechlaw (talk) 02:45, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia down?

About a two-three minutes ago I was unable to access wikipedia. I checked downornot.com and it claimed wikipedia was down everywhere. What happened?--92.251.179.11 (talk) 21:24, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

well, it was down... or were you expecting some sort of conspiracy, where it was only down for you and someone changed the website downornot.com just to get at you ? :P —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:26, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Well it's up now! Secretlondon (talk) 21:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It appeared to be that all Wikimedia sites were down. At the time I had been deleting my cache and cookies, I thought it was my fault – that I had accidentally deleted Wikipedia too, haha! Jared Preston (talk) 21:28, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
I'd love to have that kind of power! Secretlondon (talk) 21:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
With great power comes great irresponsibility. — Richardguk (talk) 21:39, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions#What just happened?. It's time to throw somebody into the village stocks. Ryan Vesey 21:47, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

It's back, for me - but the css doesn't appear to be loading. Looks like the Internet from the eighties. pablo 15:19, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Back to normal now. pablo 15:25, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Editing my watchlist

When I click on the "View and edit watchlist" link, I get a Wikipedia error page. It says, "Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes." On the other hand, if I try the "Edit raw watchlist" link, the page doesn't load; I just get a white screen.

I have almost 24,000 pages on my watchlist. I want to whittle down my watchlist, but I don't know how, if neither link will work.

Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 17:49, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Well....you could go to some of the pages on it (by looking at the basic watchlist screen) and manually remove the star in the article by clicking on it...bit slow but with over 10,000 pages it might not let you load it anyway.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 17:51, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Can you explain what you mean by "manually remove the star in the article by clicking on it"?
The only way I can currently remove any pages from my watchlist is to open them and click the "unwatch" link.
Is there any other way that I can view ALL of the pages on my watchlist, such as an option on the Toolserver site? Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 17:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, that's what I meant..though with 24,000 it might be a while.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 18:17, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
The star refers to the the way a page is unwatched in the default Vector skin. You must have another skin. Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morriswa?useskin=monobook and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morriswa?useskin=vector. If unwatch works in your skin then there should be no advantage in Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:19, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Also, Help:Watching_pages#Size_limitationsuggests that you should reduce it manually, though does not exclude the possibility of other methods.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 18:23, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
I have the Monobook skin. What other methods are there? Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 18:25, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
WP:POPUPS has an unwatch feature when hovering over a link. Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts#Watchlist includes a link to user:js/watchlist. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:06, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I know that it does. However, with nearly 24,000 pages, I can't remember them all. If I could, I would be able to type them in and unwatch them that way. Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 09:55, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Does Special:Watchlist display correctly? If so, you can at least use part of the feature. Get into the habit of unwatching pages as you check the listed edits, unless you're strongly interested in the page. This will (slowly) reduce your watchlist size); to prevent it increasing quickly, switch off all the "Add pages ... to my watchlist" options at Preferences → Watchlist, and when editing a page, only check "Watch this page" if you're strongly interested in it. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:43, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Site errors when moving

A week or so Bwilkins got a site error when moving the Syrian Civil War article, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive238#Site errors in middle of move. Today I moved the article and, although in both cases the move appears to have gone through, I also got a site error. Yesterday the same thing happened (site error, but move worked) when I moved 2011–2012 Egyptian revolution. Now, I'm not suggesting this has to do with moving pages related to the Arab Spring, but is it perhaps because both articles are very big and have a decent amount of subpages? Here is the site error I got: 

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MovePage&action=submit, from 10.64.0.130 via cp1014.eqiad.wmnet (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1)
Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Sun, 05 Aug 2012 11:57:49 GMT

Can anyone explain this or pass it on to someone who may be able to resolve it? Cheers, Jenks24 (talk) 12:08, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

When you move a page, you only get a response from the server, after the move is done. Basically in order to present you the "it succeeded" page. However if the move takes longer then 10-20 seconds to execute, the network setup behaves as if the request failed. The operation is continuing (so the move did not fail), but you just didn't get to see the result. You often see the same problem on complex pages when editing, the response of the server takes so long to generate, the timeout error is presented before you get to see the new version of the page. The problem is that it is very difficult for the squid server to distinguish between something that takes very long, and something that cannot reach another server. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:27, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Substitution error occurring after posting deletion sorting templates

  Resolved

Recently an error has been occurring when posting delsort templates, in which rather than the delsort notice posting, a message is posted that states "This template must be substituted!" despite the "subst:" prefix being in place.

Example – When posting: {{subst:delsort|Business|~~~~}}

This is what is being displayed:

This template must be substituted!

—Northamerica1000(talk) 01:22, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

I've fixed it. User:Czarkoff made an edit to the template but didn't use {{issubst}} correctly. I've fixed that with this edit. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:40, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
  Thank you – The templates are posting correctly at this time. Northamerica1000(talk) 06:48, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Categories in Google Chrome

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41047

Categories are showing weird for me in Chrome. Some categories are on two lines for some reason. It changed suddenly a few days ago. Firefox and IE are showing them correcly. Any fix for this? --Mika1h (talk) 22:45, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
 

Interesting. I too use Chrome (on XP), but have not seen the issue. Chris857 (talk) 01:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
Scratch that, as I just found it occurring on Alice Dalgliesh. (At 100% zoom) all appear correctly except for "1893 births", where it is on two lines, but the space seems wide enough for it to fit on one line (just like the above picture). 1024x768 screen resolution, occurs at 200% zoom, 100% zoom. 175% zoom and 50% zoom affect other cats.Chris857 (talk) 02:32, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm seeing it too--just started today for me. Mackensen (talk) 03:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I see it too in Chrome 21. Looks like a measuring error in the layout fase. We probably need to file an upstream bugreport about this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:56, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
I've submitted a report on bugzilla. Chris857 (talk) 02:13, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
I just realized that I've been seeing something very similar in tables of contents (TOCs). For example, in Leucophoenicite, "4.1 bibliography" displays on two lines, whereas it occupies only one line in IE. Chris857 (talk) 02:30, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
I've been noticing this as well, especially in motorsports results tables. Some cells with a longer-then-normal driver's name used to display on one line in Chrome 20, now they display on two lines in Chrome 21. I get the feeling tables in Chrome 21 now might need to have a width explicitly set to avoid this problem - unless it's an unintended Chrome bug. TheChrisD Rants•Edits 11:19, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
Cannot be reproduced in Chromium nightly build, so likely folks will just have to wait for Chrome 22. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:10, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
I have that too. In Chrome on Win Vista. Weird, but not really a problem for me. --Nnemo (talk) 07:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
The position of the vertical bar schocks me much more. --Nnemo (talk) 07:33, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Odd sound file

File:02 Calma Pueblo.ogg- Does this actually contain malicious code? Is it an mp4 file, or an ogg? Why is it so big? Thanks to anyone who can help. J Milburn (talk) 13:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

It is unlikely that it actually contains malicious code. We put that warning for any file that is not on the list of "safe" file formats. What most likely happened is someone took an mp4 file, changed the extension thinking that is all one needs to do to convert to ogg, uploaded it (somehow it got past the upload screen even though its extension doesn't match its type, or perhaps are file type detection subsequently got better), and here we are. Bawolff (talk) 13:22, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
The file was uploaded just two days ago. The first version was a regular ogg file but the second version was the MP4 file of the entire piece of music. I made a complete mess while trying to delete the second version, as it's a copyright violation; no matter what I did, even if I reuploaded a new version or bypassed my cache, Wikipedia still showed the long copyright-violating version, so I've deleted the file completely for now. Graham87 04:48, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Nyttend just undeleted the original version of the file, as I was trying to do, but my computer still showed the longer copyright-violation version when I used the play sound button or tried to download the ogg file. I finally had a brainwave to try a different browser (Firefox instead of IE) and the problem was solved! Graham87 15:38, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Hey thanks for all your help. I tried uploading a smaller version of the file and it went a little crazy. The only problem now is it is still a copyright violation because it is 124 kbps, when it should not be above 64. Any ideas? Basilisk4u (talk) 16:46, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
Try re-uploading it again, but make sure that you select the right file in the "source filename" box. After you've uploaded a version with lower resolution, ping me on my talk page. But I don't think the difference between 128 and 64kb/s is such a big deal that the original file needs to be deleted immediately. Graham87 08:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

How to hide bots from watchlist

==Watchlist==

Is there a way to auto-hide bots in my watchlist, i.e. so it displays the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&namespace=&hideBots=1 automatically?--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:36, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Try looking in your preferences and please do not add new sections like this: there is a special "New section" ("or "+") tab on top of the page. — AlexSm 16:45, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, I should have realised, on both counts.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:49, 4 August 2012 (UTC)
  Resolved
Also note WP:HIDEBOTS. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:29, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia goes awry again

I am just wondering what the error with Wikipedia now. Why is it also only displaying Times New Roman with the Main Page a mess? Purging the pages does not help. It is only on secure that everything displays normally. Difficultly north (talk) 14:28, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia down

Summary: A fiber cable connecting the main Wikipedia datacentre with the rest of the world was accidentally cut by construction. Workarounds have been put in place, but this required considerable time before they were finished and effective (about an hour). Operations should slowly return to normal now. DNS entries were changed, so if you experience trouble, likely this is due to slow DNS updates between you and Wikipedia. If you are still affected, at some unpredictable point in time, it will also be fixed for you.

Let's get in first. Down, down, down, down, down. You can check the status with http://status.wikimedia.org/ Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:32, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Based on IRC chat, it seems like a line got cut by a construction worker in Tampa. Ryan Vesey 14:33, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
As a note, the current error notice gives a link to irc chat that uses irc:// that is fine for those with clients, but not for a majority of the people who see it. I would suggest changing that to a webchat.freenode.net link. This issue was raised on IRC as well. Ryan Vesey 14:34, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Official Twitter updates found at https://twitter.com/Wikipedia. A wikipedia status site telling you everything is working just fine. http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/ :) Now would be the time to donate, except the donation server is down. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:37, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Red status lights have changed to yellow http://status.wikimedia.org/ Regards, SunCreator (talk) 14:41, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Secure Server works like a dream :) --Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 15:19, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Aren't big data centers usually fed by cables going by two different routes? Anway diffs have been working fine for me since I started this afternoon's session (New York) almost two hours ago. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:55, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Consider this an opportunity to give backhoe fade and backhoe fading some attention. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 19:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

  • Ah, this might be why it's responding slowly right now? - The Bushranger One ping only 03:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
    • There was another issue today (likely caused indirectly by the issue yesterday), where one of the internal links in the Tampa datacentre got overloaded, causing significant responsiveness issues. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:36, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit protected template request

Is there any chance someone can please take a look at the edit request for Template talk:WikiProject United States? Its been open for 10 days now and only admins can edit it because the rest of us with hundreds of thousands of edits and years of experience on Wiki can't be trusted to do it. :-)Kumioko (talk) 10:54, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm an admin but don't know anything about the WikiProject and eight changes sounds like a lot to review. You could try asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:22, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
I understand and I would but unfortunately the vast majority of the active members of the project are not admins so we cannot make the change. All we can do is put it out there and wait which usually takes a couple weeks for someone to get around to it. Which is also the reason there are so many at a time. Its starts as one or 2 and then after a couple weeks the list grows. Kumioko (talk) 13:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Linking to italizied titles

How do you link to an article which is italizied when there is a different article titles conventionally. I found a broken link (Fuzzy Wuzzy) that in the past targeted to the second link on the disambiguation page (which at some time was moved to Fuzzy Wuzzy in italics). I am at a loss as to how to repair the link. How do I link to this sort of title?--BirgitteSB 01:54, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

There are no "italized page names". The other page is Fuzzy-Wuzzy with a hyphen in the middle. It's displayed title is italized with {{Italic title}}. — AlexSm 02:04, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
I just knew it would be something ridiculous that I was failing to see! Thanks.--BirgitteSB 02:34, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Edits lost when logged in as user, but retained when I log out and become anonymous

Sometimes, over the last week, my edits have been lost upon "Save" (i.e. the page goes back to the old version, there is no record of my edits in the history, and I can't recover my edits). However, if I log out to become an anonymous IP user and make the exact same edit on the exact same page, using the exact same browser, then it works and my edits are saved.

Has anyone else noticed this? It doesn't happen on every page, but when it does happen on a particular page it will continue consistently on that same page. Logging out and then logging back in doesn't help. Grover cleveland (talk) 07:04, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

There was a report of this on bugzilla: bugzilla:39065. So far no indication of why happening, or even how prevalent issue is. Bawolff (talk) 14:33, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Facebook link previews

If you share a Wikipedia page on Facebook, the preview image is invariably the MediaWiki logo. Regardless of how one feels about Facebook, this is stupid and annoying.

While this is clearly the result of some poor heuristics by Facebook programmers (in the absence of other cues, they seem to grab the last image on the page?), I was wondering what could be done to address the issue on Wikipedia. One way might be to add some attributes to the main image within an infobox. However, this seems to be very difficult without getting parser functions to hack through HTML and add an attribute, maybe with regular expressions. This immediately seemed like a bad idea to me, but I was wondering if there was any precedent for doing this. I don't see anything in the docs that I would trust to work properly on arbitrary HTML, but I'm not a wizard with wikitext, so maybe there is some way.

Of course, even if it worked, this would also cause lots of chaos on Wikipedia's side because we'd have to regenerate every infobox, and the cost is almost certainly not worth it.

The easiest alternative seems to be to pester Facebook to special-case what their sharer does for Wikipedia pages. I've already pinged Kul Wadhwa, the Wikimedia employee who manages the relationship with Facebook, as well as people I know who work at Facebook. But I just wanted to be sure that there wasn't an easy fix on our end, if anyone asks.

NeilK (talk) 12:07, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Related recent Wikitech-l thread (there were other discussions too): "Facebook grabs the Mediawiki logo instead of the site logo". Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:32, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Thank you, HaeB. The OpenGraphMeta extension would at least make the preview be a Wikipedia globe or something. I guess there is no reasonable way to get the Infobox image, though. NeilK (talk) 12:43, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
You could mark the infobox image with a particular CSS ID or a magic word, surely. --MZMcBride (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, there's no hack for doing this in the page. The preview is considered metadata of the entire page, so it has to be a <meta> element in the head (there was a <link> hack, also in the head, which seems to be deprecated.). Also, given that the image property of the Infobox can be arbitrary wikitext, I am not sure we could reliably add an attribute without recourse to really evil parser functions. -- NeilK (talk) 08:43, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
Doesn't Facebook allow you to choose a thumbnail now? In addition, could we face any legal trouble if a non-free image was used as the thumbnail in the link to Wikipedia? Presumably it is all FB at that point, but I wanted to throw it out there. Ryan Vesey 21:59, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
The preview choice doesn't come up for me on Wikipedia pages. I'm not sure why. As for licensing - Facebook is doing these previews for every site on the internet, not just us. -- NeilK (talk) 08:43, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
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